Where Every Connection Becomes a Bond
She’s sitting across from you at brunch, glowing, married for three years.
You ask her how marriage is, and she sighs contentedly: “It’s amazing. Best decision I ever made. We still go on dates every weekend. The romance never dies. I’ve never been happier.”
Six months later, you see her at the supermarket. She looks exhausted. You ask how things are going, and her voice drops: “Honestly? It’s hard. Some days I don’t even like him. We haven’t had sex in weeks.”
Welcome to the carefully curated lies married people tell single people.
Marriage is real and beautiful and messy and hard. But married people often present a fantasy version of it to their single friends—sometimes to convince themselves it’s worth it, sometimes out of shame, and sometimes because they genuinely want to protect the sanctity of what they have.
Here are the ten most common lies married people tell single people about what married life is actually like.
1. “We Never Ran Out of Things to Talk About”
The reality? Most married couples operate in companionable silence.
After years together, you’ve told each other your stories. You’ve discussed your dreams. You know each other’s opinions on politics, religion, and the neighbors. The “deep conversations” become fewer and farther between.
What married people don’t tell single people is that conversation often gets replaced by logistics: who’s picking up the kids, what’s for dinner, did you pay that bill?
The romance-novel version of marriage—endless meaningful conversations over wine—gives way to a more practical rhythm. You’re together constantly, but you’re not always talking.
Married people paint a picture of unending intimacy through connection when the truth is often more like: comfortable coexistence punctuated by moments of real connection.
2. “We Still Have Amazing Sex”
This is one of the biggest lies, and it needs to be said clearly: many married couples struggle with sexual intimacy.
Whether it’s due to kids, work stress, body insecurity, hormone changes, or simply the loss of novelty, sex becomes infrequent or unsatisfying for many married people.
But they won’t tell you that. Instead, they create a fantasy where marriage means unlimited, passionate sex—which couldn’t be further from the truth for many.
Some couples have thriving sex lives. But plenty have mediocre ones, mismatched libidos, and bedroom dynamics that feel more like obligation than desire.
What married people tell single people: “Sex is so much better when you’re married.” What they don’t tell you: it’s often worse or nonexistent.
3. “Marriage Is Easy When You Marry the Right Person”
This suggests that if you just find your perfect match, everything will flow smoothly.
It’s a comforting lie because it shifts responsibility away from work and onto “fate” or “the right person.”
The truth is that all marriages require constant effort, compromise, forgiveness, and recommitment—even when you marry someone “right.”
Two people who love each other deeply still disagree about money, household responsibility, parenting, intimacy, and time together. The “right person” doesn’t make these challenges disappear; they just make you willing to work through them.
Married people want to believe they married the “right person” so they tell this lie to themselves and others. But the reality is that good marriages are built through dedication, not discovered through perfect matching.
4. “I Never Fantasize About Being Single”
Many married people lie about their contentment with their status.
The truth? A significant number of married people fantasize about the freedom of single life. They daydream about spontaneous decisions, time alone, financial independence, and the absence of compromise.
This doesn’t mean they don’t love their spouse. It means that the loss of independence—which is an actual loss that happens in marriage—is sometimes painful, even if the trade-off is worth it.
Married people rarely admit this to single friends because it feels like a betrayal. It sounds like they regret getting married. But you can love your spouse and still sometimes miss having a life that’s entirely your own.
5. “Our Relationship Never Gets Boring”
The early relationship phase is intoxicating: constant novelty, excitement, discovery, anticipation.
Then you get married. You become predictable to each other. You know each other’s routines, your jokes, your insecurities. The mystery fades.
This is not to say married life is boring—it becomes a different kind of intimate. But it’s definitely less exciting in the way that early relationships are.
Married people often romanticize the early days while presenting their current life as equally thrilling, which is simply not true. The excitement transforms into comfort, stability, and a deeper knowing—which is valuable, but it’s not the same as the butterflies and rushing heart of new love.
6. “I Love Sharing Everything With My Spouse”
This one gets under people’s skin because it’s so frequently untrue.
Many married people desperately need space—mental, emotional, and physical. They need time away from their spouse. They need to maintain friendships and hobbies that exist outside the marriage.
