According to the self-proclaimed relationship experts of the Internet, my marriage is doomed. Why? For one of the following reasons.
1) Dan and I met online. Apparently if you marry someone you met on a dating website, then you have not found true love and will have a higher chance of getting divorced.
2) We are not “evenly yoked.” Dan is an atheist. I am a Christian. This is a “missionary marriage” because obviously I only married Dan to convert him to my religious beliefs. How can you truly love somebody AND truly believe the Bible if you’re okay with your husband going to hell? On the other hand, how can an atheist respect your belief in fairy tales?
3) We don’t share the same last name. A woman taking her husband’s last name is proof that she’s committed to the marriage. If she keeps her last name (not her maiden name), then she’s a flake and a gold-digger and a heartless banshee who doesn’t believe in God’s design for marriage.
4) We spend time alone with members of the opposite sex. Even just a hint of impropriety according to gossips and busybodies is enough to convince your spouse to cheat on you. Let’s pretend that bisexual people don’t exist, because otherwise they could never have any friends. Letting Dan share a hotel room with a female friend of ours so he could attend an engineering conference means our marriage is doomed. Me spending the night later this week with a male friend of mine who I’ve known for 8 years and who I haven’t seen in over a year means I will suddenly forget my wedding vows and cheat on my husband.
5) Dan didn’t ask for my father’s permission to marry me. Clearly unless a man gives explicit approval in advance of an engagement, then a couple is self-centered and immature. Grown-ass women are not capable of making their own marital decisions. Besides, it’s more important to flatter your future father-in-law’s ego than it is to respect your future wife’s autonomy.
6) We didn’t live together (long) before we got married. You absolutely must live with your significant other before you get married. Choosing to live two hours apart means you’ll never discover each other’s bad habits which could become deal-breakers.
7) Sometimes I “withhold” sex from my husband. If you don’t say “yes” every single time your spouse requests sex, then your spouse will cheat on you. Also you make God cry every time you decline sex.
Obviously this is a little tongue-in-cheek. I can’t help but roll my eyes at a lot of marriage advice, especially from Christian marriage “experts.”
Why will your marriage fail? Share your thoughts in the comments section!
My marriage will fail because we *did* live together before we tied the knot. And because we’re one another’s first relationship. We met too young. Got married too young. Etc. etc.
Honestly, everyone’s different, and every relationship is as unique as the individual people filling it out. Why does *anyone* think there are universals (aside from love and respect for your S.O.)?
I married my first boyfriend too, although he does have one ex-girlfriend out there somewhere. I’ve also heard that if you *do* live together before marriage, you’re doomed to divorce.
To your last statement YES YES YES! That’s what I’ve tried to emphasize in my series on dating/relationships/sex. I try to give very generalized advice on best practices, but I point out how everyone is different. Just because something works (or doesn’t work) for one person/couple doesn’t mean that’s true for everyone else.
Ugh. These make me so mad. And you know what’s funny? While these may be some of the more “popular” beliefs out there, I’ve even heard the opposite of some of them too. Just do what works for you!
Yup! Basically, if you live together before you get married and have a happy marriage, then CLEARLY everyone must live together before marriage.
But if you don’t live together before you get married and have a happy marriage, then OBVIOUSLY that’s the only way to have a successful marriage.
Or maybe, every person and every couple is different?
Haha just maybe you’re on to something there!
I couldn’t help but bust out laughing at the “heartless banshee” comment. It’s sad and laughable that so many people still think this way.
I giggled a bit while writing this. It was fun!
They all have it wrong lol. There is no set of rules for successful marriage.
Exactly! Because all of us are different. 🙂
I mean, you know my feelings on love, marriage, and happy endings in general: Nothing lasts forever, the whole “love conquers all” trope is laughable, and the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep (Kenny Rogers is one of my karaoke go-tos)
But regardless, passing judgment on another person’s marriage is a demonstration of moronic narrow-mindedness. And frankly? There are two kinds of people that choose to criticize another person’s marriage so glibly:
On one hand, there are people who are unmarried but jaded and bitter about it (I’m not advocating dismissal of anyone not in a long-term relationship from participating in discussion on the subject, it shouldn’t be a members-only club; but if you are unable to keep your own bitterness from coloring your opinions of others’ relationships, well . . .)
