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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This is one of those generic pieces of casual advice that literally leads people into hell.
I'm not writing this to attack you, @FtttG, but to attack that idea.
Relationships are not about compromise unless there is a greater goal to compromise for. Otherwise, this is a circular argument that is also negatively compounding. Think about this rephrase;
"Relationships are all about compromise. When I want to do something that my wife doesn't want to do, she compromises her own happiness (just a little!) to make me happy. Likewise, when she wants to do something that I don't, I do it, and compromise my own happiness (just a little!), to make her happy. The relationship net happiness is totally the same, right? Not at all slowly degraded."
The intent, genuine as it is, is to maintain system stability in the relationship. But if the "goal" is the current state of affairs, then every possible choice becomes overweight in risk because every possible choice represents a potential change to the system. Soon enough you get into defection problems. Think of this scene; Guy wants to go our for guys night, has already informed his girlfriend / wife of his intention days before, she has agreed, but, then, at the moment he is pocketing his keys to leave, she hits him with the puppy dog eyes and asks if, maybe, just this one time he can stay home and watch Netflix with her. Why? Because there is no direct relationship upside to him hanging out with the guys. Sure, sure, he needs time with his friends and all, but there's the much higher risk that some bar slut will make a move (or is that just a perceived risk?). The point stands.
My counter is that relationships are about two people working towards a defined mission. Usually, thats the having and rearing of children. When it isn't, there has to be something beyond mutual emotional support (which is stasis). Perhaps that something is being the DINK couple that travels a bunch. "Babe, we're going to hit 50 countries this year if we save and budget!" maybe it's the fitness couple - they run marathons together. It doesn't matter what the particular goal is just that The Goal is there and third party to mutual emotional support. Then, you can "compromise" because both parties can see it as a positive sum sacrifice for that external goal. The guy stays home from boys night because the drinking will impair his training. The girl doesn't nest up the couch and binge watch netflix because that means missing a training session.
I think I have to disagree here. I have no idea if I'm qualified to give any advice here, all I have is N=1 data point of 20+ year long marriage. But I don't think it requires KPI goals. I mean it's cool if you run marathons together, but it's not a requirement. People being comfortable together and genuinely interested in each other's happiness is a requirement. That's where the compromise comes from. If I want to do something, and I suspect my wife may be not ok with it, I ask, and she can say no. Or she can say yes. Or if she says no, and I really feel like I need it, we can talk about it. The key here we want to find that point where we're both happy - or at least, the least amount of unhappy - about the outcome. It's not a mathematical formula and it's not a ledger, if you start keeping balance on it, you're going to get in trouble. But it's totally about sometimes just doing something you otherwise wouldn't do because your partner wants you to. If you're going to be good long-term partners, you will be able to find a way to figure out how to negotiate those things, everybody does it in a different way. If you can not find a way to do it, then probably the partnership is not going to work out.
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