
What Romance Really Means After 10 Years of Marriage - DiabloD3
http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/02/what-romance-means-after-10-years-of-marriage.html
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general_ai
As someone in late 30's, I look at this thread and shake my head. Folks, you
can't apply your own stereotypes to everyone's situation. What's a "healthy"
relationship to some is completely unsustainable for others. What's "romance"
to some is neglect to others. People's needs differ, and not only you don't
have to conform to stereotypical norms in your private life, you simply can't
do it: it'd require too much willpower.

So, TL;DR: don't tell me what's "healthy" and "normal". And coincidentally, I
greet my cat first when I get home, and my wife doesn't mind.

~~~
cvvcvv
Call me crazy but I would never marry a woman who prefers cats to dogs.

~~~
pluma
Call me crazy but I probably wouldn't be nearly as happy if my wife weren't a
cat person.

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Scottn1
Been with my wife 26 years. One kid. We are High school sweethearts. Just had
"date night" again last night where we had dinner/wine and watched the magical
movie La La Land after. Just about a perfect night.

I chose that despite having three good friends texting me all day to go out
for drinks. Two of them are divorced and newly single. The third has been a
bonafied "will never marry" womanizer his whole life who I sometimes would
envy a once in a while in our 20/30's when he'd get an 8 or 9, but now it is
really getting old and sort of pathetic in our mid 40's.

One thing that sticks out to me from something the womanizer friend of mine
told me like 7 years ago. I tried to boost him up one night after breaking up
with one of his 2 month fling (a pretty hot waitress) by saying he gets hot
girls all the time so cheer up. He told me something along the lines of "yeah
hot girl here, next month I'll have another but you get to crawl into a warm
bed tonight with someone who loves you and you the same. I'll never have
that".

~~~
phkahler
I was hanging around work a bit late one time. My phone beeped and I said "Oh
crap, she's gonna be pissed that I'm still here". One of the other guys - a
really great guy and engineer - looked at me and said "At least you have
someone that gives a shit that you're late." He was single and nobody was
going to complain that he was late that day.

That helped put things in perspective for me.

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ryanmarsh
Last night my wife took me out to dinner and a raunchy hilarious burlesque
show for my birthday. We've been married 14 years. The evening was wonderful.
We decided to stay out a little longer and had a disagreement over something I
really don't know how it got this big but turned into an argument in the
parking lot that could have ended with a short ride home and make up sex but
since the car wouldn't start it turned into a really bad argument while we
waited over an hour for roadside assistance to get there and jump start the
car.

This morning she rolled over and told me to fuck her and we had passionate
intimate sex and it's like nothing happened but we're still both a little hurt
but won't say anything about it until the argument boils over again and I
still haven't hung the new light fixture in the half-bath and I have to pack
for a business trip Tuesday and I dread packing so I'll drag her into it and
she'll tolerate me, barely, and I don't know what this is or if it's how it
should be but it's us and we love each other more than we hate each other and
it's not that we're great for each other it's just that there's some kind of
intersectionality in our individual dysfunctions and so here we are.

I don't know shit about marriage and I'm glad the author is happy but I swear
to fucking God that dog shit would drive me up the fucking wall so we have our
thing and you have yours so let's just not judge each other or label each
other's marriage.

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swsieber
I think there are some important points alluded to, but maybe not explicitly
pointed out:

When the sparks leave a relationship, you have two choices: put in effort to
it happy and fulfilling, or leave it. Those who have a happy marriage put
effort in (note that putting effort in can still leave you with an unhappy
marriage, because it takes two to tango).

Additionally, love is not blind. A good marriage is probably made up of two
people who are painfully aware of their partners shortcomings. I would venture
a guess that the husband in the article is very aware of his wife's foibles,
but has chosen to be happy in that marriage, because there's a lot in there to
him happy. Ditto for the wife.

Lastly, though I don't think it was explicitly mentioned in the article, I
think lots of physical affection, including but not limited to sex, is an
important component of a happy marriage.

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laughfactory
Brilliant article. And I think the author is pretty spot on.

I think a lot of the divorce rate is caused mostly by a lack of understanding
that the infatuation of the first year or two doesn't last. That at some point
the romance is in being deeply known, surviving life together, and being able
to depend on each other. This is not to say that there won't be dates,
dinners, flowers, etc. But just that those things become footnotes. I suspect
that our culture (in the US particularly) has so tightly bound romance with
lust and infatuation, that that's what people who get divorce after divorce
are constantly in search of. How sad I am when I hear "we're great friends,
but we both just want something more..." Like what? Because you can totally
try someone new on like a pair of socks, and in all probability, in ten years,
if everything's gone well, be right back to where you started: best friends,
but something deeper because you've survived together.

True romance and the fruits of it are only achieved after decades.

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ShahofVista
There is research on this, there are two distinct kinds of love, passionate
and companionate. Passionate is in the beginning and generally lasts a year or
two, while it fades, companionate evolves. Though companionate declines over
time, some level of passionate is needed to keep the relationship lasting.

[http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb07/eternal.aspx](http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb07/eternal.aspx)

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Fuzzwah
5th year of marriage coming up. Two kids; eldest turns 3 next week, the
younger one just started crawling.

This article has my current feelings about my wife and my life spot on.

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dclowd9901
I'm so sick of the trope of the happy sexless marriage. It's unhealthy and
it's the cause of a lot of unhappy marriages and delusions out there. This
article doesn't address the trope and instead reinforces it.

