Scratching The Seven Year Itch

Lessons learned in building a marriage actually worth being in

Thirteen years ago, I showed up on a stranger’s doorstep for a potluck they were hosting that a mutual friend had invited me to. That stranger quickly became a good friend. Eight years ago, I sat across from that stranger-turned-friend in Kramerbooks Cafe in DC as we nervously discussed, for the first time, whether there might be a possibility of an “us.” Seven years ago, on an overcast day in front of our families and our community, we committed to doing the work of building a life together.

As I look back on the years that we have been doing just that, I am deeply grateful and moved that Allah chose this path for us.

People often ask me for relationship advice and I really try to avoid giving it. Giving advice implies that I have an area of expertise that sets me apart from others. But the thing about relationships is… they are highly context-specific. Regardless of how much or how little a relationship makes sense to people from the outside looking in, the relationship only needs to make sense to and work for the people in it. So while I resist the idea that what I have learned about how to make my relationship work is broadly applicable to others, I will attempt to the peel back the curtain and share some of “the work” we have done to build our relationship.

People often say “relationships take work” without specifying what exactly that work entails. “The work” of a marriage is not forcing yourself to like someone you don’t. Or forcing yourself to become someone you’re not. Or forcing someone to change for you. Or forcing much of anything at all. The work of marriage is the effort it takes to honor the wholeness of two autonomous beings simultaneously while building a life together. The work of marriage is allowing yourself, flaws and all, to be seen. Honestly. Authentically. Vulnerably. The work is understanding that you, exactly as you are, are worthy of love and being treated lovingly. The work is believing that your partner is also worthy of love and the effort you must make to embody that belief in how you treat them every day. And through this exercise of giving and receiving love, the work can result in gaining an appreciation for the way that Allah loves you — wholly, honestly, flaws and all.

Click on the image above to see a short clip of Toni Morrison sharing some truths about what it means to extend love outside of yourself.

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As I was preparing to get married, I had this visceral fear of marrying the wrong person. I was aware that attaching myself to the wrong man could quite literally ruin my life. I was suspicious of most men, confident in what I brought to any and every table (“I AM THE TABLE!”), and maintained thick, rigid boundaries that made it difficult for even the most enthusiastic of suitors to get too close. Once engaged, I consumed pretty much all marriage (note: not wedding) content out there. I looked for questions to discuss with a potential spouse and, when none of the lists were comprehensive enough for my liking, I made my own. I read every awful article with outdated generic advice for married couples and to this day I am triggered by the phrase “never go to bed angry” (sometimes I be mad and I be sleepy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). 

In my research, I also discovered the cultural myths known as The Three Year Glitch and The Seven Year Itch, which name the three and seven year time period in relationships as points of sharp decline in happiness. The legend goes that you can only be on your best behavior in a relationship for about three years, after which you have no choice but to show who you really are — laundry piles and all. Similarly, there are theories that it takes about seven years to take a situation for granted and to stop making intentional efforts to make it work. While there is very little science to back up these claims, there is some divorce rate data that aligns with these time frames, giving these theories continued relevance.

In honor of my own seven year wedding anniversary, here are some lessons I have learned about how to face the glitches and the itches and build a marriage actually worth being in:

1. Marry a friend (or someone you actually like). If you can’t marry a friend, then build a friendship with the person you marry. For me, marrying a friend has meant that we have a baseline of respect, knowledge, care, and joy built into how we treat each other. We like hanging out with each other and seeking each other’s advice. We enjoy collaborating on things together (hosting parties, building community, a whole child!). Being married is like participating in a group project with increasingly heightened stakes. Over the years, the pressures of life and aging and unexpected transitions can cause a lot of things in relationships to fluctuate (romance, intimacy, date nights), but having a through line of friendship can keep you close and working together as a team even when life starts lifing.

