Marriage is Tough, Get a Helmet - Working Through Modern Relationship Myths

In this episode of TUF, Robbie dives into the modern misconceptions surrounding marriage and relationships, sparked by a viral video claiming, “If marriage feels hard, you’re with the wrong person.” Reflecting on (almost) 14 years of marriage, Robbie discusses the ups and downs, the importance of resilience, and why sticking through the tough times can lead to deeper connections.

From navigating life’s chaos as a parent to debunking the myth of perfection in relationships, this episode explores:

• Why “the grass isn’t always greener” applies to relationships.
• The value of working through challenges instead of walking away.
• Balancing love, friendship, and partnership in a long-term marriage.

With humor, insight, and candid honesty, Robbie tackles how societal pressures and social media skew our expectations and why grit and self-reflection are key in making relationships thrive. If you’ve ever questioned what makes a marriage work, this episode is for you.

Tune in for an unfiltered take on love, growth, and the journey of marriage.

Keywords: marriage myths, relationships, resilience, long-term marriage, social media and relationships, marriage advice, parenting and marriage, modern relationship challenges, navigating tough times in marriage.

Chapters

• 0:00 Reflecting on Turning 37
• 11:03 Navigating Hardships in Relationships
• 17:50 Commitment to Marriage and Family

Transcript

Robbie (00:00)
Welcome into the show, everyone. Hope everyone's having a fantastic day so far. We are getting close to the end of the year. And as I'm recording this, I've just had a birthday, officially turned 37, feeling not really necessarily older than I did a couple of weeks ago, but definitely on this side of old now. 37, I'm no longer in my middle 30s. I am now officially in my

late 30s, I'm an old fart, getting close to 40. But other than that, the birthday was good. Got to hang out with my family, real low key. Beer, ugly Christmas sweater, ugly Christmas shirts, good food, had a good time. So thanks everyone that celebrated my birthday with me. because of everything that's going on, it's been difficult to get recording time for these podcasts, but I'm committed to you.

My fan base, obviously the millions and millions of you out there, if you didn't see on social media, someone sent me a screenshot of their top five podcasts from the Spotify review of the year. And I was right there below Mr. Joe Rogan on number four for them. Now, that being said, he's a good friend of mine and probably listens out of pity, but it was good to see that. And I've definitely been seeing some growth with the podcast. So again, thank you to everyone that listens.

And I really do appreciate you being here. And I'm going to try and put out an episode every single week through the end of the year. I may take a week off. We'll just we'll see. But today I was going to talk about luckily for you, not just about being old the entire time or supplements you need to take in terms of, you know, baby aspirin for your heart and glucosamine for your joints and do daily stretching and all the other stuff that you need to do once you start getting old as shit like me.

I'm going to go and skip that this year and this episode is going to have nothing to do with my birthday or getting older, but something that actually just popped up on my feed, I guess you would say, or a video that popped up in the reels as I was doom scrolling on the day before my birthday. And it said on there like, if this showed up on your on your reels, it showed up for a reason. But it was some lady who essentially was saying that

If someone tells you that marriage is hard, they're obviously married to the wrong person. And this lady is like a, I don't know what you would call her. She's like a divorce advocate or a, I don't know, single lady advocate. I don't know exactly what the fuck it was, but it, you know, it wasn't necessarily something that I would say should be on my reels, but I did dive in and looked at her profile, decent following, like 35,000 people in a lot of her videos.

were really just about how women are better off without getting married and women pour their lives or souls into being married and that marriage shouldn't necessarily be hard. If it is hard, that means you're married to the wrong person and that everyone marries the wrong person, all this stuff. And it really got me thinking because I disagreed with pretty much everything that she was talking about.

Now there were certain things that she brought up that I think are good. And I just wanted to kind of address some of these things here today. like I said, this might be more just me venting or ranting about something that I saw, but I wanted to kind of process through this, through the podcast. And at first I just wanted to kind of acknowledge that I know that this is not the 1960s, the 1950s, fuck even the 1800s anymore.

