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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."
Amen!
/gf.
Man I hate when my finance deletes stuff off the Replay before I get a chance to watch it.
Trust me this was around a 6 month battle, culminating in me telling her that if she didn't respect my Replay shows, I would remove all her Days of our lives and she would never get to find out what happened to Luke and boe or JR and Henry or who ever the hell is screwing the other ones wife
"I am root damn it!! quit erasing my shows!"
Trust me she got the point...
DP
"(I) have this unfortunate condition that causes me not to believe a single thing any politician says when a mic's on.
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.
I've been married for 10 years and I agree with you 100%. Men who don't take any crap from their wives normally end up divorced.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
Is this really that hard people? This sounds like an author in search of a problem to write about.
Look, if the average person out there had basic problem-solving skills, many of us would be out of work... : p
This guy's the limit!
Contrary to popular belief it's not a competition, it is cooperation. I'm not pussy whipped and she's not some 1950s version of a submissive housewife. You don't dominate, you work together, and it works out fine.
been married 10 years
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
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".
"been married 10 years"
Been together/married for 19 years.
Cooperation is good, along with having ones own space. "Space" = gear, too.
Wife and self have seperate workshops, seperate computers and peripherals, seperate vehicles and seperate tech in general.
Anything that is best set up for one person should belong to that person.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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.