If that’s the way one or both changes, that they don’t want to make any effort, when they started out willing to, then yeah. But individuals changing? That’s inevitable. Growth and development doesn’t stop after puberty.
My wife and I have been a couple for twice as long as we have not. We have lived experiences together and individually. Some hard on each of us for different reasons. Of course she is not the same person she was; of course I am not. Of course we have had and do have fights. It is far from perfect.
Still our core values remain. I love the ship of Theseus she is today, too.
No question sunk cost, inertia, keeps some in relationships that would be better move on from. But sometimes a rough patch of change gets worked through simply because it isn’t so easy to just walk.
I was trying to think about how me and Sr. Weasel have changed and it was kinda tough. The most obvious one is my mental health is 1000% better because of all the effort I put in over the decades. As a result, I’m more independent than I used to be, especially emotionally.
For the two of us, I think we’re more cynical but also more nuanced in our thinking, especially politically. We’re starting to have old person opinions.
But really not that much has changed. Things did shift after the boy was born, but we’ve kinda course corrected by now. We’re still very conversational and playfully antagonizing as we’ve always been.
One of the things that drew me to him is how utterly predictable he is, and that hasn’t changed at all. And I’m every bit as silly and loyal as I’ve always been.
Maybe it’s a surprise we haven’t changed more.
I didn’t have kids until I was 37 so I can relate to the fear women have of time running out. I waited forever. The first time we had a serious conversation about having children we were 22 maybe. And he was always, “Soon.” For 15 years, “soon.”
Looking back I can’t see how it could have gone any differently. But it sucked to be living it.
Change isn’t bad for a couple as long as you’re changing in more or less parallel. And (ref your earlier post) as long as one of the changes is not stopping giving a shit about the relationship and so losing willingness to work at it when necessary.
The usual risk for younger people getting married is that their characters are so untested and so unformed that even if they’re nicely parallel now, there are lots of ways for either or both to go shooting off in some unexpected weirdball direction compared to the other. That way lies unhappiness or failure.
I acknowledge that I may sound like I am talking out of both sides of my mouth here …
We do each continue to change and grow. Significantly. Different life phases. Life events and experiences. But our basic core characters? I think both our basic values set persists, and our basic temperaments. I haven’t seen too many people whose characters go shooting in wildly different directions. Maybe different aspects get revealed more as the result of growth and experience.
But to the point of the thread. Any successful long term marriage is not just marrying each other as they are at that moment but the individuals of decades future. Those two future people being in love is not a given but it is not just luck, not just a passive event. We actively work at it … or don’t.
Another thing that can happen is like the situation with my best friend. The wife in the relationship is much like the woman that’s the subject of this thread – strong-willed, methodical, and, if I may use the term, calculating. My friend is pretty much the opposite – laid-back and doesn’t get too excited about anything, and apparently just appreciates the comforts of married life.
He jokes about “the ball and chain” in a way that I think reflects the fact that there’s real truth in such humour, but he just thinks it’s worth it. It’s probably the same reason that he spent his entire career working for a company that he despised, but which paid well and eventually gave him a generous retirement package. I guess you could say that he and his wife were both transactional, but in entirely opposite ways. It was like she ruled the roost, and he didn’t give a shit that she did. Strangely, I think they were both happy.
That’s generally true, but - and I’ve been trying to keep politics out of this but it’s a really salient point - there are a not insignificant number of people right now dealing with the fact that their partners have gone full conspiracy theorist MAGA and that this has radically transformed their character. I would consider that an insurmountable issue.
Agreed. You spend decades together and you have some influence on each other.
Not strange at all. It makes perfect sense. There are often very happy couples where one person wants control over the details and another really doesn’t care about which restaurant or such. Thing is the partner who usually doesn’t care much has things about which they do care about a lot. When they disagree about those things the usual decision maker is smart to give in as much as is possible.
Haven’t seen it myself. Not already apparent in core values previously? Yes that happening could be insurmountable.
It hasn’t happened with my husband ( he went the other way ) - but I’ve seen it happen with other people who I’ve known well for years.* I’m certain it must have happened within marriages.
*My mother for many years used to argue with people who didn’t want homeless shelters in the neighborhood and who were against food stamps and Medicaid existing. She was a Democrat most of my life.She turned into a Trump supporter - she may have changed back but I wouldn’t know since she learned that if she start talking politics, everyone leaves.In a million years, I never would have predicted it - and I still don’t understand why.
Yup. I make most of the decisions, because there are more things i care about. But when my husband really cares about something, he always gets his way.
I was 17 when I met my wife-to-be. She was 16. I had dated a number of girls, but didn’t really connect with any of them, even they all had lots of good things about them. The I met my WTB…In just a couple of dates, I was madly in love. There was just something about her…objectively, she wasn’t more physically than the others, but that didn’t matter. Intelligent, funny, interested in things besides clothes, who is dating who, makeup and such…she was it. We dated for 4 years, and slowly (at least in my case), the idea of marriage and a family grew in my consciousness. We became engaged at 3 ½ years of dating, which surprised no one.
