Last weekend my husband and I traveled down to Dallas to help my parents settle into their new house. We found ourselves building furniture for my brother's bedroom while my mother and her parent's looked on. At one point, after several pieces had been troublesome only to reveal themselves attached backwards, my husband was annoyed. I was no longer helping but instead was relegated to staying out of his way and handing him anything out of his direct reach.
As he grumped through the rest of the wall unit, my mom jokingly observed "I think we're putting your marital bliss to the test here, Mandy."
This comment launched my grandfather into a story about the first months of his marriage to my grandmother. Apparently at one point he asked her to mow the lawn one day while he was at work. He came home that afternoon to a wife beyond annoyed because she had been unable to get the lawn mower started. When she went to show him, she pulled the cord so hard in her anger that the mower finally roared to life.
My grandfather is, to this day, still quite amused at the mental image of her standing over the noisy mower, vowing never to even attempt to mow the lawn again.
My grandmother simply shrugged and said "Well mowing the lawn wasn't in the vows. I didn't promise to do THAT."
This exchange got me thinking about all of the things that married life does actually entail that are never mentioned before or during the hoopla of your wedding day. Even in today's jaded world where much of the pre-marital counseling centers around the reality of day-to-day married life and bringing your love-high down to earth, there are numerous things that no one ever mentions. To name a few:
1) For those who go the traditional route of sharing a home and a bed - you might be sharing more of that bed than you ever would have agreed to. The longer my husband and I are married the more of my side of the bed he seems to think he is now entitled to. And if Daly or Ralph wants to nap with us - I might as well just go sleep on the couch.
2) All of the times Colin complained about his roommate's bad habits (i.e. leaving cabinet doors open in the kitchen) I never dreamed he was actually the culprit. I have now hit my head on those open cabinet doors often enough to have learned better.
3) If both partners are always selfless, you'll never get anywhere. Have you ever thought of the logistical nightmare it would be if both you AND your significant other spent every waking moment trying to make the other happy? Would anyone ever actually BE happy? No. Marriage is not actually about continual selflessness, although that always sounds nice when people talk about it. In practice, one person is selfless while the other gets to be selfish and then you trade off. If not, neither of you would ever actually get anything you want - you'd be too busy trying to give the other person what they wanted while they were busy trying to deny they wanted it in order to give you what you wanted. (What a MESS!)
4) You will go to bed angry and, sometimes, you will wake up even angrier. Think about trying to hash out an argument at 2am when you both have to work in the morning. At that point you're so pissed that you're still arguing you'll never come to a consensus. Give up the ghost and go to bed - but don't expect to wake up to roses in the morning. Love isn't about never fighting or about always giving in with some beautiful gesture - it's about always knowing that you'll make up at some point in the somewhat-immediate future and there won't be any residual crap left over to deal with weeks later.
5) Your goals won't always be the same. It sounds lovely to think that you'll find someone who will always want exactly what you want but I'm not sure I believe that's ever the case. (Maybe - I can't rule out aberrations but I just think it is probably quite rare.) I think one of the more beautiful aspects of marriage is the level of necessary compromise and the love in that compromise. Oftentimes you have to say "I will do this now, if you will do X later." But the compromises are big things - where to live, where to work, when to have children or get pets. To know that someone loves you enough to compromise on the big things is the beauty and the power of commitment.
I think marriage has been wonderful and interesting and has stretched and pulled me in all sorts of directions. I know I'm a better person for it - and we're just now 18 months in. I can't imagine what kind of person I will be 20 years from now.
Regardless, it might not be a good thing that no one warns you about all that marriage really entails - for certainly far fewer individuals would speak those vows if everything were written in, laundry, lawn-mowing and all.