I cracked the code. I married my best friend. Now I get to hang out with my best friend every single day!
I also had a rule that I would live with them for at least 1 year before committing to a proposal. I had to know in advance that I could live with this person, at their best AND worst every single day, before I would even consider marriage.
So many marriages fell apart during the pandemic because so many people had to be trapped in their house with their spouse all day and quickly learned that they didn’t really like spending time with them. But not me and my spouse; it was the normal routine for us, but more of it!
Personally, we like to spend time near each other, but not necessarily doing the exact same things together. It’s important to have different hobbies that the other can respect, but not necessarily be all-in with you. Because doing the same things with a partner every day can get exhausting.
For instance, my wife spends 90% of her awake time playing mobile games on her phone. I love to spend time indulging in hobbies online. We’ll both sit in the same room together all day, but be engaged in our own things.
When we want to do something together, we’ll both agree to switch to that. For example, we both love watching movies and binging TV shows. So when one of us moves to the couch, that’s usually a sign that they’re up for watching something and we’ll both decide on what to watch together.
It also helps to not be solely interested in someone for their looks. Looks fade, and unless you find a personality under those looks that meshes well with yours, you’ll eventually find yourself frustrated and trapped with someone you don’t get along with. Looks are a bonus; no relationship should be focused solely on that, unless you mutually agree in advance that the relationship is meant to be a fling based on looks and passionate desire. Which can be beautiful in its own way, but may not lead to marriage.
1 year is a bit too little. A lot of couples break up at year 3-5.
I’ve been together with my gf for 5 years and am only now certain it is time to get married. We haven’t had a single real fight in those 5 years.
I have learned that if your relationship takes serious work and you have fights, its not worth it and it will fail.
I have learned that if your relationship takes serious work and you have fights, its not worth it and it will fail.
I actually learned the opposite in my experiences. When I tried to avoid fights and keep the peace, my relationships always failed. But when I stopped being a “yes man” and spoke up about important subjects of conflict, it gave us time to discuss, and I found my bond with my significant other to be much stronger afterward.
Yes, sometimes it would start with a fight, but we learned how to argue like mature, responsible adults and not bicker like children. It might get passionate and angry, but we always apologized for the elevated emotion when we calmed down. We always made sure to fight about the conflicting situation and not directly attack the person. Sometimes this was a learned behavior through trial and error; we’d have to apologize after the fact for getting angry at the person and not the situation. But after a while, we learned how to argue productively.
Nowadays, my spouse and I don’t get into real fights anymore. We might have heated discussions, but we don’t yell and scream at each other. We acknowledge good points on both sides, even if it’s contradictory to our viewpoint in the discussion. We point out where feelings got hurt during the debate and we’re both quick to apologize for letting emotions get away from us in the heat of the moment. Again, keeping the debate focused on the topic of disagreement and not on attacking each other has helped us to be productive in our arguments.
And because we’ve learned this advanced way of debating and arguing, we can speak openly with one another without fear of ruining our relationship over a disagreement. We accept that we don’t have to agree on everything, and we do our best to state our case on the things we feel we need to be in agreement about.
In my experience, putting in the serious work and learning how to have healthy disagreements, even if they’re not perfect every time, has only made my relationships better. If I never got into a fight with my spouse, they’d probably always get their way and walk all over me, and I’d never be happy in my relationships.
Maybe I take our personalities for granted. We do have heated arguments but we have never yelled at eachother (large distance communication excluded). We still get pissed over small things at times as we both have things that annoy us very hard but we acknowledge that these are very small issues and its nothing serious. Those cases are also very rare.
One important thing is not to take your frustrations out on the person you love. I just get mad at people on the internet.
I also had a rule that I would live with them for at least 1 year before committing to a proposal. I had to know in advance that I could live with this person, at their best AND worst every single day, before I would even consider marriage.
Blows me away people get married before living with them. I never experienced that in reality, but the dating shows drive me crazy.
My wife and I moved in during the dating stages, and we drove each other crazy. After a few years, we chilled out and learned better habits from each other, then after a long time… We popped the question.
I grew up with divorced parents, and quite a few of my school friends also had divorced parents. It made me quite paranoid about ever getting married, so I made a couple rules:
Live with the person first for a at least a year
Go travelling to another country with them (when I travelled alone I met a lot of people whose relationships had ended during their trip, travel seems to be a good “pressure test”)
Make sure that even in the middle of the worst fights, I still wanted to marry the person. That I wasn’t just marrying them for the good times.
I have observed these to be true as well. If you spend most of the trip fighting, its been over for a while.
I’d like to add:
4: Even after a fight make sure you still sleep in the same bed. One of yous must apolagize before the day is over, doesnt matter if it is right or wrong, your love for the other person must triumph trivial shit like ego.
