Add to the list: the expectation that various other things should be cheerfully sacrificed for the health of the marriage. If one partner suddenly wants more kids, or for their partner to quit a job/turn down a promotion/break off a friendship, people will often view the other partner as selfish and unreasonable if they don’t put “the marriage” (really the other person’s wants, disguised as or promoted to the whole marriage) ahead of their own priorities and desires, even if the other person has suddenly dropped a completely unexpected wish on their heads after never indicating such an issue previously.
I’ve seen a Reddit thread where someone’s significant other—girlfriend, not spouse—wanted them to break off a lifelong (20+ year) close friendship due to feelings of insecurity about the relationship, and there were people lining up to insist that the romantic relationship took precedence over the friendship, and I wanted to make an account and jump in asking them how many of their exes they considered more important than their longest-lasting, closest friendship.
Not only because romantic relationships don’t always last and this person was statistically likely to become an ex, and not just because isolating one’s significant other from their friends is usually a red flag, but because the friendship had not been concealed from the significant other and either they hadn’t been around long enough to attain seriousness enough to jettison a lifelong friendship over (for the same reason you don’t marry someone you’ve known for a couple months) or they’d sprung this on the OP out of nowhere after it not being a problem previously. Either way, a lifelong friendship has value and it’s weird to see people think it should be so lightly discarded, just because Romantic Relationship More Important (regardless of length or quality).
There’s also a tendency, running alongside the primacy of the romantic partnership, to view a person who’s become your romantic partner as yours to change, or even view your desire for a particular person to expect them to change to get you.
People do a disturbing amount of getting with someone they’re not well compatible with just because they like them in other ways, with the full intention of expecting them to change once they’re dating, or demanding that they change once the relationship is established enough to be painful if broken, hoping and often banking on the other person reshaping themselves for the relationship. People also do a disturbing amount of lying about themselves to make themselves temporarily more attractive, in the hopes of getting the other person attached before they reveal the truth.
(While we’re at it, add the viewing of unrequited romantic love as a preventable tragedy that could be fixed by the recipient “giving them a chance” or trying to love them back or just accepting a relationship with them, especially as if they get to claim placeholder rights if the person is single. For that matter, add the tendency to preface and pre-strengthen an attempt to date someone by asking if they’re single.)
Ironically but unsurprisingly, a whole goddamn lot of the functions of amatonormativity come at the expense of actual love.