~~~
biocomputation
Gay man here. In a long term relationship. Also have lots of straight friends,
so I've heard about that side of things as well. I think the trope of a happy
marriage requiring sex is just as harmful.

The truth is that a marriage needs as much sex as it needs, no more, no less.
There are people who are perfectly happy in sexless marriages, and people who
are miserable in marriages where sex isn't a problem.

The most important ingredients for a happy marriage are two people who are
well sorted ou. Everything else is negotiable.

~~~
dclowd9901
I absolutely agree with you. But it's not addressed here and simply continues
the trope that all marriages become sexless, joyless slogs where we're just
supposed to be happy with living. You see it everywhere, and I think it gives
people the idea that there's only one kind of marriage: one where you don't
have sex but you love each other all the same.

I think it would have been great for her to at least talk about their sexual
frequency and how agreement of frequency is important, otherwise that lack of
passion undermines everything.

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kchoudhu
"When you crawl into bed at 10PM"

Amateurs. A good night's sleep begins at 9PM for my wife and I.

~~~
91bananas
Pro-status is truly achieved when you fall asleep on the couch right after you
put the kids to bed then wake up at 2am like what did we do?!

~~~
kchoudhu
Oh good, my wife and I are not the only people this happens to.

Seriously, someone needs to start a support group for new parents so that
normal behavior can be...normalized?

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thatwebdude
Does new parent status still happen five years in...?

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k__
Also you can just accept that marriage and monogamy is just one way to live
and it doesn't have to fit you.

~~~
pluma
The article is literally about relationships in the context of a long-term
marriage. Your comment is a complete non-sequitur.

Heck, the article doesn't even require the presumption of a monogamous
marriage for the points to be applicable. It applies equally well to any
committed long-term relationship, no matter how many people are involved and
regardless of your tax status.

~~~
k__
That's exaclty the point. The article doesn't explicitly talk about monogamous
relationships. It simply sees them as given and talks about solution 'inside'
of this given assumption.

I'm just saying, you don't have to follow these parts.

~~~
pluma
That's like pointing out the existence of veganism in an article on pulled
pork recipes, or the existence of other religious faiths in an article about
the meaning of Ramadan in Islam.

The article is written as a response to a question about romance in long-term
monogamous marriages, so of course it sees monogamous marriages as a given.

Did you expect her to add a paragraph like "Hey, maybe if you can't find
romance in a monogamous marriage you're just not made to be monogamous or
married and that's fine too"? Do you expect articles on programming best
practices to contain similar paragraphs ("Hey, maybe if you don't like
fizzbuzz you're not really into programming and should try hardware
instead.")?

~~~
k__
No, it's different.

The article is about a specific problem and tries to tell people 'everything
is okay, you just need to accept that things change' while this may not the
solution many long term relationships need.

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apatters
It sounds positively abominable. Why anyone would enjoy such a life continues
to elude me.

~~~
abakker
That's good, though. Other people enjoy it, you don't. There's nobody forcing
you and yet you still try to understand it. Maybe one day you will.