2. Build the relationship you actually want to be in, not one based on someone else’s idea of what a marriage should look like. Many people are in miserable relationships. And to justify their choices, they work hard to convince themselves and others that suffering is a core pillar of being married. These folks will try to give you advice about what you should or shouldn’t be doing. These folks will harshly judge a more equitable division of labor in your home, while completely drowning in the lopsided responsibilities their own relationship structure has placed on them. These folks were never taught that a relationship is a thing you build from scratch with the person you are in a relationship with. My relationship is not the place for me to do my best impression of whatever wives I’ve seen around me. We are not our neighbors or siblings or parents or grandparents or our imams. The circumstances of their lives are different than ours. Their priorities are different than ours. No matter what opinions they might have about our lives, we are the only ones coming home to our life together each night. So we are responsible for building a thing that reflects our needs, not anyone else’s.

3. Recognize that at least three new family dynamics are created when a marriage occurs, all of which need to be acknowledged and the terms of which need to be explicitly negotiated. 1) Partner 1’s family dynamic is shifting with the addition of a new person into the fold. 2) Partner 2’s family dynamic is also shifting with the addition of a new person in the fold. 3) Both parties are creating a new family. In this sense, every marriage is a cross-cultural marriage, because every family has its own distinct culture, traditions, and norms. Both of us must serve as ambassadors, representing our newly created family to our families of origin. Both of us are also must represent our families of origin to our partner. It is our job to translate family dynamics, provide historical context, and facilitate points of connection and understanding between our partner and our families of origin. Both of you are joining a cast of a beloved sitcom in Season 8 - you have a lot to catch up on. If you are trapped in a childhood dynamic and have no practice expressing your needs to your family, it’s time to realize that you’re grown up now. Things are going to have to evolve and change and it’s your responsibility to facilitate this transition with your family of origin and your partner.

4. How you fight is a reflection of the strength of your relationship. Establishing healthy norms around how to fight, disagree, and reconcile will save you a lot of agony in the long run. If you don’t want yelling to be part of how you fight, say that. If you need space to think after receiving hard feedback and want to revisit the conversation once you’ve had time to process, say that. If you don’t like being made fun of in front of friends or family, say that. You will disagree over a lot of things, and having some norms around how you disagree with the other person’s feelings in mind will lead to quicker, more satisfying resolutions.

5. Foster a sense of safety in your relationship. Safety starts with us. We often focus on what we want from relationships and not on what we bring to our relationships. Remember: you are not the main character; this is an ensemble cast. We must create the conditions for honesty and accountability in our relationships. We must provide space for learning together from mistakes, for giving and receiving grace, for sharing and receiving feedback, for practicing loving accountability.

6. Abandon the need to control one another in exchange for a need to understand each other. Every corner of our culture claims that control is a normal, acceptable relationship dynamic. If I demand that my partner do or not do something, that is a form of control. If I demand access to their communications with others, that is a form of control. Eliminating the desire to control others in your relationships will free you from so much toxicity and pave the way for a more liberatory love. Accepting that you both are fully autonomous beings who choose each other every day is key to honoring your shared humanity. Each of us is free to leave at any time, which makes choosing to keep being with each other every day even more miraculous and beautiful. When I express how something made me feel and seek to be understood, I am focusing my energy on cultivating shared knowledge and a sense of accountability between us, not on dictating my partner’s behavior. Ironically, understanding how my actions impact the people I love does inspire me to adjust harmful behaviors. But when that behavior change is self-motivated, it is more likely to stick. Fear and control have no place in a strong, loving relationship. If your relationship is dependent on these harmful dynamics to exist, please know that at some point your partner will find their way back to freedom with or without you.

7. Learn to love feedback and healthy conflict. So many of us have experienced conflict and receiving feedback in ways that were intended to belittle us, control us, or trigger feelings of shame and guilt. But what if we regarded feedback as a form of care? What if we regarded conflict as an invitation for greater intimacy? As a place to surface our values and deepest desires? What if we aligned the manner in which we offer feedback with the intention to honor our partners’ highest ambitions and their capacity to achieve them? Accountability is a recognition that our humanity, our futures are bound up in each other. If you are not okay and we share a life together, that will impact me. If I am not okay, that will certainly impact you. This is the reality of doing life together. There is no perfection, only progress. We must build our capacity for engaging in conflict with each other and consider the feedback we receive with curiosity and humility.

