Why Marriage is So Hard

Marriage exists at the edge of human capability. No one is born ready to create a happy, thriving marriage; we have to develop that capacity. It’s like playing the piano or climbing a mountain or ballroom dancing:  possible, but not easy. 

If your parents were exceptionally good at loving each other, you get a free head start on the path to creating a really good marriage. If you had normal parents who weren’t very good at loving each other, you get to start back here with the rest of us. Welcome to the real world. 

Your brain is primarily designed to handle a child-parent relationship, not an adult relationship. Your relationship with your parents was a survival-level priority when you were a child. You didn’t have the option of choosing different parents, or asking them to change, or asking for parent-child relationship therapy. Instead, you just had to do the best you could with what you had. 

As a child, you were incredibly vulnerable. When your parents failed to love and protect you, it had a significant impact on you. If you grew up in a soft nest, where you were treated kindly, your brain developed soft programming that was appropriate for childhood, and could then be adapted to thrive in adulthood. If you grew up in a hard nest, your brain developed hard programming to help you survive in a hostile environment. This kind of programming is difficult to rewrite, and it is not compatible with marriage. 

When you were a child, your parents had all of the power in the child/parent relationship. You needed them to survive, and your brain was programmed to stick with them no matter what. You were also programmed to see your parents as good people, even when they weren’t. If you grew up in an abusive home, your brain was programmed to see your parents as more benevolent and less sadistic than they really were. 

Most parents enjoy hurting their children at least some of the time, and children are not capable of understanding that their parents like hurting them. If you grew up with sadistic parents, your brain twisted that sadism into normal, acceptable human behavior. You became blind to sadistic behavior in your parents, in yourself, and in others. This blindness causes the cycle to be continued, generation after generation. As long as you are blind to sadism in your parents, you will also be blind to sadism in yourself and in others. 

Most of us grew up in families where anger and conflict go hand in hand. Did you ever see one of your parents take a strong stand against the other with love and kindness in their eyes? We learned that you stand up for yourself with anger, or you don’t stand up for yourself at all. 

There are only two ways to overcome fear:  anger and courage. In a normal marriage, when my partner is pressuring me to do something I don’t want to do, my default response is to get angry. My anger helps me stand up for myself and hold firm on my boundaries. It helps me take action even when I am afraid. As a child, anger was my only solution to these kinds of situations, because children are not capable of the kind of courage it takes to stand up to someone with love and kindness. 

Imagine silence on one side of a continuum, and anger on the other. Most of us feel trapped in this spectrum, seeing only two choices:  either speak up with anger or remain resentfully silent. There is a third choice:  speak up why kindness and courage. This third choice requires a level of emotional maturity that most of us never reach in life. We might be able to do it at work, but we generally can’t do it at home. 

Marriage is hard because it activates childhood behavioral patterns that were designed to help us manage difficult child-parent interactions. We learn about human relationships as three-foot-tall beings who have no power and great needs, and then we try to use what we learned to create a thriving adult relationship. We have to radically re-wire our brains to create thriving, long-lasting adult relationships. 

Your brain is wired for childhood, not adulthood. You can rewire your brain, but it takes deliberate, intense effort. If you just allow your brain to do what it wants to do in marriage, it will continue to behave as if you were a small, vulnerable child, and your partner was an unkind parent.