the hard work of love: lessons from those I know

choosing to stay & knowing when to let go

Sep 26, 2025

Some friends are planning weddings, others are filing for divorce, and the rest of us are just taking notes. What I’ve learned is that the couples who make it vs. the ones who don’t often come down to things nobody mentions at engagement parties—not whether they’re soulmates, but whether they can handle ordinary problems without tearing each other apart.

Between the happy moments and heartbreaks, patterns have emerged—hard-won wisdom that feels too valuable to keep locked in our private conversations.

Before I dive into these lessons, I keep coming back to my godparents’ Advice. Married at 20 and 23, together now for over 40+ years, they’ve always emphasized the importance of choosing the right person to build a life with—not just someone you love, but someone who becomes your closest friend.

They’ve shown me that marrying your best friend doesn’t eliminate life’s difficulties, but it means you face them as a team. The beautiful moments become even more meaningful when shared with someone who truly knows you.

I always keep their advice in mind when I think about my own relationships: love deeply, choose wisely, and remember that the best marriages are built on friendship as much as romance.

Through engagement parties and divorce courts, my friends have become my teachers. Here’s what they’ve taught me about love and marriage realities.

Lesson 1: The First Year Will Test Everything You Think You Know

Marriage changes the equation in ways you can’t anticipate. You’re not just sharing space anymore—you’re merging entire life systems. Bills, schedules, habits, and expectations you didn’t even know existed suddenly matter. The adjustment period isn’t a sign that something’s wrong; it’s the reality of two people learning to function as a unit while still being individuals.

From what I’ve seen, the ones who handle it well don’t expect this transition to be seamless. They give themselves and each other permission to struggle through it. They understand that feeling overwhelmed by the shift doesn’t mean they chose the wrong person—it means they’re learning to make decisions as a team instead of just for themselves.

Lesson 2: Guard Your Relationship from External Interference

Everyone will have opinions about your marriage. Family members will offer unsolicited advice. Friends will project their own relationship fears onto yours. Social media will present impossible standards. But the only people who truly know what’s happening in your relationship are the two people living it.

Protecting your marriage doesn’t mean isolation—it means being intentional about whose input matters. The healthiest couples learn to filter external noise while staying open to genuine support. They understand that even well-meaning interference can damage something that was working fine before it got scrutinized by others.

Lesson 3: Early Warning Signs Don’t Disappear with Time

That uneasy feeling you have about certain behaviors or patterns? It’s not anxiety; sometimes it’s intuition. The things that make you uncomfortable during dating don’t get resolved by marriage; they often get magnified by the stress of building a life together.

Hope is beautiful, but it shouldn’t blind you to reality. When someone consistently shows you who they are through their actions, believe them. This doesn’t mean every flaw is a dealbreaker, but there’s a difference between quirks you can live with and patterns that erode your respect for each other. The cost of ignoring red flags early is years spent trying to fix fundamental incompatibilities that were visible from the beginning.

Lesson 4: True Compromise Serves the Partnership, Not Individual Ego

Real compromise isn’t about keeping score or making sure everything’s perfectly equal. It’s about recognizing that what’s best for the relationship sometimes differs from what you individually want in the moment. When both people approach decisions with genuine care for the partnership, nobody ends up feeling like they always give while the other always takes.

Healthy compromise flows both ways and feels chosen, not coerced. It’s less about winning arguments and more about building something together that serves both people’s long-term happiness and growth.

Lesson 5: Learn to Fight Fair, Not to Avoid Fighting

Conflict isn’t the enemy of a good relationship—destructive conflict is. The couples who last don’t avoid disagreements; they learn to navigate them without tearing each other down. They understand that how you repair after an argument matters more than whether you argued in the first place.

Fighting fair means no name-calling, no bringing up past grievances, and no threatening to leave during heated moments. It means taking breaks when emotions run too high and returning to the conversation when you can both think clearly. Most importantly, it means fighting for the relationship, not against each other.

Lesson 6: Money Reveals Everything—Handle It Transparently

How couples manage money often predicts their success better than how much money they have. Financial stress doesn’t just strain budgets—it tests communication, trust, and shared values all at once. Different approaches to spending, saving, and financial risk can create ongoing tension if not addressed directly.

Financial transparency isn’t just about sharing account numbers—it’s about being honest about your money fears, goals, and habits. The strongest couples talk openly about their financial anxieties and create systems that honor both partners’ needs for security and autonomy.

