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Soon after my husband and I got engaged, instead of pledging our undying love each day, we started saying, "Thank you for tolerating me." It was a joke, but not. We saw marriage not as a harmonious union of two souls but as a relationship that would require work, patience, and toleration. For example, I learned to tolerate things like the sound of him smacking his food loudly, to the point that I would sometimes wonder if I'd made the right decision in my choice of life partner simply based on this one flaw. Despite this issue, I know I love him because instead of throwing a plate at his head every time he chews, after nearly seven years, I still summon all of my restraint and force myself to gently say, "You're smacking really loud." And he stops — until the next meal, when we do it all again.

This may be why I instantly fell in love with Heather Havrilesky's book Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage. Early in the book, Havrilesky, longtime Ask Polly advice columnist and author of How To Be a Person in the World and Disaster Preparedness, calls marriage "the world's most impossible endurance challenge." To her, romance isn't about dual massages (gross) and meaningful stares, it's about the ugly stuff, the hard stuff. It's about loving someone enough to stay with them every day, possibly forever. So if you occasionally think or utter to yourself, "I hate my husband," don't despair. It doesn't necessarily mean that your marriage is on the outs, just that there's work to be done.

Keep reading to find out what to do if you hate your husband, wife, or spouse.

Accept the Hypocrisy

According to Havrilesky, you can both love and hate your spouse. If that sounds hypocritical, it's because it is — but that's okay. I tore through Foreverland, underlining passages like, "Marriage is designed to break you. You will forget everything you knew before. You will tremble under the weight of your own shortcomings." How inspiring! I deeply identified with her raw, real, and often hilarious take on motherhood, growing older, and the challenges of tethering yourself to another person.

Because her words felt so true to me, I was surprised when a New York Times excerpt of the book, an essay titled "Marriage Requires Amnesia," spawned a slew of angry comments and tweets, many of them from men, accusing Havrilesky of hating her husband. Maybe they expected her to fawn over him, but don't people know you can hate your spouse and love them deeply? I found the enraged takes comedic because the commenters got her tone so very wrong. Plus, didn't they hate their spouses too?

It's OK to be Angry — Sometimes

The ensuing tweetstorm led me to Chelsea Rae Hopkins, who defended the essay in a since-deleted Twitter (now X) thread. When I reached out to Hopkins, who lives in Austin with her infant daughter and her wife Marty, she told me, "Of course you hate your spouse sometimes."

Hopkins also saw the hate comments as a "fundamental misreading" of what Havrilesky is actually trying to express, which is a humorous take on what it truly is to be married. When I asked Hopkins if she talked to her wife about the essay, she said, "This is not the first time we've had intellectual conversations about what it is to be partnered, but I just hadn't seen marriage written about so humorously and frankly."

Look Inward

Havrilesky tweeted and wrote about the misreads of the excerpt in a 2022 Ask Polly column, writing, "The idea that I'm miserable and I'm promoting resignation and contempt is a hilarious side effect of how moralistic and reductive our culture is about marriage and writing and personality and opinions and everything else under the sun."

I spoke to her on the phone shortly after the essay came out, and she said that early on, she told her husband of 15 years, Bill, to "brace himself" since the reactions to this book would likely be a mix of ecstatic camaraderie and misguided rage. 

"People are angry at me for being angry at my husband," Havrilesky told me over the phone from North Carolina, where she'd recently moved. "They assume my husband is a persecuted individual. I'm not going to contradict the notion that he's persecuted by me — that's accurate. But he's also well aware of who I am."

So, if you're being judged by others for your feelings, recognize that they are not you and don't deny or feel ashamed by how you truly feel. However, take a deeper look into your emotional responses to understand where they are coming from.

Remember to Communicate

If you're feeling resentment toward your partner, you may be inclined to yell and scream or, even worse, stonewall. These are toxic behaviors that will only exacerbate negative feelings and, therefore, should be avoided. Instead, communicate your feelings in a healthy way, which can include bickering.

The "capital D discourse about marriage," as Hopkins called it, isn't confined to Havrilesky's essay. A Modern Love column in The New York Times discussed the benefits of bickering in marriage; couples are ditching the "happily ever after" fantasy and getting real about what they need and what's not working. In a healthy, happy marriage, there can still be plenty that's not working.

Sarah Anderson, a teacher in Phoenix who has been married for almost 14 years, said that during the holiday break, she and her husband were at home together for two weeks straight. 

"I called my sister and told her I needed her to provide an alibi for me because I thought I was going to kill him," Anderson joked of her husband, whom she deeply loves, by the way. 

Her sister sent her Havrilesky's excerpt, and instead of making Anderson feel hopeless, it helped. 

"I instantly felt better," she said.

Accept Reality, Not Fantasy

Reema*, a product manager in San Francisco who has been married six years, agreed, telling me, "The more we talk about the bad moments, the more we don't feel like there is something wrong." 

Addressing your problems is not a sign of failure, but ignoring them is. Still, not everyone can get behind the idea that "hating" your spouse at times can actually mean you truly love them. Shelley*, a Los Angeles-based financial consultant who has been married for 15 years, compared Havrilesky's essay to a woman who constantly posts on one of her local moms' groups about how annoying her husband is. 

"I don't know if you need to describe how phlegmy your husband is in the national newspaper," Shelley said of Havrilesky's essay. "It seemed like she was kind of being a jerk."

That's the thing about excerpts, though. You're only getting a sliver of a much bigger story. 

"I wanted this book to feel like you are living inside this marriage for 15 years," Havrilesky told me. "I want you to understand how this marriage is and how I'm growing and evolving. The reader can dislike me, but mostly, I want you to trust that I'm telling you the truth." 

Havrilesky said she takes any pushback as a "bellwether of how badly needed these types of conversations are."

Heather Havrilesky

"The idea that I'm miserable and I'm promoting resignation and contempt is a hilarious side effect of how moralistic and reductive our culture is about marriage and writing and personality and opinions and everything else under the sun."

— Heather Havrilesky

Final Thoughts

If you read Foreverland, it's clear that Havrilesky absolutely does not HATE her husband — phlegmy as he may be. She writes that she's the villain of her own story, and if more of us owned up to that, maybe our relationships would benefit. 

"The point of the piece is to show what an asshole I am," she said. "It's about how it feels to disappoint yourself in marriage. You thought you were going to be a princess bride, not a naggy little bitch. You have to face yourself."

So yes, I hate it when my husband smacks his food. When he orders a long pull Americano at the McDonald's drive-thru instead of just asking for a damn coffee, I want to maim him. We fight. Our communication is sometimes horrific. We've endured rough patches, and I'm sure there will be more of them down the road. However, as long as we remember to say, "Thank you for tolerating me," I think we have a chance. In Foreverland, that's considered the height of romance.

*Names have been changed

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