Unintelligent Nerd has requested for me to share a can of worms with all of you.
And since all of us love delicious worms, I suppose I shall share my stash.
And since all of us love delicious worms, I suppose I shall share my stash.
Hi ERSG, A cheeky question, but what made you know your girlfriend (back then) was "the one" for you? Or maybe you do not have such schemas of "the one" in your mind, then what philosophy have you adopted on love and relationships? Just curious to hear your thoughts. Cheers!
--Unintelligent Nerd
LOL, I'm totally ok with talking about this.
I think "love" or "the one" is really a TV creation.
Personally, I feel there is no such thing.
It's definitely not easy to find an appropriate partner. I'm not saying that it doesn't exist, but the idea that there's a lightbulb that goes "ding!" and I know who I'm going to marry... I think that isn't how it works.
Or even if someone started out with a feeling of "lust/love" with all the excitement and romance, they will be in for a rude awakening when reality hits.
Life is not all fun and roses, and I think not many people recognize this. Put idealistic 20 something year olds who have just come out of school in a relationship??? What do you expect to get? How many people know what they want when they are 20+? How many people think it's all about this fuzzy feeling called "love" that is shown on TV?
Nah, I don't really believe in that. I believe this so called "love" is something to be worked for. If it's exciting, chances are, it is only at the start of a relationship and if you're expecting that to last for the whole relationship, then I think that's unrealistic.
Ok, so here's my story, I was never really really really interested in finding a partner. I mean, I expected to get married eventually and all that, but I always thought that it would work it's way out. When I got together with my wife, truthfully, I didn't expect to marry her, come on, I was at the last year of Uni, I expected to change as our live progressed and probably meet someone at work and probably marry that person.
But anyway, I got together with my wife, she was a nice girl, good values, sufficiently reasonable, we could talk things out. Hey it's not all fun and roses. We had a lot of disagreements in the early years.
But I think what's important is the couple's willingness and ability to iron things out talk things through, not just sweep things under the carpet. So it really depends on the values of both of the parties and what they both believe in.
Cos the fun is when it starts, the thrill of the unknown, no one knows how any relationship is going to progress, they expect the TV kinda "love" always exciting, always keeping the heart pounding. That's just not real, after all the excitement, it's really the values and how a couple can work things out that keeps them together.
We had the usual girly issues, usually she wants me to spend time with her... example, after we were dating for a couple of months, we started getting into the groove of my usual life, my family usually just hangs around at home on weekends to play mahjong, and this has been the routine for years when I was younger. And after a couple of months of dating, she fell into this routine as well, she accepted it at first, but got bored of it and made an issue that we don't go out much anymore.
And I told her, look, life isn't all about going out, eventually we have to settle down. We have to find hobbies to do with our family and all that. We need to integrate all these activities. I mean, we still can go out once in a while, but we need to recognize that life is a routine after awhile, and we need to be comfortable with the routine.
She was ok with this explanation. So it was left at that.
And then we had a big argument about going out with other girls. And I was pretty much... look, I have male and female friends, I can't be only going out with my male friends. I have some female friends who are stand alone and they don't mix with other people. So I have to go out with them alone.
If there's no trust in this then there's no point. Cos if someone's going to cheat, it doesn't matter what the scenario is. It's better that I just tell the truth of who I'm going out with and you accept it and don't kick up a fuss, else I could just lie about who I go out with, and that's worse.
And she was ok with that too....
Now note, I don't have much interest in girls in a relationship sense or a cheating sense. I'm someone who's more interested in money or keeping the peace and living my life simply. To me, getting into unnecessary relationships just messes up the overall life situation. It's like... woah nothing better to do, everything is going fine, then the person messes it up... err.. no thanks.
Or she was fussy about food and travel.
Now, I don't really like to spend a lot of money on food. I have a certain value which I need to encourage me to spend, it needs to be really good stuff for me to spend money, else I'd rather just eat some simple chai-png...
Same as for travel, I didn't really see the need to travel cos it was just a hassle for me.