There's a lot of things that have happened. There's a lot of progression that's happened within our world, socially, culturally, that is definitely for the better. There are a lot of things that were really shitty back then, and I don't think that people should just stay in marriages for the wrong reasons. I don't think that you should just stick around, be abused verbally, mentally, emotionally. That's obviously not a good thing. So yeah, there are things that this lady was...

mentioning that have happened in the past and probably still happen today to a certain extent or definitely still happen today to a certain extent within relationships. But I think that the overall message was what I disagreed with. I do think there are certain circumstances where things are gonna be shitty or hard or you should get away from the person that you're married to or that you did marry the wrong person. But I think that...

What really got to me is like, feel like this is just the overall message that I hear in society and culture and not like in real life, probably. It's mostly just social media, which that could just be the way that these videos are coming in just to piss me off. You the algorithms got me knows what pisses me off, even though I don't like or dislike shit, or I don't comment necessarily on any of these things on social media. I'm sure they probably fucking know just because they know everything. They can look into your soul through that that little iPhone lens.

But yeah, I think that this idea that everything should be perfect and if it's not perfect, like fuck them, fuck marriage, fuck your family, right? I feel like I see this also in like with people who have issues with their moms, their dads, stuff like that. It's like, if they're not on board with how you wanna do things or exactly how you believe things, then fuck them, move on. They're not worth it. Same with like being married. know, if your husband...

doesn't believe certain things that you do, or it gets hard from time to time, or you guys are fighting, like, fuck them, just leave them. You can go ahead and get up and leave. That's the fluidity that's available in culture and society nowadays. And specifically when it comes to marriage, I definitely disagree with this quite a bit. I think that anyone who's been married for a long time and has worked through problems,

knows that being married can be a lot of work. Yes, it could be a lot of fun. Yes, there's a lot of great stuff that goes into it. Hopefully you marry your best friend, someone that you could get along with, someone that you're attracted to. There's a lot of things that, you know, when you're doing that, that screening process, I'm a recruiter. So when you're doing that screening process in the beginning, hopefully you're finding someone that you're compatible with long term. But in my mind, when

People give up too early or when things get rough, they just decide, well, fuck it, I'm gonna get divorced or I'm gonna leave this relationship. They're missing out on certain stages within the relationship. To me, in any relationship you have with anyone, can always get difficult, whether that's a friend, a brother, a sister, your kids, your grandparents, anyone, it doesn't matter who the fuck it is, coworkers, things can get difficult. We're human beings, we fight, we think differently.

we get into arguments. We could get pissed off at the way someone's acting. This is all super normal. And in my mind, being married, yeah, you can marry the wrong person, but at the end of the day, there is no greener pasture at the end. Like I said, I feel like I have to keep on jumping back to this idea or this framing of it as,

Yes, if someone's abusive or someone is just a terrible person or something like that, right? Yeah, then maybe it's time to move on. But in general, with most marriages, you're gonna have ups and downs. You're gonna go through stages where you absolutely despise the other person or you have this resentment that builds up. And a lot of times it's not even them. It can be you, it can be your own.

built up emotions that make you feel a certain way about the other person. And that goes both ways. That could be for the man or for the woman in the relationship. I definitely know there are times in my relationship where I'm probably holding up a bunch of resentment and anger towards my own wife. And it makes me feel angry or like things aren't going well. But it could potentially have nothing to do with her. could have everything to do with what I'm feeling and what I'm lacking to process in my own head.

