There’s a common belief that love is an unpredictable, mercurial force, like a lightning storm that either electrifies you into an ecstatic state or fries you into charcoal. This belief is mostly bullshit. Love is mostly logistics. It’s about how much effort it takes to exist next to another human being without wanting to spontaneously relocate to a different time zone.
The wrong person feels like slow suffocation. They make everything harder. Not just the big things—mortgages, parenting styles, joint bank accounts—but the trivial things, the things you never thought could be a source of struggle: picking a restaurant, watching a show together, deciding whether the dog should wear a sweater. With the wrong person, even eating a sandwich becomes a matter of philosophical debate (“You like mustard? That’s weird. I hate mustard. But fine, you can have mustard. Whatever.”). Everything becomes exhausting, a never-ending game of emotional Jenga where every piece you remove makes the whole structure less stable.
But the right person? The right person is eerily easy. Like, suspiciously easy. It’s almost unsettling how effortless it is. You brace yourself for the struggle because you’ve been conditioned to believe that love is work, that relationships require sacrifice, that happiness is something you have to claw your way toward. And then suddenly, you’re with this person, and… it’s just easy. It’s like stepping into a warm bath that never gets cold.
With the right person, you don’t keep re-litigating the same argument about the dishes. You don’t have to prepare a legal defense every time you want a night out with your friends. They don’t make you feel insane for having basic human emotions. There is no resentment boiling under the surface, waiting to explode over something as dumb as whether the toilet paper should be over or under.
Being married to the right person is like having a best friend who is legally obligated to care about your dental hygiene. It’s a perpetual sleepover where nobody’s parents show up and tell you to quiet down. It’s knowing that if you get food poisoning, there is a person in your home who will hold your hair back and also probably make fun of you later, but in a way that makes you laugh instead of resent them. It’s the confidence that you can be your worst self—sick, exhausted, existentially depleted—and instead of making you feel like a burden, they just hand you a blanket and tell you to rest.
And sure, there are still fights. But the fights aren’t The Battle of the Somme. They don’t stretch on for weeks, leaving emotional corpses in their wake. The fights are like brief summer storms—they come, they drench you, and then they pass, leaving the air feeling cleaner. Because when you’re with the right person, you’re not adversaries. You’re teammates.
At its core, a good marriage is just ease. It’s not about never having problems—it’s about knowing that when problems arise, you’ll tackle them together, like a co-op video game where neither player has to carry the other. You don’t have to convince yourself it’s good. You don’t have to mentally brace yourself for the next inevitable conflict. You don’t feel drained by every interaction. Instead, you feel… safe. At home.
Or, to put it in the simplest possible terms: being married to the right person just means you’re not constantly thinking about how much better your life would be if you were alone.