To think that marriages have a shelf-life

[Blindspot82]

I think most people fall in love with the idea of marriage.....committed to one person, forever, forsaking all others, till death do us part. It sounds very romantic at the time and people who do marry probably have the best intentions........at the time. The idea of finding a soulmate is very comforting.

And then, after the kids come along and years upon years spent nappy-changing, domestic servitude, repetitive boring sex, or no sex at all, washing clothes, little to no interesting conversation, ironing, paying bills etc etc the dream is over, the spouse is at best, a very good friend who you love but no longer fancy and surprise surprise, people find themselves straying, or catching their partner straying.

Lots of people do remain in committed marriages but equally, so many people take lovers, have polygamous agreements, or just end up splitting to start afresh. People feel bad for having affairs, but they're too scared to end a dead marriage for various reasons.......social condemnation, security, etc etc. I wonder if marriages do have a natural shelf-life and we're biologically pre-disposed to couple romantically with more than one lifelong partner. Lots of other cultures don't have the puritan Western view of one lover. Is it setting yourself up for failure to expect total emotional and physical loyalty to one person, for the rest of your life? "For the rest of your life" is a long fucking time! I think most people find it too long. AIBU???

I guess I was one of the lucky ones

You’re lucky if you get what you want out of life. A lifelong marriage doesn’t always give that, especially given what I want is to be single. I feel I’m lucky that I learned what I wanted young enough for it to be possible!

@Span1elsRock I think you've hit the nail on the head there, same here.
We've had some awful times, brilliant times, and plenty in between. I can't imagine starting over with someone new, and I'm sure he can't either. No it's not all bells and whistles but we have a laugh every day, and common goals/interests.

Of course marriage has a shelf life - it's a lifetime. We still make that promise, don't we? Some people fail at it, but that doesn't make marriage itself a failure. It probably means they shouldn't have got married in the first place.

It's ok saying people grow apart but I don't think it's acceptable to grow apart when you have kids and the legal contract of marriage.
Kids shouldn't suffer because parents cba to work at their relationship.
All couples could drift apart, those married for years could have given up many a time, but you communicate and make compromises, meeting somewhere in the middle.
If you are stupid enough to marry someone before you know who they really are then you only have yourself to blame.

I know some men turn abusive after marriage, some displaying red flags beforehand which are ignored. Others hiding it until kids come along. Of course I'm not suggesting you try and stay together where abuse is concerned. But all the divorces almost half of marriages, isn't a result of abuse.

It's ok saying people grow apart but I don't think it's acceptable to grow apart when you have kids and the legal contract of marriage

What qualifications have you got to offer advice on anyone’s relationship? Surely you can only decide what’s acceptable in your own relationship.

Kids shouldn't suffer because parents cba to work at their relationship

She hasn’t suffered. She has three loving parents (me, her father, her step-mother) who all parent her as a team. She would suffer far more with unhappy parents.

People are all different. My family has a history of extremely happy long-lasting marriages: my grandparents celebrated their 50th very happily; my parents celebrated their 60th several years ago now and are still very happy; dh and I have been together for 35 years and married for 26- I don't find it long at all. Don't get the thing about little to no interesting conversation: if I found dh interesting as a young boy in his early 20s, why isn't it at least a possibility that he has grown more interesting, has thought more, and has more to say in his late 50s? He has read more, he has talked to more people, he knows more.

I don't expect other people to live my life, but I would be extremely silly if I just took a lover because I had an idea that there is a natural shelf-life that works the same for everybody.

I'm in my mid-50s and tbh the rest of my life doesn't seem like that long at all.

Of course marriage has a shelf life - it's a lifetime. We still make that promise, don't we? Some people fail at it, but that doesn't make marriage itself a failure. It probably means they shouldn't have got married in the first place.

My parents have been married for over 50 years. For around half of that my dad has been an alcoholic. If my parents had divorced 10-15 years ago when it became clear that he was dragging my mum down with him, I still wouldn't have regarded the marriage as a failure and I certainly wouldn't have said they shouldn't have got married. They had children and for the first 25 years were happy together. I don't think they could have predicted how my father would change.

So I think their marriage had a shelf life and it was successful for a time, but now isn't.

drabani you have a very simplistic view on this. It's rarely that simple.

Your amateur psychology doesn't cut it either. How do you know what is best for all kids in all families?

Come to think of it, I wonder if the secret of the happy marriages in my family isn't precisely because we are so interested in life: not just in big exciting adventures, but in little things like reading a new book or baking a new kind of biscuit or walking down a new path to see where it leads. We seem to be very fortunate in marrying men who share that childlike delight in life.
(we also have anxiety and depression running through the family, as well as a hereditary physical pain condition, so it's not all roses- but the one thing it is not is boring)

I love being married to my DH even after a decade. We are a team. No DC, but plenty of ups and downs with life in general.
We are a team and I genuinely believe neither of us could find a better team mate.
We are each others champions, cheerleaders, shoulders to cry to, he eats mushrooms of my part of pizza and gives me skin from grilled chicken😁
Neither of us are romantic. But we value that we have actually found the perfect match. And we wouldn't be where we are without each other.

