“She’s Basically Half-Dolphin”: 40 Things Couples Realized Only After Marriage
Being honest doesn't necessarily mean being open. A person can communicate without lying or distorting facts but may still choose not to share certain aspects of their thoughts, feelings, or experiences. And you can get quite close to someone without the two of you revealing every intricacy of your inner lives.
In fact, one survey of 2,175 married Brits showed that 20 percent of them are keeping a major secret from their partner (and about one in four of those people said the secret is so big, they worry it would end their relationship).
So let's see what this looks like and take a peek at a Reddit thread that asked platform users to share the things they learned about their spouse only after tying the knot.
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That my husband sings a different song every morning. We had lived with each other before we were married but it wasn’t until after we were married and moved into our new house that I started to realize he sings every single morning and it’s always different songs from all different decades. It’s one of the things I love the most about him."
I look forward to hearing what song he has chosen to shape his day around.
What a wonderful way for you both to start your day. Knowing there is a couple out there in the world loving life and each other so much brings me joy and hope.
She's a great swimmer. One day, after we'd been married for about seven years, we joined a gym with a swimming pool. She challenged me to a race. Ok, I thought, I'm a pretty good swimmer. I was surprised when she offered me a half-length head start - and then doubly surprised when despite my massive head start she beat me easily. Apparently she used to be a competition swimmer at school. She's basically half-dolphin. But she'd never happened to mention it before.
My husband goes sock, shoe, sock, shoe instead of sock, sock, shoe, shoe. F*****g psychopath.
My husband loves telling this story. He is a big meat and potatoes guy. On our honeymoon, I told him that I was becoming vegetarian. It was something I’d been thinking about for awhile and couldn’t implement well while living with my parents.
When we got back from vacation, we fell into a routine where I did all the cooking. Turns out that he is lazier about cooking than he likes eating meat. Also, it turns out I’m a pretty good vegetarian cook. He now eats vegetarian whenever we are at home, and gets meat at restaurants when he goes out with his friends. He’s totally happy with it (truly!). It has been 10 years.
He’s the best.
I do that too! Don't like cooking meat and the smell in my house. So, great way to reduce meat consumption
Been together 20 years. Married for 17.
I’ve been telling the same “dad joke” since I was about 17. Whenever someone says something was “intense” I always respond with “like the circus?”. My wife has been rolling her eyes at it for nearly 20 years...until about 6 months ago.
I gave my lame response to her, but instead of rolling her eyes at me they got really big, like I saw the lightbulb go off, then she chuckled.
She never got the joke until then.
One of my favourite lines from Victoria Wood. 'I thought you'd know how to put the tent up. Your mother said you were always intense.'
She farts.
She had always farted around me. No big deal. Usually she kept it to little toots unless she was sick or drunk then it would be loud like mine.
I don't mind it's nature.
But holy f**k she unleashed an a*s trumpet that would put college marching bands to shame.
She can be across the house and I can hear her a*s.
That the whole mr nice guy, mr sweet kind, generous, compassionate thing was a mask, an act, a disguise and camouflage in order to lure me in, in order to possess and control me. Then after we got married the mask came off. I was too naive to recognize the red flags before hand and fell into the trap. He faked being exactly the type of person that I wanted him to be, it was devastating to discover that the person I fell for never actually existed. Thank goodness I escaped. He was a true horror underneath.
He’s a superstar on the dance floor. I was completely stunned as he danced circles around everyone to an 80’s playlist.
How much I love her. It keeps getting better.
That the night before we go away on a trip, he will not sleep the entire night and I can hear his face smile against the pillow because he is excited."
Also when he rubs his eyes they squeak which is quite alarming when you first hear it.
We were together nine years before we were married!
He absolutely cannot be trusted with desserts in the house. Back when we were engaged he’d give me time to eat my half of the ice cream or Oreo package or whatever we had on hand... now? I’m sitting here eating thin mints from a stash from under frozen veggies in our outside freezer.
I have a friend who was born and raised in Romania in a relatively poor family. His favourite section of a loaf of bread was the crusts on ether end (possibly even his favourite food in general) so when he got married (to a woman from Australia) he started leaving the crusts for her because they’re the best so he wanted her to have them. Well typically in Australia we throw away the end crusts, so when my friend left them she assumed he didn’t want them ether and threw them away. They were married for years before he caught her tossing them and got confused.
