Well, you can certainly take precautionary measures. If you don’t want them to pass away make sure they look both ways before crossing the street, stay away from bear pits, don’t smoke, eat healthy, etc. If you don’t want them to love someone else then make sure you are being a good gf/bf/wife/husband. If you don’t want to grow apart then prioritze to spend time together and have things in common.
There is no immunity from “passing away” or anything else (outside of CFA exam duration matching), but there are certain things you should do to make the outcome more likely to turn out the way you hope it will.
My view is that meeting someone is all by chance. You can meet someone you connect with well, and over time (dating, doing nice things, being together), you decide they make you happy, and you marry them.
But so many times in life, you suddenly meet someone you connect with very strongly, they make you feel special, you feel a much stronger spark then what you had with your wife, what do you do then? And it can be as simple as… you saw some flaws in that person you married, and someone new and exciting came to you that doesn’t have those flaws.
Should someone be confined and locked in for the next 50 years of their life just because they met that person first? If you ask old couples who stay together decades, their tone is generally one of “marriage is about work”, “it’s about compromise”, etc etc. You almost never hear: “oh yea, we’re as hot for each other as when we were teens”
People marry after getting older because they believe their ability to attract others diminish. Girls try to lock in because they know their looks will fade (and let’s face it, men are aesthetic creatures).
I think two people can be together extremely happy without a lock-in of a signed piece of paper.
When i was younger i probably would agree… but now that i am older, i don’t think there is a forumla for love. And we can only try our best to maintain a relationship. A 100% good wife doesn’t necessarily mean the husband is never going to cheat. The most beautiful woman probably can’t keep her husband from looking at another girl…
While it’s easy to say “spend time together” and “find things to do together”, but if your other half doesn’t love you anymore, they may find that suffocating, and invading his personal time and space.
Marrying for romantic purposes only started in the last century. For some reason people thought it was possible, but when you look throughout history, marriage was never intended to be about love. As soon as it become about love, divorce rates spiked.
This is also exactly what I said. These are preventative measures. I know somebody that never smoked a day in her life that died in her twenties from lung cancer. Very sad. That doesn’t mean we should all just say f’ it and start smoking.
I think people have a very hard time admitting they messed up in any way in a bad relationship. When I think about past break ups, sure I could just say “it wasn’t meant to be” but the reality is that I screwed up in some way. Maybe I wasn’t that into the girl, but then I should have ended it instead of just not being a good bf.
But if i have learned anything in statistics is that just because two events happen at the same time does not equal to causation. Marrying for love and divorcing rate may go in the same direction but one cant conclude that marrying for love causes higher divorce rates.
What I’ve learned… life is all about comparison. If you only had one or two cookies, you can never really tell what is a great cookie. Maybe you had 2 bad ones, and never had a good one. OR you had 2 great ones, and just never knew how great until you eat a bad one.
Same with relationships. You learn about yourself and how others react to you, what others like about you. And you learn about how great the women you dated really are… once you go through several of them.
A starving boy given a loaf of bread would be so happy, while a wealthy man would scoff at it.