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• Friday, January 9, 2009 08:33 PM

  marriage is harder than it looks

  I'm relieved to see that so many of the previous commenters got it. I don't know how old the author was when she got married, but it sounds indeed as though she and her husband went through a difficult phase of poverty, which so many of us go through, and grew up.

  I don't know if I ever thought my husband should take care of me, but I remember how panic set in, a week after our wedding, when i was in a cockroach-ridden studio with him a thousand miles from home, in the godforsaken wasteland of a frozen Rust Belt city, and he told me I needed to get a job quick, because he didn't think he'd make it through his difficult graduate program in the physical sciences. (He did, with flying colors. It was just first-year jitters talking.)

  I don't think I ever thought of leaving him...maybe, partly, because I didn't know where I would go. But this is something that happens in many marriages during hard times. It's not that you stop loving your spouse--it's just that love gets buried under stress and anxiety.

  It wasn't the only time the prospect of financial stability stressed our marriage--there were times when I was ashamed of not handling things well, and he forgave me, but even now I still feel terrible about it. The important thing is that we stayed together and carried each other through. We loved each other.

  In sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer, still holds. It's just that it's not always a walk in the park. Love isn't perfect; it needs refining. It sounds like the bitter, misogynistic commenters on the first couple pages haven't quite grasped this.

  —Marianna Trench Read Marianna Trench's other letters
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