I was the kid that my dad never told his new wife about. They had 3 kids together before she found out about me. My struggling mom filed for financial assistance, and when they found out she wasn't getting child support for me, they tracked my dad down easily through his government job and started docking his wages. I was 12. And that's how he had to tell his wife about this glaring omission from his past.
That my husband's anxiety is as bad as my own. It's actually refreshing because we know exactly how to help each other out when the other one's anxiety gets bad.
Awww, that's sweet! Someone who understands you + knows how to help you. :)
My mom found out my dad was a compulsive liar when his twin sister didn't show up to their wedding. When questioned about it he said she must have imagined the dozens of stories he had told about his twin sister. He is an only child.
He's really good at doing household chores. Between us, I do all the cooking and he cleans up. He even makes sure the cutlery air dries on a cloth before wiping down the water stains. He developed a cleaning procedure to make sure the black marble kitchen top is spotless. He never ever leaves the dishes for the next day no matter how late the dinner ends (which can be really late when we entertain guests)
Also, he has a fondness for the latest household gadgets. The robotic vacuum cleaner was a really good buy - now he's eyeing an electric lock so we will never need to carry our keys again.
She makes PB&J sandwiches by mixing the PB and J in a separate bowl before spreading it on the bread. Pure savagery.
We moved to New England after we had been married two weeks. When we got there, I found that my husband's name there is "Larry", not Jim, as I had always known him. Because there were so many men named Jim in his family, they called him by his middle name. Now, 49 years later, I still haven't gotten used to that name. He just doesn't seem like a Larry to me. I renamed him "Shamus" since that is his name in Irish, which he is. So, he now goes by three names. His 60th birthday cake read "Jim/Larry/Shamus". Life is strange.
I’m happily divorced now (almost 12 years now that I do the math), but after we got married I learned that she viewed her money as her money and my money as our money. Which was interesting because before we got married my money was our money and she didn’t have money to speak of. Not that I was even making good money. But after we got married she got a well paying job and suddenly her money was hers and mine wasn’t mine. It didn’t last long after that.
My wife didn't know lambs were baby sheep. She thought they were different animals entirely. She figured this out at a baby shower while playing a game to match baby animals (words only, no photographs) with their adult counterparts. Needless to say, lamb chops are no longer an acceptable dinner option.
My wife thought that a rat was the male and a mouse was the female....
She procrastinates cleaning until the task becomes unnecessarily difficult, which means she takes forever to clean, which means she hates cleaning, which makes her procrastinate. She also talks in her sleep, and that can be pretty funny sometimes. "If my pants have two holes in them, why are three parts of me tired?"
My wife cannot read an analog watch / clock for time. Married 4 years, been together 7 years total, and somehow that came up only a month ago when I asked for the time off a watch during a power outage.
I don't give her a hard time about it, but that was a fun fact to learn
My wife is allergic to all artificial sweeteners. During the second night of our honeymoon we decided to stay in and get some takeout. My beverage of choice at the time was Crystal Light Raspberry Ice which contains aspartame. While we were eating she wasn't thinking and she asked for a sip. About 5 minutes later she became extremely ill and started having issues breathing. After a few minutes she read the ingredients on my beverage and yelled at me "I AM ALLERGIC TO ASPARTAME!!!". Me...being the loving new husband I am yelled back "SINCE WHEN!? YOU NEVER TOLD ME THAT!" She never bothered to tell me because she grew up in a household with no artificial sweeteners because she was allergic.
Wow. I'm allergic to sucralose (splenda) and I definitely make sure to mention it and never drink anyone else's drink; everyone around me seems to drink crystal light.
That he plays video games. For 10-15 hours a day.
Even when he married. And has kids. And has a full time job.
With marriage counseling he cut back to five hours a day. It’s now (year 22) back up to about 7 hours a day on weekdays.
I never knew marriage was going to be this lonely.
My wife informed me that she could not have children AFTER we got married.
This mad me sad.
Being able to prove her wrong made me happy.
He likes to eat fish.
