General Housekeeping
I struggled to write this post for weeks. Of the half dozen or more married people I’ve spoken to, getting out of a rhythm and struggling to back into a pace of life is a fairly common transitional problem when you get married. It’s like, you’re aware the thing happens, but until you experience it, you don’t understand quite how derailed things become.
Moving, marriage, and children seem to be some of the biggest life events that throw you off. Divorce, and death too, but I’ll save the morbidity and mortality discussion for another post.
As readers, thank you for your patience — I wager some of you forgot this Substack existed; I even had people unsubscribe, but that’s understandable, and that’s life. I genuinely apologize for the wait and now that our home routine has settled a bit more, I will be getting back onto a more routine schedule.
The Practical Therapist is a free enterprise. However, if you wish purchase a subscription, the yearly rate is $60, or, you can donate to the cause to help me pay down my student loan debt by visiting me at Buy Me a Coffee.
Without further ado:
Before I was married, I used to dream about the ease with which my life would come to me; wouldn't it be better, I’d say to myself, when you share a home with your husband?
Won’t it be better when you sleep in the same bed, under the same roof, eat meals together, read together, love together, take walks together, and all manner of sweet things now that you are bound?
My husband and I have had the peace (relatively) of settling in in our two months-going-on-three of marriage. He’s my best friend; he makes me laugh; we’re goofy together; snuggle, cook, plan and execute said plans together. We support one another and try to help the other by making life a little easier, a little sweeter.
As Roman Catholics, upon getting married, we’re granted graces through the sacrament of marriage that blesses and strengthens us through the covenantal bond forged in Christ at the alter when we take our vows. Peace, joy, fidelity, charity, love, among many.
Though I am an anxious person at times — perhaps it is biased, wishful thinking — there has been a greater degree of calm that has carried through from that day through this one, a sense of confidence and sureness in what we do, together, going forward. While not everyone will experience being married, as not everyone is called to marriage and is meant to be in that state of life, striving to find peace in one’s current season of life, along with the joys and crosses that come, is a good learning process.
As the weeks have trailed on, we’ve done our best to get our lives, our home, and our jobs in order. After all, we are stewards of the offices and responsibilities that we’ve been given to manage. I admit I’ve been distracted with newly-wed life and getting my desk into some level of organization so that I can conduct Telehealth sessions without the space looking like a small disaster area. 😱
But a few thoughts have percolated. I dare not pretend to know everything about marriage and condescend to all of you; however, there is a genuine mindset shift, that, hopefully, occurs when (or if) we get married that differs significantly from the single life.
Life is easier to share with your spouse.
I could wax heavily on this one, but it feels pretty self explanatory.
All relationships, especially marriage, take work.
Patience, humility, sacrifice, charity, fraternity, temperance, diligence, kindness, and chastity (for us Christians who believe in that).
Some people fall into the assumption that upon finding the right person and right relationship, all aspects and strife of life will be done away with. As anyone who has endured and managed to stay married across several decades will tell you, if you read those thoughtful essays detailing the secrets to a happy life or marriage from an octogenarian or some such decade-accoladed individual, there will be that pause of reflection, a smile, and they simply tell you that you do the hard part by just getting on. Sounds very British.
Before we got married, and through much of our dating, I was genuinely plagued by fears and anxieties from previous relationships and the dysfunctional stress of the house I rented a room in. My roommates were generally nice people, but there was a distinct lack of maturity among a couple of them about responsibility to others (not necessarily for) in maintaining the cleanness or order of the house. You’d think it was a college frat, not occupied by women ranging from 25 to 32, based on the state of the dishes and clutter.
Because of this, he and I try to help one another out with chores; putting things away, cleaning up, organizing (I do that one a bit more to be fair.) We can have a conversation about the dishes getting out of hand or being on top of them more often, rather than getting a non-response or “those aren’t mine” when you’ve been gone for a week and everyone else … hasn’t been.
My husband makes my life easier because we communicate; small confusions and grievances don’t grow larger because he’s patient with my anxiety, and we tease it out kindly, together. Arguments and difficulties still happen; we had a long talk a few weeks back about spending, expenses, and saving that inevitably happened once we had a few weeks of data points to see how well we were doing. I cried, wiped my tears, set aside my fear of being in a state of constant anxiety about starving, and thanked God for my husband being the wise and responsible steward of finances that he is.
He cherishes me as much as I cherish him, and as stewards to one another in our marriage, I strive to remember to be thankful for who he is and the loving things he does, something that seems to be forgotten in a culture of narcissistic, adolescent soul-searching for the God found within.1
Thus, marriage requires something else entirely. ⬇️
The ego of the old self must die away for the new person you are to live.
This is true in most transitional stages. Read any bildungsroman.
