Never, ever introduce your wife of 27 years as ‘Your first wife’. Just don’t. It’s true but not recomendended.
[quote=“Jinx, post:1, topic:1027859”]
Once the honeymoon phase wears off, both you and your spouse’s real personalities come out. The person you’d die for becomes a drag and/or a nag. You ask your spouse for a simple favor, and one day, it’s like you asked him/her to perform the Twelve Tasks of Hercules. All of us have idiosyncrasies that manifest and grow over time. People are dynamic, not static beings. Marriage til death do we part are tough words by which to live![/quote]
I think you want to marry a person you want to live for. Dying for someone is easy as you don’t have to put up with their crap for the next 40 years!
I think you know within a year if you want to spend the rest of your life with someone. The problem with waiting 5 years or longer is you get emotionally invested in the idea of the relationship rather than viewing the time served as as sunk cost and objectively deciding whether it should continue..
Planning a weekend away by myself or with friends is certainly something I can do while married. Doing so without any conversation with my spouse, just getting up Friday morning and driving away with the only car, not so much.
That’s your fault. You must know who you marry. And you must know who your friends really are.
Please, you didn’t know your spouse before you married them? How is that even possible? Marrige is not a game show.
She’s always in the last place you look.
Sometimes I fantasize about living alone. I’m a very introverted person. And I like it quiet. And my kid is not quiet. And if I lived alone I wouldn’t have to deal with anyone else’s possessions. There would be nothing in this house that I didn’t want in it. Everything would be arranged exactly how I wanted it. I would not have action figures on my bookcase. Or food that I don’t eat.
In this fantasy I’m a widowed empty-nester. I don’t know how else anything like that would even happen. I’m very unlikely to get a divorce. I would go twice a week to the local needlework group (I guess I’m retired too) and on Fridays I would volunteer for the food bank. I’d meet my friends for lunch during the week if I felt like it.
Oh, and I’d definitely have a cat.
I’m happy with the life I chose. But oh, silence and solitude. How I miss thee.
This wasn’t a Mormon couple, was it?
I know couples who have broken up over one of them leaving Mormonism. And I’ve heard of many, many more.
For religions like Mormonism, which is so encompassing, time-consuming, and requires such a degree of involvement and faith from its members, the failure of a marriage is actually not surprising when one leaves, especially for the true believers.
Looking back to when I was a Mormon teenager attending church and getting the indoctrination for what marriage was going to be, it just seems crazy to me now.
I’ve also definitely heard of Jehovah’s Witness couples doing that.
I post on a true-crime website, and whenever news breaks of yet another family annihilation, most of the time, these stories come out of Utah and yes, they are Mormons.
What @Spice_Weasel said. Especially when I am trying to read a book and mr. romans decides that’s the perfect time to strike up a conversation, want to show me a video he thinks is funny, etc.
Death
I think you are meant to be quoting @Jinx here.
I’m sorry if I was wrong. (see, I have this marrige stuff figured out).
But it does seem that people marry a persone THEY DO NOT KNOW.
Sure you grow together. That’s to be expected. And it’s great. You learn from each other.
It’s certainly possible for a person’s bad side not to make much of an appearance until later. And people change over time.
Indeed. I’m a much different person today at age 38 than at age 21. I’m sure glad I didn’t marry the woman I was in love with when I was 21. It would have been a disaster.
My ex and I just grew apart and we were unhappy. I have posted many times that we are still besties and consider each other family. But yeah it used to drive me batshit when she would insist that I do a chore and not help and then do nothing but criticize when I did my best and was finished.
One time we had a plumbing issue with the washing machine and the plumber had to come three times before it was eventually fixed. Shit happens and it was ok in the end. She was just awful through the whole thing. After the divorce when she moved into her new place an almost identical thing happened with the washing machine there. It was one of the best “I told you sos” ever which she accepted in the good humor in which it was intended.
The worst we have seen of each other is a little bit aggravated. “You forgot the butter, but I need that for this dish”
As said, there have been small disagreements that don’t add up to a hill of beans.
And one of us would fix it. Problem solved.
We are gonna play chess tonight, or darts. Maybe cribbage. Neither of us really care. Or, I think we are watching a movie.
She has some friends coming over next weekend. That’s fine. I’m going to try my hand at fondue for the first time.
You two are very lucky. Many people don’t wind up so compatible after a lifetime of togetherness.
But you bring to mind parents of easy children who believe it’s due to their good parenting until they have a kid who isn’t so easy, or with kids who aren’t picky eaters who think it’s because of their good cooking until they have a kid who is a picky eater.
There are plenty of good reasons for someone not to get married. It’s not for everyone and that’s okay. What I don’t get are people who plan on remaining together for years, they might purchase a house together or even have children, but for some reason choose not to get married.
What’s so difficult to understand? There are numerous financial situations where it isn’t beneficial and numerous philosophical reasons why they don’t believe in the institution.
It was, and I agree it wasn’t so surprising once one of them left. What I think was hard to guess was that one of this couple would have left. Obviously it happens, quite a lot, but there are some people where I could estimate pretty good odds that they’d leave (of course, those people didn’t usually marry inside the church), and some people for whom maybe I didn’t guess but where it didn’t surprise me… and then there are some where I don’t think you would necessarily have been able to tell that it would have been this person who would end up leaving rather than the one sitting next to them at church, and this was one of those times.
When marriage works and community works in this kind of religion I think it can be really great, where you are partners in this big life’s work as well as working together with others to build a tight-knit community. I was just thinking today of a couple of really great marriages in my ward and feeling that I envy the people who can do that, I can’t. Of course, when either of those (marriage or community) doesn’t work inside the religion it can be all kinds of awful, so there’s that. I’m quite lucky to be even on the outskirts of a religious ward/stake community that does in fact work well, I know that’s not a given at all.