The Marriage Box

Marriage Advice

I found this advice online while looking on Pinterest for wedding ideas. I love these ideals and the way they are presented. I want to create my marriage on these principals

1. Go to bed mad.
The old maxim that you shouldn’t go to bed mad is stupid. Sometimes you need to just go to freakin’ bed. “Let not the sun go down upon your wrath” is prefaced in the Bible by the phrase “Be angry and sin not.” So, who’s to say it doesn’t mean “Stay angry, bitches. Don’t let the sun go down on that awesome fierce wrath of yours.” Seriously. Whoever interpreted this to mean that you should stay up after midnight, tear-stained and petulant, trying to iron out some kind of overtired and breathy accord -- was stupid. Shut up, go to bed, let your husband get some sleep. In the morning, eat some pancakes. Everything will seem better, I swear.

2. Laugh if you can.
In any fight, there is one person who is really mad, and one person who isn’t that mad. That person should deflect the fight. Make a joke, do something stupid or corny, make the other person laugh. If the fight is very serious for you and you feel like you really want to plant your flag and die on this hill, fine. Do it. But if you’re fighting for entertainment, or because you’re just reacting, then you be the one to deflect. Fights are bad. Deflecting a fight whenever possible is a good idea. When you’re the one who’s being pissy and raw, and the other person helps you get out of it and brings about peace, that feels fantastic.

3. Don’t criticize. Ever.
Here is a fact: Whatever critical thing that you are about to say to your wife/husband is already being loudly articulated in her head. And if it’s true, she already feels like crap about it. Assuming you married someone intelligent enough to like you and sane enough to let you put a ring on it, trust that they are self-aware enough to know when they screwed up. It may feel good to you in that moment to say the critical thing, let it go ringing through the air in all its sonorous correctness, but it will feel awful to hear it. The only, only way it’s beneficial to give your wife criticism of any kind is if you’re absolutely positive she is completely unaware. And you better find the nicest, kindest way possible to tell her. And even then; good luck convincing her. Their recognition of the thing you are helpfully trying to point out will be INHIBITED, not facilitated, by your criticism. And then you’re the asshole. So be careful.

4. Be the mirror.
Your husband is the mirror in which you see yourself. And the things you say to him give him an image of himself too, which he will believe. You want him to believe it, so make it good. Be a mirror that reflects something positive: you’re smart, you’re successful, you’re fantastic in the sack, you’re a great provider, and you’re the best. Can you MAKE him any of these things just by telling him he is? I don’t know, but consider this: the alternative really sucks. The things my husband says to me are 1000 times more convincing than anyone else’s opinion on earth. Don’t think he won’t believe you because you’re married and you’re contractually obligated to say nice things. He’ll believe the shitty, insulting things you say, and the gloriously positive things.

5. Be proud and brag.
Let your spouse hear you talking about them in glowing terms to other people. Be foolish. Be obvious. It will mean everything.

6. Do your own thing.
Dan races bicycles. I write books. I don’t race bicycles or have any desire to race bicycles. He doesn’t write books, nor does he even read the books that I write. Seriously. And I don’t care. My opinion is that he’s the fastest, coolest most awesome bike racer ever. His opinion is that I’m the bestest, coolest writer ever. We don’t have to know all about cycling or writing in order to form these opinions -- in fact knowledge of literature or actually reading my book might damage Dan’s opinion of me as “best writer since the dawn of time.” We can still support each other without being all up in the other person’s stuff. Doing your own thing, having your own friends, being completely insanely passionate about something that the other person has no idea, really, about, is awesome. It allows your spouse to be your cheerleader, uncomplicated by knowledge or personal investment. And it means you’ll always have stuff to talk about, because you’re not overlapping all the time. You don’t have to read the same books either. You don’t have to have the same friends.

