I hear ya. Ha. I come from a very quite family. My wife’s family is a bit more… noisy. Her mom. Oh boy.
My wife is very much in between, not afraid to speak up but have never heard her yell or antything.
I find earplugs are useful in situations like that. You can find some that are discreet.
At our wedding reception, a nephew yelled across the room over 30 people talking. He was yelling to his dad on the other side of the room. It was about sports scores.
I’ve had a talk with him. Twice.
I think to be successful long term a marriage has to have a component that goes beyond a merge transactional activity. Unless, of course, you are simply getting married for transactional reasons.
I don’t mean woo bullshit, but logically there really is no reason to contractually obligate yourself to another human for your entire life because you liked fucking and hanging out in your 20s.
Yeah, I don’t think any of the posters you quoted is disagreeing with you about the idea of having an abiding mutual emotional commitment and sharing of life goals in marriage. I think they’re just questioning whether that component needs to be called “spiritual”.
We’ve found that a good formula is to ignore Good Housekeeping-style Principles For Marital Success.
Except for one useful concept: don’t let your spouse take any shit from in-laws - or her family, for that matter.
I think some people were just using “spiritual” as a short-hand for the emotional / non-logical aspects of marriage. Although many do feel there is a religious or supernatural element.
Sort of like a Force that gives marriage its power. An energy field created by all living things that surrounds, penetrates, and binds the galaxy together.
Well, yes.
Although I refuse to use words such as religious or supernatural in relation to marriage, I have no such objection to the word spiritual.
There have been many women I’ve been emotionally connected with, but only a few for whom I’ve felt something much deeper and overwhelming that I could not explain. And sometimes it didn’t even make sense objectively.
Spiritual suits me fine here.
This is pretty well put. Can be applied to same sex too.
I imagine it almost like brothers in arms. When you go through incredible shit, you get a connection. You just know. It’s the kind of connection that means you will drop everything to help.
Never been in the service, but I have four of those connections. And two that broke, very sad.
I’ve been married for 15 years. I don’t think people should get married because:
- Marriage is “what you’re supposed to do” at their age.
- They would rather settle for their current “okay” relationship instead of being single in their 30s or 40s.
- It would make their parents, grandparents, other family members happy.
My husband does woodworking/laser-cut items as a side business and he makes a lot of gifts for weddings. I remember one of his customers rolling her eyes because her son was getting married at age forty: “He’s forty and decided to get married.” If the guy never met anyone else who he truly wanted to make a commitment with, then I respect his decision.
I think it should always be a choice.
Isn’t this just love? I think of that as emotional, not spiritual.
My objection isn’t the spiritual dimension of things, though, but the fact that when other people use the word in order to “help” me / the general public / a client base, they are generally pushing religion, woo, or both.
I think marriage is (or at least was) something that people “just did”. Ultimately marriage is just an artificial social construct designed as a mechanism of stability and wealth transfer. You reach a particular age of adulthood at which point you are expected to find a suitable match and have children.
I find it statistically unlikely that someone’s “soul mate” just always happens to be in their geographical and social circle in their 20s/early 30s when everyone gets married.
Indeed. Not only was there the social expectation that people got married, but women, in particular, who still faced a lot of challenges if they attempted to be independent economically as late as the 1970s, would have faced intense pressure to marry someone, for their own financial security, as well as it being a societal norm.
My paternal grandparents got married, in 1928, because my grandmother was pregnant. I really didn’t know my grandfather (he died when I was five), but from what my father and uncle told me, they really really did not get along, didn’t even particularly like each other, and spent times separated because of that dislike.
Nah, that part is statistically credible (at least if we postulate that an individual’s (highly hypothetical) “foreordained soul mate” is likely to be around the same age as they are).
If we assume that no children marry, and that all adults wish to find and marry their foreordained “soul mates” as early as possible but the median time required for the process is on the order of several years, then the period of one’s twenties and thirties will be the life phase where the highest proportion of one’s adult contemporaries are unmarried. So that’s when the highest number of individuals bump into their “soul mates” and marry them.
The statistically inevitable small percentage of “incorrect” matings with non-“soul mates” means that many of the leftover singles have been deprived of their designated “soul mates” and now can’t marry “correctly”. Very sad. 
Of course, that all requires a metric ass-ton of other dubious assumptions as well, about the higher likelihood of foreordained soul mates inhabiting one’s own ethnic group and/or neighborhood, for example. But the tendency to marry early in adulthood is about the least statistically dubious part of the whole highly dubious “foreordained soul mates” model of life-partner relationships.
Oh, I totally agree with you on that.
Yeah, I don’t know.
There have been cases where I felt a sort of immediate spiritual bonding with a woman, and that seemed to me to go beyond a mere emotion or physical attraction.
For most of the women I’ve been with, I can easily come up with a list of all the things that I liked about them.
Yet, there are a couple of them for whom I can do that too, but it feels like it falls way short of explaining exactly what it was about them that attracted me so strongly.
I don’t believe in the concept of “the love of my life”. But for those women, I feel that the idea that we were soulmates on some level makes sense. That’s more spiritual than emotional, I think, in the sense that I cannot really explain it.
I think it depends on several factors and assumptions. The main one IMHO is the assumption that there are X number of “soul mates” for a given human in the world. It’s sort of irrelevant whether these soul mates have been pre-ordained by God or are simply another person who one is compatible enough to have a happy and successful 20-year marriage (long enough to bear and raise children to adulthood). The main point is that there are X out of Y age / gender / sexual preference compatible humans on Earth.
That implies a certain “soul mate density” D = X/Y or number of soul mates per datable humans.
It would be interesting to try and crunch the numbers, but this has several implications, depending on what that ratio might actually be.
If the ratio is very low, what are the odds that your soul mate happens to be living in your college, town, circle of friends and acquaintances while you both happen to be single and marrying age?
If the ratio is high, then all those romcoms were bullshit and it doesn’t make sense to spend your entire life looking for that girl who dropped her scarf on the train or disappeared after that magical evening together because some other girl will likely drop her scarf or have a magical evening with you next month once you get your head out of your ass.
Although interestingly enough, if everything else stayed more or less the same except my wife and I broke up when we went to separate business schools in different cities, we may have encountered each other again during at least two periods where we both worked at different companies within the same Manhattan office buildings.
And for whatever reason, I am able to tolerate a lot of her really annoying habits and I generally don’t tolerate annoying habits from anyone.
Do people really do that ? I think I now know why I hate those movies.
I find the very idea of a person having a single “soul mate” to be unlikely. My guess is that there are many people in the world that an individual person could be happily married to (after all , there are plenty of people who were happily married and widowed who go on to a second happy marriage). How many of those possibilities a person ever meets is another story.
Same. Unless a romcom was written by literally Shakespeare, I’ll pass. I’ve been dragged to a few by friends and it’s appalling how you can predict literally every next scene and almost every next line of dialogue.
Ok but that Shakespeare play, like many of his comedies, were reboots of older Italian comedies. He didn’t invent it.