I’m so not typical in today’s world I don’t know if my experience would help anyone.
I met my wife when she was 16, we married when she was 19 in 1972 I was 21. We have been together ever since. We were on Active duty (Army) together with a child. We helped each other get our degrees. I could write for days about our difficulties and problems, I could write for weeks about our joys and happy days together. Without doing any of that, we made the right decision for us, I cannot imagine a time we will not be together. All 3 of our kids were grown when we turned 40, there is a real advantage to this.
I don’t know anything at all about the dating scene today or yesterday, but I know happiness when I find it and I hang on for all its worth.
I don’t think it’s the being married for a long time that brought up the “life of your own” comment, actually, but more your description of your marriage. You do make it sound like you two are what we used to call “attached at the hip.” Some aath couples are genuinely best friends and share common interests, but some of them are quite frankly each other’s emotional crutches. The latter is the very definition of co-dependent and is, in my personal experience, far more common than the former. So you can’t really blame someone for wondering which your relationship is, when all they have to go on is one post on a message board.
I do think the whole pizza comparison is pretty dumb, though. Yes, if you’ve only ever eaten Pizza Hut you don’t have any basis for comparison to decide if they have the best pizza in the universe. You have, however, eaten other food and know whether or not you like Pizza Hut pizza enough to keep eating it. Likewise, by the time you’re of dating age, you’ve met enough people that you know whether or not you think someone is a good person and whether or not you like them and are interested in them, whether being with them makes you happy and is likely to continue to make you happy.
I’ve been with my husband since I was 19. Maybe there’s someone out there who would make me happier than he does. I don’t know, I’ve never dated anyone else seriously. And maybe living in Paris or Madrid would make me happier than living in Hazard. I don’t know, I’ve never lived in those places. Maybe being a teacher would make me happier than being a vet tech. I don’t know, I’ve never been a teacher. What I do know is that I have a really, really great husband, home, and line of work, that those things make me very happy, and that if I were incessantly searching for the absolute best I wouldn’t have the time or energy to enjoy the really, really great and thus I wouldn’t be happy.
Sorry if this is too much of a hijack, but in conversations about relationships, co-dependence seems to crop up quite often and I always wonder what’s so bad about it? Granted, it’s not something that most people can handle, but if two co-dependent people have found each other and are happy together, thus keeping themselves out of the dating pool of non-co-dependents, what’s the harm?
And just so it doesn’t seem too self-serving, I don’t think my relationship is co-dependent or attached at the hips. We both have our own lives, interests, blah blah blah.
I wouldn’t call it co-dependency, but inter-dependence. Because I am in a similar relationship, and he was my second serious relationship, and in between I was with other guys, though less serious.
It’s just…every time I have a thought, I know he knows what I think. I enjoy being with him. Even if we don’t agree we deal with it the same way - after all these years we have come to a respectful understanding. I don’t enjoy time with anybody else as much, and neither does he, though once in a while I will go out with others.
Interdependence is healthy and I think that people who do tons of things outside of their relationship expect everyone else to be the same. We’re all different and we all cope with things differently. I have found the one who I truly enjoy spending all my time with. I was lucky to find him early, around 21, but still after I had been in another relationship. I don’t need tumultuous love, just steady.