The Second-Worst Marriage Advice I’ve Ever Gotten
The Second-Worst Marriage Advice I’ve Ever Gotten
One of the weirdest things about getting married is how people you know and love—and people you don’t know or love—will give you marriage advice.
When my wife and I were married almost 19 years ago, one thing I quickly learned during the process was that people love to tell you what to do—and what not to do—in your relationship and in your marriage.
From the very first moment we began discussing the possibility of getting married, then when we became engaged, then were married, and for many days, weeks, and months afterward, we faced a nonstop barrage of advice—almost always unsolicited—from family, friends, grandparents, neighbors, and even total strangers about how they thought our newly-budding family should look and how our house should be run.
I think because I was 20 at the time, and my wife was 19, a lot of people older than us looked at us like pitiable fools about to make a big mistake, or at least a lot of small mistakes.
I’ve always thought this was weird since it’s far more normal and historically traditional to get married before age 20 (one of my great-grandmothers was married at age 15, for example.) But no matter: in the 2000s and on, it seems nobody gets married until they’re at least in their late 20s or, more often, pushing into their 30s or even older.
I was both amused and annoyed at the weirdness of just how frequently people would give us advice: people came out of the woodwork to tell us their thoughts when they heard we were engaged. As I’ve said, this came both from people we knew and people we’d never met before, offering what they were certain were nuggets of wisdom that would give us a long and happy marriage.
It was all so strange: I almost never asked anybody for advice, and the few people whose opinions I actually cared about waited for me to ask them.
Perhaps not surprisingly, I quickly found that the people who would dispense their advice most freely were usually people whose opinions I never would have asked for in the first place. (There’s a lesson in there somewhere.)
So many “dos” and “don’ts” were given to us, individually and as a couple, it was hard to keep track of, much less make sense of it all and decide what to actually listen to and what to discard.
I heard so many conflicting ideas about marriage from men and women, about my role as a new husband:
After you’re married, you need to tell all your male friends you can’t hang out with them anymore since you need to focus on your wife and only spend time with her.
After you’re married, you need to keep spending time with your male friends since it will give you time away from your wife.
You should clearly split up the household chores so you both know exactly what each person is responsible for.
You should always share all household chores evenly.
Months later, when they found out my wife was pregnant, they also rained down torrents of opinions about childbirth and parenting:
You should circumcise your child if it’s a boy.
You should not circumcise your child if it’s a boy.
You should have a home birth.
You should absolutely not have a home birth.
You should take the baby to bed with you at night.
You should not take the baby to bed with you at night.
You should vaccinate your baby with all the recommended shots.
You should not vaccinate your baby at all.
You should induce labor and have a scheduled birth.
You should not induce labor and instead let the baby come when he or she is ready.
You should get epidural anesthesia during the birth.
You should not get epidural anesthesia during the birth.
It was maddening and confusing.
Who was right? Who was wrong? What was the right choice for us? Why did anybody else care? …and how was it any of their business?
One young man slightly older than me, who was unmarried and had no children, asked me, “Are you going to be there for the birth?”
I told him, “Yes, we’re planning on having a home birth, so I’ll catch the baby.”
His response was shocking and insulting.
“Ewww, really?” he replied. “I have some guy friends who watched the birth of their kids, and they told me it was the most disgusting thing they’d ever seen in their lives.”
Imagine my awkward smile as I bit my lip, trying to comprehend what he just said and decide how to react with my wife right there, by my side.
I got so much advice about what to do and what not to do that it nearly made my head spin.
Of all the unsought advice we ever got, though, there are two things that stand out as the worst we’ve ever heard.
The first is so bad, it is, without exaggeration, so horrifyingly awful it’s actually the worst life advice I’ve ever heard. I don’t even want to write about it here. That’s a topic for another time, and I’ll get to it someday.
But the second worst marriage advice my wife and I ever got was from a family friend we bumped into by total coincidence just a day or two after we returned from our honeymoon.
It came from one of the men I knew in my teen years, a much older guy I looked up to as a man, as a husband and father. I had invited him and his wife to our wedding.
After my wife and I returned from Las Vegas, we started sorting through the pile of presents in our living room and found a bunch of gift cards to various stores to kick-start our new home: grocery stores, hardware stores, clothing stores, and so on. We decided to go on a spending spree over the weekend and stock up on the essentials for our tiny little one-bedroom apartment.
One of the gift cards was from Sears, and when we went there to spend our loot, I convinced my wife that I needed a new cordless drill. As we were in the power tool section, holding hands and talking about which model of drill we could afford, I almost literally bumped into my friend who had come to our wedding.
At first, he began the usual awkward banter: “Oh wow, I didn’t see you there… how funny meeting you in a place like this. How are you doing? It’s good to see you!” and all that.
