6 Marriage Lessons From 6 Years of Marriage

A while ago, I was talking to someone a lot older than me about our relationship and mentioned that it got better every year. The other person mentioned that that was an unusual experience to have.

I feel sad that so many people assume that a marriage deteriorates once the initial honeymoon period is over. If a relationship gets worse, I think that there’s often some important growth work — improving one’s communication with each other, increasing mutual understanding, etc. — that could be done to improve it.

In our case, our marriage got a ton better the more we learned about each other. Every year, we argue less. We still argue but if the trend continues, perhaps we will reach sage-level by the time our 50th anniversary comes around…

Since our expectations often influence what we put up with, one of my takeaways is that a relationship is like wine. It should get better over time. After all, the wedding is the least important part of marriage. If your marriage doesn’t get better, it might be a good time to get external help to work through challenges.

This brings me to the next point: people aren’t taught in school how to have a good relationship. Perhaps that’s why it can be tempting to consider abandoning a relationship when the issues seem great. 

What I’ve learned is that we can’t expect relationships to work on their own, without putting in any effort. Instead, it’s up to us to make it work. However, that doesn’t mean we have to do it alone. There are many resources that can help gain the necessary insights and skills to get closer to one’s partner, such as books, coaching, or other forms of external help. For instance, here are some of my articles about how to deal with unsolvable relationship problems and how to show your love in skillful ways.

By getting outside support, we’ve been able to work through issues that otherwise would have kept us from getting closer together. 

When it comes to relationship issues, I can’t overstate the importance of cultural differences. While my husband is American, I’m German. So, naturally, we’ve had to deal with many cultural differences. And while I’ve lived in different countries throughout my life, there’s nothing quite like a marriage or long-term relationship for shoving cultural differences in your face.

You never know just how crazy another culture is are until you marry someone from that culture and have to put up with “travesties,” such as celebrating Christmas on the 25th in the morning or being exposed to a system of measurement that makes no sense to you when you think it’s much nicer to open gifts on the 24th at night and deal with the metric system. (My husband, as you might guess, has his own set of complaints about the idiosyncrasies of German culture that make no sense to him either).

You might think this lesson doesn’t apply to you because you’re not (planning) to spend your life with someone from another culture. What I’ve learned from my marriage is that it’s easy to assume that things should be the way one is used to. And while there often more differences like that in international relationships, I would assume that you and your partner might have some cultural differences, even if you grew up in the same city. The way your family worked when you grew up was different. Your work cultures are probably different. Your peer groups likely were different.

Over the last years, it has been important for us to get used to all the little (and big) differences that are based on different versions of culture. Instead of immediately assuming something is a bad idea if it’s different from what we’re used to, in most cases, we’ve learned to keep an open mind about how the other culture does something. (Since my husband is a scientist, he thankfully agrees with me about the merits of the metric system…)

This is, perhaps, the most important lesson I’ve learned. At some point during a marriage or long-term relationship, the people involved grow into a team. 

Whereas 7 years ago, I used to only look at my own achievements when measuring how successful I was, my thinking around that has completely turned around. These days, I am more inclined to consider my and my husband’s achievement together.

Here’s why: since a long-term relationship is a team effort, one partner’s success is, very often, a collective success. My husband first pointed this out to me when I published a book. He mentioned that even though my name is the only one on the cover, he put a ton of effort into it that wasn’t recognized (such as dealing with me while I was in the middle of writing it, editing it, etc.). The same is true for many of my husband’s accomplishments. 

That we can’t just ignore one person in a marriage became apparent to me when I negatively compared myself to an entrepreneur who I saw as so much more successful than me. At some point, I realized that her husband completely gave up his career to support her. In other words, her success was also her husband’s accomplishment. It’s not fair to compare myself against a two-person achievement. 

Since a long-term relationship turns you into a team, you often can’t artificially separate one partner’s accomplishments from the other. Instead of only measuring you well you’re doing, consider how well you and your partner are doing together. 

I will end with a relationship lesson that probably sounds cheesy but that doesn’t make it any less true: love grows when it is shared. The more loving I am to my partner, the more loving he is to me which in turn makes it even easier for me to be nice to him. Showing your partner that you love them creates a positive upward spiral. 

Sometimes, relationships can enter a downward spiral. In that case, it’s important to do something to break the pattern — do something nice for your partner or tell them how much you love them (and mean it). Sometimes, the things we most want in a relationship are the things we have to give first. Once we give them, our partner might be able to reciprocate.