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'Til Tech Do Us Part
WSJdpatton writes "Marriage often requires coping with the loss of some individuality, whether it's adopting a spouse's last name or setting up a joint bank account. Now, some couples say it can be equally tricky to navigate intimacy in the digital sides of their lives. They are running into thorny questions regarding how much to share and how much to keep separate in areas ranging from email addresses to online calendars.
For some young newlyweds, this means a debate over whether to combine their blogs. Longtime spouses, meanwhile, say perennial arguments about who has more closet space are now joined by bickering over which TV shows get deleted to make room on the TiVo."
The obvious question is, so what?
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Get a fucking life. In the end, I don't know a married man on earth who hasn't been completely pussy-whipped. If you get married, your wife will own you; it's that fucking simple. End of story.
Just like in everything else, it's about creating a solution to keep both people happy. Concerned about merging your blog? How about the two of you just start a new blog together and keep your old ones personal.
Is this really that hard people? This sounds like an author in search of a problem to write about.
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...by bickering over which TV shows get deleted to make room on the TiVo.
Do what I did and buy two. If you're going to argue, at least pick something worth arguing over. Television isn't worth the expended energy.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Keep it simple, keep it separate. All I can say is that in marriage you need alone time to do your own things. If couples do everything together, they will burnout on each other pretty fast. Trust me, it happens. You maybe in love today, but tomorrow maybe a different story, so it's much easier and cleaner to leave when couple have separate accounts.
If you're in a solid relationship, then you and your partner should have no problem sharing everything.
If you're a guy, let your wife know that you like to masturbate to bukkake photos online. In return, she can masturbate to photos of well-hung men of various other racial groups.
Furthermore, if you're a guy, let your wife know that you send raunchy emails to your secretary from a rather anonymous Hotmail account. And your wife will tell you about how she and her friends from the spa exchange pictures of their husbands' cocks on a phpBB forum they set up.
So in the end, everyone is open with what they do and what they like. There are no secrets. And your marriage is strong, just because everything is in the open.
(but sometimes I wonder why anyone would marry a vi person anyway)
Let me start by saying that I've been happily married for 7 years now, so I know what I'm talking about :)
We used to keep separate bank accounts, but consolidating everything helped keep us more organized. That's been the theme throughout our whole marriage. I do think that we play nicer than most couples. There are many things we share. For example I run 4 workstations, and my wife and I use them all. If one of us is on one, the other will go to another one. If we need to use something on box, IE a computer that has a VPN client installed, then we'll switch. We keep common email addresses, and share all the account info... mostly because we know each other's passwords. It's easer that way, and if you can't trust, or play nice with your spouse then you have more important issues.
We do keep separate blogs, but that's mostly because my wife runs one for her company, and I run a more personal one.
Who posts this bollocks to Slashdot?
Just the same as what radio station will we listen to, what will we both watch on TV, we like different foods, etc. etc. Is this some journalism student trying to come up with an 'angle' on a 'story'?
Dude, spend an extra $15 a month and get a second NetFlix account.
If she ends up dying of cancer at least you'll be able to say that you got to watch the movies YOU wanted. What the fuck, people? Get some perspective! Are you that hung up on the trivialities of your life that you can't work around them? Grow up and start acting like an adult.
In my experience what is "best" is to let each married couple decide for themselves what is "best".
When my common-law partner and I had children and moved in together for the first time we quickly disolved into a complete mess. I played my fair share in that. My biggest issue, looking back on it, was that I put far too much stock in what other people thought that MY marriage should be. People start treating you differently. Parents and friends try to, innocently, impose their ideals on you regarding what it means to be married and to be a parent and how you should behave and what your role is etc.
It also doesn't help that not only do you have your own family trying to be helpful, but your spouse's family, who may have been relatively distant before you actually moved in together, all of a sudden begins to act like they've known you all your life and you get the expectations from them too.
In my case it went down something like this. My family is relatively small and likes to get together every couple of months to celebrate someone's birthday. When multiple people have a birthday in the same month we merge the gathering into one and we get together for 3 - 4 hours and we try hard to plan it around everyone's schedule. The idea of celebrating something like an anniversary was entirely foreign to me. Sure, my marreid relatives celebrated, but they went out for dinner just the two of them. It wasn't a family event. My wife's family, on the other hand, is massive and they get together at every single possible opportunity (birthdays, anniversaries, 'just for the heck of it' bbqs and pool parties etc.) and they make it an all day and all night event and everyone is expected to be there. This wore me out. My wife and I had to balance two family responsibilities, but I never cared much for my wife's family and being forced to spend a great deal of time with them and listen to all of their expectations and 'advice' drove me to the point where I wanted to end it after about a year. If I didn't step up and be part of their family then somehow (in their eyes and, after absorbing so much of their opinions, in mine as well) I wasn't a good husband and father.
Of course, in the end, we compromised and worked it out. But my point is that I found when we moved in and started treating our relationship as a marriage, that the expectations on us from others grew exponentially over night. I wasn't prepared for that. We've been living together for 7 years now and I found that the most important thing is to concentrate on what the two of you want out of your relationship and to ignore all outside 'advice', regardless of how positively intentioned it may be. Every single person goes into a relationship wanting unique things out of it and most people are a little vulnerable in the beginning because they don't truly know what they're getting themselves into. And so at that point they're more likely to pay attention to what other people have to say. Particularly if there's children involved because (most) people want to be the best parents that they can be. But putting too much stock in what other people, particularly family, thinks can really drive you mad.
In other words, different strokes for different folks. Some people will want to merge every aspect of their lives and be completely happy with that arrangement, other people will want more independence. There is no "right" marriage or relationship. Everyone needs to figure out what's best for them and ignore all outside influences.
