If writing a note each day is too much work for you, then the daily sacrifices of being in a loving marriage may be too much for you. If that is the case you might want to think about what you're giving up and why. If you are happy with the exchange then great but I think many don't know how great it can be.
It's not what's going to save marriages on it's own, because it is useful in a specific environment.
When I'm away for work, I always make time to call family morning and evening, so we can keep up with our wake up togheter and spend evening togheter kinda routine. It is both specific to the situation, the family and the context. It'd be silly to call home when I'm home, as it'd be silly to say that this will save someone else marriage.
Heck, marriage doesn't even mean the same thing to different people or has the same meaning across cultures or even within the same culture across time!
Normative approaches to marriage are almost always doomed to fail precisely because of this, and that's also why counseling is largely a personalized process/experience.
What is the reward?
If I started writing literal daily notes to my wife, she’d be very concerned something was wrong. Then she’d ask why I’m wasting my time writing a note when I could have done… literally annoying else more productive lol
I've found this to simply mean that you enjoy the work you put in. Gamers can spend hours getting good at a game. Few would call it practice, they'd call it play. However, whatever you call it you need it to get good.
Whatever that thing is that you put into a relationship, it's needed.
For some people it isn't until it is. There are many things that can break a great relationship. Routine, lack of common projects, financial difficulties, personal struggle of one or both.
It has been 16 years and somehow head to pillow every night still brings a smile to my face for this amazing woman being the love of my life.
This is where it takes work. You have to accept the fact every day this is your partner, you have to wrestle with thoughts of perhaps coming across an actual ideal partner some day. You have to learn to love your partner, and do things to make them happy, not necessarily things you want to do.
Because the alternative is to just be single and die alone surrounded by no one, childless in some nursing home where nurses increasingly don’t give a fuck about you the closer you are to death.
Some people will argue being single isn’t so bad. But for a person whose goal it is to be married and share life with someone it can be a fate worse than death. And the longer it takes to get married the more of your life you are living without sharing experiences with anyone that matters to you.
> This is where it takes work. You have to accept the fact every day this is your partner, you have to wrestle with thoughts of perhaps coming across an actual ideal partner some day. You have to learn to love your partner, and do things to make them happy, not necessarily things you want to do
If this is actually your personal experience, could you share more of it?
I've always ended up dating women who absolutely love me but who I am somewhat ambivalent to after a few weeks. Most of life already feels like work to me, was hoping a romantic relationship wouldn't. But I've thought often of throwing in the towel and settling for the next sane one even if I'm bored. Because wife + kids sounds long term better than fun uncle who ultimately dies alone.
for your problem, i would want to look closely what it is that makes you feel ambivalent after a few weeks. try giving it more time to see if you still feel like that. get to know each other better, plan your potential future life together to get an understanding what each of you want from a relationship. love alone is not enough.
what i found helpful is to not focus on romantic dates but join group activities where there is no pressure to interact directly. your friends and her friends or even some other group that you both join for some activity. there is still plenty of opportunity to get to know each other that way, because you will see how each of you act around other people.
But it turns out that marriage is really just a partnership and relationship, and all different kinds of people have different styles and interpretations of what that is and how it works for them. Some people need a lot of passion, some people need a lot of stability, some may need both, or neither.
But there is definitely something to the notion that good relationships don't come easy. People are all flawed in different ways, and sometimes people need help to work through those flaws in order to have successful relationships. Plus, a marriage may involve some long term expensive investments, like a mortgage, pets, children. So "saving your marriage" might actually be quite a rational and emotionally intelligent act, if all partners are amenable to it. Best-case scenario: you end up with a long-term loving partnership and a wonderful life; worst-case, you don't. Seems like it's worth saving?
like in karate kid, "wax on, wax off" is not about the wax.
but, you're right, marriage isn't for everyone. but i also don't think TFA is trying to convince everyone to get married.
The person you’d most love to raise a family with (or run a fishing boat with, or whatever), isn’t necessarily the “easy” partner whose super cozy and gets you all the time and never needs you to make a special effort beyond what comes naturally.
But at some point, if it’s what you want to do, you pick a partner for what’s important to you and make good on that choice. Depending on who you are and who you picked, that latter bit of “making good” might benefit from a few contrived gestures and rituals that wouldn’t have been necessary in some other “easy” relationship. But that doesn’t mean it’s the wrong relationship or an unhealthy relationship, it’s just your relationship; and if those things make it better, why wouldn’t you do them?
I want to work to not have to work anymore. I can’t think about a partner because I’m too dead from work to give someone else the commitment they might deserve. Don’t want kids that sounds like work. Nothing is wrong with me just want to be able to relax without commitment.
