sSara (00:05)

Empowered people make informed decisions that lead to living a life without regret. This is Sara Khaki and Shawna Woods from Atlanta Divorce Law Group. And this is the Happily Ever After Divorce Podcast. Welcome to the Happily Ever After Divorce Podcast. I’m attorney Sara Khaki with Atlanta Divorce Law Group. And I’m joined by our very own managing partner, Shawna Woods. Today’s topic is, is marriage hard work? Well,

I think we all agree that marriage is hard work, but let’s poke at that a little bit. Let’s challenge that concept and understand what do we mean when we say marriage is hard work? What do think Shawna?

sShawna (00:43)

I think it’s a great question to ask the married people in the room,

But I really, you know, when we think about marriage, those of us who are not in it, we think, okay, this is the ideal situation for love, right? This is where we go and we find our partner who we wanna go on long walks with and go to the beach with and enjoy life with. So Sara, why is that hard?

sSara (01:14)

You know, when you think of marriage, like you said, there’s this ideal of love, and then there’s this ideal of safety, and then there’s this ideal of foreverness, and that I have my backs covered, right? I have now a team that’s with me. I’m not by myself. I’m not alone. And marriage actually comes

Completely throws all that in your face and then has a chuckle at you. And you can have all those things. You could actually have incredible love, feel more love than you’ve ever felt before. You can actually feel the togetherness more than ever before and you can absolutely feel safety if you do the work, the hard work in marriage. And that hard work is

First learning how to provide that all that for yourself. And I think that there’s two types of people that get into marriage. You have those that want all that figured out before they get into a marriage. And there are those, which I fall into this category, we got married at a younger age or we found our person at a younger age, right? And we had to learn how to do all those things and be all of that while we were married.

And that’s when marriage becomes really hard work. But I will also say that it is not a reason to postpone marriage because finding that dance of how do I provide safety for myself? How do I provide security for myself? How do I acknowledge my own needs? How do I bring understanding to myself? How do I cherish myself? Because those are all the things that you ideally want from that.

How do I provide love for myself? Once you learn how to provide all those things for yourself, then you open up space to allow your partner to provide all that for yourself, for you, because you’re able to properly, authentically communicate to your partner your needs, your standards, how you want to be loved, how you want to be cherished, and what safety means to you, what freedom means to you, and all those things.

A lot of times when we grow up with our partner, we can do that together. And that’s when two people decide to go on that journey of self-discovery together in a partnership. Sometimes two people come together and they might have done a lot of that and now they’re trying to combine it. That has its own challenges, right? So I think that the belief that…

I want to go into a marriage and we have both figured out who we are and then we just do it together. It’s a sense of entitlement that probably does not exist. The end of the day, whether it’s marriage or, you know, two people that want to spend the rest of their life together, we’re talking about partnership. Now, I think, you know, the title of marriage just gives it a legal institution and a ceremonial institution in some aspects, a religious concept to it.

But at the bottom line is we’re talking about partnership, which means we are combining ourselves into something that is even bigger than the two of us. It has its own value system. It has its own decision-making protocols, right? It’s almost its own institution outside of just you and outside of just me. And if we can combine forces, the sum of the parts will be greater than

Each of the parts on their own. And that takes hard work within you. Now, the point that I would like for people to understand is that to have a enriching life, a fulfilling life, and have an authentic life where you are able to be the best version of yourself and live to your full potential, you have to do that self work anyway.

You have to do some self-examination. You have to bring some self-awareness and you have to gain some clarity on what are my needs and how do I express my needs? What does love mean to me? How do I value security versus freedom? What does security mean to me? Am I comfortable being alone? Marriage just…

Brings these things to you in your face and you either are forced to deal with them because you’re in heated moments of tension and conflict, or you don’t deal with them. Like many people, you may have a marriage that’s not completely fulfilling for you, or I may end up in divorce. But I think when you see people that claim to have a successful marriage, that doesn’t mean that they don’t have conflict. It doesn’t mean they don’t have tension.

That doesn’t mean they don’t have moments where they wanna rip each other’s hair apart. It means they have succeeded in time and time again, instance after instance, choosing partnership, choosing being vulnerable with each other about, hey, I don’t know exactly what I want right now. I actually cannot tell you what I want right now. Can you give me a moment to figure that out? Instead of jumping to, well, you don’t provide for my needs. You don’t love me enough. You don’t understand me.

You’re trying to control me and letting go of that instead in partnership saying, I need to figure out what it is that my words and be able to express to them. And then your partner in return saying, I get it. You do that.

sShawna (07:10)

Do you think that, because if we’re setting marriage as hard, right, marriage is just hard across the board, do you think there’s a test or something that you can look at to say, is my marriage harder than it should be, or is my marriage just as hard as it should be?

sSara (07:30)

I don’t know if there’s a test for that, but I think it’s the same mindset that you can apply to anything in life. And I learned this from my mentor, mindset mentor, David Nagel and his team, Steph Tuss. And anytime we were coming across something uncomfortable that brought you out of your comfort zone and brought you to a place of having to really take a look inside and

Face your dark side and face all of that, they would say to you, this can be as hard as you want it to be, and it can come as much grace as you want it to be. And that’s why I wanna poke fun at this a little bit, because when we say marriage is hard work, I think we’re equipping a lot of people that like to just dismiss marriage quickly and say, marriage is hard work. Like, I don’t wanna do that. Well, what in life that’s worth having doesn’t put you through

A bit of getting outside of your comfort zone, a bit of testing you, a bit of stress testing your awareness, stress testing your ability to look within and not run away from what you see. There isn’t a lot I can imagine in life worth having that gives you a more fulfilling life and gives you a extraordinary life than that most other people may not experience that doesn’t require a level of that.

