Is Marriage Hard?
Maddie Trizzy Troutt and those first year of marriage instagram posts
I am so excited to have our first special guest/hopefully regular contributor to the Release the Women substack! Victoria Ward is a writer who lives in Oxford, UK and is a longtime (like 20 years??) friend of mine. She’s also one of the original cofounders of RTW and I am so excited she is writing in this space with me!! I am thrilled about this essay from her that feels like an extension of the many conversations (and IG cringe follows) that she and I have had. Hope you enjoy!!
Madi Prewett Troutt, former contestant on The Bachelor and current Instavangelist, recently shared an Instagram post celebrating her one year of marriage to Grant Troutt, young adult pastor and son of a billionaire businessman. The caption is well over 300 words long and makes a somewhat stumbling explanation of what real marriage looks like. “Marriage isn’t always ‘post worthy’ with perfect filters and big smiles,” she begins. “Can I be honest? If I’m being real with you, there are moments where I am selfish and love to only receive.”
Madi goes on to describe the difficult moments they’ve encountered so far. These include “serving” when she doesn’t feel like it and needing to quickly forgive when they fail each other - “and boy it’s a lot” she adds in parentheses. “Yes there are MANY laughs and joyous moments (he’s my very best friend) but I also want to be real about the mundane and harder moments too. That’s real love I’m learning.”
Although Madi used relatively mild language, her caption received a mixed reaction. Comments ranged from critiques on the length of the post to its confusingly negative tone.
“The longer the caption the more problems there actually are, or so the saying goes,” one commenter said. “I will read all 615 of these comments before I finish one of her paragraphs. Amen,” said another. “I ain't reading all that. I'm happy for u tho. Or sorry that happened…”
Many seemed offended that the privileged couple, who spent upwards of $1.5 million on their ceremony while championing their decision to withhold sex beforehand, should be experiencing difficulties so soon. “You don’t have children. You’re wealthy. WHY are you sounding so energetically exhausted after a year with your husband? … We have been together 5 years and I wouldn’t think to caption ANYTHING that sounded this tough,” read one Instagram comment.
As a person who grew up in Evangelical churches, Madi’s post is nothing out of the ordinary and definitely not the worst I’ve seen. It follows an incredibly familiar format, copied and pasted on most young, newly-married Christian feeds at one point or another. These captions are long-winded, boasting transparency and vulnerability to share the (shockingly) grittier sides of their relationships.
I’ll admit it, for someone like me, distanced from the Evangelical scene and thirsty for any kind of tea, these posts are my catnip. The other day, I scrolled past a two-year anniversary post that literally used the words “grueling” and “not for the faint of heart” in the caption (with a lovely “It’s worth it” tacked on at the end).
Women in the comments section respond with, “Beautifully said!” and “So much truth to these words.” These may seem like inappropriate reactions to such a brutal description of a still-new marriage, but similarly positive comments can be found under Madi’s anniversary post, sandwiched between the jokes and the outrage.
To these commenters, a tough first year of marriage isn’t a bad sign or a red flag, it’s what is expected - and combative relationships, with partners “fighting” to make it work, are aspirational. In part, this is why Madi’s ending words in her caption are so ominous to me - “That’s real love I’m learning.”
I was prepped for marriage to be tough from a very early age. Not by my parents, but definitely by the churches they brought me to and the communities that I found myself in. I was learning about wives submitting to husbands and how the first year of marriage is the hardest in my middle school bible studies. I called my big sister the other day to ask how she remembered it, and she agreed, “It’s like they were preparing us for bad marriages,” she said. “The first year is the hardest was a phrase they, like, instilled in us. They locked it in our brains!”
I don’t think this problem is unique to the Evangelical Christian community. Women on the whole are taught to endure terrible relationship dynamics, especially in heterosexual marriages. It seems like now more than ever though, we’re beginning to investigate what makes marriages so damn hard. Terms like “weaponised incompetence” and “the mental load” are now on my feeds more than these explanatory anniversary posts. They pop up as Instagram infographics and viral TikTok videos with women dissecting their roles and duties and the tolerable level of permanent unhappiness their husbands seem more than happy to subject them to.
Author and Journalist Rose Hackman spoke about this tolerable level of permanent unhappiness recently in a TikTok:
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“Women are told that being in a permanent committed romantic relationship is the prize in and of itself. And because we place a hierarchy on women in romantic relationships - we kind of try and trap them there. Meanwhile, once women get into these romantic relationships, they’re put to work,” Hackman says.
“And being put to work doesn’t just mean cooking and cleaning and doing way more domestic labour than their male counterparts. It means emotional labour, which is the expectation that they will sacrifice for the group… We are finally starting to say, absolutely not… We’re not diluting ourselves permanently for the sake of male partners anymore, we’re not falling on our swords anymore, we’re not sacrificial lambs.”
I think my main problem with long marriage-is-hard Instagram captions is the over romanticizing, spiritualizing, and even hero-izing of young women accepting “permanent unhappiness”. Not only is this utterly depressing, it’s dangerous. In All About Love: New Visions, Bell Hooks says, “All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm's way.”
I remember seeing a Scary Mommy article a few years ago that discussed a moment in actors Kristen Bell and Dax Shephard’s marriage when they both fought so intensely they blacked out. The title read, Kristen Bell Describes Incredibly Relatable 'Blackout' Fight With Dax Shepard, “Hi, hello, yes, this is marriage,” the author added after describing the incident.
I read this article in early 2020, while on a trip visiting my boyfriend (now husband) in the UK and right before Covid would quarantine us together for the next six months. Marriage was definitely something I had on my mind, with neither of us citizens to the same country and long distance getting old. I remember the article made me feel gross, with how banal “blackout” fights were made to seem and how the actors’ dynamic was represented as the ideal.
I paid special attention to my partner as we were locked down together in his tiny Oxford flat - noticing how we interacted with each other and how we made each other feel, wondering if our love, which was so dear and perfect, would indeed disintegrate into something as agonizingly “relatable”.
We would be married the next year and have now been married for almost three. During this time, I’ve learned that real love doesn’t have to come at the cost of my happiness, peace, or identity. It doesn’t have to look like unending sacrifice, grueling fights, or diminishing myself. My love supports me. It is consistent and completely reliable. It comforts me when I feel anxious, just as it reassures my partner when he feels lost or down. It’s uplifting and utterly safe.
I know that love and relationships and marriage look different for everyone. But for all my friends and every woman I know and admire, I wish for them a love like this.
Bell Hooks says it best, “The moment we choose to love, we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others… When we choose to love, we choose to move against fear, against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect, to find ourselves in the other.”
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