I see quite a lot of elderly people with health problems. The ones that are completely alone… it’s a pretty wretched existence, frankly. That’s the reality. Not to say all marriages are great obviously, but often even an ex-husband is better than no husband at all.
When they push forward as social animals with no social support network and things eventually take their toll (age/entropy/etc) they will fall back on someone else’s marriage for help - their parents or siblings.
I say this as a late 30’s person with no marriage. I thought I had one and it didn’t work out unfortunately. Now it’s just me and I am in true shit if really anything remotely severe goes wrong.
For quite a long time this was a very obvious and common sense statement. That is literally the traditional view of the Catholic Church on marriage, for example.
Things changed only very recently.
Can you elaborate on that? Living as an unmarried couple is not very catholic AFAICT, and when not in a relationship, how should you marry?
Having sex outside of marriage (and, for pleasure only) is of course wrong.
As is using contraceptives; as that moves sex to just pleasure.
In my (entirely anecdotal) observation, boomers were the last generation to be raised with social pressure to appear to be religious, in communities where Catholic traditions and the Church were a central and reasonably respected part of life. They got married relatively young, baptized their kids and maybe sent them to Catholic schools all to keep their own parents happy, but didn't pressure their kids in the same way.
As the boomers got to middle age and figured out their own way to live, they dropped the pretence. In parallel, the church largely retreated from public life, education, politics, healthcare etc.
It's easy to blame this on the Church or the boomers but it's part of a wider trend of community and common institutions losing their hold. People move further away from family, have less friends, participation in community activities is down across the board, the self-sufficient nuclear family has been pushed as the ideal since the 50s and cultural gatekeeping or telling someone what to do in their own home is the biggest sin.
It's all a trade-off for getting rid of some of the genuinely more awful parts of the pre-war era.
“And if your right hand should be your downfall, cut it off and throw it away; for it will do you less harm to lose one part of yourself than to have your whole body go to hell.”
I've heard there was a time, ~2000 years ago, when people thought the second coming of christ was so close they were only being asked to be celibate for a year or two, and marriage was only there for people who couldn't manage that.
[1] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians...
This all made sense when you had a man working and a woman at home looking after the house and kids, but in a modern society where both work and responsibilities are mostly shared, it doesn't make sense that the person who earned the most is now at huge risk despite the relationship not reducing the others earning potential in any way. This risk is a real discouragement to even enter a relationship. You might be open to the emotional risk of things not working out but not be willing to put your house and future income on the line.
> In most countries you are exposed to this risk even if you don't marry as you automatically enter a de facto which is pretty legally similar to a full marriage.
From only being in a relationship or from living together, spending together, having kids together? I'm pretty sure there is no such thing in the EU country I reside in.
Relationships aren't for everyone, especially when thinking about relationships like a business
A lot of people complain this is the wrong way to view marriage. That's only true if you're on relatively equal financial footing with your spouse. Any successful person has the right to structure their marriage such that there is no compelling financial incentive for their spouse to divorce them (and that too on top of a base divorce rate of ~50%). Only a fool would do anything short of make their marriage bulletproof in a situation of unusual spousal wealth asymmetry [1].
[0] https://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/seven-celebrities-w...
[1] https://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/a26570850/justin-bi...
> And then move to Texas for the cap on child support orders
I'd rather stay single than move to Texas because of a possible divorce. This is possibly the weirdest way to view a marriage I've ever come about
The beauty of the divorce racket is that victims usually don't understand the enormity of the financial pain involved until it's too late. Anyone who's observed a friend go through such a divorce would be wise enough to not make that mistake.
As for moving to Texas, you can choose not to and just accept that a judge may order unconscionable amounts of child support to vindictively undermine your prenup (this is routine in states like California). I'm not making the recommendation to go to Texas lightly. The divorce game has gone through many rounds of evolution over many decades and is now almost perfectly calibrated to deprive the successful of their wealth.
Personally, I'd rather just live in Austin. It's a fine city.
I also don't believe in rolling the dice on marriage without protection. It's way too irrational to assume you'll beat the 1 in 2 odds.
If you think you need a prenup, you probably shouldn't get married.
The alimony issue happens when you look for stay at home wife have stay at home wife for yours and that marriage breaks. Incidentally, those women tend to be more afraid to leave even if marriage is bad while employed women are more likely to initiate divorce - cause they are more confident of their ability to be single.
It doesn't have to work for everyone to be useful.
Also, I feel like far too many people have "holywood" views on what marriage is.