Ask Me Anything: Love Edition

Nine Keys to a Happy Marriage, How to Argue, and the The Best Relationship Advice I Ever Got

my wedding day, Yosemite

Yes, this is a Substack about writing and publishing. But I thought I’d end the year on a different subject: love.

When I put out a call for questions for Craft Week: Ask Me Anything, a few readers took the “anything” part to heart, which was what I was hoping might happen.

Some of the questions came via email. Here’s one of them.

(You can read my answers on film options, rescuing a muddled manuscript, enlisting a developmental editor, coming up with ideas, and more in Craft Week Part 1 and Craft Week Part 2.)

A Question About Marriage

Hi Michelle,

You said we could ask questions about anything you know about.

What in your opinion are the ingredients of a good marriage, and a good relationship if not in marriage?

After many years of both the above I am still struggling with relationships.

I am now 74 and about to start a new relationship with a woman one year older than me. 

Thanks,

Raymond 

Dear Raymond,

It is true that I have been married for a long time. My husband and I will soon celebrate our 22nd wedding anniversary. We lived together for a few years before we got married, and we dated for a couple of years before we lived together; all told, we have been together for 28 years. I’ve spent more years with my husband than without him.

Several years ago, I wrote a whole novel about marriage, called The Marriage Pact, for which I did a lot of research into the psychology of marriage and the statistical aspects of marriage. (For example, it turns out that people who spend a relatively small amount of money on their wedding tend to stay married longer than people who have a very expensive wedding.)

I tell you all of this simply to say I do believe that I know a few things about marriage. Which is not to say that I necessarily know more about marriage than someone who has had a less “successful” marriage, because marriage and longterm partnerships contain myriad variables, and there are so many ways a marriage can fall apart, beginning with a fundamentally poor match—which is exceedingly difficult to overcome (more on that later).

I know about my marriage, and why it works now, and why it has worked for so long, and what has threatened it, and how we have held it together. I also know that I began with a fundamentally good match—someone with whom I had little in common on paper, but who turned out to be the right match for me nonetheless.

You will notice that the first small image on this post is a wedding cake, and the second small image is a house. That is because a marriage begins with the celebration, but what it comes down to, after the cake and champagne have run out, is the life of the home. For a marriage to work, the life of the home must be intact.

I think of it this way: the world outside can be tough. The home should be a refuge. It was my husband who told me this, a couple of years into our marriage, when I was going through an argumentative phase. He wanted peace in the home. Having grown up in the midst of drama and conflict, I didn’t consider drama and conflict a big deal, but he did. I came to share his way of thinking on this matter, just as he would come to share my way of thinking on others.

Before I get into the meat of this post, though, I’d like to offer the best piece of marriage advice I ever received. It was from my paternal grandfather on the occasion of either his 6oth or 50th wedding anniversary to my grandmother (I can’t recall which). My grandparents lived in rural Mississippi. Their three kids and all of the grandkids were gathered in the front yard of the house he had built with his own hands, the house that my grandmother hade made into a home. The house was on a country road, and on the other side of the road was a pasture. My grandfather liked to sit in the front porch in his rocking chair, watching the birds wheeling over the pasture. He was a man of great calm and few words.

I asked him, “What’s the secret to marriage?”

He said, “You just try to get on along.”

I remember that conversation often. It is the best relationship advice I ever got—both for marriage and for relationships in general. So there, I have put the best advice up front. It is really the key to everything. There’s more, of course.

In this very long post, I’ll cover

• the things I think are important in a marriage

• the things that don’t really matter

• how to argue (and how not to argue)

• why having “things in common” is much less important than people often think

• what makes a good match

• what to do when things get incredibly tough (which they will)

• when to “let it slide” (I wrote about this in the post Notes on a Marriage by Way of Joan Didion, over at my author newsletter)

• Does shared faith predict marital success? (totally nonscientific, anecdotal evidence from my own extended family)

So, to begin, here are my Nine Principles for a Happy Marriage: