I’ve had a lot of thoughts on marriage for a long time, but have hesitated to write about it because I wanted to wait until I had more years under my belt. And while I know there’s still a lot for me to learn and experience, I think having a very stable and happy marriage for 6+ years is enough to warrant some sort of reflection. If I were to sum everything up to one sentence, I’d say that the key to a good marriage is truly being on the other person’s team. You want the best for them, you want for your partnership to succeed, and you put in the effort to achieve those goals.
The reason I felt so comfortable marrying my wife was because it felt like she was on my team as soon as we started dating. First, I’ll set the stage with a personal story that really exemplified to me just how good of a teammate my wife is.
I can’t remember the exact timing, but we had either just recently married or were engaged. I had to go to Hawaii to buy our property there, and I asked a bunch of friends to see if anyone wanted to come. One of my close female friends agreed to join last minute. I know that it sounds a little bit weird to go to Hawaii with a woman who is not your wife, but we had been platonic friends for a long time with zero ambiguity, and I even ran it by my wife to make sure she was ok with it.
On our layover I get a call from my wife, and she’s really upset. She was talking to someone who never met me, told them that I was going to Hawaii with another woman, and the person basically said, “Yeah, obviously he’s having an affair.” Our relationship was new enough that it planted a seed of doubt in my wife’s mind. And I don’t blame her— zooming out and looking at the situation, I agree that it looks sketchy. To make things worse, my wife and I didn’t live together yet, and my friend had been visiting me a lot in Vegas. My wife had never even met my friend, so she had no read on her character.
It was an awkward few days in Hawaii. I was excited about buying our property and trying to have a good time, but it was hard to resolve the issue remotely and I knew that my wife was suffering.
We got back and had a long talk about it. I agreed to never travel solo with my friend or any other woman she hadn’t met, and I asked in return that she try to remain unbiased when she meets my friend, and that she be open to me traveling with her in the future once she meets her. Based on my experience with other women, I assumed she would not actually be able to be objective.
But I was wrong. She proactively set up a lunch with my friend, met her, and realized that she was no threat at all. My friend visits us all the time, and I’ve traveled with her many times since then.
To me this is the perfect balance of being a teammate. She wanted to protect her relationship, but also cared about my friendship and was looking for ways to help me rather than punish me. It gave me tremendous confidence in our relationship and frankly inspired me to be a better partner too.
Being a teammate is so important that I think it’s universal to all relationships. Through friends and coaching I’ve been exposed to the inner workings of a lot of relationships, and this one factor is almost entirely prescriptive of whether or not the relationship will work. I also have other ideas on what makes a good marriage, which I’ll share below, but not all of them are universal.
Maybe the next greatest factor to our marriage’s success is that we have made our marriage what we want it to be, not a cookie cutter typical marriage. The biggest example of this is that we probably spend about 50% of our time apart. I’d say she comes on about a third of the trips I go on, and is in Vegas about 80% of the time I’m there. We obviously enjoy time together, but we also value independence and autonomy. It makes time together feel more special, and honestly I sometimes find it even easier to appreciate her in her absence. We also don’t usually eat dinner together (we cook separate meals and eat at separate times), which made one relative think our marriage was fake, but it’s just how our schedules and preferences work.
We keep our finances mostly separate. The primary reason is we both have enough that we don’t need the other’s money, and we both like having the freedom to buy whatever we want. I don’t want to ask when I’m buying pinball machines or random stuff for my next project, and she doesn’t want to ask me when she goes shopping or sends money to family members. We both invested enough money to cover house expenses and the interest goes into a joint account that pays the bills every month. Of course if she needed some of my money for some reason she’d be welcome to it, and vice versa, so it’s more like we have combined finances that we manage separately.
Overall we have fairly traditional gender roles (except I’m the flower arranger and interior designer and she kills bugs). She cleans my clothes and dishes, I maintain the house and build and fund most of the improvements and tend to lead most big decisions. She’s also a much better host to guests than I am, and even though our finances are separate, most of what she’s invested in has been initiated by me. I don’t think everyone needs to have traditional gender roles (and I think it’s much more important to build the unique marriage you want), but it’s pretty obvious to me that there’s a reason that they are traditional and that they probably work better more often than not.
In that same vein, we both contribute everything we can to the marriage without trading or keeping the score. Throughout our lives there will probably be phases where each of us can contribute more than the other, and we certainly contribute different things. But we’re building a marriage, not trading favors. This leads to a virtuous cycle because she does so much for me that I’m inspired to do more for her, and vice versa. When you see people trading favors and arguing about “what’s fair”, it’s a bad sign. Either one person is contributing so little that the marriage should end, or the two parties are too focused on themselves.
We didn’t sign a prenup. It never really crossed my mind until she proactively offered to sign one. In my mind if I don’t trust a woman to treat me fairly in the case of divorce, I definitely shouldn’t be marrying her. I don’t mind a disincentive to divorce, and I’m very happy to have a strong incentive to choose a good partner. If I am such a bad judge of character that she’s not who I think she is and she wants to divorce me and take half of my money, then I’d say I deserve it. On the other hand I have a friend who got married and he made a provision for his wife to get a certain amount per year in the case of divorce, because the plan was for her to quit her job and be a mother. I thought that was a really fair way to take risk off the table for her.
We argue VERY infrequently, maybe once per year or so. Our biggest “fight” was the one I opened the blog post with, and it was resolved really well as soon as we could. I can actually only think of one or two other arguments, and they were like an hour long or so. Over time our conflict resolution has gotten much better and now I’d say that on the rare occasion we do have a conflict we leave optimistic and motivated. So many couples argue every month, week, or day, and I just can’t imagine it being healthy. People justify it by saying “marriage is tough and it takes work”, but what they don’t realize is that the work should be 99% on building the relationship, not repairing it.
When my wife and I first met, it was obvious that we have very aligned principles. To me that was an absolute prerequisite for a serious relationship. We agreed on finances, kids, where to live, priorities, etc. We’ve never argued once about any of those things. We didn’t have that many activities in common, though. Something I’ve found useful is when I find something we both enjoy, I go all in on it. For example, we enjoyed playing pinball so much at my friend Noah’s house that I came home and built a virtual pinball machine primarily because I knew it would be a fun thing to do together. Now we have an arcade room with five pinball machines and we have a tournament together every night. She enjoyed learning to ski, so we get season passes every year and go out as much as we can. Principles are really hard to change, but finding hobbies to do together is pretty easy if you put in the effort.
While I think it’s beneficial that we don’t spend all of our time together, I also think it’s important that we have a good default routine that we share. In Vegas we tend to do our own things until afternoon, and then we play pinball together, swim and use the spa together, and sometimes watch an episode of a show. The swimming and spa time in particular is a nice opportunity to make sure we get to talk about anything on our minds every day.
I’m grateful to have such a good wife and such a good relationship with her. These are my perspectives on it, but I do also believe I’m playing on easy mode because my wife has such a great character and puts a lot of effort into our marriage. I can’t imagine being married to anyone else.
If you’re thinking about marriage or are in a marriage that needs work, focus on partnership, building a unique marriage that suits both of you, make sure your principles are aligned, and put everything you can into the relationship with blind faith that your partner will do the same.
###
Photo is our pet Tortoise, Daisy. She’s around 53, has three legs, and my wife reports that she is 30% happier when Daisy is not hibernating.
Leave a Reply