By Jane Sonnenschein · August 14, 2026

One evening, while scrolling through videos, I came across a clip from a TV drama.

A married couple were arguing. Nothing dramatic had happened. It was all the ordinary, trivial friction of daily life, but as they kept talking, the argument grew bigger and bigger.

The husband already struggled with insecurity. His wife was stronger than he was in many ways, and after he was involved in a car accident, his inner sense of imbalance seemed to become even worse. He began finding fault with her everywhere, always feeling that she looked down on him. Later, his mother got involved too, and their marriage slowly came to an end through one argument after another, along with suspicion, resentment, and exhaustion.

After the divorce, the woman was also laid off. She suddenly lost her job, and her family was not well-off to begin with. At the time, she felt as if her life had reached a dead end.

Then she met the man who would later become her second husband.

He felt completely different.

He seemed to believe that as long as you were still alive, many things were not nearly as serious as they first appeared.

When the woman felt that her future had gone completely dark, he asked her:

“Are you nearsighted?”

She said, “No.”

“Then why can you only see this little bit of difficulty right in front of you? Why can’t you see how much life is still ahead?”

He knew that she had previously worked in a place related to ceramics, so he asked her: if she already knew how to do those things, why couldn’t she open a shop of her own?

Eventually, with help from her family, she really did open one. The business gradually picked up, and the man stayed beside her and helped her along the way.

A lot of people in the comments said that the kind of partner a woman chooses really can make an enormous difference to how happy her life feels.

Some people make you laugh and fool around every day and remind you that life still has many possibilities.

Others will argue with you over the smallest things until you are dragged into an endless cycle of explaining yourself, proving yourself, feeling hurt, and finally falling apart.

Watching that, I suddenly thought about my parents.

When I think back to their arguments when I was a child, what stayed with me most was not any one major event. It was how quickly something very small could turn into a long war.

My mother was especially fond of bringing up old grievances.

Maybe the problem was simply that something had not been done properly that day. But after a while, it would become, “There’s something wrong with you as a person.”

Then it would become, “You were already like this decades ago.”

And suddenly, things that had happened many years before would all be pulled out again and argued over from the beginning.

They could argue about buying an electric fan. They could argue about buying some ordinary household item.

Something that should have been a discussion about one specific issue often ended up becoming a judgment of the other person as a whole.

As a child, I could never understand it.

If you really thought this man was such a terrible person, if you thought he had been awful in one way or another for decades, then why had you insisted on marrying him in the first place?

Only later did I learn that their marriage had originally been arranged through relatives and was already more or less settled.

At one point, my father had considered backing out. My mother went to his workplace after him and even said she would speak to his supervisors.

She always believed that my father had changed his mind because his prospects had improved and he no longer wanted to marry her.

But many years later, my father told me a different version. According to him, the real reason he hesitated was that he felt their personalities did not suit each other.

What exactly those events left behind in each of them at the time, I can never fully know.

But I understand more and more why some couples can live together for many years without ever truly putting the past down.

A small thing happening today is only an entrance. Behind it comes an entire collection of old grievances, judgments, and resentment.

What happened today is no longer just about today.

It becomes:

“See? You’re doing it again.”

Then:

“You’ve always been like this.”

And finally:

“There is something fundamentally wrong with you.”

Once an argument moves from the thing that happened to that point, it becomes very difficult to solve anything.

“This thing you did made me uncomfortable” is something two people can discuss.

“But this is simply the kind of person you are” has already become a judgment of someone’s character.

A specific problem can be changed. An entire life of several decades cannot be put on trial and proved all over again in the middle of one argument.

Maybe a lot of what people call the “art of getting along” in marriage comes down to something very ordinary:

Deal with the issue. Don’t immediately turn it into a judgment of the person.

Doing one thing wrong does not mean someone is a bad person.

Making me unhappy today does not mean that every grievance from decades ago has to be brought back out as evidence.

When two people live together, there will naturally be many things they dislike about each other, do not understand, or simply find completely baffling.