My husband is pretty well-versed in philosophy, as much as I am in Psych, observing human behavior, and drawing conclusions.
Among those discussions and conversations of how to keep building our future together, and around home-school, public, or parochial, was a point that has massively been forgotten in American culture: self-sacrifice for the good of another.
In much of the philosophy he’s read and we’ve discussed, in marriage, our egos have to die in order to sustain the marriage, in a religious, literal, and metaphorical sense. That death is in echo of the sacrifice Christ made on the cross. He gave his whole self to the point of death; for us, it is an ego death.
There are certainly marriages (of which I am privy to by way of client’s stories of their personal lives) where in one way or another, one or both spouses struggles or completely fails to give up self- or ego-centered ways of thinking.
When I went to the bank to close down my old account, the rep informed me that she often sees many married couples who maintain separate finances, tightly gripping hard onto what is theirs. As I said to her (told to Augustine and myself by our priest) “When you become one flesh, you become one wallet.”
There are numerous examples of couples who fail, and equally as many who succeed.
This ego death is necessary if one hopes to have children. We must learn patience, temperance, empathy, discipline, duty, and self-restraint, not only for our spouse, but for children that we bring into the world. Every interaction a child sees up until they leave the home, shapes their internal structure of how the world works: how men treat women, how women treat men, to whom and how we show or deny love, forgive or hold a grudge. It’s a painful death, but necessary, for us to grow — whether we have children or not, to be honest with you — in our personal relationships, our jobs, and our communities.
We are responsible to others we live with, and the habits we develop beforehand will serve or destroy us in our marriages.
This ego death has no better a practice grounds than in the experience gained in having roommates. Living with others is one of the greatest challenges, as we exist in interconnected intimate spaces that are shared communally. Sometimes we have privacy, and at other times, we don’t. Suffering the cross of roommates taught me many things about myself, and a vast amount about how we are responsible to others, and what we are responsible for.
When we get married, we have to be on the same page on the responsibilities of communal life. How many farcical stories have we heard where disagreements emerged a few weeks in on how do we do dishes? Marriage is a sacrifice, and both our egos have to die for the sake of the other, if we are to live together (see previous point). There is no better an example for the purpose of this practice as when we bring children into the world, or, for whatever reason, we become caregivers for others at some future point.
Conscientiousness can be an inborn trait, as well as being learned. However, it requires the forethought to understand how the dominos of your actions have consequences on others that build to a greater crescendo.
Roommates taught me to be conscious of where I left my property in the common space — to clean up after myself for the benefit of others — a trait both my husband and I share. When I’m upset about some aspect of our current space being a little messy, I speak to him about my preferences; he does the same, though he’s less particular about it and far more gentle than me, and I remember to try to speak from a place of love rather than reaction going forward.
Our lives before we get married are practice for the routine and habits that we develop and bring into marriage. While living with others can teach you what not to do to help you grow, if you don’t recognize or learn that you need to grow and answer those challenges to your ego now for the benefit of yourself, spouse, and family later (should you desire those things), the learning curve will be steep and painful.
Living with others who are at a lower level of maturity than yourself — or if you find yourself at that place of being mentally many years behind your biological age — can stultify your development. And the growing pains will not be pretty, for you or your partner.
As much as you may internally groan, understand that by putting off tomorrow the skills, tasks, and lessons of today, you shortchange your future self the benefit of the gains you will have later—of insight, wisdom, prudence, perseverance, competency, and grit. Also, being able to take care of yourself and others.
Because when there’s a baby throwing up at two in the morning and the dog has wet the carpet, and the house is a mess because at the age of 30-something neither your or your partner/spouse remembered to put things back when you were done with them —and now, my lord now, you are searching in the dark and stumble and stub your toes and the whole place is a mess as the baby’s wail reaches an impressive new pitch you didn't think they were capable of before — that’s going to take a whole lot of something to clean that up before you go into work the next morning. 😉
Or as one woman said to me recently, “You didn't have to put it that way.”
To make the point, why yes, yes I did.
Don’t worry too much about the future.
Each day we wake up, the cycle begins anew—a constant scroll-worthy endless amalgamation of ever-present anxiety-inducing panic-related news.
Every morning, I’ll read headlines from the left and the right, sometimes an inkling for Hollywood Reporter, Vox, Vice, Substack, MSN, Drudge Report—because the headlines still get a chuckle out of me, or The Atlantic. I read a lot of different things from different people, and if I had the money to justify the expenditure, I’d probably pay for The Wallstreet Journal and The Spectator/American Spectator. Sometimes I hit up First Things, or Aeon.
Sorting through the information deluge has become more fraught, especially with the doomsday panic over AI-generated news and text. I try to limit myself to an hour each day, first thing in the morning, to satisfy my own digital addiction, of which I am not proud of but am deeply aware, and wonder how I will manage, cut down, or cut it out completely once my husband and I start (hopefully) having our own children.
