Things can get messy

THINGS CAN GET MESSY.

The oversized, block letters mounted on the whitewashed brick immediately grabbed my attention as I took my last steps up the stairs and entered “The Loft” at Earls, a stylish space for holding events in Yaletown, Vancouver.

“What do you think the phrase means?” I asked my future wife, taking in the exposed brick walls, wooden beams, and concrete floors as I leaned against the granite counter of the bar in the restaurant that would become our wedding venue.

“I don’t know, I guess it sounds a bit ominous, right”?

“Yeah, like a playful warning,” I replied.

“I like it, though. Feels real.”

At the beginning of marriage, I interpreted the phrase “Things can get messy” as a cautionary reminder to tread carefully: life, relationships, or any major human endeavour rarely goes according to plan.

After a decade of marriage, the foreboding message has taken on a new meaning for me, and it’s one of renewal.

For the first few years of marriage, most people try to avoid messiness and treat the relationship like they would a new job; in other words, they try not to screw anything up. To that end, like many couples, my wife and I scheduled weekly meetings, planned date nights, and spent the first week of every new year mapping out our goals for ourselves and the relationship for the next 12 months. The goal, of course, was to get on the same page and move forward together, but perhaps the secondary, underlying goal was to avoid messiness.

In our society, people tend to avoid messy situations at all costs – it’s the default approach. Messiness leads to discomfort and conflict, two things we’re taught to treat as threats. However, as I’ve learned over the past several years, nothing meaningful stays neat and tidy for long.

And sure, mess-avoidance works for a while, but it ultimately becomes unsustainable: people change careers, children are born, parents get sick, interest rates increase, and life priorities shift in ways you can’t predict or control.

All couples handle messiness differently, but one of the worst things you can do is sweep it under the rug. The problem with avoiding messiness in a marriage is that you miss out on something critical to building a healthy relationship: getting your hands dirty. Disagreements, discomfort, and the resulting vulnerability are where real connection is forged. This is a lesson you learn over time, but it’s not just a life lesson; it’s a philosophical one, too. Philosophers have been grappling with the above ideas for decades. For example, Jean-Paul Sartre, an existentialist, explored themes of freedom, authenticity, and interpersonal relationships in his philosophy. Sartre believed that authentic relationships required individuals to confront conflicts and tensions arising from differences in personal values, desires, and perspectives. And if you’ve been married long enough, tensions will emerge in these areas.

Sartre argues that we should steer towards messiness, not away from it. Addressing messiness head-on provides opportunities for individuals to exercise their own individuality and freedom within the marriage and develop deeper bonds with their partners by exchanging difficult truths, making joint decisions, and accepting the consequences of their actions. Sometimes, this means taking a leap of faith.

For those who have worked to build a career, we eventually learn that playing it safe is not the most effective way to earn a promotion or grow a business. Instead, we must take chances and get involved in messy projects to demonstrate to leadership and our peers that we can thrive in difficult circumstances. The same approach applies to marriage.

The problem with messiness is that it sometimes feels uncomfortable, even terrible. When two people are attempting to work through a messy situation, they may feel uncomfortable in their own skin and with each other for a long time. Sometimes, they may think the love has gone. However, steadying the rudder and maintaining the course through windswept seas is about understanding that love isn’t always a feeling; it’s a joint decision to continue to move forward together to discover what lies beyond the edges of the storm clouds.

One of the tricks to embracing messiness in marriage is to acknowledge that the ideal marriage is not one with limited conflict. Social media makes this idea very difficult to accept; scrolling through Instagram, we see an alternate reality scrubbed clean of messiness. Psychologically, we know those digital realities aren’t real — but when we see them daily, they start to feel more convincing than our own. They feel so concrete, real. Spending too much time in this sterile, digital world will eventually distort one’s expectations with respect to their own marriage. But hear this: don’t measure your behind-the-scenes challenges against a stranger’s highlight reels.

My wife and I have been very lucky not to encounter any major messiness over the past ten years. We’ve been fortunate — the messiness we’ve faced has been manageable. For that, I’m grateful. However, when the next mess rears its head, it’s helpful to know that my wife shares my view of messiness, though I think it took her longer to embrace the philosophy. “I’ve chosen a new picture to hang in our bedroom,” she said to me one afternoon. “Okay,” I said. “What is it?”

Hanging on the wall across from our bed is a picture of a broken vase, with each crack filled with gold. The picture depicts a Japanese art form called “Kintsugi,” in which broken pottery is rejoined with lacquer, often using gold powder to draw attention to the repaired areas. Kintsugi is not just a method of repair but a philosophy that embraces imperfections, messiness, and an object's history. The image of the golden-lined vase reminds me that challenges can be overcome, and that the entire structure of a marriage can in fact be renewed and made whole again, provided both people’s hands are committed to the repair.

When it comes to marriage, I still have plenty to learn, but I do know this: when I got married to my wife, I set out to build a life with her. What that life looks like continuously changes depending on what life throws at us. Sometimes, what we mean to build is graspable, tangible — other times it’s nebulous. However, I’ve come to learn that, in many cases, messiness is a prerequisite for the relationship to continue moving forward and flourishing. In messiness, your story expands and transforms into something new. Like the picture of the cracked vase, what we build may break apart from time to time, but that messiness provides a space for us to start anew.