8. Seek to understand before you seek to be understood. In a conflict, we become so entrenched in our respective positions that it becomes difficult to see a path forward. If you are able to soften just enough to hear a what this person is trying to convey, you are much more likely to identify the shared values and solutions that honor these values. You are much more likely to find a way forward where both of your needs are met. Once you have demonstrated an accurate understanding of the other person’s perspective, then it is time to share yours. Rinse and repeat.

9. Do not try to be each other’s everything. In my relationship, we pour into ourselves so that we may pour into each other and the world around us. We maintain and nurture our independent relationships with family and friends. We prioritize being present in the communities each of us cares about. We each pursue our passions and interests, and don’t force each other to adopt them. We don’t do everything together, go on every trip together, do all of our socializing together, or eat every meal together. In other words, we accept that each of us has needs that extend far beyond what any one relationship could reasonably provide. In my experience, expecting one person (friend, lover, child, whoever) to be your everything is a recipe for anxiety, resentment, and unmet needs.

10. You will not experience deep love without being deeply vulnerable. As someone with historically rigid boundaries, I have learned the hard way that I cannot set emotional boundaries for the bad stuff and expect the good stuff to trickle in through the steel door I’ve shut. Relationships require vulnerability — exposing ones true self to another with no guarantee of reciprocation. The kids today love joking that they hate being perceived, but being perceived is the soil from which love grows. Disappointment will not destroy you. Misunderstandings will not ruin you. Heartbreak will not end you. You must turn towards each other even, especially, when the stakes feel high and you know you have something to lose.

11. You probably don’t know how to communicate and you really need to learn how. If you are someone who is used to meeting your own needs or if you had trouble getting your needs met as a child, chances are you don’t have much practice verbalizing your feelings and desires. I literally have two degrees in conflict resolution and am still learning how to communicate in a healthy, clear way. Our partners are not mind readers, no matter how loudly we stomp around them. You are not a child anymore. You are an adult. So we must learn to be brave, invite our partners into our interior worlds, and share how we are experiencing the relationship so that we have a fair shot at actually getting our needs met.

12. Become fluent in each others love languages. The personality quiz industrial complex has us all hyper aware of how we prefer to give and receive love. But being in relationship also requires us to understand how our friends and partners give and receive love, and to do some translating between languages. I love words of affirmation. My partner loves gifts. This requires us to stretch in ways that don’t always feel natural in order to recognize each other in the ways that we like to be recognized. He makes the effort to write the occasional card, while I keep a running list of gift ideas based on things he expresses interest in. Your relationship doesn’t start and end with your love language; it requires you to really understand and respond to how someone else gives and receives love too.

13. Honor the ritual of checking in about your relationship. People start to take their relationships for granted when they assume things are working that are very much not working. Build in recurring rituals of checking in on your relationship — What do you need today? What can I do to ease some of the stress you’ve been under? Has this routine/dynamic been working for you? Where do we need to adjust? Do you have any feedback for me about how things have been since the last time we checked in on this? Humility means accepting that you cannot and do not know everything, so be humble and seek knowledge about your relationship on a regular basis.

14. Learn together and teach each other. Be open to being influenced. Chances are, there are probably some strengths you have that your partner doesn’t have, and there are some strengths your partner has that you don’t have. Allow yourself to evolve and to learn from each other. Try new things together. Enjoy the process of seeing the world through another person’s eyes. Savor what each person brings to the table and let it be the basis for you both growing far more as a unit than you ever could have apart.

15. Value the contributions you both make and be open to adjusting how and what you contribute, based on capacity and needs. You each bring different skills and preferences to the relationship, as it relates to building and maintaining a home and life together. Distribute the labor of your shared life based on capacity and needs. Skills can be learned and taught. Going solely off of preferences can exacerbate inequitable dynamics in your relationship. You both are building the table together, so generously share your tools, your guidance, and your needs.

This is the list of what helps my relationship work. What’s on yours?