That being said, like I said, you're going to go through stages of marriage, of relationships. And if you give up too early or if you just, as soon as it gets hard, you throw in the towel or you quit. And that doesn't necessarily mean divorce, right? Even if you just give up trying, or if you stop trying to, to do better, to understand things within your relationship, to be friends or to connect with your partner.

you're going to miss out on these later stages of life that you're going to get to, right? It's easy to just kind of throw in the towel, not to say that divorce is easy, but it's easy to just like throw in the towel and think that there's things are going to be so much better once you're past being married to this person that you quote unquote hate, resent, whatever all those things are. And you've given up on trying to make the relationship better. You can give up at this stage, but I kind of look at it as like a

a sine wave or a cosine wave for all you math nerds out there, where it's just gonna continually go up and down and you get to a certain stage in your life and your marriage. I don't know where it's at five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 years, somewhere in that range. Like you're gonna get to these points where you are upset with each other, where you're angry, where you have this resentment. Maybe you don't like that person as much or you've let that friendship.

get so far away and essentially made it more of like a partnership. It's almost like just like business dealings that can happen. That's happened in my relationship before where it's felt more of like a transactional relationship. And that's not a good thing, but you can get past that. You can work past these things and you have to work past them in order to get to the different levels of your relationship that you're never going to get to. If you don't move, move forward, move past

these hardships. want to get up down that hill down to the bottom and then whether it's through your own self help or if you go and get counseling or someone, you know, trusted friend is able to help you through those hard times, work your way back up and continue on along this trend, this relationship. You're going to get to a point in life where it's going to be good again. And then guess what? It's going to get hard again and then it's going to get good again. And you're going to get to a much

deeper understanding of your partner, a much deeper appreciation of your partner, of your relationship, of your marriage by working through these things and not just giving up the first sign of hardship. And as I mentioned, I think that people think that once things go a little bit south or sour, however you want to characterize it, that they could just give up, leave that person, go on to the next person and things might be great.

at the beginning, right? So you go and you get remarried and you start down this trail and it's, it's all, you know, sugar, sugar canes and fucking rainbows and sunshine and all that shit until you run into the same fucking issues that you had before with the person you were with prior. And you're going down the same trajectory that you had with your previous partner, with your previous husband or wife. And you decide, Hey, I'm going to quit again. And you just become almost like this serial data, Marrior.

I don't know, whatever you wanna call it. These problems are gonna continually come. The pastures aren't always greener. And no matter who you find, there's always gonna be issues. It's just human nature. You're never gonna find someone who thinks exactly the way that you do. And in all honesty, if you find someone who thinks exactly the way you do, you guys are gonna fucking fight like crazy. Cause I don't know about you, but I would never wanna marry myself. I would have so many fights with myself. It's fucking ridiculous. I'm not even married to myself. Just in my own head, I have fights with myself all the time.

But yeah, that's just kind of some things that came to mind for me while I was listening to this. And as I mentioned too, I feel like this is just almost like a prevailing thought process in society nowadays or within social media of when things start to get tough or if something's not going exactly the way that you would like it to, it's like, well, I don't deserve this. I'm worth more than this. I'm just going to go ahead and...

leave the situation, they're not good enough for me, fuck them. And I think that a lot of people's standards have gone really high and that's fine. We could all have high standards. We could all want the best for our lives. We could want things to go well. Like we're all kind of working towards having the best possible life that we can. I'm no different in that. But there are going to be hardships and you don't get to the good stuff unless you work through some of those hardships. If you don't work through the hard shit in your life,

You're never going to get to greener pastures. You're just going to kind of stay within those shallow, you know, topical level of happiness or of contentment or relationships. You're never going to dive deeper. You kind of got to go through the shit to get to the good stuff, right? It's almost like having a greener pasture. You've got to put down the manure before you can get to, you know, a lush green lawn.

And hopefully that's something that will start to change. Like I said, I don't know. Could just be social media. Maybe a lot of people are still out there trying hard, but I know that even for me and my wife, I'm 37 now. So like I said, I'm old as shit, older than dirt, but we've been married for...

