Marriage Advice

I don’t believe in marriage advice. I think that almost all of it is actually harmful. Most parenting advice is actually harmful, but marriage advice is almost completely harmful.

Despite that, I am sharing my two cents.

(We are married 25+ years, for street cred.)

A marriage is between two people. If you keep it to those two people, you can make a good thing out of it.

If you bring in your mother, Cindy down the block, Tom at the auto shop, your chances of having a happy and fulfilling relationship go down.

This Fair Play game, which I read about in the WSJ book review, seems to me to be an example of allowing in other people’s expectations into the inner sanctum of the marriage covenant.

Who cares about society or how much help some woman needs or her husband minds?

The only one whose opinion matters is your spouse. No one else.

If they are ok doing everything, great.

If it bothers them specifically, then you have to tweak it until you find something that works for both of you.

From what I learned in law school, a Fair Play game that actually prized fairness would have the first session of playing the game as a session where the two of you draw your own cards for how you live, your personalities, kids, etc. The two people actually in the marriage are ok with the cards. They are both ok with the rules as established. Because what I learned in law school is that what the rules are is very important to the eventual resolution.

Cards written by some woman trying to avenge womankind for centuries of oppression are not going to help your marriage. They are going to hurt it. This is not an objective and helpful tool. This is a way to bring Cindy from down the block into your spousal chores conversation for backup. Nothing fair about that.

If either spouse minds something, then that’s important and must be dealt with.

If a woman who wrote a book on Gender Studies thinks that your distribution of chores is inequitable, that should make absolutely no difference in your life.