Everyone says marriage should be 50/50. It’s the biggest crock of bullshit I’ve ever heard. It’s never 50/50.
I recently came across this clip from a Tim Ferriss interview with the wonderful Brené Brown:
This really resonated with me. I’ve been married for just over 12 years now. At the start I was playing a role, trying to be the type of husband I believed I was supposed to be, always aiming to bring more than my fair share to the table.
It wasn’t until recently I got clear on what it takes to make a marriage successful.
Romance isn’t enough
When people first get together there’s often a rush of love, or lust, or romance. We are told we need to find “the one”. We must fall head over heels, swept away with the excitement of it all.
To borrow from Brené: that’s a crock of bullshit.
Romance is important, don’t get me wrong. That spark matters, it brings fun into your time together in lots of different ways. But marriage is fundamentally a life partnership. Running a house together, a family together, a life together - there are many, many decisions involved that make marriage not so different to a business partnership.
That involves a distinctly unromantic level of logistical discussion. Financial discussion. Admin. No-one ever got hot and steamy doing the weekly shop.
You won’t always agree, on a thousand different things. There could be major disagreements: Where should we live? How should we solve for having enough money? How many children do we want?
There will be minor disagreements. Daily moments of tension to navigate and negotiate. Whose job is it take the bins out? Why are you relaxing while I’m grafting? Can you please help with the kids? And on and on.
You have a choice to make about how you handle these moments. You can see marriage as a battle, go to war with your other half, and make sure you win. Often when that happens the other person gives in, accepts their role as servant and slowly becomes a shell of who they might have been.
Conflict and capitulation don’t make a successful partnership. They are not a route to lasting respect, or lifelong love.
The alternative choice is simple, but not easy.
Work together to make your together work
My wife and I were reflecting on this recently. We were out for dinner on our wedding anniversary and talking about the journey we’d been on.
The last 12 years have changed us, mostly for the better. We’ve had 4 kids for a start. Nothing makes you grow up quite like having someone else be more important than you, and totally reliant on you.
We’ve also both done a ton of personal growth work, which all started from us wanting to make sure our marriage worked for us. We are chasing a shared vision of a contented later life. We talk about that often.
Esther Perel speaks about how each of us will only have 2 or 3 seriously committed relationships in our lives, and it’s possible that each of those will be with the same person. Often that breaks down into a life before children, with children, and once the children are grown. I can already see that ‘3rd relationship’ in our future, a time we will get to know each other once again, in a different way.
When we were reflecting we asked ourselves what we judge to be the secret to making a marriage work. The phrase we settled on was this:
A shared commitment to making it work for both of you
That commitment is the alternative to the cycle of conflict and capitulation. A simple statement that captures a critical concept.
Striving to make marriage work just for yourself leads to conflict. Prioritising making it work just for your partner leads to capitulation.
You must commit to making it work for you and for them. And they must do the same.
Be brave enough to be honest
That shared commitment to make it work for both of you is the crux of what I understand from that Brené Brown clip. Marriage will rarely be 50:50. Some days one of you will show up with only 20 to give.
As Jo likes to say, you can’t pour from an empty cup.
Those moments when your partner has less than 50 to give are the real test of your commitment to make it work for both of you. Those are moments to step-up, when you need to and when you can, with empathy & understanding rather than anger at your partner not pulling their weight.
It’s taken me a long time to be able to say “I just don’t have enough today”. I used to bluster my way through, faking energy I didn’t really have, or hide away rather than consciously protect myself.
It takes vulnerability to admit that you are close to breaking point. Particularly, I think, for men - after all, ”the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”.
That vulnerability is critical to making this commitment work. If you can’t be honest about how much you have to give at any moment in time, your partner won’t be able to support you. Vulnerability opens the door to empathy and understanding (unless you’re married to a narcissist, and this is a pretty good way of finding that out).
The hardest times to navigate are when one of us doesn’t have enough, and the other says “me too”. When we are nowhere close to 100 between us.
We’ve found then that we need to get clear with each other on what’s really needs the energy we have in that moment. What do the kids need? Can we call in support? What can we just let slide?
These days we’re able to have those conversations without judging each other, or ourselves. That’s a big step forwards.
Of course, the best days are when we both show up with more than 50 to give. When, together, we total more than 100.
Our work is to keep both our cups full, for many more 100+ days to come.
This was a lovely read Deri. Thank you!