Some marriages might have a "shelf life". I strongly believe ours doesn't. We will sit here in 50 years cracking stupid jokes about what's on TV. We still sometimes piss each other off obviously.😁

What Marsha said on the first page: to the world I’m a disabled, slightly grumpy, middle aged woman. To DH I’m (sometimes) still that fearless, slim, redhead he fell for thirty years ago and thought was a great catch.

And to me DH is still a head turningly gorgeous boy. Only now I know he’s a kind and loyal man too.

All the good and bad times we’ve been through, what we have couldn’t be replicated with anyone else.

All the good and bad times we’ve been through, what we have couldn’t be replicated with anyone else.

I think you really put your finger on something there. For some people it works like this.

Dh is, among all sorts of other things, my companion-in-arms. The one who fought with me during the really tough times, the one who has seen what I have seen. The one who sat with me by the bedside of our child after yet another suicide attempt and laughed with me when someone cracked a joke that showed that we were still, mercifully, a family. The one who I can turn towards and look at and we both know that we climbed this mountain together. I could never replicate that with someone who got airlifted to the top by helicopter while I was crawling on my hands and knees.

Doesn't work that way for everyone, but that's how it works for us.

I've seen it all to often, but people will justify it to themselves and say their kids are fine.
I don't think you should get married for years, until you know the person, but I'm old fashioned with a happy family still all intact.
Of course I'm glad that some make it work, that's not to say there aren't a lot of harmed kids out there because mum and dad couldn't be arsed.

The amount of times me and dh could have split up over trivialities, they became trivial when we spent time communicating.
We'd have been divorced after a couple of years otherwise.

aaawww I hope not, been with DH for 17 years and still love every bone in his body

I don't think you should get married for years, until you know the person, but I'm old fashioned with a happy family still all intact

We’d been together 5 years when we got married, 7 before we had our daughter.

What I didn’t know was that we’d lose a much wanted child, and endure 5 years of unsuccessful fertility treatment. You might say that is trivial, but it changed us both and we gave each other the greatest gift we could - freedom with love. I think that’s the most caring thing you can do for anyone when you’re not fulfilling their needs.

So many posts like this seem to assume that 'marriage' is the same thing for everyone and that because a lot of marriages end, that means the concept of marriage (or a lifelong monogamous relationship) is flawed. In reality, though, every couple is different. Everyone has different expectations and everyone has different experiences.

For some people, a marriage might have a 'shelf-life' because their expectation/hope was that their relationship would be exactly the same after 20 years as it was after six months. Other people might find it easier to accept that a marriage will evolve over time. There is no one-size-fits-all approach and nobody's expectations/requirements are right or wrong; it's just personal to them.

Personally, I'd say my relationship (we're not married, but we've lived together for 17 years) is in a very good place and there are no signs of it reaching an expiry date. It isn't the same as it was when we'd just met, because we're both older and our lives have changed, but it is just as happy, possibly more so.

Of course the main issue is that there is, of course the archetypal “smug married”, who think they’re better because they’re doing it right.

You’re only doing what is right for you, it isn’t a badge of moral superiority.

@JacquesHammer I agree. No one knows what's around the corner. Alot of things in life are totally out of your control and I say that as a happily married person.

Jaques, I didn't mean to come across like that, but now can see what I did. I was just trying to answer the assumption that everybody gets bored with each other and that this is some kind of inevitable development. Truth is, some people get bored, some people don't.

I didn't mean to come across like that, but now can see what I did

You absolutely didn’t. It was very clear you were talking about your happiness in your own marriage, that isn’t what I was talking about

People pick the wrong partners that they shouldn't have married in the first place.
Marriage is also about finances and how the world seems to run. You need 2 incomes to have a decent standard of living. It's better to be married in the event of people's deaths etc for inheritance.
To go through a whole life together, 60/70 years of marriage is amazing in my eyes. All the shared history. I've been with my husband for 20 years and already we have shared so much, good and bad. I think marriage is a good thing but I do think it should be easier to seperate if needed.

YABU. If you feel like that, you just have a crap marriage.

DP and I don't want kids, so that's a non issue. Our sex life has always been infrequent by choice, so it won't change. I don't see how people run out of things to talk about. I've been talking to my mother every day since I learned to speak and haven't yet run out of conversation. Surely everyday you have new things to say? If not, stick on the telly and do a Gogglebox. Chat about what you're watching.

I don't think marriage has a shelf life. I think people rush into it with the wrong person and then regret it. Or, very often, different parenting styles drive people apart. That's a biggie.

YANBU and @Blindspot82 you've actually made me consider and reflect on my own current situation with my "partner".

The idea of renewing the contract every 5 -10 years utterly negates what marriage means. We are supposed to go into it in the expectation that it is forever. Otherwise we might as well do away with marriage altogether!
I think we need to take abusive relationships out of the equation - obviously the best thing is for those to end asap. My grandparents had a very long marriage, but it certainly wasn't a happy one. My nan deserved a better life than the one she got.
But wrt to normal, non abusive relationships, the whole point of marriage is to take the tough with the smooth and hopefully end up with a relationship where you really do have someone who has your back no matter what. That's valuable and if you don't try for it then you have wasted an opportunity.

If you are stupid enough to marry someone before you know who they really are then you only have yourself to blame.

Genuinely this is the most stupid, ignorant and arseholey comment I've ever read on Mumsnet in my whole life. What a dick.