What is man? A miserable little pile of secrets.
And nothing reveals secrets like committing to somebody for life. When you live with somebody you learn more about them than you ever necessarily wanted to.
Are they good or bad? Not necessarily. But they are a surprise.
Redditor ImContentWithLosing asked:
"Married people of Reddit, what's one thing you didn't learn about your spouse until after your wedding day?"
Here were some of those answers.
Loss In Crustmunication
"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."
– thats_cripple_to_you
Glaring Omission
"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."
– BuffyPilotKnob
Always Learning
"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."
– echapmancarter
Spotless
"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."
– friesinrootbeer
Analog Is Oldalog
"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"
– chunderzone
Athleticism
"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."
– Bleu_Rue
Gaslighting
"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."
– AdmThrace
Brain Over
"How insane his mother is. He was clear that they had a difficult relationship when he was growing up and that he is really close with his dad because of her behavior. Since we've been married she's been diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder, and her health professionals say it's likely she has genetic degenerative neurology (Huntington's)."
– hoohooagogo
My Sweets
"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."
– 50thusernameidea
No Touching
"That would be that she does not enjoy affection and has to have some list of excuses for not wanting to have sex."
– Beastly111
Here Are The Rules
"This wasn't after the wedding day, but after he put a ring on my finger. His Dad starts telling me all these traditions for the wedding and for when our future children are born. We had been together for 4 years and they only told me these things once I was fully committed, my fiance seemed so secular before the engagement but apparantly not."
– maggiedev
How Did I Not Know?
"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 :D"
– Oh-My-Goats
Not Happily Ever After
"That she is completely untrustworthy. She manipulated me the first two years of our marriage into doing ONLY what she wanted by threatening to divorce me if we didn't. I truly loved her, I really did, and so I thought I was just doing things for her because I loved her and loved seeing her happy. Until I found out, five years later, she had been having an affair with her boss. Then I started to really examine everything, and saw everything for what it was: she'd lie something believable to get what she wanted, she'd spread errantly false rumors because she got off on watching others squabble over an issue that either never existed or never came up, she'd lie to friends, family, and coworkers about events that did or did not happen... how many other affairs she had is unknown. But she refuses to believe that she ever did anything wrong, and in classic narcissism, continues to play the victim card."
– PaulzerGuy
She Couldn't Fathom It
"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."
– pepper_pete
What's In A Name
"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."
– pineywoodrooter
Soundtrack To His Life
"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"
– Deleted User
Like A Little Kid
"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!"
– paintedbow
She Wanted Something Else
"That her family was more important than me, and more important than our family even after we had kids. We're divorced now. Her new boyfriend looks like a combination of her brothers."
– RonSwansonsOldMan
I'm From...
"My husband told me he had grown up in my fathers home town (to break the ice I guess) and it wasn’t until over a year of marriage while filling out paperwork did I find out that he had actually been born somewhere else. He forgot he had lied."
– wendigal99
The Thirteenth Year
"She's a great swimmer. One day, after we'd be 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."
– CiderDrinker
Be sure to have a lot of open and very honest conversations before you tie the knot to avoid some of these discoveries.
Do you have similar experiences to share? Let us know in the comments below.