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A Woman’s Perspective: Anna’s Response to Chapter 2

If you fully enter into a marriage, chances are it’s going to be a wild ride. How could it be anything else? You’re bringing together two people, blending two lives to make one.

The question is whether that ride will be wild in a way that’s exciting and enriching or in a way that’s draining and disheartening. Will it feel like an adventure, or more like a burden?

If you want it to be an adventure, this will mean fully facing the more difficult aspects of building a life together. You have to learn to steer around the pitfalls this book addresses, such as these: making killer statements, insults that damage a marriage quickly and deeply; dishonesty, which even in minor forms can change your relationship in powerful and painful ways; and many more that you’ll encounter as you make your way through these pages.

The chapter you just read includes the idea of marriage as an achievement, and for good reason. Making two lives into one, and keeping them that way, is hard work. It’s not for the faint of heart. If you’re not together on the things that matter most, your marriage’s chances of surviving, much less thriving, greatly diminish.

The first year of marriage can be an awakening. Even in the best of marriages, people stumble. You learn each other’s preferences, including ones you may not have been aware of. From holiday traditions to how you plan a trip, you bring together not only your own backgrounds and experiences but your opinions—again, opinions you may not have even realized you had. The better you understand how to work as a couple, the better you’ll be able to navigate these challenges.

Marriage is a dance, one that together you learn to choreograph. You aren’t required to copy the steps of another couple’s dance. You couldn’t do that anyway. Though there may be things in common between one marriage and another, and certain features are central to all marriages, your relationship is unique, a dance with steps that only you and your spouse can determine. Sometimes these steps are big and life altering, such as where you’ll live and how you’ll raise children if you decide to have any. Other times, they’re as small as how to squeeze a tube of toothpaste.

Clinton brings up the fact that, in our house, we use two tubes. But he didn’t tell you why. It’s because he’s particular about the toothpaste being squeezed from the bottom, and I like to be able to squeeze it anywhere I want. Rather than hash out how we squeeze a shared toothpaste tube, we each use our own. The two-tube solution has worked for over thirty years.

Those toothpaste tubes are our reminder that creative problem-solving has a central place in marriage. During our first year, we had plenty of challenges that came with learning to live as one. Dealing with the little ones helped us with the big ones later on. We learned to yield or compromise on issues when it counted. But, when it came to the little ones like the toothpaste tube, sometimes I just wanted to squeeze the thing from the middle!

Sooner or later, you and your spouse will find yourselves facing the question of what kind of marriage you truly want. And since it’s going to be a wild ride in any case, this becomes a very important one.