I found the perfect solution to this. The females of the household want the seat down as default so they won't fall in when they don't bother to look first.
My solution was to close both the seat and the lid. This gives neither side the advantage of default position.
Sometimes, I see how the industry is dying. All of the "smart techies" never reproduce. Because they were to dumb to figure out a simple issue.
I've had 15 years of marriage (and have two kids). Judging by the character of the posts, I'm pretty much a senior citizen by slashdot standards, because apparently I'm about 13-15 years older than the majority of posters here. I can tell you now, the writer of the original aritcle has their head up their ass. For that matter, anyone who thinks in the terms listed in the article really DO have their head up their ass, and shouldn't even bother getting married.
There are lots of solutions to the issues in the article, but none of them work as well as "here, just borrow my account to browse instead of me logging out" or "honey, whatcha reading in your email?" or any other form of give-and-take, which needs a foundation in TRUST. It's not "boyfriend-girlfriend on the playground at recess". It's a marriage. There is a simple solution: FOR SHIT'S SAKE, GROW THE FUCK UP.
Marriage is like a bridge, and each spouse holds one side of the bridge up. It takes both sides to keep it up and going. Sometimes, one of the two has to put the bridge down (for rest, health reasons, "me-time", family emergencies, whatever...doesn't matter, it happens), for just a breather - and the other one has to carry the load. If the marriage is working, that person comes back and picks up their end of the bridge. But the bridge won't stand up forever if only one is left holding everything up, or if both spouses can't agree to share the load and the bridge never goes up to begin with.
Guess what? Marriage takes an EFFORT. You will do HARD INTERPERSONAL WORK. Work that requires you hold up your end of the situation. It's you and your spouse choosing to share life - all of life - and all of each other, the good parts, and all the bad parts. If she can't deal with those things in you that are a part of you, or you can't deal with those things in her that drive you crazy, then it's just not gonna work. Ever. You need to find - gasp! - compromise. And it seems that the younger groups of today seem to have less and less of this critical quality that's needed for marriage.
This isn't me trying to troll. It's me trying to slap some sense into someone's thick skull. Seriously. No fool'in. If you have a friend that's about to get married, and they think they way they do in the article, you need to print this out, roll it up, walk up to them, and slap them upside the head - repeatedly. They need to really think about something as serious as this before just waltzing off to the land of eternal Tivo replays and iPod picks. Because it has nothing to do with tech. It has everything to do with "these people need to seriously grow the hell up".
This from a user whose id is "SPLATTER" lol
Honest Answer:
The only times I've taken out the trash was when she was really ill, or not home because she's 'on vacation' and I've bought her a plane ticket to go see her friends for a long weekend up in MN. She does most of the house cleaning. Why? Because I have a high tolerance for clutter, she has a low tolerance. I have my own computer, my own office, and we can both be in the house and completely ignore each other for our own interests, and then get together and either do something out of the house together or watch TV/Movie/Other when we want to spend time with each other.
She's let me play a video game for 14 hours straight, bringing me breakfast, lunch and dinner while I did so. During the heart of my WoW playing I would do that every saturday and sunday and she never complained about it. She felt I needed my down time. When I quit playing I asked her about it and she said some days it was a bit much but most of the time it was OK because she had other things she could do.
If I want something, i buy it. She knows I'm not going to starve the family for the next big gadget, computer, tv, whatever. Weirdly, she doesn't like to go shopping, she doesn't like to spend a lot of money, the nice clothes she's own I've actually found online and ordered them for her and surprised her for a birthday, an anniversary, or just because I was tired of seeing her wearing cheap ass t-shirt & shorts in the summer and thought she should dress up every once in a while to maintain her sanity and remember what it is like to be an adult.
She also has the important job, she's just underpaid. She stays at home with our 5 and 3 year old kids. I work. She may go back to work after our youngest starts school but at this point we don't really know what the plan is, as she never got herself started in a career she enjoyed.
I'm sure she has a list of things she likes to do, but she doesn't surf forums, she doesn't do much on the internet. She uses her laptop I got her three years ago for email, and to read the fark headlines and laugh. Yet somehow we met on the internet in '96. When we finally met in person I asked her how she found me and she showed me. (Long story, but gist of it was, late night, studying for MCSE in late '95, coworker bets me $100 I wont' post an online ad on a dating place as I'd been single for three years at that point, so I did)
She went to webcrawler, searched for 'personal ads' picked the first one she found, searched based on how far away they were, picked two people, me and some guy that lived near where her mothers family was, I answered. That was it. Her email consisted of double clicking on an icon in Win 3.1, it was a terminal client that logged into a dec unix box, when the $ she knew to type in 'mail' and new she could read, but if she hit anything other than r she never knew how to get it back.
I'm not a big fan of religion, or fate, or whatever, but to this day I have no clue how all that lined up in such a way that I've managed to find someone like her through a bunch of random little events.
There is no 'you do this and i'll let you do something you want' give and take in our relationship, we each do what we like, and we like each other. I've had more people I know over the years exclaim in disbelief when I've called her at 3 AM while in a club in some foreign city to say hi, or how I'm in Vegas at 5AM drinking texting away as she is waking up on the east coast letting her know i'm in some burlesque bar and think I just saw a porn star she might know the name of. Stuff like that.
It can happen, but near as I can tell, it's rare as shit for something like that. I don't know a lot of other guys my age that have a free flowing open relationship where there aren't things like 'if you take out the trash I'll sleep with you tonight' type of trades or other odd things. To me, it's a foreign idea.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.