Did your marriage make you a better person?

[Pothosdracaena]

This came up whilst chatting with a few friends yesterday. The idea is that a lot of the qualities that make you a good partner overlap with those that make you a good person generally.
So if both partners are willing to work on the marriage/are not dicks, then being married is the one situation where you have to practice these things(e.g being less selfish, being more forgiving, thinking of others, being a supportive person etc etc) over and over again, sometimes several times a day.
You also learn a lot about your faults(e.g. holding on to petty grudges for ages) and realise that you have to work on them if you want a happy marriage.
Of course you can be all these things without being married, but the idea is that marriage forces you to work on these things daily, therefore making you better over time.
I'm not married, and my friends have been married for a couple of years at most.
I thought I'd throw the question out there to see what others thought.

Yes, that we can't (well we can but we choose not to) walk away at the first sign of difficulty. Being a parent too for the same reason.

Absolutely - I have become more considerate of other's feelings, less selfish, and able to compromise better.

Plenty of good people aren't married.

I think my second marriage did, yes. Dh was a much better person than me, and his qualities made him a role model for me in lots of ways.

But caring for him when he was ill, and being the breadwinner and the primary parent and all the other things... soured both of us. By the time of his final episode of illness I was running on empty without recognising it. And that contributed to his death.

It's not my fault that he died. But I had to face then and forever the reality that I fell short as a wife and carer.

No, not at all. But I don't really see my marriage as something that needs to be worked on really. I certainly don't work on it daily!

OP, your title says one thing, the content another. The "work" angle is quite different from the "make" of the title.

From my late DH I learned the value of a truly adventurous spirit.

I should have said that whether this makes me a better person is neither here nor there as I'm the only one affected.

Absolutely a better person I was a bit selfish if completely honest and very tough. I did have a very authoritarian upbringing. We have been together for 27 years, married for almost 25.