Okay, I Got Married. Now, Where’s My Happily Ever After?

We are all conditioned to believe that marriage is the final milestone in a relationship. There’s a feeling of having reached the finish line. A feeling of victory. My culture (I’m from South India) has a popular saying that translates to “Everything will become alright if you get married.”

My friends and I have always laughed at this saying, criticizing it for how unreasonable it sounded. Imagine our shock when we each tied the knot and realized that we had unintentionally internalized this belief ourselves.

One by one, we each got married. We enjoyed the honeymoon phase. And about a year into our marriages we all found ourselves asking the question “Everything has definitely not become alright. Was this really worth it?”

What really happens after we get married

Everyone is familiar with the concept of the honeymoon phase. Things are new and exciting. You’re living with a new person and figuring life out together. You’re traveling to exotic places. You’re going on dates every other night and putting on all that happy weight.

Once the novelty wears off, and you’ve sobered down from your newly-wed high, you slowly start noticing all the little things that you dislike about your partner. It could be their habits, or their friends and family. All the things that had been cast into shadow by the glorious honeymoon phase. You’re starting to realize that you have to spend the rest of your life this way.

And you’re forced to come to terms with this fact: It takes a TON of effort to co-exist with another human being.

You’re not unhappy, per se. But it doesn’t exactly feel like the happily-ever-after that you were promised either.

This is completely normal.

You’ve felt this before too. Remember that new job which was so interesting in the beginning, but later you got really bored of it? It’s the same thing. The only difference is that we never expected a job to solve all our problems. It’s a ridiculous expectation. It’s time to let go of that expectation when it comes to your marriage too.

What you can do to solve this

It is human nature to crave novelty and keep striving for growth. The status quo will always become boring to us. Our school and college systems have always set clear milestones, like exams or graduations and we always knew what the next step was. At most corporate jobs, there is always the next launch or the next sale to work towards. There is always the next milestone.

So that’s what you need to do. Set the next few milestones for your relationship. Marriage is not the end, it is in fact the beginning. Set goals together and work towards them. You are responsible for bringing the novelty that you crave so much.

Some conventional goals are having a kid or buying a house together. But we are hardly ever ready for these huge steps right after the honeymoon phase.

But there are a million other goals you could work on with your partner. You could

• Start a business
• Make art
• Re-decorate your house
• Make a travel bucket list and start chipping away at it
• Move to a different city (or country)
• Plan your retirement

This is an endless list. And I have so many ideas only because my partner and I talk about this almost every weekend. We go on a drive, put on some chill music, and talk about where we want to be five years from now. And we’ve been having this conversation for years now. This is a long-term project, but a really enjoyable one.

Marriage is definitely not the final milestone. It is the first of many. And when it comes to dreaming about the future, two heads are always better than one!