Years ago I came to the not-remotely-original understanding that love is at the center of everything. Loving each other, creating bonds of love, loving ourselves, loving something bigger than ourselves—it’s all mission critical for a happy, satisfying life.

That understanding informs my writing, and it also informs both my personal life and my work as a coach and therapist to couples. After all, marriages are often the heartbeat of the love in our lives.

Doing this work as long as I have, I’ve realized a lot of conventional wisdom is, in a word, flat out wrong. But people in need of transformation cling to these axioms like life preservers, not knowing that some of these beliefs wind up doing more harm than good.

And so I bring you my fresh take on dated principles. Hoping that I can offer up some useful reflections on love and marriage. Please leave a comment at the bottom, I’ll be interested in your thoughts!

Myth: In a good marriage, a partner anticipates our needs.

A healthy marriage is not one where your partner can be safely expected to mind read and anticipate our desires, but rather one where when you feel safe enough to say what you need, and your partner takes that seriously and works to build it together That’s love. It’s really that simple. Sure, it’d be nice if our chosen ones just knew, by sheer osmosis, that what we want for Valentine’s Day is a planned date, complete with arranging the sitter and a dinner reservation, with a thoughtful card written in free verse. But friends, as bad as you are at knowing what I’m thinking right now, your partner can’t know what’s in your brain.

Say the words.

It also means that your partner can’t be expected to know what’s bothering you. Yes, it would be nice if we all had infinite time to sit around and contemplate our partners every non-verbal clue—the faint wince, the subdued quiet. But come on, life is nothing if not complicated. Our lives often feel like we’re moving faster than our wee little minds can tolerate. Your partner’s brain, much like your own, probably often feels like’s it’s crackling with static. In that state, how can your partner be expected to tune into your frequency and see that something is amiss. If something is amiss, say it! And if your partner does somehow cue into your elevated shoulders enough to ask, “what’s wrong?’ don’t say, “nothing” unless the answer is indeed “nothing”. We are no longer being pursued, we can’t expect our partner to drop everything and chase us down to insist on being told what’s on our mind. We are grownups who wear grown up pants, and we can be reliably trusted to hold our own and say our truth.

Say what you mean. Mean what you say.

Myth: Marriage is work.

All of us were told this one at some point. it is one of the first myths I find myself breaking down when I see couples. Because a good marriage should feel joyful, wonderful, liberating. In a good marriage, you want to be with your partner, you don’t have to grit your teeth and suffer through a meal together. In a good marriage, you don’t hide in the bathroom summoning up the willpower to sit across the living room from your partner. Yes, marriage takes time and intention, but I can’t tell you the number of people I’ve seen people stay in horrible marriages because they assume marriage is to be gotten through.

Rather than think of a marriage as work, I’d so much rather people think of marriage as continual recalibration. Yes, when you bring children on board, you will need to take a breath together and decide how you’ll still make space for your relationship. When your last child hits Kindergarten age, and thus you’ve moved from the childbearing years to the child-rearing years, it’s time to take stock and consider how to use your newfound bandwidth for what’s really important, each other. Sudden illness, change of life circumstances, the first Wednesday in August, these are all moments when we need to stop and think, is this marriage sustaining, fulfilling, enriching for us both? Do we need to scrap some old assumptions and create something different today?

So you see, it’s not work per se, in that it’s not a chore akin to taking out the kitty litter. It’s more that a good marriage requires investment in time. Time together, time to reflect. And a good marriage, above all else, requires the ability to recalibrate.

Myth: Love your partner more than yourself

If I had to pick one thing that bring couples in more than any other, it’s this one.

Here’s the thing: How in the world can you love anyone until you learn to love yourself? You can’t! Until you love yourself, when your partner expresses love for you, you’ll feel one of two things—shame at pulling one over on your partner because you can't possibly deserve this love, or a need to keep that love coming at any cost because it’s the only thing keeping you afloat.

Either way, its recipe for an unbalanced marriage. You might assume that that shame and need to be loved would lead to a partner grateful for any proffered love, when in fact, people who don’t love themselves are often irritable, difficult to please, sometimes even downright abrasive. Why? Because they are always looking to prove this one central aspect of who they are, even as they are scared to prove it. Put another way, people who don’t love themselves are always looking for evidence that they were right all along, they are not worth loving. So they nitpick, they stonewall.

In contrast, when you love yourself, you can absorb the warmth of your partner’s affection, redouble it, and send it back into the universe.

Here’s a metaphor to help you understand the importance of self-love in the context of marriage. You know how annoying it is when you try to compliment someone and they wave you off? Like:

“I love your new haircut!”

“Are you kidding, it’s awful. You’re just being nice.”