Another little relationship hack I learned is to apologize for every little thing sincerely and with follow-through. This serves two purposes:
When you actually fuck up and really need to apologize, it will be easier to fall on your knees and beg forgiveness
Each time you apologize and follow through on your apology, you are embedding in their mind that you are a trustworthy person who takes responsibility for your mistakes.
I cracked the code. I married my best friend. Now I get to hang out with my best friend every single day!
I also had a rule that I would live with them for at least 1 year before committing to a proposal. I had to know in advance that I could live with this person, at their best AND worst every single day, before I would even consider marriage.
So many marriages fell apart during the pandemic because so many people had to be trapped in their house with their spouse all day and quickly learned that they didn’t really like spending time with them. But not me and my spouse; it was the normal routine for us, but more of it!
Personally, we like to spend time near each other, but not necessarily doing the exact same things together. It’s important to have different hobbies that the other can respect, but not necessarily be all-in with you. Because doing the same things with a partner every day can get exhausting.
For instance, my wife spends 90% of her awake time playing mobile games on her phone. I love to spend time indulging in hobbies online. We’ll both sit in the same room together all day, but be engaged in our own things.
When we want to do something together, we’ll both agree to switch to that. For example, we both love watching movies and binging TV shows. So when one of us moves to the couch, that’s usually a sign that they’re up for watching something and we’ll both decide on what to watch together.
It also helps to not be solely interested in someone for their looks. Looks fade, and unless you find a personality under those looks that meshes well with yours, you’ll eventually find yourself frustrated and trapped with someone you don’t get along with. Looks are a bonus; no relationship should be focused solely on that, unless you mutually agree in advance that the relationship is meant to be a fling based on looks and passionate desire. Which can be beautiful in its own way, but may not lead to marriage.
1 year is a bit too little. A lot of couples break up at year 3-5. I’ve been together with my gf for 5 years and am only now certain it is time to get married. We haven’t had a single real fight in those 5 years. I have learned that if your relationship takes serious work and you have fights, its not worth it and it will fail.
I actually learned the opposite in my experiences. When I tried to avoid fights and keep the peace, my relationships always failed. But when I stopped being a “yes man” and spoke up about important subjects of conflict, it gave us time to discuss, and I found my bond with my significant other to be much stronger afterward.
Yes, sometimes it would start with a fight, but we learned how to argue like mature, responsible adults and not bicker like children. It might get passionate and angry, but we always apologized for the elevated emotion when we calmed down. We always made sure to fight about the conflicting situation and not directly attack the person. Sometimes this was a learned behavior through trial and error; we’d have to apologize after the fact for getting angry at the person and not the situation. But after a while, we learned how to argue productively.
Nowadays, my spouse and I don’t get into real fights anymore. We might have heated discussions, but we don’t yell and scream at each other. We acknowledge good points on both sides, even if it’s contradictory to our viewpoint in the discussion. We point out where feelings got hurt during the debate and we’re both quick to apologize for letting emotions get away from us in the heat of the moment. Again, keeping the debate focused on the topic of disagreement and not on attacking each other has helped us to be productive in our arguments.
And because we’ve learned this advanced way of debating and arguing, we can speak openly with one another without fear of ruining our relationship over a disagreement. We accept that we don’t have to agree on everything, and we do our best to state our case on the things we feel we need to be in agreement about.
In my experience, putting in the serious work and learning how to have healthy disagreements, even if they’re not perfect every time, has only made my relationships better. If I never got into a fight with my spouse, they’d probably always get their way and walk all over me, and I’d never be happy in my relationships.
Maybe I take our personalities for granted. We do have heated arguments but we have never yelled at eachother (large distance communication excluded). We still get pissed over small things at times as we both have things that annoy us very hard but we acknowledge that these are very small issues and its nothing serious. Those cases are also very rare. One important thing is not to take your frustrations out on the person you love. I just get mad at people on the internet.
Blows me away people get married before living with them. I never experienced that in reality, but the dating shows drive me crazy.
My wife and I moved in during the dating stages, and we drove each other crazy. After a few years, we chilled out and learned better habits from each other, then after a long time… We popped the question.
I grew up with divorced parents, and quite a few of my school friends also had divorced parents. It made me quite paranoid about ever getting married, so I made a couple rules:
I have observed these to be true as well. If you spend most of the trip fighting, its been over for a while. I’d like to add: 4: Even after a fight make sure you still sleep in the same bed. One of yous must apolagize before the day is over, doesnt matter if it is right or wrong, your love for the other person must triumph trivial shit like ego.
Another little relationship hack I learned is to apologize for every little thing sincerely and with follow-through. This serves two purposes: