I sometimes think about how other people have less happy relationships than mine, and that makes me sad for them
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We’re about to celebrate our 17th anniversary and we’ve been together over 20. I am more in love today than I was when we first started dating. She’s the most wonderful person I know and I love sharing my life with her.
Got a partner who pays half the bills, does half the laundry, cooks half the food, washes half the dishes. Even without sex, it’s an absolute win.
But you consume twice as much food, have twice as much laundry, and so on.
But it’s simpler. Cause it’s not hard to have to do more laundry. It’s the initial actions that are a problem. Cause it takes me the same amount of time to load the detergent and other stuff. Plus it’s the mental burden of having many things to take care of. With two, it’s the same amount of things even though each thing is bigger, but it’s easier to take care of and split.
Economies of scale
Plus specialization
My husband does all the dishes and I do all the laundry. It’s an absolute win for both of us.
Yeah but then zero of many things.
I may do double dishes. But zero baking and I’m rewarded with cookies randomly.
I may do double cleaning. But zero when it comes to buying gifts and cards for people, because she loves doing that. And I get to reap all the benefits.
Absolutely this. I suck at cooking but my wife is great at it. She hates doing dishes but I really don’t mind.
That’s because I’m getting fat because I only have to do half the work I did before.
I know, right!?
I’m pretty introverted, and one thing I found surprising is that time with my wife counts as “alone time” for that =)
She charges your battery - that’s so sweet. 😭
Same!
One of my fears dating was that id run out of social energy and she’d realize i was really boring. A few years in our relationship, I told her. And she said she thought SHE was boring me, because she never had anything to really say.
Now it’s been more than a decade and there’s no social battery being drained with her, and vice versa. We charge each other up!
I remember hearing all the boomer “take my wife…please! Ole ball and chain” jokes growing up. I fuckin love my husband. I love being married. I feel bad for people who think resenting their spouse is the default. I get to touch butt pretty much whenever I want.
I think the key is remembering to be grateful that you can have sex whenever you want
You can? What kind of marriage is that? 😅
Edit: the only thing the boomer comments got right about my marriage is the lack of sex, other than that we are super happy and have absolute zero regrets
I have noticed that my desire for sex in general went way down after my fiancée and I got serious. My understanding is that what messes other couples up is that you kinda need to schedule romance after a while; at least, it seems like that based on how often my grandma took me on hours-long trips to Barnes and Noble as a kid until she got the all-clear text from my mom that it was safe for me to come home.
Whole new angle on the grandmother hypothesis
Tbh as a kid I only thought it was a bit odd that mom and dad seemed much more cuddly after my B&N trips, but didn’t give it any more thought than that until I was an adult
I know a few people for whom that’s almost definitely the case
More recent generations have much better emotional intelligence than previous ones. We’re consistently getting better at things like communication and being aware of our own feelings, which makes marriage a lot better.
I always heard growing up that once you stop fighting, the marriage is in trouble. Which, frankly, is bullshit. The marriage is in trouble when you stop communicating, but that doesn’t mean you have to constantly fight. It’s possible to work out differences before they build up and explode.
It’s still difficult at times, but yeah, marriage is rad if you both commit to being great communicators.
you don’t need to get married for that
Exactly, I had a cat for years before getting married
heheh
Or just live together without getting your official government approval certificate
In the US at least:
What if they get seriously injured? How will you have rights about their care? To go and see them? What if you have great insurance, but they don’t?
Marriage has tons of benefits over being unmarried, right or wrong. Plus, I enjoyed getting married. I also enjoy being married. Life is hard. My wife always has my back.
Why can’t you get similar right via other certificates?
Ask the legislature. Some of those you can get other ways, but not all of them. Getting married does them all.
I can’t imagine living with one person who likes me, let alone 2 (or more I guess, though poly isn’t my cup of tea)
My partner and I both say that we’re better than being alone. And we both LOVE being alone.
I love being alone together with my wife
I told some of my single friends I needed some alone time, and my wife joined me. And they said, “I thought you needed alone time”.
And I didn’t know how to explain that to them.
