Just because you have someone who loves you unconditionally who you CAN dump your frustration and anger onto, doesn’t mean that you should.
I’ve been with irishfella since I was 19- we’ve survived LDR, living apart, living together, anti-social shiftwork and parenthood.
Even when it was hard, it was always worth it, and that made it seem easy.
Oh, most importantly-never take your sex life for granted. Even if it requires military precision and advance planning to make it happen…make it happen.
However, I can give a test that couples can apply that may determine at the outset that a marriage won’t work, no matter how hard you try.
While there is no set of sufficient conditions I know of for a marriage to work, there are the following three necessary conditions:
Mutual trust and respect. (I see Dogzilla has already spoken of the necessity of this condition.)
Shared or compatible values, worldview, and life goals.
Enjoyment of each other’s company.
There’s a world of stuff in this short checklist, particularly in #2, but it has the advantage of brevity and concision. If you’re considering marrying someone, and can’t comfortably go 3-for-3 here, don’t be in a hurry to set a date.
I’ve been living with my girlfriend for about four years, and we get along quite well, so I don’t expect married life to be any different from our life now. Is that a horribly mistaken way of thinking?
I can only comment from my own experience, but it works on two levels: one, no, it doesn’t really change your daily life; two, but it does change how you think about your partner, because the marriage is a separate entity, born of a public declaration that involves your entire virtual community of friends and family, that speaks of your union.
I’m a secular atheist, but I still acknowledge the need for public ritual, and a wedding is just that. Your relationship suddenly means a lot more than just the two of you living together and having a great time. It’s a symbolic declaration that creates a very pleasant burden that the two of you jointly carry. And that’s not even taking children into account.
(My marriage broke down due to the lack of communication I mentioned above. Not for want of me trying: a problem arose, which was hers, but she wouldn’t talk about it, so we never stood a chance of fixing it. Which is why I mentioned how important communication is.)
yes and no. grrr explaining what it is to be married is kinda hard if you’ve never been. Well, here goes at least a try. The main difference between being married and merely living together is that when you’re married, you can’t just “leave” as easily. When you’re just living together, the truth is that there is nothing stopping you from walking out the door forever (depending on what you are willing to give up). while this is also true for marriage, it is less true and much much more difficult. That change in circumstance may seem trivial to some but it is one that has subtle and long ranging effects.
when I said grinding hard work in my earlier post, maybe I didn’t word that very well, I didn’t mean a slogfest. Mostly I’ve encountered the attitude that the marriage is going to be like the wedding, happy and romantic and a kind of fairy tale and the reality is far from that.
My first marriage was very very easy and failed. My second marriage is NOT so easy, but I have better hopes because this time I (ME MYSELF) am putting effort into making it work and not relying on my wife to do it all while I content myself with my “contibution” being the breadwinner.
Yep, drives my wife nuts sometimes cause I want to talk about everything, but yanno, I’ve learned where the nag line is and try not to cross it, when to press her and when to let her know and back off so she can come back in her time.
The hard work is learning to know yourself well enough to know whats truly important enough to argue and or fight about and whats important but not worth wrecking the relationship over.
Not everyone will give the same advice since not I’m not you or them and vice versa, but a lot of it will be similar.
Yes communicate communicate communicate, but don’t NAG
and everything i’ve just said I realize is a really inadequate nutshell version, but jeez there’s a reason why there are whole shelves of books (or at least enough books to fill shelves) on how to make relationships and marriages work. Marriage is just too complex a subject to do justice to on a message board (imo)
My partner and I lived together for 21 years, last week we had a civil union ceremony, I was convinced it would mean nothing more than “getting legal”. It’s only been a few days but it FEELS really different. For 21 years I knew somewhere in the back of my head that if I wanted to go, I could just go. As guestchaz said, the difference is subtle but it’s there. We are just starting the process of changing over documents (wills, house deed/title, insurance, works benefits), with every change we make it becomes more and more real, more permanent, better.
There is a significant difference in how other people see your relationship, and over time this changes how you see it yourself. Other people take married relationships more seriously. Your mother might be miffed if you spend Christmas with your girlfriend’s family, but she’ll likely be less offended if you spend it with your wife’s family. Your buddy might have made an unflattering crack about your girlfriend in front of you, but he’d never say such a thing about your wife. Your work might be taken aback if you turned down a promotion that involved relocating because of your girlfriend’s career, but they will be understanding if your wife’s job makes moving impossible.
All these little signals from other people eventually affect your own perception of your relationship. Socially, you aren’t two individuals anymore, you’re a unit. It’s up there in your top 4-5 words that identify you: “married” is up there with "male or “adult”. Some people find it suffocating, but I really enjoy it.
This is what I came in to say. Be happy being yourself before you get into any relationship serious enough that marriage is a likely outcome. Have your own friends and hobbies, be complete in yourself, and just generally have a pretty satisfying thing going on. Then, adding a serious relationship just adds joy (on balance - no relationship is 100% peaches and cream) to an already happy existence.
Depending on several things, it could be close to the same or something different. If you’ve always talked about and planned for the future together, and always thought of each other as spouses, it may be very similar. I’ve seen couples who were very together and for whom the wedding was just one more thing that they had planned together.
I’ve seen people be blindsided by a difference in expectations for a partner vs a wife or husband. That can be a difference in expectation for their spouse or for themselves. And they may not know that they have those expectations. I don’t know of any way to prevent this, but talking about the future would not hurt.
I also have one relative who could not seem to keep herself from treating a husband like shit. It was an amazing shift. She finally gave up on marrying. She was able to keep a long term relationship going once she learned not to marry. To avoid that, look at how spouse-to-be treats everybody. There will be clues.
Well, one major change is that you’ll stop having to stop and worry about whether ‘girlfriend’ sounds too unserious and temporary, or ‘partner’ sounds too businesslike or ‘lover’ is too pretentious, or ‘sweetheart’ is to affected and cloying, or ‘old lady’ is insulting, or …
That’s probably the biggest day-to-day change. There is that whole thing about deciding to be committed to each other for the longest term and stuff, too, of course.
This; I’d add (perhaps to #2 or #3), sharing a sense of humor seems to be a prereq as well, at least from my empirical observations. This doesn’t mean you need to find exactly the same things funny, but if one person finds the other person’s funny jokes offensive, that’s a recipe for disaster.