If every difference has to end with someone being right and someone being wrong, and every dissatisfaction turns into “Why are you this kind of person?”, it is hard to imagine daily life not becoming a mess.

That made me think of the jar of chili oil Chris made today.

We usually buy Lao Gan Ma, a well-known Chinese chili crisp brand, but lately we have not been able to find it anywhere, and the jar at home was almost empty.

A while ago, Chris started saying:

“Then I’ll make it myself.”

My first reaction was: Why bother?

To me, making something like that sounds unbelievably troublesome. You have to find recipes, buy a pile of spices, chop things, prepare everything, heat the oil…

Just thinking through the whole process was enough to make me lose interest.

But he is completely different.

First, he found two English-language recipes online. One was for chili oil, and the other was for a sauce similar to Lao Gan Ma. He watched them carefully and made a list of everything he needed.

Today, he went to an Asian supermarket by himself and bought chili powder, Sichuan peppercorns, mushroom powder, and all kinds of seasonings.

At the checkout, he even started chatting with the cashier. He told them very seriously that he was planning to make his own Lao Gan Ma because we could not buy it at the moment, and then asked whether he had chosen the right ingredients.

Just imagining the scene made me laugh.

A German man standing at the checkout of an Asian supermarket, holding bags of chilies, Sichuan peppercorns, and spices, solemnly telling the cashier:

“I’m going to make my own Lao Gan Ma.”

When he came home, he started experimenting in the kitchen. He chopped, mixed, adjusted things, and eventually he really did make it.

I tasted it.

And I have to admit, it was pretty good.

Just extremely spicy.

But apparently making it was not enough.

He filled another jar for his Turkish friend, who also loves spicy food, and called him to tell him about it. By the evening, Chris was already reviewing the whole experiment, thinking about what he could change in this version and how he could improve it next time.

Recently, he has also started eating Lao Gan Ma with mayonnaise because, according to him, the mayonnaise softens the heat a little and the combination tastes especially good.

All I could think was:

Lao Gan Ma with mayonnaise. You really are something.

But as I watched him enthusiastically messing around with all of this today, it suddenly occurred to me that this, too, is part of a person’s vitality.

Chris has quite a few health problems now — headaches, problems with his leg, and issues with his back. These things often limit what he is physically able to do, even when there are things he genuinely wants to do.

Sometimes a person can still have a head full of ideas, along with plenty of curiosity and desire, while their body simply refuses to cooperate.

That can be deeply painful.

But whenever Chris comes across something that interests him and that his body happens to allow him to do, that energy immediately comes back.

Can’t buy the chili sauce?

Make it yourself.

Don’t know how?

Find a tutorial.

Once you have made the first version, start thinking about how to make the second one better.

And suddenly I thought: in moments like this, what an intimate relationship can do for a person does not have to be anything grand.

I do not need to enjoy making chili oil just because he does.

He asked if I wanted to go to the Asian supermarket with him. I said I was tired and did not want to go, so he went by himself.

I do not need to stand beside him and study every step with him either.

If he wants to experiment, he can experiment on his own.

When he finishes, I can taste it and say:

“You know what? That’s actually pretty good.”

That is enough.

With a different way of relating to each other, even something this small could easily become an argument.

“Why are you wasting your time on this?”

“If we can’t buy it, just don’t eat it.”

“Now you’ve made a complete mess of the kitchen again.”

“You’re always messing around with useless things.”

And the other person could just as easily answer:

“Why don’t you support me at all?”

“You won’t even come with me once.”

“You’re never interested in anything I do.”

One jar of chili oil could be more than enough to turn the whole house upside down.

So I increasingly feel that a good relationship does not mean two people have to like the same things.

It does not mean your partner has to understand every one of your interests either.

There are things where I genuinely do not understand why you like them so much.

But that is okay.

You like it.

Go do it.

As long as it does not hurt anyone or seriously interfere with our shared life, why should I have to turn you into someone who lives exactly the way I do?

A great deal of unnecessary conflict between people probably comes from this very impulse.