But married people often don’t admit that they sometimes feel suffocated by the constant togetherness, the loss of privacy, or the burden of managing another person’s emotions alongside their own.
The fantasy is that you’ll want to share everything with your spouse. The reality is that sometimes you need to be alone, to have parts of yourself that remain private, to exist as an individual—not just as “part of a couple.”
7. “Married Life Never Gets Monotonous”
The daily grind of marriage can feel crushing in its monotony.
Wake up, work, dinner, household tasks, bed. Repeat. For decades. With the same person.
What married people tell single people is that marriage is an adventure. What they don’t mention is the heavy weight of routine, the predictability that can feel suffocating, the sense that you’re stuck in a loop.
Some couples manage to inject novelty into their routine. Others settle into a rhythm that feels less like adventure and more like survival. This can be satisfying in its own way—the security of knowing your partner and your life—but it’s definitely not the excitement that married people tend to describe.
8. “I Never Regret My Choices”
This is a loaded one that married people tell themselves and others.
The reality is that many people experience regret—not necessarily about their spouse, but about timing, about paths not taken, about versions of themselves they’ve had to sacrifice.
You marry someone at 25, and by 35, you might wonder who you would have become without that responsibility. You might grieve opportunities you didn’t take. You might wonder what it would have been like to live differently.
This doesn’t mean marriage was the wrong choice—but pretending there’s no cost, no sacrifice, no version of yourself that’s been left behind is dishonest.
Healthy married people learn to grieve these losses while embracing the gains of their marriage. But acknowledging that loss? That takes vulnerability, and most people package their marriage as a pure win to their single friends.
9. “Marriage Made Me a Better Person”
Some people do experience genuine growth through marriage. But this narrative is often overstated.
Marriage can also enable people to stay exactly the same. It can reinforce bad habits, poor communication patterns, and emotional avoidance. It can allow people to avoid personal growth work because they’re focused on managing another person’s needs.
The truth is that marriage is neutral—what you get out of it depends entirely on the work you put in. It won’t automatically heal you or complete you or make you better.
If you weren’t willing to do emotional work before marriage, you probably won’t after. And if you were already growing, marriage might accelerate that growth—or it might distract you from it entirely.
10. “You’ll Understand When You Get Married”
This patronizing line is the umbrella under which all the other lies live.
Married people use this to dismiss single people’s concerns, questions, or perspectives about relationships. It implies that single people can’t possibly understand the depth of marriage until they experience it themselves.
The truth is that marriage isn’t magic. It doesn’t grant you access to secret wisdom that single people are incapable of understanding.
Single people can understand relationship dynamics, communication, commitment, sacrifice, and intimacy. They might understand them differently than married people, but not more validly or more deeply.
This line is also often used to shut down legitimate criticism. If a single person points out an unhealthy dynamic in a married couple’s relationship, the married person dismisses them: “You just don’t understand—you’re not married.”
That’s a convenient way to avoid accountability and reflection.
Here’s what married people should actually tell single people: Marriage is real. It’s beautiful. It’s hard. It’s boring sometimes. It’s deeply intimate sometimes. It requires constant work and recommitment.
It won’t complete you. It won’t make you happy if you’re not already capable of being happy. It will change you—sometimes for the better, sometimes in ways you didn’t anticipate or want.
The lies aren’t malicious. They come from a place of needing to believe that the sacrifices you’ve made are worth it. They come from shame about the parts of marriage that are hard or disappointing. They come from a desire to protect the institution you’ve committed to.
But single people deserve the truth: that marriage is a choice with real costs and real rewards, neither of which is guaranteed to look the way you imagine it will look.
If you’re married and reading this, consider being more honest with your single friends. Share the beauty and the difficulty. Show them what marriage actually looks like—not the fantasy version, but the real, messy, meaningful reality.
And if you’re single, don’t let the lies convince you that marriage will fix you, complete you, or make you happy. The same person who is unfulfilled as a single person will often find themselves unfulfilled in marriage—because the fulfillment was never about the marital status. It was always about what you’re willing to build within yourself.