We're coming up on 14 years pretty soon. So definitely married the longest out of any of the people that we know within our friends group. And we had people that were getting divorced three, four, five years into their marriages and just kind of petered out

And that's not to say that me and my wife have this perfect ideal marriage, but we still like each other. We're still attracted to each other. Yeah, we've got two kids and our lives are fucking nuts and there's always shit to do. And it seems like we never get to see each other. We're always picking the kids up, dropping them off. One of them threw up in the fucking living room. They got to get taken to baseball practice. Work is nuts. We got to work late.

everything that kind of comes up within life can pull away from us spending time together and us kind of having that, I guess you would say deeper connection. But we understand that this is a season of life for us. This is what we're doing right now and that we have to try and stay as connected as possible during this in order to make it through to the end of it, right? When our kids are older and they move away and they have families of their own, like it's gonna be just us. And I don't wanna have to try and start over.

or get to know my wife again, I'd rather just continue to be friends with her during our marriage, even though it's not exactly like it was when we first started dating. It never will be. Things will change, and we've got to be okay with the fact that things change, but try to adapt with them to make it the best possible situation that you can. And maybe that's where people can start to, I don't know, look in inward as...

when things aren't necessarily going well, it's very easy to point the finger at the other person and say that they're the problem or whatever is out there. It's always easy to point out words and just be like, that's the problem, as opposed to looking inward and being like, am I contributing to this in any way? Are my own emotions and feelings getting in the way of things? Am I holding onto resentment? Am I gunny sacking? Am I just holding onto so much and then building these false realities in my head?

and lashing out and then ultimately giving up on whatever I'm working towards and just saying, fuck it, I give up, I quit. It's everyone else's fault. I'm perfect. I'm great. Yeah, I feel like that can happen. I like that could happen quite a bit to a lot of people. And it's not just, like I said, it's not just within the confines of marriages. There are a lot of other things that I see in the world through social media where when things get tough,

People just quit or they say that they don't deserve it. That's I see that a lot too. It's like, I don't deserve this. I don't deserve that. But nothing is given to us in this life. And you do deserve a certain amount of decency, human kindness, certain amount of respect. There are certain things that should be a given in this world, but they're not necessarily a given and they never will be a given because this world is imperfect. It's not a perfect world. Things aren't always the way that they should be and they're never going to get.

to perfect. We could always strive to get there. We could always strive to make things better, but we can never lose sight of the fact that things aren't perfect and that they're never gonna be perfect and that when things are tough, it takes a certain amount of grit and gumption and just hardheaded stubbornness to push through those things in order to get to where we wanna go. And...

Yeah, that's just all of these things came up when I saw this lady that basically said if someone tells you that marriage is hard or can be hard, that they're married to the wrong person. And I just thought, I'm like, well, I'm not married to the wrong person, bitch. Fuck you.

You know, my marriage is going along. Not perfect. Not the best marriage in the world. Well, maybe. Maybe it's best marriage in the world. I don't know. But it's definitely not perfect. We have issues. We have struggles. we're continually working on trying to make it the best that we possibly can. And it's not just about us anymore. We have kids. And our kids are very important to us. My spouse, my wife, she's important to me. My kids are important to me. My whole family is important to me. And that's I'm willing to fight for.

something that I'm willing to put in the extra effort and something that I'm willing to eat a little bit of, know, eat a little shit for to make sure that I'm putting up with whatever I need to in order to make this life the best that it could possibly be, to make my marriage the best it could possibly be and make our family life the best thing that it could possibly be. anyways, all of this came up just from that one post that popped up on my feed. Thank you to the algorithms for

for showing that to me that helped me get this episode out today. yeah, I think that that's gonna pretty much do it. If you agree with me, if you disagree with me, let me know, send me a message, check things out on social media. But yeah, that's gonna do it for this week. I'm old, I'm 37, and I'll try and continue to make sure that I'm putting out a couple more episodes. I may take a week off, two weeks off, we'll see, but I'll let you know. But yeah, have a good rest of week. That's gonna do it for today.