The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I'm successfully married in so far as that I'm married and it lasts. Does that qualify?
I'd say your summary sounds about as good as it gets. You can never know for sure and there's no telling how clouded by love your mind really is, but if the facts are as you laid them out, then go for it. You're unlikely to find much better.
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You can never fully reason out that a relationship will/won't work out. It's the other minds problem, "What is it like to be a bat?" You can never really know what someone else means when they say they feel love. A lot of over intellectual fuckboys agonize themselves into knots over trying to figure out if this is real love or fake love or whatever, but at the end of the day you're always taking a gamble. Nothing will give you 100% certainty of a good marriage, not living together first not mutual virginity not entrenching yourself in a trad community not joining a polycule. It will go bad for some people.
For me, and keep in mind I was 20 at the time, I realized Mrs FiveHour was it for me like you realize you won the big pot and you should cash in your chips rather than keep playing poker. Every partner is a gamble, some are better gambles than others, assuming you want to get married you'll need to pull the trigger on one. Do you want to reroll?
No, my parents married hella old. ((Like probably old enough that if you wanted to make fun of anything I posted by linking to stats about geriatric pregnancy I'd have little counterargument)) Ironically my sister and I both found our partners relatively young, she married the guy she went to senior prom with, I met my wife sophomore year of college, though technically I got married at a younger age despite my sister's two year head start.
No. We've had a long running understanding on several fronts, but it's not something we're actively engaging in most of the time, and we've always been 100% socially monogamous.
However, I will note at the time I made the decision to commit I expected to be fully classically monogamous, truthfully Mrs. FiveHour had dropped hints about alternatives from early on but I thought it was typical 20 year old girl shit talk about how great and open minded she was about things that would never make their way into reality. I was... Wrong about that.
ETA: What are you deducing from these facts?
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When I was trying to decide if I was going to propose to my wife, I talked to my dad and brother (two people I highly respected) about things. Which is something I highly recommend you do as well. Talk to some men (I assume you're a man) who you respect and have experience with marriage. For me at least, the most valuable part of the experience wasn't advice. It was that to try to answer the questions they asked me, my own thoughts got sorted out as I tried to come up with an answer.
One specific question my dad asked me I found very helpful. He said "it comes down to this: are you better off with her, or without her?". And as I thought about it, I decided that I was in fact better off with my then-girlfriend. I had a good woman who I could be happy with, and that was what mattered. Like @janeerie, I don't believe in "the one". Getting married isn't about finding some mythical perfect partner, but about saying "yeah I'm happy with her, this will be good" and taking happiness in what you have.
What do you do if you have never met anyone who you can respect?
Hmm I am not sure what I would have done in such a case. I'm hoping that it's pretty uncommon and that most people have at least one person they respect to talk to. But if you truly have nobody, then you might need to fall back on trying to get advice from books or something?
I'm just asking as the advice hinges on that factor is all.
Sure. I would imagine it would be pretty uncommon for someone to not have anyone they respect to talk to. But in the case that they don't, my advice wouldn't work.
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There is no "the one." You just decide to commit yourself to this person to build something bigger than yourselves. There will probably be times when you doubt your choice, but then you just have to recommit and move forward.
The whirlwind emotions you describe, while nice, are not the foundation of a marriage. It sounds like you and this woman would build a lovely life together.
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