Lesson 7: Physical Intimacy Requires Ongoing Communication

Physical connection changes over time—through stress, illness, parenthood, aging, and shifting life circumstances. The couples who maintain satisfying physical relationships don’t just hope things will work themselves out; they talk about what’s working, what isn’t, and what they need from each other.

This isn’t just about frequency—it’s about understanding that intimacy encompasses much more than sex, and that both partners’ needs and comfort levels deserve attention and respect. What matters most is maintaining connection and communication, not meeting external expectations about what your physical relationship should look like.

Lesson 8: You Can’t Fix Your Partner—Everyone Does Their Own Emotional Work

Love makes us want to heal each other’s wounds, but you can’t save someone from their own unresolved issues. Mental health struggles, unprocessed trauma, and destructive patterns require individual work that no amount of love from a partner can substitute for.

Sometimes the deepest pain comes from realizing that someone you care about doesn’t have the capacity to meet you where you are. You have to grieve the hope that if you just try harder, love more, or say the right thing, they’ll finally see your worth.

Support looks like encouraging professional help, maintaining healthy boundaries, and taking care of your own emotional needs. Enabling looks like making excuses, taking responsibility for their choices, or sacrificing your own well-being, trying to manage their problems. The difference between the two determines whether your relationship becomes healthier or more destructive.

Lesson 9: Maintain Your Individual Identity Within the Partnership

The healthiest marriages aren’t built from two people who complete each other—they’re built from two whole people who choose to share their lives. When you maintain your own friendships, interests, and personal growth, you don’t become less committed; you become more interesting.

Independence within a relationship is needed. Partners who retain their individual identities bring more to the relationship and are better equipped to weather the inevitable challenges that come with building a life together.

Lesson 10: Daily Interactions Build or Erode Everything

Grand romantic gestures get attention, but it’s the small daily interactions that actually determine relationship satisfaction. How you greet each other after work, how you divide household tasks, how you respond when your partner is stressed—these mundane moments create the foundation of your connection.

Couples who pay attention to these everyday exchanges express appreciation for ordinary contributions, show interest in each other’s daily experiences, and treat each other with kindness even when they’re tired, stressed, or distracted.

Love isn’t just a feeling—it’s a practice.

Lesson 11: Love Alone Cannot Sustain a Marriage

Love is what brings people together, but it can’t carry a relationship on its own. Respect, trust, compatibility, and emotional maturity are what keep it alive. Someone can love you deeply yet still not be the right partner if they lack the skills to navigate conflict, communicate openly, and grow together.

Strong relationships rest on multiple foundations—emotional connection, shared vision, practical compatibility, and mutual respect. Love deepens when paired with empathy, compassion, and the ability to repair hurt when it happens.

The right partner notices the little things about you that others miss and loves you more because of them. They speak your language, so you don’t spend a lifetime translating your soul. Love with them feels steady, not confusing, and never leaves you questioning whether you’re truly valued.

Lesson 12: Sometimes the Loving Choice Is to Let Go

Hard thing to admit out loud, but not every relationship is meant to last forever, and recognizing that isn’t always simple. Sometimes two good people grow in directions that no longer align. Sometimes, despite genuine effort from both people, fundamental incompatibilities make a healthy partnership impossible.

Choosing to end a relationship can be an act of love—love for yourself, love for your partner, and love for the possibility of both people finding connections that truly fit who they’ve become. The bravest people aren’t always those who stay; sometimes they’re those who have the courage to admit when something isn’t working and choose truth over comfort.

Leaving doesn’t mean the decision is any less painful, or that you didn’t try hard enough or love deeply enough. Sometimes love means letting go.

What I’ve Learned

These lessons came from group chat confessions and kitchen table conversations, not self-help books. Watching friends realize their marriages weren’t failing over surface issues, but because fundamental incompatibilities were ignored, showed me that love alone isn’t enough.

Marriage is complex, and yet it can also become this quiet sanctuary where you don’t have to pretend. Being with the right person means finding someone you can build a life with, communicate with, and grow alongside.

Here’s what I keep coming back to: your relationship will mostly be determined by who you choose and how well you both handle Tuesday afternoon problems. The intense feelings, the romantic moments, the sense of destiny—those things matter and they’re beautiful, but they’re not what gets you through year five when someone loses a job or year ten when you’re both too tired to pretend you’re not annoyed by each other’s habits. What gets you through is finding someone who can communicate when you’re both stressed, who makes ordinary moments feel extraordinary, who turns mundane Tuesday afternoons into something you wouldn’t trade for anything else.