I personally come from a value system that when you look for the easy button, right, you may not always get the results you want. But I also come from the belief system that if you can reframe your mindset about hard work and look at what could I gain from this? What could I learn from this? What would it be if, what would it look like if this did come with ease and grace?

What would that look like? And that’s again, comes from so much of coaching with David. And when I go into that mindset, I stop looking at it as I am a character in this story of conflict with my spouse. I almost take a more objective drone view and say, okay, we are two people that keep butting our heads over this one point. What must be the truth for him and what must be the truth for me?

That keeps creating this because there is somewhere that as deep reflection I have to have and hopefully by the deep reflection I am having, I am influencing a deep reflection in him. And I think that’s the part where makes marriage a little bit more challenging than your average journey of self-awareness because you can be on your own and do.

Ton of therapy, ton of coaching and do a lot of self-awareness and have a pretty meaningful and deep life, right? Like, obviously there’s a lot of people that never get married. Some of my closest friends, closest family members, you, my partner, you’re living a very happy, fulfilling life, right? But if you choose partnership and you choose marriage because you find that person that you want to have that with, I think the decision you’re making is I will go on a path of

Self-awareness so I can show up as the best partner I possibly can for you. And in times when you’re not able to bring that self-awareness, I hope that my self-awareness will influence yours. And that’s where marriage is letting a bit go of a bit of control. And I think that’s where it’s so difficult for people because you can’t control the other person to always be so self-aware. You can’t control and order the other person

To be as responsible as you. But you are relying on a bit of faith in the partnership that you’ve chosen the right person and that your values are so aligned and that you both want this badly enough that they will pick up their self-awareness along the journey as well.

sShawna (11:44)

So I’m hearing a couple of things and it just kind of lends to questions about when we hear marriage is hard, why should we engage in it? Why should we bother? And what I’m hearing from you is actually it’s more about bringing yourself to a higher self-awareness. That be inaccurate still?

sSara (12:06)

Absolutely. Mean, there are so many moments that marriage takes you out of animal instincts and brings you into human awareness. And, you know, I talk about that a lot and that’s something I learned from the partnership guru, Alison Armstrong, where, and it’s not just marriage, partnership, right? Partnership forces you to go out of animal instinct. And what is animal instinct? It’s the complete survival instincts.

You know, am I safe? Am I provided for? Do I need to run away from this or do I need to stand up and fight and protect myself? So it is a completely natural human instinct that when you’re in a partnership and you see a sign from the other person, you’re like, are they gonna abandon me? Are they judging me? Are they not loving me anymore? Am I being left alone? And all of these things bring your animal instinct up and then you react, right?

What marriage does is or partnership does, it forces you to say, let go of that need to just protect yourself really quickly and being so scared. And maybe it’s not about you. Maybe there’s something going on with your person. And what would human awareness look like where you’re able to really tap into your gift of abundantly giving love to them or abundantly giving.

Safety to them or security to them and hopefully influencing them to rise to the better version of them in times of conflict. There are so many lessons, I think, in marriage and partnership and I use those things interchangeably because I think the best marriages are based on partnership. You have just because you’re married doesn’t mean you have a partnership. And I think if you want to have a happy marriage, you do the work towards partnership.

But know, Shawna, I believe that about my relationship with you, right? Like my relationship with you is every time that we are agreeing with each other, it’s based on our shared values and our partnership. When we’re not agreeing with each other, it’s okay. How do we, instead of me thinking, okay, how do I just convince Shawna to agree with me so my opinion is safe? I instead challenge myself to say that’s an animal instinct reaction.

How can I bring human awareness to really understand Shawna and make Shawna feel safe enough in full vulnerability, honesty, and authentically to come to me and tell me why her opinion is this, right? And then we can have an authentic agreement versus a forced one just so we can keep the partnership.

sShawna (14:52)

And I think that’s where people reach us and reach our level is when they are viewing the marriage as a, what is this person doing for me and my goals in my life and how are they an asset to me rather than how can I be of service to them? How can I give to them and build them up and help them live their true authentic selves? So I do think the way you’ve explained that makes it

Worth being hired for most people. Yeah.

sSara (15:24)

Right?

You know, I, there was a point in middle school when I was convinced I wanted to go into psychology or psychiatry. And I remember opening up like a book to study, like how long you have to study to go to, to do it. And it was like crazy, like, you know, 12 years post college or something. And you know, sometimes people say something to you and you just keep it for life. And I remember my friend in the library that day.

I said that to her, was like, oh my God, it’s like 12 years after college. She goes, well, that time, you’re gonna waste that time anyway. And I remember I was like, wow, like this middle school kid for the rest of my life gave me one of the most brilliant life messages. You are going to have to be faced with the reality of who you really are anyway. It’s gonna hit you. One point in your life.

If it doesn’t hit you before your deathbed, it is going to hit you at some point where you have to take a hard look at who you are and you can’t run away from it anymore. The gift of partnership, right? Which we hope marriage brings, not all marriages bring it, but the gift of partnership is hopefully it brings it to you with the person who loves you the most. And hopefully that is really worth having. Thank you.

Thanks for listening to the Happily Ever After Divorce Podcast. If you’d to learn more, go to atlantadivorcelawgroup.com/resources.