Marriage. It's hard work. Bologna. If my beloved had said, "You know, honey, being married to me is going to require hard work," I would have cut and run. My idea of a great marriage is not tantamount to labor camp. Yet we hear over and again, "Marriage is hard work." It's not.

What's hard work is:

Being right. Just as you can't have left without right, up without down, cold without hot, or light without dark, you can't be right without someone else being wrong. While there are things that, based on empirical evidence, are objectively right, your opinion is not one of them. We all have opinions about virtually everything...the prettiest color for the bathroom...the superiority of cats over dogs (or vice versa)...the best team in football...the perfect recipe for mac 'n cheese...what music is worth listening to, and so on ad infinitum.

And while it may be difficult, if not downright impossible, to believe that anyone would love eggplant, prefer beige to taupe, and think a day at the water park is as good as it gets, your partner has opinions, too. Expressing your opinion is easy. Listening to your sweetheart's opinion is easy if not mind-boggling. So far, no hard work. It's when you elevate your opinion to universally right and then try to convince your sweetheart that he or she is wrong that the going gets tough.

Differences are just that. Your sweetheart is not your clone. Get over it. If you insist of making differences matters of right and wrong, you're going to be exhausted from the hard (and futile) work of convincing your sweetheart how right you are and how wrong he or she is. Worse, you're going to be an irritating bore. It's not necessary to reconcile all your differences to peacefully coexist. Really, it's okay if you're a Democrat and your sweetie is a Republican. Where differences do have to be reconciled-yep, you do have to agree on what color to paint the bathroom-it's just a matter of negotiation. And, come on, differences make life more interesting, don't they? No matter how wonderful you are, would you really want to live with your mirror image?

Remodeling your partner. If your sweetheart engaged in a campaign to remodel you, how successful would that be? Are you interested in being whipped into shape by someone who "knows" more about what you should be than you do? Of course not. Well, it cuts both ways. Sure, you can nag, cajole, manipulate, and badger your partner into compliance, but talk about pushing a heavy rock up a steep hill. It just doesn't work and the effort is both exhausting and futile.

The price tag for insisting on being "right" about your opinions, the price tag for continuous efforts to remodel your partner, is huge. Resentment is the enemy of intimacy. If you want a more intimate relationship, stop working hard on the wrong things. If you're dead set on working hard, then work on yourself. The better person you are, the better partner you'll be.