And on the other hand, there are people who are married but about whose marriages I am legitimately worried. Because if you fail to recognize the beautifully mutable nature of love and commitment, then there is no chance that your marriage will be able to survive the ebb and flow that life visits upon every relationship since time immemorial
Every love is different, and it’s the ability to allow your love to change and modify that allows a commitment such as marriage to survive. Brita, your acknowledgment of love’s inability to be categorized and pigeonholed is a source of strength to your marriage, and I’m really rooting for you
That said, relationships have a lifespan from birth to death just like everything else in the world, love is a delightful thing but there are still plenty of times where’s it’s just not enough, and sometimes you just get to the point in life where you’re all out of aces. But maybe that’s just my jaded and bitter side talking 😉
The funny thing about #6 is that recent research actually shows that couples who cohabitated before marriage were less satisfied with their marriage in the long run. So it may be a popular belief, but it’s one that research has proved time and time again to not be true 🙂
#1 I think in this day and age is changing drastically. Most people meet online on things like Tinder. I don’t see why meeting in person makes a difference, I never have, maybe I’m just weird.
And #7. I don’t think you have to say “yes” every time. There’s no reason to do that grudgingly, that’s not going to strengthen your marriage at all. BUT, I do think that with holding sex and using it as punishment or incentive or anything like that can be harmful. So I see that one two different ways.
#2 kind of intrigues me, especially with some things going on in my religion right now. Having the same values and religious beliefs was one of the not negotiable things on my list of “future spouse” qualities/must haves. I’m doing an interview series next year on the blog and just added you to my list of wives to interview for this topic 🙂
#7 You should read the link I included. It’s to a guest post of mine on a Christian website. I intentionally put “withhold” in quotation marks to imply I don’t mean the actual action of withholding sex. But way way way too often do I see ANY refusal of sex equated with a cold and manipulative withholding of sex. This might be TMI, but the longest Dan & I have gone without sex is 3 weeks–and I spent a large chunk of that time violently ill and in severe pain.
#2 If I were to remove my heartfelt belief that Dan and I were meant for each other, my jaded response would be the utter failure of Christian men. #sorrynotsorry In 100% honestly, I literally have only met maybe 3 Christian man IRL who were both interested in an egalitarian marriage and supportive of saving coitus for marriage. (And by “supportive,” I don’t even mean they made that choice for themselves, but they would be willing to do that for a partner who wanted to wait). An atheist who shares all of my values, who respects me as a person, and who wants to be equal partners in a marriage is a much better partner for me than a Christian who can’t manage those three requirements.
I’ve bookmarked that link and will go read it this weekend when I get the chance!
I have heard a lot of the same things about Christian men in general. Our LDS beliefs teach waiting for marriage and that sex should only be between a married couple, so in my faith, it’s not as difficult to find someone with those same values and beliefs. But I agree, more than your religious beliefs, someone who holds the same moral values as you in all aspects is more important!
My marriage is doomed to fail because I had sex with other men before I met my now-husband. I have permanently given little pieces of myself away to those men (who hold onto them tightly and consider me their wife), so now I only have enough left for my husband through the end of 2016. Whoops.
YOU HARLOT!
Your husband is obviously a pillar of morality who has graciously forgiven you for sharing his property with other men.
HAHAHA
I love this.
This is great. I love #4 especially. I’ve heard so much flak about this because I have close guy friends and like to spend time with them without my boyfriend. Even my friends question it!
My husband lets me have power and say over a lot in our marriage. I’m the dominant one and he’s happy to follow my lead. Shame on him for not making me be more submissive LOL! My father in law told us we had our roles reversed.