7. Have kids.
Kids stop you from being as crazy as you want to be. Because when you have kids, you can’t be that crazy.

8. Get really good at sex.
You’ve got all the time in the world to get really really good, not just at sex in general, but at having sex with your one particular husband. You should make it your life’s mission to become the perfect sex machine exactly for him. And he for you. There is no reason to hold back, or be embarrassed, or not ask questions, and get everything working properly. There’s absolutely no excuse for letting years drag on without becoming fully skilled, gifted sex partners for each other. It makes everything so much better. Does talking about this make you uncomfortable? How uncomfortable would it make you to know that your spouse is secretly, silently “just okay” with your sexual performance? Yeah. You want to last forever, remember? That’s a long time to be mildly happy.

9. Move.
Live in different houses. In different parts of the country. Travel. Make it so that you can look back and divide up your life into the years you spent in different cities, or different houses. If you’re feeling stuck geographically or physically, you can confuse yourself into thinking you’re stuck romantically. See your husband in different places, in different contexts, in different countries even. Try it. Take him to a mountaintop and give him another look. Pretty sexy. Take him to a new city and check out his profile. Along the same lines, don’t be afraid to change personally, or let your wife change as a person. Don’t worry about “growing apart.” Be brave and evolve. Become completely different. Don’t gather moss. Stagnation is unattractive.

10. Stop thinking temporarily.
Marriage is not conditional. It is permanent. Your husband will be with you until you die. That is a given. It sounds obvious, but really making it a given is hard. You tend to think in “ifs” and “thens” even when you’ve publicly committed to forever. If he does this, I won’t tolerate it. If I do this, he’ll leave me. If I get fat. If I change jobs. If he says mean things. If he doesn’t pay more attention. It’s natural, especially in the beginning of your marriage, to keep those doubts in your head. But the sooner you can get go of the idea that marriage is temporary, and will end if certain awful conditions are met, the sooner you will let go of all kinds of conflict and stress. Yes, you may find yourself in a horrible situation where it’s absolutely necessary to get a divorce. But going into it with divorce in the back of your mind, even in the way way way back of your mind, is going to cause a lot of unnecessary angst. Accept that you’re going to stay with him. He’s going to stay with you. Inhabit that and figure out how to make THAT work, instead of living with the “what if”s and “in case of”s. But don’t give up trying to impress him.

11. Do not put yourself in trouble’s way.
Leave your ex boyfriends and girlfriends alone. I’m sure you’re very trustworthy. Aren’t we all? The thing is, there’s absolutely no reason to test it. Your husband and your marriage are more valuable than any friendship. Any friendship that troubles the marriage should be over immediately. Protect it with knives and teeth, not because it’s fragile but because it’s precious. Don’t ass around with a “hall pass” or a “harmless flirtation.” Adultery isn’t an event, it’s a process with an event at the end. Don’t put your feet on a path that could lead someplace bad.

12. Make a husband pact with your friends.
The husband pact says this: I promise to listen to you complain about your husband even in the most dire terms, without it affecting my good opinion of him. I will agree with your harshest criticism, accept your gloomiest predictions. I will nod and furrow my brow and sigh when you describe him as a hideous ogre. Then when your fight is over and love shines again like a beautiful sunbeam in your life, I promise to forget everything you said and regard him as the most charming of princes once more. The husband pact is very useful because you want to be able to vent to your friend without having her actually start hating your husband. Because you don’t really mean all those things you say. And she, the swearer of the pact, knows this.

13. Bitch to his mother, not yours.
His mother will forgive him. Yours never will. If you’re a man, bitch to your friends. They expect it.

14. Be loyal.
All the crap you read in magazines about honesty, sense of humor, communication, sensitivity, date nights, couples weekends, blah blah blah can be trumped by one word: loyalty. You and your spouse are a team of two. It is you against the world. No one else is allowed on the team, and no one else will ever understand the team’s rules. This is okay. The team is not adversarial, the team does not tear its members down, the team does not sabotage the team’s success. Teammates work constantly to help and better their teammates. Loyalty means you put the other person in your marriage first all the time, and you let them put you first. Loyalty means subverting your whims or desires of the moment to better meet your spouse’s whims or desires, with the full understanding and expectation that they will be doing the same. This is the heart of everything, and it is a tricky balance. Sometimes it sways one way and some the other. Sometimes he gets to be crazy, sometimes it’s your turn. Sometimes she’s in the spotlight, sometimes you. Ups and downs, ultimately, don’t matter because the team endures.

