Are Relationships Supposed to be Hard?
No. (And, yes.)
After another fight in the kitchen and getting into your car and driving away—another morning ruined—you might ask yourself: Are relationships supposed to be this hard? Shouldn’t love be easy? Shouldn’t a good partner or a healthy relationship not make me feel this way?
I remember that drive to work.
Body all tensed. Seething. Actually happy to be going to the office where all of the people made me feel better about being me than my own wife did. No one makes me feel as bad as the person I love the most.
It’s a depressing contradiction.
But language and semantics are a funny thing. Are relationships supposed to be hard?
No. And, yes.
Let’s talk about both answers.
No, They’re Not Supposed to be So Hard
You should not be experiencing inordinate amounts of pain, nor the absence of love, care, and respect from your partner in healthy relationships. You should always feel at ease communicating a pain or problem that you’re having within the relationship, or about your individual pursuits like work, school, health, and friendships.
What might an easy relationship look, feel, and sound like?
You have easy conversations. Successful conversations. When you’re speaking to one another, they rarely devolve into anything painful or ugly.
Your partner seems to understand your intentions and seems to truly understand who you are. You feel as if they trust you in situations both large and small. You rarely or never feel unfairly accused of wrongdoing. You feel like you and your partner both share the same understanding and opinions about what constitutes “wrongdoing.” You feel like your partner knows you better than anyone else, and there’s comfort and security in having someone know you so thoroughly—even the scars and weaknesses and past traumas—and still love and desire you. You rarely feel let down by your partner, and you rarely experience them feeling let down by you.
You rarely feel surprised by your partner’s thoughts and feelings about you or a situation they might be in. Things your partner says and does routinely fall into the category of what you would expect them to do.
In the rare circumstances in which there’s some type of emotional pain or misunderstanding or conflict between you, you are able to efficiently and expertly repair the situation, re-acclimating to a peaceful, comfortable equilibrium rather quickly.
So, back to language and semantics.
All of those conditions should be present in a healthy relationship, and if they’re not, it makes sense for there to be some conflict, stress, and general unease about the quality of your marriage or partnership.
But we don’t necessarily achieve a healthy relationship easily.
Group Coaching is Now Available
After several years of one-on-one coaching, I’ve launched a new support group/group coaching project for you to consider joining. I hope you will. To start, we have a men’s-only group meeting on Mondays at 12 p.m. ET, and we have a mixed group (women and men) meeting on Fridays at 12 p.m. ET.
It’s inevitable, I think, that there will have to be evening times available for this to work. If you’re interested in joining, but can’t meet during the middle of a weekday, please let me know what time of day would work better for you. I’m currently thinking the addition of an 8 p.m.-9:30 p.m. ET time slot might make sense.
If interested you can learn more about joining Group here. - MF
Yes, They’re Supposed to be Hard
(That’s what she said.)
Healthy relationships are typically not (probably never) the result of two people who just happen to be perfect for one another.
Healthy relationships are the byproduct of two people executing good relationship skills and habits. Some people are raised in such a way that those good relationship skills are taught to them and modeled for them from a young age. And just maybe those people would say it’s “easy” for them because that is simply what has always been their normal.
The rest of us have to learn what healthy relationships and good relationship skills look and sound like, and then practice them so consistently that they become habits—our new default-setting behaviors. The alternative will always be relationships that slowly wither from the inside over several years.
While I think there are nearly unlimited examples of “easy” relationships between friends, classmates, neighbors, extended family, coworkers, etc., there are VERY FEW examples of easy relationships between long-term romantic partners, who share homes, money, schedules, children, pets, etc. The more shared responsibility, the more our personal values and preferences will conflict with each other.
It IS hard. But it’s not complicated.
Individual people often have different wants and needs from each other. Even two people who love each other very much, and who decided they wanted to spend their lives together.
These differences aren’t always obvious.
Sometimes finding the toilet seat being left up feels painfully like being invisible and disregarded to one of the relationship partners. Other people are unfazed and might even think it’s stupid and hypersensitive to let something like the position of a toilet seat have any influence on your thoughts and feelings whatsoever.
You can substitute literally every possible event that can happen in life into that previous paragraph and it will be true. Most of us—especially romantic partners—generally think and feel the same way about things. But what ends up eroding trust and hurting us in our marriages and long-term partnerships are all of the things we don’t feel the same way about.
It can be really hard to take something that is nonobvious to us and treat it with an abundance of care. It’s not as if it’s a difficult task so much, as our brains never register that nonobvious something as important.
I like snacking on peanuts. They appear nonthreatening to me. I don’t think much about them at all.
Others with severe, potentially fatal, allergies to peanuts experience them much differently than I do.
And that’s not weird. No one even thinks it is.
But sometimes, in our relationships, events occur which are less obvious, and seemingly less threatening than a potentially life-or-death medical condition. Sometimes, it’s the difference between how one feels when they walk into a bathroom with the toilet seat left up for them (even after requesting for many years that it not be) relative to how another person experiences that (they don’t even notice because it’s not important enough).
These are the everyday micro-transactions that happen in relationships. And when they result in positive feelings of being considered and respected and thought of and cared for, a healthy relationship ensues with people feeling loved and connected.
And when they result in negative feelings of being ignored and invisible and disrespected and not cared for, trust slowly but surely erodes between two people.
It’s HARD to do the mental work of caring about things you don’t automatically care about on behalf of another person. That critical mental work doesn’t necessarily come easy to people.
But this is what must happen if you want to have good relationships. It must happen consistently, every day of your shared lives.
Your relationship won’t be “easy” when you make consistent consideration in your everyday exchanges the default experience for one another. But it might look that way from the outside. And it might feel that way on the inside.
Great relationships are not promised. They’re earned.
Matthew Fray is the author of “This is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships”, a relationship coach, and formerly the blogger at Must Be This Tall To Ride.