If you're married...Follow

Um...thanks for the advice? I hope that I can assume that after a few posts you might fill us in on the details?

A swift kick in the nuts will reboot his malfunctioning system.

That's not known to have satisfying results.



That is not even quoted in order (or the correct context)...

I moved in with my girlfriend back in October and it has become increasingly clear to me as the days go by that girls are and always will be crazy and not entirely mentally stable.

First is the need to speak in code.

When the girlfriends says "Bodhi did you leave the plug in the drain" it isnt a question that is requesting a yes or no answer. It is a statement letting me know that she doesnt like the fact that I left the plug in the drain. Also it can mean more than that. It might mean she wants to have a discussion (and by discussion I mean her talk and me agree with her) about how leaving the plug in the drain is bad.

The inequality in topics of conversation. If I talk about riots in france its boring and pendantic or if I try to talk about something that happened at work. If she is discussing how she told her friend about topic x then I better be paying attention to her everyword.

There is a difference between listening and listening. My girlfriend occassionally accuses me of not listening. My usual response is to repeat back verbatim what she had been talking about since im the type that can just remember conversations word for word. She gives me a second of stunned glance and then says that I wasnt listening "actively", Now by active listening to break it down for you, Im listening but not giving her the proper feed back so as to encourage the conversation to its fullest potential.

Attention. When Im giving it to her she doesnt want and when Im not she does. She seems to need to talk only when I am a)reading a book b)sleeping c)Playing World of Warcraft.

I could go on and on and on but needless to say moving in was not the smartest idea and I dont know why I agreed with her when she made the suggestion.

Edit - Tone of Voice. I might in the end turn out to be right when arguing a point of fact however I will in the end be wrong because when arguing said point I used a tone that was "mean, condescending, etc". Which is true I might have been but unless I argue a point like a vulcan I am liable to be at fault.



Edited, Mon Nov 7 15:47:20 2005 by bodhisattva

Your first clue, Thumbelyna, that this marriage was doomed from the start was that he had an ex. I suspect if you had filtered the "***** just doesn't understand me" routine and maybe gone and talked to her yourself, you'd have discovered the reason her marriage failed is precisely the same why yours is circling the drain.

Here's some free advice for all you who are single and never been married: Do. Not. Marry. A. Divorcee'. Especially. One. With. Kids.

That's the best thing you'll ever hear concerning marriage. Comprende?

Totem

Extra advice from observations of my fiancee's family:
Never marry a widow(er) whose spouse died under a year ago. Re-bound ahoy!

So whats the scoop T?

No scoop whatsoever, DSD. I have been happily married now for 23 years to the same woman. It just has been my opinion that outside of the seemingly obvious things one must do to ensure a successful marriage, there are other steps you can take as a single person to nearly guarantee marital longevity.

1) As stated before, avoid at all costs partners who have ex's. A previous spouse entails baggage that runs the gamut from emotional to financial. And none of it is ever Gucci luggage either. Beat up Samsonite knockoffs is more likely.

2) Don't marry people with kids even if they have never been entwined in conjugal bliss. Kids = bad news. Parenting is tough enough when they are your own and have a few years of regular husband/wife time to get the basics down pat. Insta-daddy? OJT for you then. OJT with an irritable boss if the child is the spawn of someone else's loins.

3) Check to see if your prospective spouse has parents that have been divorced. If they have been divorced then factor your chances of success downward by it's square root. That percentage for failure continues to increase exponentially for each marriage her folks have had. When a parent has the lawyer on speed dial, that is a good indication that it is the blueprint for her leaving you when the going gets tough.

4) Prenuptual agreements are just early notification of divorce proceedings.

There you have it. Pretty simple and commonsense when you think about it, but an astonshing number of people think they can reinvent the wheel when it comes to marriage.

Totem

In reply to Joph's comment, if you are a divorcee', the advice does not apply to you since you've seen and done it all before. You can go into a relationship with both eyes open because you know what to expect. But a previously unmarried person has all these expectations and fantasies of what marriage entails and it is best if the couple discover together what is reality and what is not. A divorcee comes into the relationship with insider knowledge and it's accompanying luggage-- something most singles are unequiped to handle, especially since marriage is hard enough without adding a third party into the mix.

The euphemism "blended marriages" masks the inherent difficulty of balancing parenting with another (absent) Mom or Dad and the ghost of past failures and sore spots. It makes it sound like a recipe where if you just follow these simple instructions on the package everything turns out great. And that just ain't so.

Totem

Id love to know if statistics can prove this true. I've found the opposite in my own life. My mother has been divorced 3 times ( getting married again tomorrow) and my husbands mother was divorced as well. Because of this and how it affected us, we know on a firsthand basis what it can do to children, especially if its a messy break up. And because of this we talked a lot and worked hard to ensure our marriage was indeed what we wanted before taking the plunge. Our idea was that marriage is indeed forever and that it is something you work on everyday.

Friends of mine from divorced homes had simliar philosophys and so far all of us who have been married have been married longer than our parents. And they're each very happy stable relationships.

Just my own two cents

It's hard to cheat on or abuse a corpse =/

Heh something about that makes me think of an ICP song.

I was addressing a multitude of topics within one post

Congrats on 23 years Totem!

/kick niobia



yeah that made me feel good.
Thanks Mental!