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dang... 3 of my friends are having a divorce...
- Thread starter rex3live
- Start date
This is so true. I am witnessing this first hand with a few friends and family members. Divorce spreads like cancer and it scares the hell out of me. My wife and I are pretty level headed, but these thoughts haunt your mind everyday. I have been married 10 years and we have our ups and downs. We work through them and move on. I wouldn't have it any other way. I was talking to one of my close friends the other day and he was all hyped up about hitting the dating seen. I laughed and said " good luck with that, while your at home pissed off at the world, eating your microwave dinner alone, I at least have someone to talk too when I get home from a crappy day".
congrats everyone... lemme know if you need a lawyer
18 years next month to this wife, 6 to my first wife, I learned the two secret words to a happy marriage...........................................YES DEAR.
Today is my 17th anniversary. I guess if we have a secret, its that we don't think we have to be glued at the hip. We do stuff together, we do stuff on our own. A mix of common and separate interests helps us not get sick of each other. It helps that I was really picky. Some of the stuff I was picky about was stupid, in retrospect, but I also got lucky and was selective for some important things. Ignoring the stupid stuff I was picky about, here are some things I would absolutely not tolerate in a GF back before I met my wife.
These were MY minimum criteria that have turned out to be important to me over time. I had some other criteria that turned out to be less useful, and she has many good traits I didn't even think to look for. But in any case my criteria may be worse than useless to you.
Not being overly materialistic. This one turned out to be so important I can't even say how much it has positively influenced our lives. As an example I didn't feel I could afford a nice wedding band set. So I proposed with a ring I'd bought on the side of teh road in Arizona from some Native Americans, with a promise to replace it with something better*.
Not being a reader. She didn't have to be a devourer of books, but being one of those "Oh I don't read books" people was an absolute deal breaker to me. To my view, people who don't read often turn out to be fairly boring. You have to live a pretty exciting life to make up for not having done any vicarious living.
Being dumb. That might sound mean, but if a girl was ok with being smarter than me, that was fine, but I wasn't ok with a girl I didn't feel I could have a real conversation with, about both concrete and abstract topics. I had a test that accomplished multiple goals. I'd just give them a copy of Atlas Shrugged. Passing was if she read it, and equally important, if she got it. Ms. Rand helped me eliminate more than a few girls from my dating pool.
Being unwilling to work. I had already seen too many men working like dogs to support a woman at home who did nothing but spend their money to allow that to happen to me.
Being ok with welfare. Self explanatory I think. We qualified for welfare for the first 5 years of our marriage. I honestly think if we had allowed the state to step in and help us, we would not have ever moved beyond that standard of living.
Being anti gun. Another self explanatory I think. I bought my first rifle at the age of 18 from a friend who ran a little gun store. Paid 60$ for an SKS still in cosmoline. I still regret selling that gun.
Being anti education. Anti education is actually a bad way to say that. This is a much more broad issue than just education, but I've met a surprising number of people who harbor a strong antipathy toward both successful people, and the very things that help one become so.
Expecting me to be a "nice guy" AKA completely whipped and serving at her beck and call.
Possibly the most important, not living under the illusion that she was going to run my life, or looking at me as some kind of fixer upper husband.
There are probably others I have forgotten about, but these are what came right to mind as criteria I used back then.
Oh, and money. We're not rich, we both came from what people would call dirt poor (for example her parents live in a trailer, regularly rack up consumer credit debt and then struggle to deal with it, and have never indicated they mind.) At first money was a huge issue. We both came from no money, and had equally no idea how to budget, or stay on top of bills and such. Basically we knew how to bounce checks, live hand to mouth and scrape by with no safety net. I decided that this was not acceptable. Looking back its still a little funny to remember what a novel idea it was when I presented to her the idea that one our incomes, we could reach a point where if we both lost our jobs, that wouldn't be immediately catastrophic. So when I was working at Mcdonalds and she was working at a local grocery store (tip of the iceberg there, damn we worked a lot of **** jobs) we did a lot of reading, and came to some conclusions. Some seemed good and over time we discarded, some have proven the test of time. But in any case, after that we both saved like crazy, and controlled our money instead of the other way around (spend like crazy and be controlled by your money). We had some pretty big financial setbacks, but our preparation made them setbacks instead of disasters. Just taking most of the money stress out of the relationship was a big deal.
* A few years later I replaced it with a titanium band inset with some rather small sapphires (my birthstone, she didn't like her birthstone). This was way back before titanium rings were hip, or even commercially available, so I made both our rings out of pieces of titanium pipe stock. This was back when I had more time than money, which was good because that took so much work to get it right. A vice, a few hand tools plus a dremel, and a lot of evenings and weekends manual labor and jewelers rouge. I went through a few tries before I considered them good enough for her. Made me glad I bought the pipe stock a couple feet long. I have met and heard of plenty of women for whom my cheap ring, and then a second ring that carried a low dollar cost would have been deal breakers.