Personally, it's not all the way it's cut out in this article, but the article
hits on some of the key points. If you play your cards right, there's still
romance of the traditional kind too, but it takes planning, surprises, and
commitment to pull it off.

~~~
manmal
The article's author does sound resignated though. It seems she does not
expect any (whatsoever) disruptive things to happen until death. I could not
live with that feeling.

I do have 2 kids and will marry soon (living together for >10 years now), so I
can believe that one could dissolve herself completely in family life and what
she calls romance. I just could not bear the thought of "this is all". For me,
family is where I thrive and relax and love, but it can't be the answer to all
questions, can't be the self-serving means to an end.

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Fnoord
> After a decade of marriage, if things go well, you don’t need any more
> proof. What you have instead — and what I would argue is the most deeply
> romantic thing of all — is this palpable, reassuring sense that it’s okay to
> be a human being. Because until you feel absolutely sure that you won’t
> eventually be abandoned, it’s maybe not 100 percent clear that any other
> human mortal can tolerate another human mortal. The smells. The sounds. The
> repetitive fixations on the same dumb shit, over and over. Even as you
> develop a kind of a resigned glaze of oh, this again in, say, marital years
> one through five, you also feel faintly unnerved by your own terrible mortal
> humanness.

Marriage, yawn. No. Marriage is _not_ the factor. The factor is the moment you
consider each other 'together'. In 2017, the decision of wether you are
together or not is not anymore 'marriage'. That hegemony, as dictated by
[Christian] religion, is gone.

Also, what is being described doesn't necessarily take 10 years of marriage.
From what I gathered you're (madly) in love for max 2 years, and then (right
before those 2 years are passed) the hormones produced and amounts of them
change in amount and it becomes a different kind of love. A caring kind of
love. With sometimes references, filled with nostalgia, to those first 2
years. I would describe it as 2 years of wild fun, and then that forms the
basis of getting the thing to work between the two of you.

Also, the following specific statement:

> Because until you feel absolutely sure that you won’t eventually be
> abandoned

Is interesting because people are going to die eventually. There are 4
possibilities here: 1) Your significant other dies first 2) You die before
your significant other does 3) You die together 4) You split up (called
divorce in case of marriage) before one of you or the both of you die. Of note
here to #1 and #2 is that women on average live longer. Of note of #3 is that
this is highly unlikely, but it does happen, usually in the form of accidents.

Why is this relevant? Because apart of option #3 (which is very rare) there's
going to be a time where you are alone once more. You don't know the details
about this beforehand. For example, you don't know who is going to live alone.
You don't know when this is going to happen. You don't know how you are going
to die, or how your partner is going to die. Because of this its not concrete,
and hence ignored.

It does however mean that _you can never feel absolutely sure that you won’t
eventually be abandoned_ which contradicts the quoted sentence.

I'm aware of a different theory. A relationship (and a friendship) is a
balance of plus and minus. There are things you like about each other, and
there are things you don't like about each other. The good is a long list. The
bad are things you can handle. If something happens which you want to put on
the bad list, you need to make it up with things on the good list. From what I
read, it has to be 10:1. For some people the fuel is gone, and they part ways
while for others they feel so sure the balance is good they realise they're
not going to part by force of incompatibility.

Meanwhile, you get those references of nostalgia which retrigger the hormones
from the first two years.

~~~
rosser
I'm sorry, but I see a categorical difference between a partner's death, and
abandonment.

Maybe others don't, but in my categories the latter implies at least
deliberacy, if not malice.

~~~
Fnoord
> I'm sorry, but I see a categorical difference between a partner's death, and
> abandonment. > Maybe others don't, but in my categories the latter implies
> at least deliberacy, if not malice.

I don't see it as either one way or the other.

They share similarities, but I agree they also have differences. _Intention_
is an example of a difference. Deaths, as by disease, is generally not
predictable.

What they have in common is both are on first glance painful, and negative.
That's a matter of coping and adapting. Human beings don't do that beforehand
though.

------
known
"By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad
one, you'll become a philosopher." \--Socrates

~~~
lern_too_spel
Don't you mean --Abraham Lincoln? That quote is from an unknown source.

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guard-of-terra
> Holy Christ, I really am going to melt right into this other person (who is
> a relative stranger)! It really IS physically intoxicating and perfect! And
> it seems like we feel the exact same way about each other!

That's not romance. That's illusions. She's welcoming trouble with that
attitude.

UPD: Apparently not anymore if she left that minefield and lives in healthy
marriage.

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Red_Tarsius
' _Will I really feel loved and desired and truly adored at last?_ ' I laughed
at this sentence because no married man I know feels this way. Many of them
are just belittled and controlled and disrespected. Most of the _romance_ I
see around is pleasing the wife at the expense of the husband. An old friend
of mine – a math Phd – was persuaded by wife's family to give up all his
dreams and an ambitious career so that _she_ could keep teaching in the local
middle/high schools. He's going to be a work drone in _dilbert_ hell for the
rest of his life. He's mostly treated like a butler. It's just sad and
depressing.

~~~
PaulRobinson
You need to find better role models for healthy relationships. Reading this is
like reading the comments of somebody in their mid-20s who has known nothing
but abusive relationships and been rejected multiple times who has decided all
relationships are disgusting. If that is the case for you, I hope you can open
your mind enough to being loved by somebody who can show you the truth.

I don't know any couple who belittle or control each other, and certainly
don't disrespect each other. If I did, I'd recommend they get the hell away
from each other as quickly as possible.

Romance is not about pleasing one person at the expense of the other, it's
about two people who love each other exploring the mystery of that love.

I've been with my partner for over 7 years. She's my best friend. We respect
each other, and if one of us thinks the other one is not taking our own needs
into account we talk about it and compromise.

The fact that your friend has chosen to prioritise his wife's feelings over
his career is his choice. If he hasn't made it gladly and freely, then he
needs to get out.

