heartburn or ulcer?

friends and loved ones have asked me recently "so how are you and george doing? how's your shalom bayis? you guys are all better now?"

what the heck?! what is wrong with you people? what is my life - indigestion or heart burn? i just take some pepto and poof! all my tzores (troubles) with george disappear? all of his manipulation and baggage and issues? how can you possibly ask me "you're better now, right?" ?!!!!! do you have any clue how much work it's gonna take to make this marriage survive? do you know what a nutjob he is? (ok, i'm not so normal either, but he's in a league of his own!) yes, he's also a devoted, kind person but he is a total psycho! a nice one, but still, a psycho!

so some of you, i can understand how you can ask. my dear single friends, you have never experienced married life, so you have no clue what it's like to be that intimate and vulnerable with someone - living with them 24/7 for 7 years. you don't know what it's like. but the married people - am i missing something? am i having it abnormally tough? are your difficulties in your relationships more like a bumps in the road, versus mine that feel like climbing Mt. Everest?

when i was a kallah, everyone told me "marriage is hard work." is this what they meant? how hard is HARD? am i suppose to put up with reforming a psycho into a mentsch to make my marriage work? or did "work" simply mean learning to be more patient to accept a peson's idiosyncracies, such as leaving his cereal bowl on the table after breakfast or leaving his socks in the middle of the living room floor? what is masochism and what is the appropriate amount of investment that one invests in a marriage?