My partner will sit and read quietly in the room while I’m playing games and not interact with each other and it’s the fucking best.
Same but with check-ins every 15-30 minutes. Usually a “whatcha doin” or a surprise hug or kiss.
Could have done this much cheaper with a dog.
You can’t fuck a dog though
The sublime difference between “can’t” and “shouldn’t”.
Not with that attitude
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Yeah fair
Dogs rarely have jobs with an income or are able to make you tea when sick.
Probably because bc let’s you marry who you want instead of an obligation due to being too aroused one time.
I also love marriage. I could chuck my wife off a bridge some days, and at times she admits she deserves it, but 95% of the time we are having a wonderful time. 9 years married, 14 years together. Apparently a lot of people marry women they don’t get along with and then wonder why their marriage sucks. Or have kids to “bring them closer together”.
Or have kids to “bring them closer together”
I’ve seen it, and it’s horrifying. Like throwing gas at a fire to see if it goes out, because it’s not as though things could get worse if they’re wrong.
I hope newer generations manage to ditch older, screwed up ideas of what marriage is and realize the value of having a beloved partner, rather than whatever the hell I see some older people treating their spouses as.
Oh those poor kids. That worries me a heck of a lot more than someone who never even googled “how to relationship”
Glad it’s worked well for the original OP.
I still remember reading in the book “Thinking Fast and Slow” and the research they presented on happiness. Apparently their data averaged out to: 1. baseline happiness when single, 2. big spike up in the first year of marriage, 3. Settles at a permanent level below the baseline (from when single).
The main problem is that making a happy marriage stay happy takes a lot of daily work. Thankfully my parents showed me how to do that, and more importantly my dad showed me how to make it fun.
A lot of couples stop dating after they get married, it seems they just want to go through a checklist
Your dad sounds wise. Knowledge like that still isn’t widespread, and back then even less so. There are no role models teaching/showing/demonstrating this in real life or in media that I have come across.
I have not read the book, but from reading some summaries and commentaries, I got the impression that other people took the message as being different from “marriage makes your life measurably less happy” as the chart implied.
The figure takes on a different meaning, however, when we remember that “How satisfied are you with your life?” is not a simple question. When answering it, people think of significant events in the recent past or near future. People who are recently married or expecting to marry are likely to retrieve that fact, which affects their answer. But those who are not do not think of marriage when answering. The graph could be read as the likelihood that people will think of their marriage when asked about their lives. This demonstrates once again how we are “blind to our blindness”—how we are unaware of the heuristic mistakes that we make. In evaluating this graph, people do not understand that respondents have substituted their answer to how satisfied they are with their life with how easily they can think of happy events in their lives.
Does that book mention that married women die earlier?
Which is patently untrue, on average married women live about 2 years longer than unmarried women
Well, that depends of which study you look at
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.
Did they not love you before you got married? Only thing that changed for me was -£10k
I always find it weird how some people spend thousands just to announce “our relationship is the same, but now we told the government”
Think of it more as “this is the best excuse we are ever gonna have to throw a big party where we get to decide the guests, the food, etc etc”
Though I do think too many people spend a lot of money because they feel like they “are supposed to (have a big wedding)” and not because they actually want to
Hahaha, I’ve never needed an excuse! Mayhaps :p
F what you’re “supposed to”, really. And I’ll freely tell any family member or friend that. Rudely if I need to. I’ve heard some of the dumbest stuff come from people just because of weird traditions.
It’s the ultimate party to celebrate your relationship with those you love and care about and people who have seen your relationship grow. The documents portion is a very small section of the night or weekend or whatever. Besides the bill I would love to experience my wedding weekend again, only thing I’d change is not inviting one person who tried to make it about themselves and tried their best to actively spoil the weekend but it wasn’t that big of deal in the end.
What’s stopping you? Go do it!
I mean besides the main thing mentioned, lots of things. Doesnt have to be the same giant party as before but that’s why I’d want to experience that day again, in the 3 years many people have had kids, couples have broken up, family moved farther away, etc, it wouldn’t be able to be the same.
I’m sorry to hear that, let’s hope a new chance presents itself eventually
