Does Marriage Require Conflict?

Love is hard, right? We've heard this a million times. I've even heard preachers say it. Wrong. After three years of marriage, I'm here to say that marriage can be almost entirely without conflict, without arguments, without sacrifice, without fighting. Full of love, intimacy, and all the good stuff.

I never thought it would be this easy, this graceful, this organic. Both Katie and I had our doubts from the beginning. Looked at objectively, we had some real compatibility issue (mostly religion, but others like music, art, social group, family upbringing). Frankly, she thought I was a little weird from the beginning, and vice versa. Yet, somehow despite that, as if living in some magical alternate universe, we have what I consider to be a perfect marriage - about as perfect as it gets. I enjoy every single day. Perhaps it's rare. Perhaps I'm blessed. So be it. Carl Jung once said that we exist in order to explain ourselves. Let me try.

Main Ingredients

Respect. Most importantly by far, we genuinely respect each other, morally and professionally. We are good people, we have empathy for others, and we both support the people in society who are the proverbial "least of these". Having similar ethics is crucial, even if those ethical systems have different foundations. This usually means similar politics as well. Yet we respect each other as independent, different people with different ideas. She has her goals, I have mine; we pursue them together.

Reading. This is our passion. This is how we first met. I was working security, she was at a book group discussing Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse at the library. This was one of my favorite books, so I began discussing it with the group, as I was kicking them out of the library. Reading promotes an intellectual life; a life of learning, growth and conversation.

Money. We don't need much, we don't want much, and our hobbies don't cost much. Thus, it's nothing to fight about. We both save money rather than spend it. We are fortunate to have jobs that we can actually live on.

If you are reading this and still looking for a partner, don't settle for anything less. If you are reading this and feel unsatisfied with your boyfriend or girlfriend, either fix it or say goodbye. If you are in a dangerous or violent marriage, leave out of respect for yourself. If you are in an unhappy marriage, try your very best to fix it before saying goodbye. You owe it to yourself and your partner. Marriage should be like living with a best friend. It's usually not, and that's very sad.