15. Trust the person you married.
For two people who are trying to help each other, it can almost be harder to let the other person help you than it is to be the one who’s helping. It can be harder to let the other person deflect the fight than to be the one deflecting. It can be harder to believe that your husband is fully committed to a lifetime of marriage than to commit yourself. It’s harder to change yourself than to let the other person change. It’s harder to be loved than to love. It’s weird, but true. I’m saying this to everyone who’s newly married, and to myself: trust that person. Love them completely and let them love you. If it all goes to seed, it’s going to hurt either way. Better to have gone into it full throttle. Full throttle marriage is a thrilling ride.

Stories

Every day in life is a lesson. There is so much in the world that we can learn about. Not necessarily about science and technology and engineering. We learn about each other. The more we live, the more we understand how people work. Course there are those people Nobody knows what goes through their brains. But even those people can begin to be understood. Not nearly to the degree of the average person, but a little. Enough to get you through the world.



Songs: Songs are great for learning about people. Honestly everyone who has ever written a great song has put a part of themselves in it. I was just listening to This ain't nothing by Craig Morgan and now Tiny Dancer by Elton John. Craig Morgan's song talks about a man who had lost his house, and he didn't care, because that was nothing compared to what he had already lost. There are two ways to interpret this song, and everyone will do it differently. One person could say it's because his heart is so broken he is numb. Some could say it's because he is grateful that it was just his house and not perhaps his grand kids. The way one interprets the song can also tell a lot about their personality.So when you hear stories in the news or from people themselves, about someone who has lost everything, you can sympathize just a little more than before, because someone has relayed to you through song just how awful their experience was, and how it was similar to the news story. Tiny Dancer is about a girl who marries a music man. Now, we can always just look up the background stories, and that's helpful. But what I get out of this song is he is talking about his best friend, or maybe his daughter and how she is personality-wise. Could be his wife. Either way he knows she is happy and is happy she's happy. See now we have one perspective on how a best friend might feel about letting his friend getting married. We also have a perspective on a vague love story. Maybe someone who is in love with the tiny dancer who is marrying someone else and he doesn't really want her to know. 

So many lessons to learn from songs about people and their attitudes towards things.

Movies and Books : This one is a little different than songs because songs are mostly based off feelings. Stories such as those in movies and books can be fictional or real. Complete fantasy or autobiographies. However, Even though they are fictional, someone still wrote it. Their version of a person was portrayed to us through a fictional character. So if they wrote a character's reaction to something, it's most likely the way they, or someone they have experienced, would react. If it's not, the reaction was created by the author or director's brain and who is to say that one day he will be subconsciously doing what he had created for his story. We can never rule out feelings and reactions in books and movies because even though most people may never go through these events, someone out there will react in a similar way. We can learn from the people around the reactor, and see how they handle the reactions. That can tell us how to go about soothing or shooting down those people who need it. Even if we don't agree with the way they did it, well, that opens our own minds to new possibilities created by ourselves and then there is one more feeling on the world.

Disney's Evil Henchmen

http://blogs.disney.com/oh-my-disney/2013/04/16/questionable-henchmen/
I AM STEALING THIS FROM DISNEY'S BLOG BECAUSE I LOVE IT. I DID NOT WRITE THIS.

Questionable Henchmen

Disney Villains really need to be more selective when it comes to hiring henchmen. Many an evil plot has been spoiled not by poor planning, but by entrusting the execution of said plot to inept or under-enthused sidekicks! Villains: if you want something done right (well, wrong, actually), you’ve got to do it yourself (or have Maleficent’s Raven do it).