Somehow in our six years of dating, I got it into my head that he didn't like to eat seafood. My parents would cook dinner and invite him, and I'd constantly tell my mom, "No, can you make something else? He doesn't eat fish."
My husband loves most seafood, with the singular, random exception of coconut shrimp. We joke about that to this day, that I unintentionally kept him from some of his favorite foods without so much as a conversation about it.
That's a lighthearted answer. I'm sure there are many more. Eleven years in and we are still learning things about one another.
My husband and I dated for 3 years before we got married. After more than a year of marriage, he let slip that he is lactose intolerant. He knew that I absolutely love ice cream and we would frequently get ice cream on our dates. But he never wanted me to know about the lactose intolerance so that I could be happy with my ice cream.
She’s always leaving the lids on everything un-screwed, and guess who is always breaking jars because he always picks everting thing up using the lid?
She is a bit of a genius when it comes to finances. No complaints.
She changed a whole lot after the wedding. From wanting kids to not, from hating her parents and the way they treated other people to siding with them (her mom was a nurse who constantly talked about patients negatively and her dad was an entitled business owner who tried to run people off the road constantly, awful road rage. They both were the type of "Christians" that give the whole religion a bad name.) She ended up remarrying one of my old college buddies shortly after the divorce.
Been with my husband for 9 years total, married for 2. Just last week, found out he doesn’t care for bubble wrap. I. was. shook. When I found out, he asked me “why do you think I always gave you the bubble wrap when I had it?” Well it’s because I thought you loved me and wanted me to enjoy it more! I feel betrayed!
He dunks his Oreos in water instead of milk. I still don’t know why. No, he is not lactose intolerant, and no, he wasn’t poor growing up. He’s not a vegan. And we had milk in the house when I caught him doing this. He just prefers to dunk his Oreos in water.
That he lives and breathes sports. I knew he *liked* sports when we were dating, but I didn't realize that's *all* he liked. I didn't know he would rather watch football games on Sundays than go to family dinners or anywhere else. I didn't realize he wouldn't want to watch anything but sports on tv. I didn't know that he would want to play or watch basketball/football/baseball/golf every waking moment.
I Didn't Know He Would Prefer Sports to Sex. I was gobsmacked.
When my mom and dad got married, she didn’t know that he didn’t have his front teeth until the morning after the wedding. He was wearing dentures, and I guess she just never saw him take em out. YIKES
My wife thought that I didn't know she had an upper plate. I told her that I noticed them the day I met her, they were too perfect to be real.
That she sneezes like she trying to scare the s**t out of you (scream sneeze). I’m still not used to it now (ten years later). F**k, it’s loud as hell. Our poor daughter gets scared and says mommy you’re too loud. But in public she “can hold it back.”
That she was adopted.
In fairness, she didn't know either.
That he would make a fantastic father.
We were both on the same page in a newspaper. It was found a couple years after we were married.
A friend of mine eventually told his now wife that he didn't actually know French.
He had been teaching her jibberish phrases.
That I am solely responsible for her dreams, and I don't mean the want to have kids one day kind (have those)
I mean the type where she wakes me at 3 am and begins the conversation with "You wouldn't let me have the f*****g window seat" because apparently in her dream I wouldn't swap seats with her on the plane.
She was mad at me for at least a week, this sort of thing has happened a few times .
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I loved how a lot of these were positive things. I was fully prepared to read an entire list of people who regretted getting married because they found out something terrible about the spouse but there were only a few of those
My exhusband and I lived together for 5 years before we got married. Several months into our marriage, I found out that he hadn't filed any income tax during those 5 years. Not just not paying; he just ignored the whole thing. This was a massive warning sign that I should have paid more attention to. One of the many reasons I divorced him was his inability (or refusal) to deal with his financial obligations.
I loved how a lot of these were positive things. I was fully prepared to read an entire list of people who regretted getting married because they found out something terrible about the spouse but there were only a few of those
My exhusband and I lived together for 5 years before we got married. Several months into our marriage, I found out that he hadn't filed any income tax during those 5 years. Not just not paying; he just ignored the whole thing. This was a massive warning sign that I should have paid more attention to. One of the many reasons I divorced him was his inability (or refusal) to deal with his financial obligations.