Thoughts of children create their own sense of anxiety: Will I be a good mother, how do I feel about subverting my expectations and desires to be a writer/MH practitioner in total sacrifice for multiple tiny humans (I want five, he wants four, and only God knows what we’re getting), or worse yet, will we be able to conceive?
My husband bears this patiently, with calm, steady love, and listens to these concerns, which when finally given voice and thought through, aren’t as stressful as I believed they were.
, writer of , had a lovely piece on lessons she’s taken from Audrey Hepburn. Hepburn was a class act; she had experienced the difficulty of rationing during WWII, and learned to appreciate many little joys in her life, from gardening, to food, and most importantly, her children and family life.As Katie writes:2
4. Don’t worry too much about the future
“Pick the day. Enjoy it - to the hilt. The day as it comes. People as they come... The past, I think, has helped me appreciate the present - and I don't want to spoil any of it by fretting about the future.”
Hepburn took each day as it came, doing her best not to fret about the future, enjoying what she had in the moment. Her early life of deprivation and uncertainty during war time taught her to never sour the present moment because you’re worrying too much about ‘what if.’ The past is past, the future is largely out of our hands. Trust, prepare, hope, and enjoy the moment.
“My mother was always ready to start over from zero. I recall that during the financial troubles of the mideighties, she said to her companion, Robert, who feared a crash: “So what? Even if we were to lose everything, we have a garden, we can grow potatoes and eat them.”
An element of our age that has all but disappeared in the rhetoric of bombastic emotivism and manipulative language, is approaching the world from a practical standpoint. Last week, this passage came to mind: don’t let the devil steal your peace.
Matthew, 6:25-34:3
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat [or drink], or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?
Look at the birds in the sky; they do not sow or reap, they gather nothing into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are not you more important than they?
Can any of you by worrying add a single moment to your life-span?
Why are you anxious about clothes? Learn from the way the wild flowers grow. They do not work or spin.
But I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was clothed like one of them.
If God so clothes the grass of the field, which grows today and is thrown into the oven tomorrow, will he not much more provide for you, O you of little faith?
So do not worry and say, ‘What are we to eat?’ or ‘What are we to drink?’ or ‘What are we to wear?’
All these things the pagans seek. Your heavenly Father knows that you need them all.
But seek first the kingdom [of God] and his righteousness, and all these things will be given you besides.
Do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself. Sufficient for a day is its own evil.
There will always be uncertainties. With patience and care, talking through them, recognizing the driving fear and terror behind each one, my husband helped me to realize what was a projection and what was a wound that needed to be mended and set to rest.
Fear is the mindkiller.
—Paul Attreides, Dune
As we’ve talked about our lives before we dated, we realized we had travelled through our own personal deserts to reach the point where we ready for one another. God does prepare us for the path ahead.
For the Augustine and me, we have each other, as confidants and friends as well as husband and wife, bound in the sacrament of marriage. We have friends outside of ourselves and family that we speak to. Above all, we have prayer, whereby we recognize our frailty and failings, as the fallen humanity that we are, and our reliance on Christ.
But as Hepburn explains and the piece from Matthew gets at, is that life will always be full of anxieties. Strive to concern yourself with the tasks of the day, and count your blessings. You can’t control many things, but what you can control is yourself and how you choose to respond to what happens around you.
And maybe, if we’re lucky, we have a person who is not only part of our cross to carry, but accompanies us as we carry it to our final destination and helps us get there ultimately.
Michael Shellenberger and his staff at
wrote a bit of commentary on the importance of the values that you’re raised with by focusing on Sam Bankman-Fried, and the nihilism (from his mother) and selfish utilitarianism (from his father) that dictated his worldview, leading to a Ponzi scheme that “defrauded investors of billions of dollars”.The topic deserves an entire post on its own. Because of my faith, I believe all people have free-will, and I don’t believe in biological determinism or the theories of B.F. Skinner, John Watson, or Pavlov about behaviorism, nor the nihilism that free-will is an illusion. You do have a choice; it may be difficult or seemingly impossible to act against your nature or self-interests, but it can be done.
This week’s homework:
Not your therapist, but click the link to be taken to that portion of the post, and stew on how the values you were raised with informed your decision to adhere to or abandon those values, and the impact it’s had on your life and choices. Get some paper. See what you come up with.
Lifestyles of the Rich and Altruistic
Till next time, (hopefully in two actual weeks)
Pax 🕊
Katie Marquette, Born of Wonder, The Quiet Wisdom of Audrey Hepburn, 8/1/2023
Thorough and succinct and beautifully written. Thank you from a veteran of marriages bad and good.