If you tell most people you are unhappy after your honeymoon, they will say it’s just the low following the high, something to be expected. They don’t understand marriage.

Marriage is nothing like other things in life, where there are ups and downs. If you do it right, and your expectations are based on what marriage is and not what other things in life are like, you will experience a continual growth of happiness and inner peace. You will feel like your marriage was the best idea you ever had and be amazed at how much love and connection you feel.

When you do marriage correctly, not by taking advice from pop-stars and fools who make things up or pander to people’s emotions, you will know, and you will realize you know.

Marriage is amazing, and if you want to experience it the way it is meant to be experienced, all you will have to do is study marriage so you understand it.

If you are unhappy after your honeymoon, you probably can attest to at least one of the following:

1. You did no, or very little, marriage planning. So your marriage, which should be an even flow of love, has hit a “what do we do now?” phase.
2. You used your honeymoon as a high, “romantic” escape from reality, remaining very shallow so there wouldn’t be disagreements.
3. You actually had arguments (huge numbers of people fight during their honeymoon), thinking it is normal to fight.
4. You discovered character traits in your new spouse you had no idea existed.

The truth is you may actually be in a bad marriage, and now you have evidence of that — but that is very rare. About 99% of the time, you just need to do what you should have done before you went up to the alter: Start studying up on marriage so you don’t sink deeper.

Marriage is a unique kind of relationship that requires ever deepening understanding in order for it to work for you. I am sorry you did not know this before you got married, but don’t worry. It is not too late.

How is marriage different? What are we talking about?

• Marriage is the only relationship you commit to for your whole life. That is a very long time. But it is an excruciatingly long time if you are unhappily married.
• Marriage is one of the very few relationships based almost entirely on spiritual principles of selfless love.
• Marriage is one of the only, if not the only, relationship where expectations of give and take will destroy it.
• But the best difference is that marriage is guaranteed to bring utter joy to the practitioners who know what they are doing and always strive to do it.

Here is what you should and should not do, as a stopgap, until you learn more about marriage:

1.  Do not speak with anyone about your marriage — no friends, no parents, no siblings, no ministers, nor counselors. Keep your “troubles” private. Unless, of course, you’ve discovered your husband is a pedophile, or he hit you, or something to that extent.
2. Do not pretend everything is falling apart, nor that everything is fine as it is. You will fail your marriage if you do not learn how to be married. Even though you didn’t take the premarital course from The Marriage Foundation, it isn’t too late to learn!
3. Remind yourself of your husband’s fine qualities and focus on those. He is not perfect, as much as you may believe he might be. None of us are perfect, so learning to live with imperfections in the most mature way is part of what marriage is all about.

There is nothing wrong with you. Many people are let down by the after-honeymoon period. But if you use this unhappiness as motivation to study marriage, you will be fine, and your marriage will become greater than you can imagine. And that is what we all want, isn’t it?