--- title: "What It Is Like Being Married to Me | Parent Marriage" description: "Couples ask what it is like being married to me, so I asked my wife to answer it herself. Her honest take, and what our marriage has to do with yours." lang: en json-ld: | [ { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "LocalBusiness", "@id": "https://parentmarriage.com/#business", "name": "Parent Marriage Coaching", "description": "Emotionally Connected Couples and Marriage Coaching for parents. 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I would rather you read my wife calling me exhausting than read a page of credentials that tells you nothing. It also demonstrates the thing I teach. We can say hard, true things about each other out loud and stay close, and that capacity is most of what a strong marriage actually is." } }, { "@type": "Question", "name": "Does having a good marriage make you better at coaching mine?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "It helps, but not for the reason people assume. I am not useful because my marriage is a template for yours. Yours will look nothing like mine, and it should not. I am useful because I have run the experiments on myself for 20 years and I know how a marriage feels from the inside when it is drifting, which means I can usually spot it in your house faster than you can." } }, { "@type": "Question", "name": "Do you and your wife ever fight?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "Yes, and for a stretch of years we barely did, which she found unnerving and which I now think was a warning rather than an achievement. A house with no friction often just means two people got very skilled at not saying things. What matters is not whether you fight, it is how fast you get back to each other and whether the real subject ever gets named." } }, { "@type": "Question", "name": "Do you work with couples who are nothing like you and your wife?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "All the time. I work with couples who are dating, engaged, newly married, buried in small children, in a transition, in an empty house, or retired. Domestic couples have marriage problems and I do not care how they file their taxes. My job is not to install my marriage in your living room. It is to help you build the one you actually want." } } ] } ] --- [![Parent Marriage](/__l5e/assets-v1/323329b7-bfb6-4413-bc32-07161cb70b98/parent-marriage-logo.png)](/) [Home](/)[The 8 Stages](/help-me-save-my-marriage)[About](/about)[Marriage Straight Talk](/free-marriage-advice) [305-986-2905](tel:+13059862905)[Book a consultation](/book) [Book](/book) 1. [Home](/) 2. Married to Me Guide # What Is It Like Being Married to Me? I Asked My Wife Couples want to know whether the guy coaching their marriage has one worth copying. Fair question. So I handed the keyboard to the person with the most evidence. ![A husband and wife on the floor of a living room with their kids playing nearby](/__l5e/assets-v1/7a4e2ed7-e039-4f55-8f9e-e74de1639eda/hero-family.jpg) One of the most common questions I get asked, usually about 20 minutes into a first conversation, is some version of "okay, but what is your marriage like?" In a lot of professions that would be rude. In mine it is the only sane thing to ask. You are about to let someone look at the most private room in your life and tell you what he sees in it. You should want to know whether he has ever cleaned his own. So I did the honest version. I asked my wife to write it, unedited, and I published what she sent back. She is Argentine, she is not shy, and she has been watching me up close for a very long time. Below is her answer, the parts of it that were harder for me to read, and what any of this has to do with the marriage you are trying to fix. In this article 1. 01 [Why Couples Ask Me This Before They Ask Anything Else](#why-couples-ask) 2. 02 [What My Wife Actually Wrote](#what-she-wrote) 3. 03 [The Part That Was Harder to Read](#the-part-that-was-hard-to-read) 4. 04 [How We Run the House](#how-we-run-the-house) 5. 05 [What We Do When It Goes Sideways](#what-we-do-when-it-goes-sideways) 6. 06 [What This Has to Do With Your Marriage](#what-this-has-to-do-with-you) 7. 07 [Talk it through](#talk-it-through) 8. 08 [Questions couples ask](#faq) ## Why Couples Ask Me This Before They Ask Anything Else People do not really want a resume. They want to know if I have skin in the game. They have already read a hundred articles by people who write beautifully about intimacy and go home to a silent house. What they are actually asking is: does this work when nobody is watching, on a Tuesday, with kids in the next room and a dishwasher that needs emptying? The answer I give is that my marriage is not perfect and it is not a demo unit. It is a real marriage with twin boys in it, and it stays good because we run it on purpose. That is the whole thesis of [the parent marriage](/what-is-a-parent-marriage). Nobody drifts into a strong marriage. You either build one deliberately or you get whatever the calendar hands you. The question behind the question When you ask a coach about his own marriage, you are asking whether the thing he teaches survives contact with real life. It should. Mine does, and not because I am gifted. Because we work it. ## What My Wife Actually Wrote She started with a list, which is very her. Coach, companion, husband, father, energizer, planner, thinker, social coordinator, teacher, confidant, comedian, enforcer, comforter. Then she got to the part that made me laugh out loud. "Matthew is always ON, and truthfully, that can be exhausting." That is the most accurate sentence anyone has ever written about me. She went on to say that from the moment I walk into the kitchen in the morning until a