Pain and Panic

These guys fall in the “inept” category for sure. They had one job: give a poison-laced bottle to Hercules. And they couldn’t close the deal. They then proceeded to bumble around the rest of the film and serve only as the emotional pincushions for Hades’ very pointed frustration. For being such a clever, naturally evil villain, Hades sure has a hard time picking good help.

The Huntsman

This one falls into the “under-enthused” henchman category. His heart just wasn’t in it—or his heart was just too big—either way he was not cut out to be an evil henchman. Snow White runs to safety, finds herself out of safety again, then back to safety by the end (spoiler-free plot recap!), all because of this less-than-helpful henchman.

Maleficent’s Goons

These guys searched for the same baby for sixteen years—not the brightest crayons in the box. But, Maleficent’s management style might be to blame: she probably should have followed up to see how the search was going after a few weeks, instead of waiting to find out they were going about it all wrong a full sixteen years later.

Horace and Jasper

They literally watched TV while the puppies escaped. They watched TV and ate a bologna sandwich while 99 puppies ran around in the background. No wonder Cruella was constantly calling them names! Overall, these guys are extremely ineffective, and the only henchmen to be outsmarted by a bunch of adorable puppies. If Cruella knew they were such “imbeciles,” why didn’t she hire someone a bit smarter? Who knows, and we’re glad that she didn’t.

Shenzi, Banzai, and Ed

Sort of like Pain and Panic, these three have one job to take care of, but instead they just sort of hope that things will take care of themselves. As little Simba runs into the desert, they’re like “yeah he’s probably done for… right?” and then hope for the best. What makes them even worse is that they ultimately turn on their evil leader! Henchmen seem to appreciate loyalty about as much as they do a job well done… not very.

Megara

We tend to forget, but it’s true: Megara started out as a not-so-good sidekick to Hades. We’re glad that she had a change of heart, ultimately making her really bad at her job but really good as a human being. That’s all great and fine, but it does spell out that Hades is probably the worst at recruiting good help out of any Disney villain. Meg also has one of the best song credits in Hercules, but that’s totally beside the point.

Smee

Smee’s not so bad; he’s sort of charming in his sweetness and care of Captain Hook. But there is that whole scene where he is concerned that he gave Captain Hook too close of a shave (i.e. removed the dear Captain’s head… oops!) In general he’s loyal and hardworking, but we just can’t shake that whole head-chopping-off scenario.

Kronk

Kronk was also not cut out to be an evil sidekick. True, he has a can-do attitude and does great personal sound effects as he carries out his tasks. But he has that habit of listening to the good shoulder angel that keeps him from being effective as a henchman. That big heart of his makes him a much better scout leader than evil-doer.

Brutus and Nero

It’s hard to project goodness or badness onto these two, as they are sort of non-vocal animals that seem to be inclined to chase whoever might be a potential meal for them. But, they also fall in the low-loyalty category like the hyenas when they turn on their master, Medusa, at the end of The Rescuers. If we were a Disney villains, we’d keep an eye on our henchmen; they have a tendency to forget where their loyalties lie.

Iago

Iago has his own little evil streak, making him a not-too-shabby evil henchman. Named after a particularly schemey Shakespearean villain, Iago does his best to help Jafar and isn’t too bad of a henchmen. Most of his shortcomings seem to stem from the fact that he is a relatively small bird; he can only do so much, he’s a parrot. Lack of stature aside, Iago also has a less-publicized change of heart in The Return of Jafar wherein he turns over a new feather and joins up with the good guys. Good parrot, bad henchman.