We think that because we live together, you should live according to the way I understand the world.

But perhaps the relationships that feel most comfortable are exactly the opposite.

I can think making chili oil is far too much trouble.

You can find it fascinating.

The fact that I do not go to the Asian supermarket with you does not mean I do not support you.

The fact that you are delightedly working on your own project does not mean I have to be equally excited.

Two people can be different without constantly having to prove which one of them is more correct.

And that makes me think of Alicia.

The three of us actually have something quite similar in common.

We are all fairly good with our hands, and if there is something we genuinely want to make or do, we usually know how to figure out how to learn it.

If Alicia wants to make something, she will look for videos and tutorials herself and study how other people have done it.

Her first reaction is rarely to run over and say:

“Mom, I can’t do this. Help me.”

Recently, she made a little table at school.

A few days ago, she told me that she absolutely had to make breakfast for me, because then I could sit in bed and eat from the little table she had made herself.

This morning she was going to the zoo.

She got up and started preparing bread, fruit, biscuits, and everything else she needed. She brought things over one by one to show me.

I was unbelievably sleepy and just said:

“You can sort it out yourself. I’m going back to sleep.”

In the end, she not only prepared everything she needed. She also made breakfast for me, cut up a few pieces of banana, and really did carry that little table over to my bed.

A few days ago, she also suddenly decided that she wanted to promote my website for me.

She thought simply telling her teacher, “My mom has a website,” was not enough.

She thought she should make a little card with the website address on it, design it herself, print several copies, and then take them to school to show her teachers.

I thought it sounded like a lot of trouble.

To her, it seemed completely obvious.

At one point, she even wanted to make a little angel keychain for every teacher in her school.

And once the idea occurred to her, she did not just talk about it.

She actually went to the school office and asked:

“How many teachers do we have at our school?”

The secretary asked why she wanted to know.

She explained that she wanted to make a gift for every teacher, with a handwritten card for each person.

She is always like this.

When she likes someone, feels grateful to someone, or thinks of something she wants to do, she has a strong tendency to turn that thought into something concrete almost immediately.

As we were talking about all these things today, I suddenly realized that perhaps what shapes people most inside a family is not how many grand principles we teach them.

More often, it is the tiny feedback we give each other in ordinary life.

When a child wants to do something, what is the first thing we say?

When our partner suddenly becomes enthusiastic about something we have absolutely no interest in, what is our first reaction?

When two people have a conflict, are we talking about the specific thing that happened this time?

Or do we casually reject the other person as a whole while we are at it?

Of course we cannot expect a partner to be responsible for our happiness.

Nor can we expect a marriage to solve every problem in our lives.

Our abilities, character, choices, and lives are ultimately still our own responsibility.

But someone who lives beside us for many years really can influence where our vitality goes.

Some people make you spend more and more of your energy explaining yourself, defending yourself, and trying to prove that you are not as terrible as they say.

Others, when you already feel that your life has reached the end of the road, will ask:

“Why can you only see this little bit of difficulty in front of you?”

Some people may never understand why you are so determined to make that jar of chili oil.

But they are willing to leave you alone and let you enjoy making it.

And some children will even decide that because they made a little table themselves, one day they should personally bring their mother breakfast on it.

Maybe this is what life is actually made of.

Most days do not contain important decisions.

And most relationships do not need to be dramatic or all-consuming.

Most of the time, it is simply one person saying something and the other person deciding how to respond.

One person wants to do some small thing, and the other person either leaves them a little room for it — or does not.

Over time, these seemingly insignificant things slowly become the climate of a family.

Some homes make people feel as if they always need to defend themselves.

And some homes leave people still willing to experiment, still willing to learn, still willing to make little things that may seem completely useless to everyone else.

And still willing, the next day, to think:

Could I make it a little better next time?

This essay is also available in other languages:

Chinese version: 婚姻里真正重要的，也许是彼此给生活留下多少空间

German version: Vielleicht ist das Wichtigste in einer Ehe, wie viel Raum wir einander zum Leben lassen