This is sort of a piggy-back from C#3’s marriage thread: What’s the best marital advise you’ve been given? Or, share your wisdom. I think C#3 can go a bit too far sometimes but he’s obviously a sweetie where it counts for him to be married so long. What are the ingredients for a truly happy marriage in the long run?
PR
If you’re not part of the solution you’re just scumming up the bottom of the beaker.
Best advice I ever got: “Don’t marry her!”
Of course, I didn’t listen… 
Next best advice: “Divorce her, man…”
This time I listened! 
Well, I got a bunch of crap on my rained-out wedding day like “I’ve heard that getting married on a rainy day is good luck!”
Riiiight… that’s why we’ve argued everyday since. So I bring this up to the moron who said it, and she tells me, “Well, a marriage is like a business. If you can make it through the first year, you can make it forever.”
So we’re still arguing, and now it’s close to three and a half years.
Byron’s marital advise? “Just let me be the boss and we’ll get along just fine.”
Veni, Vidi, Visa … I came, I saw, I bought.
My mother’s advice: Never marry a man prettier than you are.
A friend of mine who is a Mormon says that couples are told before tying the knot that Marriage is not a 50/50 thing!
A successful marriage is a 75/25 thing.
If both of you mentally enter the agreement that you’ll give 75% out and expect 25% back the affair has a shot at being successful.
If there is a chore you hate, never do it, for if you do it once, it is yours for the rest of your life.
I agree with Doug, marriage is not 50-50. Some times it’s 25-75, 90-10, 60-40.
The secrets to a happy marriage? His and Her bathrooms and dead inlaws.
“Don’t.”
The best piece of info (can’t really call it advice) I ever got about marriage is that if you ask a man what he’s thinking about, and he says “nothing,” he’s telling the truth. They really are capable of thinking about absolutely nothing.
Well, I’m not technically married yet, but I can think of one piece of advice (so oft repeated) that keeps my grandparents’ marriage a happy one: never go to bed angry. Not once, in over 50 years, have they ever let the sunset on a argument. I’ve always admired my grandparents’ marriage, and this is one piece of advice that I intend to take.
Tim
“My hovercraft is full of eels.”
" Get out NOW! If you dont leave him before you have that baby, you will never get away!"
( I did- Thank Bob!!)
and “Be nice to each other”
(we tried, really )
and " A man stays with a woman not because of how she feels about him, but because of how she makes him feel about himself."
I will try that one next time. 
kellibelli said
I firmly believe this one and really think it goes a long way to get married people through some hard times. I also believe that it works the other way around too.
trisha
He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice - Albert Einstein
I don’t even remember where I heard this, but finally understanding the concept was like having a 10,000 watt bulb go off:
Love is a decision.
Not a one time decision, not a daily decision, but an everytime you interact decision.
The overwhelming majority of people have more than the average (mean) number of legs. – E. Grebenik
After 11 years, I’ve learned three things.
Repeat after me: “Yes dear. Whatever you say. We’ll do it your way. OK. Sure. Mmmm hmmm. All right. Yes. Sure. Yep.”
Husbands should learn to develop a very thick skin every 28 days.
Marry your best friend. The rest is easy.
“Owls will deafen us with their incessant hooting!” W. Smithers
Torgo: I didn’t get it right away, believe me. When I was young & ignorant, I honestly believed that men just had to be thinking about something, and if they said they weren’t, they were lying & trying to hide something. Years of seeing the same vacant expression on nearly every man I knew (family included) when they’d answer “nothing,” convinced me that maybe there really isn’t anything going on back there.
“Don’t ever stop trying to make each other laugh.” Great-Grandma Helen
“There are three kinds of women in this world Jason, headcases, headcases and headcases, and your Grandma Marie is a headcase” Grandpa John
The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don’t have it.
George Bernard Shaw
I don’t recall getting any really good advice, but I have some that I hand out.
When my then-girfriend and I were dating, I worked at a shop where love bloomed everywhere. There were four married couples in the department, itself, everyone else who was married was happily so, and mine was the fourth engagement in two years. I got engaged and was laid off. (Great timing!) The place I worked while we were engaged was the reverse: only two guys were happily married; there were seven divorces in process or just completed; all of the divorces were bitter ones (some having feuds running 8-10 years after the finalization). The complaints about alimony and legal fees were a normal theme of any non-work discussion.
I constantly heard was a stupid mistake I was making getting married.
Finally, at lunch one day I responded: You guys just did it wrong. When you get divorced, you pay your lawyer, you pay her, you pay her lawyer, and you pay the courts. If she dies, the insurance company pays you.
(Of course, having stated this publicly, I now have to go out of my way to make sure she never dies.)
Tom~
When my wife and I got married (9 years ago and counting), we were required to attend some pre-marital counselling by the minister of the church in order to be able to use that church. We did, and he was a real cool guy, and he also had a degree in psychology. He gave us a whole lot of tests, including the Myers-Briggs. At the end, he said:
“You guys should do fine, but let me warn you - Dan, you’re the type who needs to kick back and relax before he takes care of the details. Trish, you’re the type who needs to take care of details before you can relax. This will be a constant source of tension, so be aware of it.”
This was an amazingly astute comment, and he was dead-on accurate. And it has been a major source of tension in our marriage. But having him bring it up made us more aware of the other’s needs, and we’re managing to cope with it. If he hadn’t told us that, we probably would have been less willing to see the other person’s side.
A very wise friend of mine told me and my future wife that marriage is not 50/50 it’s not 75/25. It’s more along the line of 110/110. You have to give because you want to not because you expect anything in return. Because doing things for this person are what makes you happy. We have lived our lives like this for going on ten years now. We have had three fights we both remember each one vividly. Don’t get me wrong we disagree all the time but we don’t need to fight over our opinions.
Interesting side note, my friend is 45 years old now and never been married.
Ive always found it easer to get forgiveness rather than permission.
“Know who you’re going to marry and be willing to live with their flaws.”
I knew when I married my husband that he:
a) would never beat me; b) loved me; c) loved children; d) didn’t know how to hammer a nail in straight; and e) was a pain-in-the-ass about money.
10 years later, he’s still the same person. He’s turned out to be a wonderful father and husband, who has to call a plumber to fix the toilet and then gripes about how much he was charged.