We told him we’d just gotten back from our honeymoon and were stocking up on the basic life essentials. For some reason, this seemed to make him hopeful and happy for us, but I think I noticed a glint of sadness in his eyes like he was thinking back to the early days of his marriage.
We probably talked for a few minutes about the drill I was interested in and the snow shovel he was buying or something like that; then we began the awkward dance of trying to separate ourselves politely.
Me: “Well, it was nice to see you.”
Him: “It sure was. How random that we bumped into each other here.”
Me: “Yeah, that’s too funny…”
Him: “Well, nice to see you, Ron, and you too, Rachel… you know, we’re just so proud of you and excited for you.”
Me: “Thanks.”
Him: “You know, we’ll be thinking about you and praying for you as you get started in your marriage… Marriage can be really hard sometimes, you know? I mean, sometimes my wife and I fight… and you will too. You will fight sometimes if you haven’t already. It’s only natural. You’ve got two imperfect people living together in close quarters…”
Me: “Yeah, that’s true.”
Him: “But you know, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in all my years of marriage, it’s this: ‘Don’t go to bed angry.’”
Me: “Oh, really?”
Him: “Yep. That’s the number one rule in our marriage. We never go to bed angry.”
Me: “Huh. Interesting… you’re saying never? As in, NEVER ever?”
Him: “That’s right. You know, it’s like the Bible says: ‘Don’t let the sun go down upon thy wrath.’”
Me: “Right… yeah, that makes sense… but what if one of you is tired? Or what if your wife has already gone to bed before you, and she’s angry?”
Him: “Well then I’d wake her up and tell her, ‘You better get your butt out of bed so we can talk about this.’”
Me: “Wow… interesting… okay, thanks for the advice.”
I’ve thought about this interaction many times over the years since this day. I’ve had almost two decades to stew on it, and my conclusion now is the same as my initial reaction when I was ambushed with strange marriage advice in the power tool aisle at Sears.
THIS IS VERY, VERY BAD MARRIAGE ADVICE.
In theory, it sounds just fine. Don’t go to bed angry: that’s a great idea, right? What could be wrong with that?
Plenty, it turns out. In practice, it’s completely unworkable.
As he said, we are two imperfect people living together in close quarters. There are bound to be blow-ups, emotional outbursts, and breakdowns in communication, which will ultimately cause fights.
When two people fight, they get emotional.
When two people in a fight get emotional, they cease being rational. They start to say things they don’t mean, or they lash out in anger to intentionally hurt the person who they feel has hurt them.
Actually, there are many reasons why the end of the day is the worst time to talk about contentious issues. People are often pushed beyond their limits to hold a calm, logical discussion at night. They’re tired, they’re uncomfortable, they’re hungry, they’re stressed out about what they have to deal with tomorrow, and a lot more.
Saying that you HAVE to work out all disagreements before either of you can go to bed is not just silly: it’s impossible. It can also become abusive.
Even after a fight, if you both agree that one or both of you were in the wrong, you still can’t put a time limit on reconciliation and forgiveness. It’s a dangerous rule to enforce because it can breed further problems such as insincerity and dishonesty.
If you’re feeling trapped because you’re tired, you’ve been fighting, and now you’re tired of fighting, wouldn’t you just agree to whatever your husband or wife says in order to just shut them up so you can go to bed?
Of course. It’s much easier to lie, sweep problems under the rug, or pretend you agree just to make the fighting stop so you can move on.
If I were such a jerk that I told my wife she can’t go to bed until we “work it out,” I would only foresee escalation, not resolution. And the more I push, the angrier she’ll get.
What I’ve learned from my years of marriage is that you can’t make the anger go away just by talking. You need time. Often, you need time away from each other. You need to give your husband or wife space.
My wife and I have gone to bed angry many times, and this is just fine.
I don’t want to go to bed angry, but it just happens sometimes. You know what else happens more often than not when we do that?
The next day, we wake up and ask each other: “What were we fighting about again?” Usually, we can’t even remember what it was. Or even if we can, we realize it was blown way out of proportion.
Sometimes, I sigh a breath of relief, thinking: “Thank goodness I didn’t push the issue right before bed.” Because all of the bad feelings just vaporize when we walk away, even if that leaves things unresolved.
That’s what we do because it works for us.
The sad thing is, when I think about the advice my friend gave me, I feel bad: the last I heard of his marriage was that he and his wife were living separately, proceeding with a divorce.
I don’t say that to be haughty or say he got what he deserved or anything like that. But I do mention it as a caution. His authoritarian perspective on relationships may not be a direct cause of his marriage disintegrating, but one can argue they’re certainly correlated.
So, for all you soon-to-be-marrieds and newlyweds out there getting overwhelmed at all the advice you’re getting from your sister-in-law, your neighbor, and the cashier at the grocery store, in my opinion, you can just ignore it all.
And while I won’t give out any marriage advice here, I do heartily recommend that you ignore the advice I was given by my friend, like I did.