I’m not familiar with the statistics on any of these topics, but I know that, apparently, as far as studies/research show (which carry a little more weight than mere random opinions), the bleakest thing I have going for my marriage is that I married in my teens, as there are studies showing that a higher percentage of teen weddings end in divorce than weddings in mid-20s. Of course, it’s important to note that statistics aren’t predictive, they’re representative for a sample population. Sometimes people try to use statistics to predict the outcome of an individual case and that’s just not possible. Obviously, I have no idea if my marriage will end in death or in divorce, only the decades to come will tell. Give me a couple of weeks and we’ll have done 5 years together, but that’s a snap of the fingers when it comes to a lifetime.
I totally thought I had already replied to this. Oops.
You know the whole causation /=/ correlation, right? So I assume (zero facts to back this up) that the reason that, statistically, young marriages don’t work out, has more to do with why young people get married than the fact they get married young. If you marry for the wrong reasons, regardless of age, your marriage is less likely to last. Since you and Angel (I think) got married for the right reasons, then your marriage should continue to be wonderful. 🙂
My marriage will “fail” because we spend too much time apart and he’s in the military. Apparently, it’s viewed as normal for military couples to cheat. Honestly, I think we’ll be just fine despite the obstacles life likes to throw our way.
Ok, I have a question. I don’t mean to be all judgey or anything, but is it hard to navigate life and marriage with your husband who doesn’t hold the same values as you? Obviously no two people have exactly the same set of values, but when one is a Christian, and the other an atheist, it’s kind of opposite ends of the scale right? In my marriage our Christian faith determines everything we do, from how we spend our time and money, through to how we will raise our children. I don’t mean to be negative, but how do the two of you approach these differences practically? Sorry if I sound rude!
You don’t sound rude, but I do appreciate the extra step to be polite since tone is hard to discern online. 🙂
The short answer is that my husband and I have pretty much the exact same values except I believe in a Greater Being and my husband doesn’t. I get this question a lot from Christians, and I think it stems primarily from their own religious beliefs, which I don’t necessarily hold. (However, please correct me if I’m wrong). These religious beliefs are usually one or both of two things.
The big one is that I’m pretty sure I don’t believe in a physical hell, but even if I did, I don’t believe that anyone is doomed to hell just because they don’t accept Jesus as their savior. I could go a lot more into that, but then I’d be writing a whole blog post. If I had time to do that, well, there would be a whole blog post for you to read!
I assume that when Christians wonder how I can marry an atheist, it partly stems from their belief that all non-Christians go to hell.
The other is that my husband actually acts out Christian values that quite frankly, MANY self-professed Christians I have known personally over the last decade do not at all have. I’ve been so turned off by the words and actions of Christians that it’s not really a surprise I ended up marrying an atheist.
To be blunt, my greatest barrier to finding a Christian man to date was finding one who a) respected me enough as an equal to be cool with me keeping my last name upon marriage AND b) was saving sex for marriage. Not to over-generalize, but basically the progressives were all having premarital sex and the virgins all believed in male headshit.
But my husband actually met those two requirements, and so many more. <3
I assume that when Christians wonder how I can marry an atheist, it partly stems from their belief that you need to have religion to have morality.
Ahh that actually makes so much sense to me! It wasn’t the whole hell thing that I was wondering about, more so how you, as a couple, decide to spend your Sunday mornings (not that Sunday morning church defines Christianity) and all those little things! I guess most non-Christian males that I know have wildly different morals to me and spend their whole time drinking excessive amounts of beer and sexing all the gals (Exaggeration. Kind of.) so I didn’t see how you and your husband’s values could easily align. I know, silly me.
This all kind of reminds me of one of my single friends who is not a Christian but has all the morals of one. Her hunt to find a man has never worked out because what she is basically looking for is a non-Christian Christian! haha
Thanks for replying to my question! It’s helped me to understand you a bit better! I have a blog too (www.eversobritty.com) if you’re ever bored! Again, sorry for being nosey and asking personal questions! Lol.