Partnership With Complications

(advice from a happily married woman)

One thing that never ceases to annoy me is when people talk about having babies as though it will "cement" their love for each other. Or when they think that having babies will fix the problems they already have. There is nothing guaranteed to make things more challenging for a couple than having a baby. Already have a baby and having some marital problems? Having more babies will simply make whatever problems already extant even more amplified.

I'm not saying that children can't remind parents of their love for each other. I'm mostly saying that if your marriage is already troubled, bringing in another human being into your relationship who's going to have a hundred urgent daily needs to be met is not going to make life get smoother. I'm also saying that loving someone is not a good enough reason to have a baby with them. Women have been known to love the most unsuitable men who would make the most deplorable parents. A man who is good in bed and makes your heart do somersaults isn't automatically going to deal well with no sleep, and boobs that are no longer his, and having a baby's needs come before his.

• He/She should be a good companion. This is the number one thing I think is important. Romance is all well and good but will ebb and flow, maybe fade altogether into something more permanent and solid. Sex will also experience that ebb and flow, even for people with normal sex drives. What should be the steadiest thing between you is your desire to hang out together, to talk, to share experiences, especially the "mundane" every day experiences. So he/she should be someone you would consider your best friend.

• He/She should be flexible with life plans. Life rarely goes as planned. If you marry someone who has one very rigid idea of what will make them happy, chances are they will end up disappointed and you will both feel it deeply. If the only thing that will make a person happy in life is to have their own biological child, well, that's not an unreasonable desire unless it turns out that fertility is an issue. Then what? Will this person be willing to adopt? Or find other things to satisfy their desire to be around children? If this person's only ambition is to become president of the united states and they've never even gotten an acting job before?* What happens to your life together if they don't become president? Flexibility in navigating the twists and turns in life is an essential ingredient to finding happiness.

• He/She should not be a jerk. Yeah, because as surprising as it seems, getting married doesn't turn toads into princes. A marriage license is a lot less like a magic kiss and a lot more like an invitation to get more comfortable farting in front of your partner. So if he/she is a jerk already, getting married just means that you will be legally bound to a jerk. And no, a good woman cannot change a chauvinist pig. I don't care if your hoo-ha is made of solid gold, only a jerk can change themselves into someone decent and it won't happen as long as there are plenty of solid gold hoo-has that will take them just as they are.

• Being good in bed is NOT the next most important thing in choosing a spouse. It is more important that you choose someone you can (and already do) respect because living intimately together for all eternity will test your mutual respect like nothing else can. If the respect is solid then you can weather all kinds of indignities with kindness and with love. If that respect is like a thin cheap veneer, it will snap the first time your spouse experiences incontinence after having a baby or becomes a complete baby when struck down by a cold.

In fact, being good in bed isn't important at all because if you find your prospective spouse attractive and you have all these other great feelings for each other and your communication is great, you can both become exponentially better in bed as you navigate each other's very private preferences. Being good in bed is a skill and if the person you love isn't good in bed, that's no reason not to marry them because most people are motivated to improve in this area if it means they might get more sex. There are books and videos that can help you with that. It might be a good idea to find out (before tying the knot) if either of you have fetishes or fantasies that the other one finds repugnant.

• I have said before that I am not into S&M or any other kind of kinky or dangerous sexual practices and it would go very hard for me if my spouse could only really be satisfied by a woman wearing a French Maid's costume brandishing a horse whip. So as a last point I would say that in choosing a spouse, be sure to have some very intimate talks about the kinds of things that get you off. And also? If you're not gay, you might want to make sure they aren't either.

Wait...one more thing...if you don't really want to get married or your prospective spouse doesn't really want to get married? I think you should not get married.



*Ha ha.