The Emotional Labor of Marriage Was Unexpected

When I first got married, no one warned me about emotional labor. I thought partnership meant shared responsibilities, but I quickly found myself carrying the invisible weight: remembering birthdays, noticing the groceries that were running out, keeping tabs on moods, energy, and unspoken needs.

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Then motherhood came along, and it became even easier to fall into the trap of “I’ll just do it myself.” Letting someone else figure it out meant slowing down, tolerating mistakes, tolerating discomfort. And for me, hyper-independence was a well-worn survival strategy.

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Society glamorizes this hyper-independence in women calling it “control freak,” “firstborn daughter energy,” or worse, dismissing us as “too much” or “ab***h.” But what it really did was keep me in a loop. A loop where I thought it was my job to mother my husband. And let me tell you, nothing disrupts a marriage faster than that.

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The problem? Letting anyone fail wasn’t in my DNA. So I did what any academically minded human would do and I studied human relationships. I mastered the texts book… till I realized the books couldn’t teach me wisdom. I had to implement what they were teaching me which looked like: trying and failing at some pretty hard conversations.

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I started to talk like no one around me talked. My girlfriends - never said I was crazy…but the looks or the silence in their voice seemed to reflect back “Mary what are you doing”… except the more I owned my emotions, the clearer I communicated about what was real for me the more I started to see how fun life could be again.

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Yup.Joy came from owning what was real. Joy came from feeling the deep pains. Joy came from saying the hard thing to my husband… and hyper independence? I didn’tneed that as much because I was able to meet the moment instead of controlling it.

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Now, in my work, I blend neuroscience and wisdom. I help women and couples learn to see each other as mirrors — not adversaries, not projects to fix, not children to parents. But as equals who reveal what the other most needs to learn.

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And my husband? He’s become my greatest mirror. And I’ve become his. That is what equal partnership actually looks like. Not perfect. Not easy. But alive, real, and worth it.