No ultimatum was ever made, nor needed. We were together and that was that.
65 years later, she is still the one for me. Our lives have been enriched by the experiences of 61 years of marriage, and I am fortunate to have her.
So, she wakes up on the morning of their second anniversary and suddenly knows that he isn’t going to marry her? For most people, whatever held her in the relationship would continue to hold - and if nothing, she knew it ahead of time.
Reminds me of the Frog and Toad story about the cookies.
Agree that things do change - but a few more years of life experience can help one be mature enough to deal with the change. If I had married my wife when she got out of college, say, I suspect we would not have stayed married. By the time we did get married we were both convinced that no one else was going to do, and had time on our own to mature. It isn’t always necessary, but maturity is a plus.
No. What would make you imagine that is at all implied?
The importance of the deadline is precisely that there is and never will be a time that she absolutely knows this isn’t go to be that one.
Again the very non romantic investment analogy. There is nothing magical about where I have in advance decided my stop loss price point is for an investment that isn’t going the way I hoped. It may be a percent loss, crossing some trend line, whatever. It is some arbitrary point I’ve picked that in advance made sense to me as enough room for it to still come around. What was important was that I had the arbitrary point that I would stick with so I didn’t fall prey to sunk cost and the emotional aspect of not wanting to admit I made a wrong choice, the gambler thinking that one more hand will be the one. When I haven’t done that I end up with a low value stock in my portfolio forever, most often having kept drifting down. Now just saved for when I need a loss to offset a profit some. Sad.
She wakes up and she admits that despite her not wanting to admit that these last two years are a loss in terms of finding a life partner, he hasn’t made cut for whatever reason, including willingness to commit, it is time to admit it, cut the loss, and move on.
Your example involves the value of your investment. The case in point is like you decided to sell the investment two years after making it.
If after deciding she would be interested in being married to this guy she gave him two months to make a decision, no problem.
I know all about the fallacies - my wife and daughter have a contract to write a book about them - and cognitive biases don’t vanish because you set a date way in advance. Which is what the Frog and Toad story was about.
But it wasn’t about things like which restaurant to go to. She’s absolutely domineering. For instance, as we’re now in separate towns some distance away, he’s “allowed” to visit me only when she herself is going to be out of town, because heaven forfend that she be left at home alone while he goes gallivanting off having a good time. And even then, he’s obligated to check in daily. The last time he was here, some of those nightly phone calls were damn near an hour, while I sat there twiddling my thumbs. Maybe they were deeply in love, but that’s not how true love works, especially after some 30 years of marriage. But that’s how nightly phone calls work when one partner is both domineering and a ceaseless chatterbox. When he was still working I always called him at the office, because calling him at home ran the risk of the phone being picked up by the chatterbox. How he put up with this I have no idea.
The horror! Imagine a wife so ‘domineering’ that she wants to be ‘checked in’ daily! And the phone calls, up to an hour long! What the hell do married people, especially those married for 30 years, have to talk about for an HOUR anyway, amirite???!!?? So, so rude of her to not want to be forgotten and talk to her husband, my God!
You seem to be missing a key bit of context here. Would a couple married 30 years have things to chat about while having dinner in a restaurant? I would certainly assume so. But hour-long nightly phone calls when visiting a friend implies to me some level of urgent necessity, some crisis that has to be resolved. Either that, or one of the partners is pathologically needy and demanding. The fact that my friend isn’t allowed to go out of town without permission – permission not easily granted – seems like strong evidence of the latter.
I doubt that my friend would forget his wife in a span of 48 hours. I haven’t spoken to her in five years and still remember her vividly.
The rudeness was in yakking on the phone endlessly while a guest in someone’s house and with limited time to actually engage with your host. I know my friend very well and have known him since our college days, and he is the farthest thing from rude. He was not the cause of this. His faults are being overly compliant and easily manipulated, always taking the path of least resistance.
I think @DemonTree got it exactly right in the OP.
[quote=“DemonTree, post:1, topic:1020459”]
I think it would be crazy to only mention this on the first date and them dump the guy out of the blue after two years, but provided she had talked to him about marriage/where the relationship was going before the deadline, maybe it does make sense.[/quote]
If the couple went for an entire two years without once having a “where is this relationship headed” conversation, then they’re both better off out of the relationship.
Yeah, my experience tends to be this. I have maybe one friend who I can talk to on the phone for an hour, and it’s usually that friend doing about 90% of the talking. I can’t even think of the last time I talked to my wife on the phone for more than ten or fifteen minutes. When we’re away from each other (like her or I am on a work trip), we might not even talk, imagine that! I mean, if it’s like more than three nights, sure, but typically it’s just a couple texts here and there, and that’s it.
