INTRODUCTION
The first thing you should know about marriage is that there are no experts. I know that seems counterintuitive to what the rest of culture and society tells us, given that there is an entire genre of books at your local indie or corporate mega bookstore suggesting otherwise, but remember, we live in a world where reality TV exists, despite all of us accepting that it is manipulated, reshot, staged, choreographed, and edited for maximum dramatic appeal.
Think about it: have you ever noticed how solid and comprehensive the prevailing wisdom is on marriage? The latitude of opinions regarding marriage is like the style latitude of an ancient mausoleum: austere, mossy, and mostly retrograde.
This settling of critical consideration is even more surprising given that marriage is one of the most secretly amorphous and evolving things we have in our society. Sure, the fundamentals endure (holy matrimony, death do us part, The Bachelor franchise, etc..), but what it means to be married has shifted PRETTY sharply in just a few decades, not to mention a few centuries.
As a contextual aside, in the lifetime of my mother, a woman who gave birth to me at the age of twenty-two, women had to fight for the right to be able to open their own bank account! Just seriously think about that for a second. In the same lifetime that we went to the moon (aided by women), we also wrestled with whether or not an entire gender could navigate the overwhelmingly complex binary of "deposit" and "withdrawal."
And if we zoom back a century or two beyond my mother, the vibe of women was more akin to a "conversational farm animal" than it was something we see in a Nicholas Sparks movie.
I say all that to emphasize two things: 1) the stupefyingly slow pace of progress and 2) how frozen in time we tend to be about social issues, especially the ones concerning and involving women.
All that to say, it's essential to acknowledge that for a large portion of American culture, we're more or less taught that, as currently iterated, marriage is both ancient and straightforward, and all the lessons we need were known and articulated by the Desert Fathers of Judaism or Christian antiquity.
The net effect of this topical reductionism is that for a person or couple seeking advice, most materials about marriage are books more watered down than the Titanic.
Accordingly, these vaguely helpful and mostly recycled insights are a critical hurdle to clear because once we realize that there are no experts and once we realize that there is no precisely correct path to follow with our relationships, we are then allowed to unclench our collective butts about what our marriages or relationships should and should not look like.
And for the record, butt-clenching isn't good for anyone, and it's uncomfortable. Sure, you may get defined glutes out of it, but is having defined glutes really all it's cracked up to be? It just feels like a lot of maintenance, and after a certain age, being known for your defined glutes just gets a little weird. Trust me; having a defined butt is a young person's game, so unclench away!
At the time that I am writing this, my wife, Ashley, and I are celebrating 19 years of marriage, meaning that I've lived more life with Ashley than anyone else. This means that the state, the man, God, Oprah, Tom Cruise's Scientology, and any other authority figure you want to represent must acknowledge that Ashley and my relationship with her is the most foundational and consequential part of my life.
This foundational-ness is a product of time spent together and of the accumulation of all types and varieties of experiences across 19 years: wonderful experiences, challenging experiences, hilarious experiences, absurd experiences, parenting experiences, disorienting experiences, pandemic experiences, screaming-into-pillows-out-of-anger experiences and so many other types of experiences all in between.
And for me, throughout these 19 years and all manner of experiences, a light has been shined on where modern marital advice fails.
For instance, most talk or writing about marriage focuses mainly on the relationship at the center of the marriage. On the surface, this makes sense because, after all, that relationship is the whole point. The union is the manifestation, the animating aspect, and the entire reason for being, so what else would you talk about?
But in doing so, the requisite individuality that contributes to the relationship is usually ignored. There's so much focus on what the two individuals create together that more space is needed to see what it means for two separate and distinct variables of people to exist cohesively within the confines of the relationship. That's the most significant issue at the center of most marriages: not how to be together, but how to be together while being separate people.
It just seems like if you are not going to acknowledge that every person brings their own trojan horse of baggage into a relationship to be opened up, only God knows when, then what even is the point of trying to talk about marriage? Because as much as no one wants to admit it, we all have baggage that must be dealt with. All the respect and sex in the world won't resolve preexisting issues of insecurity, desperation, delusions of grandeur, low self-esteem, or selfishness. That's like spraying Febreeze in a boys' locker room; it may take the edge off, but you're still left with the stink of feet, body odor, and now also Febreeze.
The other place where modern marriage advice often fails is the generative process for marital advice to become canonized. It's insane because marriage advice is less regulated than NFTs and AI technology. Anybody can say anything about marriage, and if it is pithy, vaguely accurate, and gets repeated enough, suddenly, it's almost biblical in its inerrancy.
At about this point, you might wonder if this is my pitch to be presented as a NEW YOUNGBLOOD EXPERT BOI in the lush content fields of marriage. If that sentiment reflects your concern or suspicion, please know that I am laughing in your face because the idea of Ashley and I as marital experts is as absurd as Jimbo Fisher's fully guaranteed contract at Texas A&M.
Ashley and I are only now barely starting to understand the fundamental nature of our relationship. We love each other, support each other, and genuinely like being with each other, but having maintained that over nineteen years effectively means nothing relative to other relationships with their own specifications and nuances.
Instead, anything I say or write about in this book comes from the perspective of two people who are just big fans of marriage and enthusiastic about people figuring out their own relationships. We hold no degrees or licenses to speak with any institutional authority on the topic. All we have is our own experiences and perspectives and the hope that something we've experienced or realized may be found to be helpful for someone else.
To be honest, I was hesitant to write about this topic given that I didn't want to create the vibe of "HEY, EVERYONE, LOOK, I DID IT. I FIGURED OUT MARRIAGE."
Instead, the vibe I wanted to create was in writing something that deconstructed the static, stale, and frankly misstated aspects of most modern marriage advice, not to just destroy something for the sake of destroying it, but to clear room for us to collectively and individually build something back that is more honest, more relevant, and more helpful when it comes to conversations about marriages.
Also, no book agents wanted me to write about this either, specifically in this way and about the things in the following chapters. I wonder if it was more about the topicalities (unlikely) or the person executing those topicalities (VERY likely). Still, I did it anyway because deep down, I have a profoundly opaque and constant stubbornness in both my head and my heart and also because it just seemed to me that the longer people are married, the more withholding they tend to be about the unique contours and specific delineations of their relationship. Not because they don't want to help or are sequestered into silence by a deal with a bridge troll, but because they recognize a) how little they actually know and b) how uniquely specific what they've learned is to their own situation.
And so, all we're left with are the crumbs of cliches and stale wisdom or books committed to speaking broadly about marriage and ultimately concluding that all you need is love, respect, and sex.
It's true: marriages do need love, respect, and sex, but as it turns out, it's much more complicated than that, and yet also much more straightforward in other ways, which was one of the biggest motivations for me to write this book: to simplify the aspects of marriage that have been unnecessarily presented as complex while also giving space to the complicated elements that have been suggested as being simple.
Because if there's anything Ashley and I have learned across 19 years of matrimony, it's that while each marriage might be a unique world specific unto itself, we all deserve better and more precise ways to talk about it.
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