N and I are celebrating 15 years together. I want to reiterate that the people who say that the intensity of feeling necessarily fades over time and the excitement goes away are wrong. Everybody’s story is different but the transformation of passion into friendship is absolutely not a given.
I spent 15 years, terrified of marriage because everybody said that love runs its course in 3 to 6 months, and then you are stuck living with a roommate. And I’d rather live with a family of alligators than a roommate. Then it turned out that everybody was wrong and marriage is the best thing that could have happened to me.
There’s so much “common wisdom” surrounding these topics that’s completely stupid. I wish I had never listened to it.
Clarissa's Blog 
But he’s Russky!
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I know. I always said I’d consider a man of any ethnicity, nationality, or race except a Russian.
Then, God decided to be funny.
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Even people who “calm down” some don’t need to be like roommates. Geez, that sounds depressing!
Happy anniversary!
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Marriage is definitely a risk but you know you could always just co-habitate and not marry. The legal benefits of marriage can be accomplished separately via a lawyer, marriage just provides them via a package deal. However, very glad yours is working out well 🙂
What I do wonder is when I read about say where a man and a woman were dating for like six years, then they get married, and then the marriage falls apart in a few months (!). Like what changed?
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A relationship changes dramatically once people get married. Cohabitation, even with the exact legal status of a marriage, is not remotely the same because people don’t feel the same about it. They haven’t made the final decision. They need each other as a temporary stopgap, and not anything bigger.
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Cohabiting is a way of saying: “I’m still shopping, but if nothing better comes along, maybe I’ll settle for you.” Seems like a lousy basis for a relationship. Kudos to the people who manage to make it work in the long-term, either through sheer inertia, or through the hard work of personal growth and transformation. But they’re kind of starting out behind the 8-ball.
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Totally. The only reason I’m putting in all the hard work that my marriage requires is because it’s forever. Once you know it’s forever, and there can be no re-dos, it really simplifies things. We often forget how enormously comforting it is to stop choosing. It’s the consumer mentality that makes us think choice is always freedom. Often, the most cherished freedom is to be able to stop choosing. My body is my body. My child is my child. My sister is my sister. It’s what there is. I can stop shopping and start living at least in what concerns my family and my physical existence. What a relief.
It does wonders to a relationship that we simply accept as what there is.
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Yes! We are coming up on 13 years now, and it is true!
Congratulations!
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Congratulations!!
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Congratulations, Clarissa! Happy anniversary! Together 23 years here. Still plenty of chemistry, although perhaps a little less limber than when we started out. 😀
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“But Real Communism has never been tried!”
Jordan Peterson suggests that because we all grow up in families. “To each according to his need/ from each according to his ability” is overwhelmingly the norm, world-wide (Darwin strikes again!), virtually all humans make a category error, and fail to understand that what works in the immediate family (however defined) is doomed to failure if applied as the organizing principle of the larger society. We must be “educated” to avoid this primordial primate instinct, which 99% of time is favored by natural selection. After the ideological capture of education by the Left, from pre-school to medical school, unless a trusted family member, friend, or samizdat copies of: On Liberty, Hayek, Heinlein and Rand (“disinformation”, to be memory holed) exposes the student to why this is always and everywhere true, they arrive at college primed, and graduate the envy of aging Red Guards. Bitter experience has taught Ukrainians this lesson, and it hasn’t been forgotten.
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These are excellent points. The hope of equal outcomes refuses to die, no matter what happens to show that it leads to very bad places.
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