kiss goodnight, the volume does not really change, and that on her worst days that is a gift and on some days it is a lot. Both are true. A marriage that can hold both of those at once is doing fine. She wrote that I helped her face her own demons, which is a generous way of saying I know exactly which buttons to push and I push them. Her words: "Often this can feel very personal and intimidating, but once you get past your ego, you realize he just woke up something that will make you reflect and act in your best interest." > He serves as my mirror to see my own reflection, and to realize it when I am not being true to myself. Then she listed the things she has done since we met that she never expected to do. She quit a job she had held for 7 years to apply for a role she did not feel qualified for. She has now been at that company 15 years and holds titles she did not believe were available to her. She learned to scuba dive with me, and we spent years in caves, wrecks, open water and beach dives. She ran a half marathon after months of training, having spent most of her life at war with her body. She grew up in a family that arrived in the United States in 1987 with very little, where risk was something other people could afford. Today her position on Everest, on flying a plane, on two weeks of silent meditation in Nepal, is "why not." I did not do those things. She did those things. What a marriage can do is remove the reasons not to. What she said the marriage gives her - A different lens She comes home wound tight and tells me the whole day. I listen, and then I hand it back to her in a shape she can actually carry. She says things stop looking as bad once they have been said out loud to someone who is not panicking. - Backing, not permission Whatever she decides to go do, meditation classes, prayer beads, a trip she picked off a map, I get behind it and start planning the route. She never has to sell me on her own life. - Room to change The woman I married in year one is not the woman here now, and that was always the deal. She is allowed to become someone new without renegotiating whether she is still loved. ## The Part That Was Harder to Read She also wrote, and I am not going to soften it, that I can be demanding and obsessive. She is right. I run hot. I am the guy who has the trip mapped, the bags staged and the schedule optimized before anyone else has agreed to go. Her read is that my rigidity balances her randomness and my certainty balances her fear, which is kind, and which is also only true because we talk about it instead of letting it calcify into resentment. There is another line in her essay I think about a lot. For years we did not argue at all, and she found that genuinely strange. She grew up in a Latin family where love is loud, where people gesture with their whole body and an argument is a form of participation. She learned to bring the volume down to meet me. That is a real cost, and I want to name it as one. Every couple has a person who adapted more, and if you never say so out loud, that person eventually stops adapting and starts leaving. Occasionally the Latin in her comes back up and the house gets loud. Good. That is her, and I did not marry a version of her with the volume permanently down. What a happy marriage still costs - Somebody usually adapts more In most couples one person has quietly changed how they speak, fight or feel to keep the peace. It works until it does not. Say it out loud and share the load before the bill comes due. - Traits do not stop being traits The intensity that makes me good at my job makes me a lot to live with at 7 in the morning. Your partner's best quality and their most annoying quality are usually the same quality. - No arguments is not the same as no conflict A house with zero friction can mean two people have gotten very good at not saying things. That is not peace. That is storage. ## How We Run the House The unglamorous part is where the marriage actually lives. I do the grocery shopping. I take out the trash and do the laundry, and I taught the boys to do their own laundry when they were 8. I keep the house and the pool running. She cooks, and I thank her for it every single time, including for oatmeal, which she finds ridiculous and which I will not stop doing. On the kids we made one decision early and have never moved off it: we do not yell and we have never used physical discipline. When something goes wrong with the boys and she is running hot, which happens because she feels things instantly and I do not, one of us pulls the other aside first. We agree on the approach in private, then we go explain it to the boys plainly and check that they actually understood. It takes 4 minutes longer than yelling and it works about a thousand times better. Our last big swing was the camper. A 21 foot Winnebago Travato we call Mercury. In 7.5 years we have put 115,000 miles on it, driven out of Miami to all 48 continental states, and seen 36 of the 64 national parks with the boys in the back. She grew up believing that kind of life belonged to other people. It belongs to whoever books the time off. ![Matthew Hoelscher](/assets/Matthew-Hoelscher-Parent-Marriage-300x200-DpJrs1yl.jpg) This is me, the man she agreed to answer questions about. I did not enjoy all of the answers. ## What We Do When It Goes Sideways We are not exempt. We have bad weeks, cold stretches, and the specific flavor of tired that only parents of young kids know. What is different is the response time. We catch it in days instead of years, because we both agreed a long time ago that the distance itself is the emergency, not whatever we are technically arguing about. The mechanics are boring and they are the same ones I teach. Name the feeling before