Twistable Turnable Man

He's the Twistable Turnable Squeezable Pullable
Stretchable Foldable Man.
He can crawl in you rpocket or fit in your locket
Or screw himself into a twenty-volt socket,
Or stretch himself up tot eh steeple or taller,
Or squeeze himself into a thimble or smaller,
Yes he can, course he can,
He's the Twistable Turnable Squeezable Pullable
Stretchable Tugable Wife.
And they have two twistable kids
Who bend up the way that they did,
And they turn and they stretch
Just as much as they can
For this Bendable Foldable
Do-what-you're-tolable
Easily moldable
Buy-what-you're-soldable
Washable Mendable
Highly dependable
Buyable Saleable
Always availabe
Bounceble Shakable
Almost unbreakale
Twistable Turnable Man
---Shel Silverstein

The Empty Chair

"One day she will show up." He paused to look longingly at the other couples gathered there that February 14th night. "When the right girl comes along." The waitress looked skeptically at the man who reserved a dinner for two every year, and then waited for the right girl to come along and sit down. He refused any girl who hit on him any other week, where he was undoubtedly to be found sitting at the bar. "I firnly believe that special girl, the one made just right fo rme, will find me. And I will be prepared for her." That's what he said last year, and the year before that. He said that every year for the 6 years this girl had been working there. Many times had they discussed well into the night about fate and soulmates. She knew he was a romantic. She continued on her way, serving the happy couples dressed in pink, red and white. He always waited until a half hour before the kitchen closed before ordering food. She kept a close eye on him, fearing...she knew not what. He wasn't the kind of guy to have a mental breakdown yet...here he was, sitting at a table set for two, just waiting for the perfect girl to fall into his lap. "Why do you expect her to just show up?" The waitress asked himt hat night. "You should be out looking for her." He gave her a look mixed with confusion and almost surprise. Then the look lightened, and he laughed. "Because I have done my part already." She looked at him ghastly, not believing the extent of his selfishness. She scoffed aloud, "That is absolutely no way to expect a girl to fall for you. Sitting here, paying money for nobody year after year, will earn no woman's love." The man looked at her and smiled tenderly. "I have searched for her. And I found her. I spend this day alone, but with her. If only she will come to me." The waitress thought for a long moment. Then she slowly sat down in the second chair.

Dreams

I think one of the points of dreams are to rid ourselves of emotions that we do not use commonly, but are healthy for our balance. I also think that dreams can serve as an eye-opener, if you care enough to remember and interpret them. My dream last night was off issues with my fiancee, and in the dream, we grew stronger. That might have had something to do with the marriage 101 lecture my dance teacher gave me that night before bed, but the dream enforced a situation and specific emotions into my mind. It's easier to remember emotions and happenings other than words of someone. Dreams are "what if"s and "could be"s of our lives. Why not pay attention to them and try to make it happen? Don't forget your dreams. Write down the real emotional ones, and look over them again later, and try to put it all together. Heed the advice.

Symbols. There are always symbols to a dream. Look at the photo above. Typical dream right? Missing pieces, and Rainbow in the night, which doesn't make sense. Contradictions may just be a way to relax yourself in the dream. Who doesn't love a full moon, and rainbows? That's also one way to tell you are dreaming, if you are conscious enough to see it. I use things like that in my dreams to tell whether or not I actually took out the trash or went pee, because that dream felt so real.

 Emotions.Once again, emotions are put there to make you remember. But there will always be a level of emotional attachment to your dreams, because they are in you. There's a level of emotion to watching movies, and most dreams are the same as that. The ones with stronger emotions are the ones meant to tell you something.

Flashes. Ever notice how certain things are missing? The picture above is missing the rest of the world! My belief is that they then aren't to be worried about. We miss those things in our dreams because we need to know what our subconscious is telling us. The missing things are not pertaining to the point. So when you try to interpret the dream, only use the factors that the dream provided you. If you try to stick your sister into the situation, you will never figure out what it was the dream was showing you.

Control. If you pay attention to your dreams when you wake up, and start noticing what is wrong with them, and being able to know when you are dreaming, you can change factors in the dream. My most recent dream, I've always wanted kids, but recently changed my mind, so I pushed the kids out of my mind and dream. Pay attention to the real and not-so-real details, and the rest will come naturally.