‘Ugh! You are so irritating and I wish you’d go away.’

There’s been quite a lot of feisty debate around the interwebs this week prompted by Laura R. Munson’s Modern Love column, in which she describes how she powered through her husband’s wobbling with regard to their marriage by opting to ignore the wobbling.

I said: “…There are times in every relationship when the parties involved need a break. What can we do to give you the distance you need, without hurting the family?”

“Huh?” he said.

In response, Amanda Marcotte wrote in the Guardian yesterday, “I say, instead of applying more pressure on people to stay in unhappy marriages and try to work it out, we should apply less. Life is full of too much misery on its own, so why add to your pile?”

A central problem with our ongoing collective struggle with marriage, I think, but which is not often discussed, is the fact that it is a relationship that we have more agency over than any other close relationship in our lives. We choose to be with our partner, we don’t choose our parents, but then despite this agency, we tend to wish for the relationship to fit in to a particular paradigm of connubial-bliss-or-bust even more so that we expect biologically-determined relationships to adhere to a norm where veryone is always happy and loving each other equally.  Knowing that we enter into marriage by choice means that we feel worse about it - and more inclined to sprint away - when we fail.

And in a lot of respects that is good: I agree with Marcotte that trapping people in unhappy marriages for the sake of appearances or something is awful - she makes the point that there is no proof at the end of the article that Munson and her husband are happy; they’re just still married.

But I also think that it is important to acknowledge that all marriages are unhappy at times; just as other relationships vacillate, so will there be times when you look at your husband or wife and think, ‘ugh! you are so irritating and I wish you’d go away.’ It’s careful to measure failure carefully: if you’re playing for the long game, then there is something to be said for enduring the crap bits as Munson did, for a while at least, to see if you and your other half can’t emerge on the other side.