But she wanted to eat some nicer stuff and travel and see the world.
And I was ok with it, I think it's a reasonable request, just as long as it's balanced. So we eventually started travelling more and eating nicer stuff at fair intervals.
And after awhile, I realized that I was likely going to marry her. There's lots of other scenarios, and the thing is really what are the values of your partner and how well they coincide with your own and are you both able to rationally talk things out and come to a fair conclusion.
Of course we weren't actively looking out for other partners to mess up our relationship.
Everyone's values are different. So there's no such thing as finding a perfect partner who has exactly the same values. But some values are more important than others, or some values impact other values.
Like I used to be very bad at communication, I didn't talk things out much, I was brought up in a proud family, we don't talk properly to iron out our issues, we try to hide pride issues under made up issues to maintain a quarrel. But somehow between us, we managed to work our way to a very open communication relationship, and once this happened, a lot of other issues disappeared, less misunderstandings and more trusting.
An historical post about my wife and our finances here.
No one goes into a relationship knowing each other's values, they just look pretty or are charming or are attractive in some other way. And somewhere during the dating years, you need to be able to sift through all the daily life and excitement and romance and reconcile all these differences in life/personal values, and probably both of you will need to relax some values along the way. Or if die die some key values cannot be ironed out, then I would recommend just looking for other parties, cos I know couples who did not/could not iron out some key values which they both deferred in, none of them are in the wrong, just differing financial values. They thought that it would settle itself after marriage, but the truth is, it hardly settles itself. So after marriage, it's still the same, but worse, cos they have all the baggage and kids and living becomes hard, cos... every few days, something erupts and it's tiring and hardly a fun way to live your life. And either they always quarrel, or they both shut off each other, cos if they talk they will quickly get into disagreement.
No problem in a relationship is without signal.
An abusive marriage usually has indications when they are already dating.
Differences in financial values must have already shown in the early years.
Pride issues, differing interests, etc...
The problem is are you able to identify them amidst all the romance and blindness?
So I don't think dating is about enjoying yourself. There's a task during dating. If it's all fun and games, means something is wrong. Cos it's a test drive, and you have to make sure the car is working as advertised.
So I don't think love is like what the TV shows.
It really gives a false impression of things.
It takes a lot of work and effort and wanting to make things work AND really making the changes if necessary. It's really BS when people say, "you must love me the way I am". Cos if the way the person is, is unreasonable, then there's little to talk about. Shouldn't you want to be a better person and seek to improve yourself IF it is a valid point? If you want to make the relationship work, and the request is reasonable, shouldn't you want to be a better person?
A highly co-related post I did previously is here Becoming a better person for your spouse.
Here's a very simple picture.
You can live your life walking your own paths.
Or you can live your life trying to work together to get closer to each other.
Else seriously... what's the point in a relationship?
Live separate lives but are married on paper? Then no point right?
So what's my take towards "love" and "the one"?
Well, I think there are probably many "ones". (Or maybe I'm so lucky but I don't know it.)
But I think there are probably many "ones", who share similar values to many of us, BUT it's not easy to find them in a large population, not to mention, it's also not easy to iron out issues and work together for a common goal, a good relationship, future goals, etc.
I also reckon that staying together for many years helped us better understand each other on a daily basis. Cos by the first 2-3 years of staying together, we had pretty much settled down, and we probably stayed together for 8 years before we got married. So after marriage wasn't pretty different.
I also think, after marriage, staying together is another monster all together. It's different from dating period as well. House work, finances, parents, kids, and all these also need to be worked out with your partner.
So maybe I'm lucky... we got "married" around 6 months into our relationship. Cos we already stayed together and all our living habits were already exposed to each other.
Then again... if you asked my wife, she would probably give you an entirely different response to the question above. But let's not go there.
<<PREVIOUS POST // NEXT POST>>
Did you like this post? If so, could you "blanjah" me 1/4 cup of my morning coffee pls.
Many thanks for continuing to come to this blog to read my posts.
RSS Feed