These were MY minimum criteria that have turned out to be important to me over time. I had some other criteria that turned out to be less useful, and she has many good traits I didn't even think to look for. But in any case my criteria may be worse than useless to you.
Not being overly materialistic. This one turned out to be so important I can't even say how much it has positively influenced our lives. As an example I didn't feel I could afford a nice wedding band set. So I proposed with a ring I'd bought on the side of teh road in Arizona from some Native Americans, with a promise to replace it with something better*.
Not being a reader. She didn't have to be a devourer of books, but being one of those "Oh I don't read books" people was an absolute deal breaker to me. To my view, people who don't read often turn out to be fairly boring. You have to live a pretty exciting life to make up for not having done any vicarious living.
Being dumb. That might sound mean, but if a girl was ok with being smarter than me, that was fine, but I wasn't ok with a girl I didn't feel I could have a real conversation with, about both concrete and abstract topics. I had a test that accomplished multiple goals. I'd just give them a copy of Atlas Shrugged. Passing was if she read it, and equally important, if she got it. Ms. Rand helped me eliminate more than a few girls from my dating pool.
Being unwilling to work. I had already seen too many men working like dogs to support a woman at home who did nothing but spend their money to allow that to happen to me.
Being ok with welfare. Self explanatory I think. We qualified for welfare for the first 5 years of our marriage. I honestly think if we had allowed the state to step in and help us, we would not have ever moved beyond that standard of living.
Being anti gun. Another self explanatory I think. I bought my first rifle at the age of 18 from a friend who ran a little gun store. Paid 60$ for an SKS still in cosmoline. I still regret selling that gun.
Being anti education. Anti education is actually a bad way to say that. This is a much more broad issue than just education, but I've met a surprising number of people who harbor a strong antipathy toward both successful people, and the very things that help one become so.
Expecting me to be a "nice guy" AKA completely whipped and serving at her beck and call.
Possibly the most important, not living under the illusion that she was going to run my life, or looking at me as some kind of fixer upper husband.
There are probably others I have forgotten about, but these are what came right to mind as criteria I used back then.
Oh, and money. We're not rich, we both came from what people would call dirt poor (for example her parents live in a trailer, regularly rack up consumer credit debt and then struggle to deal with it, and have never indicated they mind.) At first money was a huge issue. We both came from no money, and had equally no idea how to budget, or stay on top of bills and such. Basically we knew how to bounce checks, live hand to mouth and scrape by with no safety net. I decided that this was not acceptable. Looking back its still a little funny to remember what a novel idea it was when I presented to her the idea that one our incomes, we could reach a point where if we both lost our jobs, that wouldn't be immediately catastrophic. So when I was working at Mcdonalds and she was working at a local grocery store (tip of the iceberg there, damn we worked a lot of **** jobs) we did a lot of reading, and came to some conclusions. Some seemed good and over time we discarded, some have proven the test of time. But in any case, after that we both saved like crazy, and controlled our money instead of the other way around (spend like crazy and be controlled by your money). We had some pretty big financial setbacks, but our preparation made them setbacks instead of disasters. Just taking most of the money stress out of the relationship was a big deal.
* A few years later I replaced it with a titanium band inset with some rather small sapphires (my birthstone, she didn't like her birthstone). This was way back before titanium rings were hip, or even commercially available, so I made both our rings out of pieces of titanium pipe stock. This was back when I had more time than money, which was good because that took so much work to get it right. A vice, a few hand tools plus a dremel, and a lot of evenings and weekends manual labor and jewelers rouge. I went through a few tries before I considered them good enough for her. Made me glad I bought the pipe stock a couple feet long. I have met and heard of plenty of women for whom my cheap ring, and then a second ring that carried a low dollar cost would have been deal breakers.
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TMI....lol
Wow thats pretty deep....Makes me wanna go waste some ammo at the range Lol. 3 months married, 4 years together. 21 years old with a 5 year old thats not my wifes, something tells me shes in it for the long haul.
Some really good points here. My sister in law was in the middle of a bad marriage and an even nastier divorce. They lived 4 doors down from us. That was the worse time of our relationship (the wife and I). Divorce is an cancer that spreads faster than the flu in a preschool.
I got 28 years with the same woman. add 3 years before marriage. Would not trade her for the world.
I got 28 years with the same woman. add 3 years before marriage. Would not trade her for the world.
Has it got better since last week when you said your wife wasn't letting you tap it? Just curious lol
26 years, lived together 1 year before marriage, wouldn't trade her for anything, only thing we ever argue about is gun porn and all related gun porn stuff.
and she hates this phrase" you can never have enough guns, ammo or mags but you can have enough wives".
and she hates this phrase" you can never have enough guns, ammo or mags but you can have enough wives".
