21 Truths of Marriage

Written By Allie Perry May 17, 2024

My husband and I recently celebrated our 21st wedding anniversary. We’ve been together for 26 years, which means our relationship is older than…..checks notes…..Google. 

Omg.

It’s older than electronic boarding passes for airplanes, the Bellagio hotel in Vegas, and the movie Titanic. If you tried to go to Blockbuster to rent Titanic back then you probably would have had to rent it on VHS, since there were only about 100 movie titles available on DVD at the time.

If you had to fill up your gas tank on the way to your neighborhood Blockbuster it would have cost you $1.06 a gallon, and with your rented VHS tape you could have picked up a two-liter bottle of Coca Cola for $0.89.

It seems hard to believe that I’ve been married that long because, despite my knees sounding like glow sticks and my memory being about as reliable as a broken watch, some days I still feel like I’m 19.

I could sit here and tell you how even though marriage was never a dream of mine, it turned out to be great for me. I could extoll my husband’s virtues and tell you how supportive he is of me and my goals. And I could impress upon you the undeniable fact that he is the responsible adult in the relationship who somehow keeps me alive and healthy. 

Instead, I’m going to share 21 of the innumerable universal truths we’ve discovered over the course of our relationship; one for each year of domestic cohabitation wedded bliss.

1. One person will be militant about time while the other seems blissfully unaware of that particular social construct. You will try to change the other’s habits and convince them that time is more/less important than they think. You’ll have better luck trying to make time go backward or stop it altogether.

2. Loading the dishwasher will only be done correctly by one of you. You will both think your spouse loads the dishwasher like a deranged wild animal and you are the only one who loads it correctly. Much like the dirty dishes in the sink that only one of you sees, this debate is never-ending.

3. One of you will have an emotional support pile of clothes on the bedroom or bathroom floor. All reasonable attempts at corralling this pile will fail. Congratulations, you now have a Floordrobe!

4. When you are trying to get anything done in your kitchen, your spouse will immediately embody Visa’s tagline and suddenly be everywhere you want to be.

5. Your significant other will be on their phone entirely too much…until you text or call them with a time-sensitive question, at which point they will suddenly have foregone all use of modern technology and become harder to reach than that earbud you dropped between your driver seat and the center console.

6. Only one of you can ever have the remote. The other will be resigned to watching things they don’t like while the Holder of the Remote has fallen asleep and, perhaps more importantly, never knowing where to find the show they do want to watch among the 37 streaming services you subscribe to in order to stop paying for cable.

7. One of you will downsize and declutter with callous indifference while the other will have anthropomorphized and formed sentimental attachments to every item in the house. The only constant is that you will both always want to get rid of the useless stuff in the attic as long as it isn’t yours.

8. If neither of you can figure out what you want for dinner, tonight, tomorrow night, and every night until eternity, you will resort to eating the same five comfort meals over and over and over. Side note: dino nuggets and tater tots will never let you down.

9. Eventually, you’ll betray your younger selves and get excited over something wholly disappointing like a new wheelbarrow (it has TWO wheels in front so it’s less likely to tip over!) distinctly marking the end of your youth.

10. You will never both be the same temperature at the same time. Ever. This conundrum will present itself not only at the fancy new thermostat you can both sneakily control from your phone, but also in the car and under the 3-8 blankets ever present on the couch and bed.

11. You will constantly find doors/drawers/toilet lids open when they should be closed, or closed when they should be open. This is your new at-home version of Whack-a-Mole, no carnival tickets required.

12. Your fridge will likely have shelves of different heights. Don’t let yourself get excited by thinking these shelves will contain height-appropriate groceries. They will not, and only one of you will care.

13. Too much of your time will be spent futilely shouting at your spouse from a different room. The same person who can hear you open the last bag of chips from anywhere within a 100-yard radius will somehow never hear you call their name or answer their question from one room over. Similarly, you will never be able to understand what they are saying from said room and you’ll both be trapped in a cycle of alternately hearing what can only be described as a dog trying to bark while gargling syrup, and then replies of, “What? I can’t hear you. I SAID I CAN’T HEAR YOU.”

14. One of you will want to stay up all hours of the night like some sort of domesticated raccoon. The other will race the chirping, pre-dawn birds to be the first out of bed. The creature of the night will be stealthy and quiet, considerate of the fact that others are sleeping, while the early riser will embrace their inner circus clown by juggling and dropping every pot in your home before the sun is even up.

15. Either you or your spouse will overthink or worry about everything and be baffled that the other floats through life simply believing everything will work out.

16. Every time you make the grocery list or head to the grocery store together, one of you will want snacks and the other will insist you don’t need them because you should both be eating healthier. You will end up in one of two scenarios: 1) You will buy no snacks and invariably regret your decision once you’re home 2) You will buy the snacks the healthy eater insisted they didn’t want and weren’t going to eat, and the healthy eater will then proceed to eat all of the snacks before their spouse even has a chance.

17. Your spouse will always be exasperated that you constantly leave the backyard light on even though they constantly leave the basement light on. Neither of you will ever understand why this is such an annoyance to the other person, but both of you understand it’s not a battle worth fighting.

18. One of you will be ready to leave the house ten minutes early, while the other will wait until they’re already five minutes late to proclaim they’re ready to leave when in truth they don’t even have pants on and they only know where one of their shoes is.

19. If you have an aversion to things being wet or sticky, you will end up married to a person who always leaves things wet or sticky. There is no way to fix this, despite it being one of the cruelest fates in the known universe.

20. One of you will wake up and jump out of bed the second your alarm goes off. The other will set a primary alarm, three secondary alarms, and a final “oh shit how’d I miss all of those other alarms” alarm, all of which will be optimistically snoozed multiple times.

21. One of you will forget to eat for anywhere between 18 and 24 hours while the other person slowly descends into a hangry rage if they don’t eat every 240 minutes. This phenomenon is exacerbated by doing projects or running errands together. (The snacks you bought against Healthy Eater’s will are helpful in these scenarios.)

While this list is comprehensive, it is nowhere near exhaustive. I’m sure as we continue to happily grow old together, my husband and I will learn many more things that annoy each other important and valuable life lessons.

And there’s no one I’d rather learn them with!