the complaint. Pick a moment that is not the middle of the fight and not in front of the kids. Say the real thing and then stop talking long enough to hear the answer. If you want the longer version of that, it is here: [how to improve communication in marriage](/how-to-improve-communication-in-marriage). If your version of a hard week is three days of the same argument on a loop, start [here instead](/how-to-stop-constant-arguing-in-a-relationship). > Nobody drifts into a strong marriage. You either build one deliberately or you get whatever the calendar hands you. Matthew W. Hoelscher, PCC ## What This Has to Do With Your Marriage Here is the thing my wife wrote at the end, and the reason I am a coach at all. She watched me talk friends and family through their worst stretches for years, and when she heard the University of Miami had a coaching program, she told me to go get formally trained and do it for a living. So the practice you are considering hiring exists because my wife pushed me into it. That is either a great endorsement or a warning, depending on how you feel about being pushed. What I want you to take from this page is not that my marriage is enviable. It is that it is ordinary. Two people with different nervous systems, twin boys, a mortgage, a full calendar, and a habit of saying the uncomfortable thing early. There is no secret in there. There is only the willingness to keep talking after it stops being fun, which is a skill, and skills can be taught. That is all coaching is. If you want to know more about how I work, [start here](/about). ## Talk it through If you have read this far you are probably not researching me for fun. Something at home has gone quiet and you are trying to work out whether it is fixable and whether I am the right person to help. The way to find out is to talk to me for 25 minutes and see. [Book a free consultation](/talk-to-marriage-coach) and bring the actual problem, not the polite version. You will leave knowing your next move, even if that move is someone other than me. ## Questions couples ask ### Why do you publish something this personal about your own marriage? Because you are being asked to trust me with yours, and trust runs one direction first. I would rather you read my wife calling me exhausting than read a page of credentials that tells you nothing. It also demonstrates the thing I teach. We can say hard, true things about each other out loud and stay close, and that capacity is most of what a strong marriage actually is. ### Does having a good marriage make you better at coaching mine? It helps, but not for the reason people assume. I am not useful because my marriage is a template for yours. Yours will look nothing like mine, and it should not. I am useful because I have run the experiments on myself for 20 years and I know how a marriage feels from the inside when it is drifting, which means I can usually spot it in your house faster than you can. ### Do you and your wife ever fight? Yes, and for a stretch of years we barely did, which she found unnerving and which I now think was a warning rather than an achievement. A house with no friction often just means two people got very skilled at not saying things. What matters is not whether you fight, it is how fast you get back to each other and whether the real subject ever gets named. ### Do you work with couples who are nothing like you and your wife? All the time. I work with couples who are dating, engaged, newly married, buried in small children, in a transition, in an empty house, or retired. Domestic couples have marriage problems and I do not care how they file their taxes. My job is not to install my marriage in your living room. It is to help you build the one you actually want. [Book a free call ](/book) ![Matthew W. Hoelscher, marriage coach in Miami](/__l5e/assets-v1/793ff08a-677d-4393-a950-cb99a7968138/matt-portrait.jpg) Matthew W. Hoelscher, PCC ICF Professional Certified Coach and the marriage coach behind Parent Marriage, in Miami. He is a coach, not a licensed therapist, [Book a free call](/book) Book a consultation ## 25 minutes. _Honest answer._ Tell me what's going on and I'll tell you honestly whether I can help. No pressure, no sales pitch. [Book a free call ](/book) Or call [305.986.2905](tel:+13059862905) ![Parent Marriage](/__l5e/assets-v1/323329b7-bfb6-4413-bc32-07161cb70b98/parent-marriage-logo.png) Emotionally Connected Couples Coaching in Miami and by video nationwide. Coaching, not therapy. 12755 SW 116th Terrace Miami, FL 33186 Explore - [Home](/) - [About Matthew](/matthew-hoelscher) - [The 8 Stages](/help-me-save-my-marriage) - [Marriage Straight Talk](/free-marriage-advice) - [Book a Call](/book) - [Stage 1: Constant Fighting](/stage-1-stupid-arguments-constant-fighting) - [Stage 2: Infidelity & Betrayal](/stage-2-infidelity-betrayal) - [Stage 3: Stay or Go](/stage-3-stay-or-go) Resources - [Marriage Coaching in Miami](/couples-counseling-marriage-coach-miami-life-coaching) - [Common Questions](/couples-therapy-relationship-counseling-faq) - [Coaching Services](/marriage-coaching-questions-services) - [Talk to a Marriage Coach](/talk-to-marriage-coach) - [Conflict Resolution](/conflict-resolution-strategies) - [Fix a Struggling Marriage](/how-to-fix-a-struggling-marriage) - [Love, Marriage & Family](/love-marriage-family-problems) - [10 Common Marriage Problems](/top-10-stable-marriage-problem-example) - [Privacy Policy](/privacy) Contact - [305.986.2905](tel:+13059862905) - [Matt@ParentMarriage.com](mailto:Matt@ParentMarriage.com) - Miami · Office in Kendall, FL - By video in all 50 states & DC © 2026 Parent Marriage Coaching. All rights reserved. Coaching services provided by an ICF-certified coach. Not therapy, counseling, or medical care.