Relationship Advice

If you don't want to marry someone . . .

Don't marry them.

See, you won't change the little uncomfortable responses you have to their ticks, and they won't change the incendiary regurgitation they have to your passivity and if you both convince yourselves that you are what one another wants, you'll just get more and more miserable.

But a lot of people seem to think that marrying is better than not marrying, and by marrying I mean "being with" for any extended period of time.

If it doesn't feel good now, it won't feel good later.

Added wrinkle: if it feels too good now (read: hedonistically, indulgently, good), it will feel bad later, because a return to some non-amplified baseline is guaranteed.

Another point: stop pretending that your partner can possibly satisfy all of your needs.  YOU satisfy your own needs, and you share in activities with your partner.  Your partner is not your parent, and you are not six.

Final point: it takes a least a year to understand someone from multiple perspectives (i.e. understand what they're like when they get mad, when their boundaries are pushed, when they're exhausted, and what the idolize, really, and truly).  Don't lie to yourself about your partner because you want to be in love.  It will come back and bite you in the ass in a permanent way, like a tattoo across the forehead. There's no undoing "I'm a divorcee" from your mental machinery, no matter how innocent and lively and fresh you feel.

And one more thing, since i'm dishing it: Nobody is immune to time.  If you want to see what you get in 20-30 years, check out the parents.  Are they a wreck?  Are they functional?  Have they stopped growing emotionally because of weird phobia-inducing conspiracy theories?  Do they drink a litre of vodka a night? Yeah?  Watch out!  Stop lying to yourself, telling yourself that you're exception.  The secret is that everyone thinks of themselves as exceptional, and the sad fact is that we are all much more average and similar to other people than we want to admit.  And so our the objects of our affection.  So go do some digging.