Then you have to either walk away in exasperation or try to convince your friend that you actually do like that haircut. It’s a lot of work!

Loving someone who doesn’t love themselves is that situation writ large. It’s unsatisfying, like a brownie with only half the required chocolate.

Myth: Love means never having to say you’re sorry

What madness is this?

We are none of us perfect. None of us. Which means we will blunder. We can’t expect our partner to know we wish we’d done it differently. Rather, we have to own our own work. In fact, I want couple to learn how to do a level-up apology, which means making that apology specific, including how we feel our blunder hurt the other person, and what steps we’re taking to make sure we don’t make the same mistake again.

For example: “I’m sorry I was late for our date. I’ve been absent a lot lately and I’m sure you even wondered if it was important to me or if I was coming at all. The truth is my boss cornered me and wanted to talk about a project, and I mistakenly thought I could let him ramble and still get here on time. Now I know, I can’t do that. So next time, I’ll let him know that I’m happy to hear his thoughts later, but I’m on my way out now.”

This leads right back, like all roads do, to the mind-reading, doesn’t it? Mean what you say, say what you mean.

Myth: Love means completing each other.

Gross.

Like, his one literally makes me heave.

Thanks Jerry Maguire for this little bit of fake wisdom.

When people complete each other, they fit into each other like book ends. Which means, they hold themselves upright, but they don’t move or grow in any way, they don’t roll upward like gears. If growth is important, you need to take control of that on your own. It’s nobody’s job but yours to journey through life in a way that feels meaningful. So have your own passions—mountain bike or have a book club or take a wine class or study Italian. Definitely spend time with other friends. You need to refill your battery so you can come together, fully charged.

If you rely on your partner to complete you, well, remember that bit about mind-reading? Couples who get starry eyed while insisting they complete each other, they are reflecting what they think they want to see. It’s enmeshment, not connection. I often tell couples, I want you to want to be together, not to need to be together. When there’s need, when a couple feels like they are only a half a person when they are apart, I start to worry that one or the other person doesn’t really love themselves enough.

Now, it is true that there are differences between men and women that seem insurmountable but actually make people fit quite well. So well, in fact, the healthiest same-sex couples I’ve seen have the same differential organization.

For instance. Men’s brains tend to move linearly. The example I give clients is often this: If you show a man a photograph of a mouse, he’ll think: “mouse…mouse in the kitchen…pick up mouse traps.” Correspondingly, three parts of his brain will light up, one after another. Whereas if you show a photograph of a mouse to a woman, her response is :

mouse…Tom and Jerry…need to figure out if my children are watching too many cartoons…look up what the American Academy of Pediatrics says about this
…cat…pick up cat food….the place with cheaper cat food closes at 4:30…move my meeting
…squirrel…squirrels in the attic…pick up gentle squirrel catcher so as not to startle children

ALL AT THE SAME TIME. Her entire brain lights up.

Couples always laugh when I tell them this. It’s funny because it’s true.

But it’s good to know about these differences, because then we don’t expect mind-reading (again), since we know that our brains FUNDAMENTALLY WORK DIFFERENTLY. Also, this differential organization means that men, in general, tend to want to solve a problem, when women, in general, want to process a problem. These are both useful processes! It’s the one way I think fitting together like a jigsaw puzzle is a good idea. In my family, we harness our differential organization like this:

I’ll read and talk and dream until I decide I want something, and then Keith and I talk about it and he wields all his problem-solver tools to make it happen. Our years in Italy were a direct result of that working together—my idea, his execution. Even my 50th birthday in Montana. I told Keith that on my milestone birthday I wanted to wake up to a staggering view. I wanted to stand at the window and just feel the power of this thing called life. I don’t know what he googled, but he sure made it happen.

I didn’t expect him just to know. Maybe he would have figured I wanted a party or something. No, I said I want a view and my babies around me and that’s what we did and I was so happy.

Which does lead me to dreaming. It’s important to be in the present, yes, but when a couple stops dreaming together, that’s the precise moment that a marriage goes stale. You need to keep your marriage juicy with dreams. What do you want? What does your partner want? it’s okay if there are differences! Where you can find a shared journey?

We don’t need to have all those dreams come true for us to feel happy. I mean, look at us, we had a year-around-the-world all sketched out while the pandemic had other plans. But we recalibrated, used our differing abilities and didn’t expect the other person to guess our feelings. Instead, we trust each other enough to know that we can state what we need and work to weave those strands together.

I hope you get what I’m saying with these myth-busters.

What I want to leave you with this this; You deserve to feel like in your marriage you are your best self. If you stick on any of the above myths, then perhaps it’s time to get some help to make your marriage the best it can be, to give you the space for you and your partner to grow together. To evolve together. To make the love between you feel like a sustaining place worth creating…together.

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