Nick StumboExecutive Director driving healing from sexual brokenness

Marriage EXPECTATIONS VS. Marriage REALITY #puredesirepodcast #podcast

22 Feb 2024

Watch on YouTube

A short monologue (YouTube/podcast) by Nick Stumbo that contrasts common romanticized expectations of marriage (living with your best friend, constant happiness, effortless sex and companionship) with the more realistic experience: relationships are messy, both partners bring their best and worst, and healthy marriage outcomes require intentional hard work. The speaker acknowledges marriage’s positives but stresses that many benefits arise through effort rather than automatic bliss.

We look ahead at marriage and we, we tend to see, and this is human nature, we see like the best, like, this is going to be great. I get to live with my best friend, be around him all the time. We can have sex whenever we want. It's just going to be this fun, wonderful, never ending adventure. And we don't look at the reality that relationships are hard, people are messy, things take work. Not only do I bring the best of myself to the marriage, I bring the worst of myself. And so do they. And when, when the shadow side of my life interacts with the shadow side of my spouse is like, things get hard in a hurry and have a really hard time thinking about that before marriage. And so we can have this myth of like, man, everything bad in my life is just going to get better. And we certainly don't want people thinking that marriage is bad or you shouldn't get married because there are, there are wonderful things about marriage. There are great things that happen in us, but a lot of the best things happen because we really put in some hard work, not because everything is just easy and blissful all the time.