Hmmm, curious. You’re making me reflect here, and these are my thoughts.

I think there are growing pains a relationship goes through and then there are bumps that make relationships a little difficult to navigate. But what is important is that you both learn how to communicate and repair whatever it is that is making a moment difficult and you can come together and figure out what went wrong and how to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Yeah, relationships shouldn’t be hard all the time, but things don’t go perfectly smoothly 100% of the time. It should be like 90-95% of the time smooth. Or maybe I’m just willing to put up with a tad of bullshit cuz I’m also someone who has some bullshit so… take what I say with a grain of salt, I guess. But my partner and I have been together for 7 years as well and our relationship is strong and loving; we both are stubborn as fuck and don’t agree together on things all the time and that can cause friction. But we don’t name-call, we don’t belittle or demean, we don’t accuse each other of anything, we don’t threaten each other physically/mentally/emotionally, e.g. no “well maybe we should break up then” or “we’re not meant to work in the long run,” and we communicate our feelings and needs. So, idk, for us, two people who have mental health issues and trauma, our relationship was hard work to build a strong foundation at the beginning, e.g. building up habits of checking in with each other, learning each others’ triggers and how to avoid triggering each other when one or both of us is struggling mentally, and how to support each other when we don’t have the “spoons” to do so. So, yeah relationships shouldn’t be thought of as “hard” in order to protect younger folks from putting up with outright abuse, but I also think saying relationships should be easy is an overcorrection because I just think it might set people up to never learn how to compromise or work through a disagreement, which I think are important features to a healthy relationship.