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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2554 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 21, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I fear a critical factor for my own happy marriage might have been "dumb luck finding the right woman", which isn't very actionable. And most of what I've learned since then has been ways to avoid or fix specific problems and conflicts, not very general tips.

But I've saved and at least tried to live by a lot of broadly-applicable advice I've read from others:

"the work in every relationship should be split 60/40, with both people trying to be the one giving 60%"

"My mom asked an elderly couple who had been married for decades what their secret was. They said that they act as if being nice to each other is a competition."

"I see so many couples who act like "Well now that we're married, I don't have to deal with the stress of self-censoring, and can be as cranky, demanding, and sharp as I wanna be." Which seems to me exactly the wrong choice. If you're married to someone, you should treat that relationship like anything else you need to last a long time: with care."

"when asked how they managed to stay together 65 years, the woman replied, "we were born in a time when, if something was broke, you fixed it ... not throw it away.""

"Your mindset changes from "Is this going to work?" to "How do we make this work?" That's it. It's both a small change and a huge change at the same time."

"Successful marriage is predicted by a consistent pattern of irrationally optimistic assumptions. That is, each spouse tends to believe, in the face of common sense and even prior evidence, that his spouse means better than he says, has kinder thoughts than seems evident from his speech, et cetera. In short, a certain amount of mutual delusion seems necessary. Although it might not be fair to call it delusional, since it seems the spouses often rise to the expectations — expected to behave better than they initially meant, they rise to it."

"Marry the version of the person you see before you right now, exactly as they are today. I cannot tell you how often I've heard "Well, I thought after we got married, s/he would get a real job / finish school / take the lawn seriously / drink less / go out less / be less of a slob / learn to manage money / take career more seriously / want to have kids" or whatever. ... I am not saying people don't change with age and maturity. I am saying: a) the ways in which they will mature are entirely unpredictable, and b) marriage is not the thing that makes that happen."

Of course, that's just the stuff applicable after you choose a worthy partner. But from what I've read from you here, my guess is you didn't have any problem doing that wisely, with luck optional.

Congratulations!

I also suspect you aren't learning anything new from the advice above, rather that you posted your question because you decided that a tiny chance of missing a little useful advice would have been worse than a large chance of wasting a little time soliciting and reading redundant or unnecessary advice. If I've guessed right, kudos; that's exactly the right attitude to go in with!

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