Long Relationships

Yesterday I touched on today’s lack of definitive roles for males and females and the push towards the asexual society. I finished up the post by saying: I’m not saying, “Whahoo! Let’s go back to the days of the past when ‘proper’ ladies wore skirts and all men were the breadwinners.”

The unfortunate thing about calling sillybuggers on the current way we’re heading is you are accused of wanting to go back to suppressing women. “Keep ‘em pregnant, barefoot, and in the kitchen.”

You’re accused of being old fashioned if you practice it, you’re accused of sexism as well as other things if you point out the way we’re heading, and things only tend to get more confused.

So what are we supposed to do with all this confusion?

A way to begin looking at conflicts and start solving them is looking at the parents of both partners.

How did your parents treat each other? How did your partner’s parents treat each other? By investigating the ways the two differ, you can begin to get a glimpse of what could be causing conflict and/or confusion in your relationship.

For a personal example, I grew up in a household where my mother made the rules and my father was the punishment giver who didn’t say much. However, the chores were eventually forgotten and the lines became blurry.

Then soon after I graduated high school, my parents found a church I’m choosing not to name. My mother turned into a submissive wife and my father turned into the dominant force in the house. While they were figuring out their new roles and trying to impose new ideals on me, I was internally conflicted. I felt as if they were betraying the roles and values they’d taught me growing up.

When I moved in with my husband, I was a very confused person in terms of our roles in the relationship. Thankfully, my husband understood my confusion and was encouraging as I worked out exactly who I wanted to be. We often compared the traits of our parents’ relationships and talked about how we felt about the roles we would take over.

By talking, comparing, and talking some more, we’ve avoided a lot of conflict and confusion. Yes, there are a few annoyances here and there, but they’re a lot fewer and less annoying than they could be.

Disclaimer: I admit this post is more geared to the heterosexual relationships. However, I do believe the principals can be applied to homosexual and even friendship and family relationships when looked at in different ways. I am in no way trying to disregard or ignore relationships outside of the heterosexual variety.

Hello relationship-ers. Welcome to today’s modern relationship.

There appears to be a bit of confusion in today’s relationships. Should the man wash the dishes? Should the woman fix the car?

Why, of course. You can do whatever you want to do. However, this can be used as a prime example of one of the things that goes wrong in today’s relationships and causes problems.

The cause of a lot of strife - perhaps not all, but a lot of it - is that society is changing in ways that doesn’t support the role based relationship of the past. No longer are we taught that women need help from men to reach things or open the pickle jar because you’ll have someone screaming ’sexist!’ at you. Heaven forbid you want to be a stay at home mother who likes to have her husband’s coffee ready for him when he gets home.

Our society is focusing more and more on the asexual being - men and women are completely equal. While that’s all fine and good, it fails to acknowledge that men and women simply aren’t the same. There are basic things - beyond penises and vaginas - that make men and women different. Granted, you have your tomboy woman and feminine guy, but you’ll generally have truths for the sexes.

No longer are we taught how to deal with the opposite sex, and that can cause problems. Why? Because society pushes for things, instincts push for others, and the environment you grew up in pushes even more.

It’s fine enough when you have a man who has been taught to respect women and a woman who has learned men should respect her meet up. But what happens when a man who has forever learned and heard about the independent woman meets a woman who wants to stay at home and be a mom? Yeah, some do still get married despite the differences.

Not only that, but you get couples who are confused about their roles with each other, with their children, and they worry about how they are viewed by society. (Or at least other people who scorn the stay at home mom or look strangely at the stay at home dad.) With all this confusion, it’s no wonder problems arise.

I’m not saying, “Whahoo! Let’s go back to the days of the past when ‘proper’ ladies wore skirts and all men were the breadwinners.” However, it is good to be aware that with the push toward politically correct, asexual, we’re all equal in all ways mentality, there is going to be confusion and there are going to be problems.

I thought it would be appropriate to tell you a little about my relationship, given I’ll likely be talking about my husband and our lives a lot. (The picture is of my wedding ring.)

I met my husband online through our mutual online friend in October 2005. We hit it off right away, falling in love over casual flirting and a lot of science. I was, unfortunately, with someone else at the time, but I knew I wanted B in my life and that we couldn’t be just friends.

He and I officially became a couple not long after we were introduced.

After a year of many emotions, learning to maintain a long distance relationship, phone calls, texts, and video chats, we began planning my departure from the US. We made an agreement that I would fly out there and we would give being together in person a try. If it didn’t work, I would move into the spare room until I could find a place and job of my own.

Thankfully, it worked out fabulously. One night as he was at his computer and I sat on the couch playing on my laptop, he suddenly spun around and got on his knees in front of me. I looked at him, confused, and then he asked me to marry him.

We got married on May 5th of this year.

This is a very much shortened version of events, but I could write pages about the progression of our relationship. More of the details will probably come out in my future posts, anyway.

I would like to invite all readers here to send me the story of your relationship. Be it only how you met or the entire story up until now. Feel free to send it to me either by using the “contact me” button under the site description on the right or by emailing me. I’d like to start posting up a story each Monday.

(Feel free to send me what you send Lyndsey for the contest she has!)

Do you have a lovely summer love story? If you do, you have a chance to win an autographed copy of The Best Lesbian Love Stories: Summer Flings.

451Press’ resident lovely lesbian lady Lyndsey D’Arcangelo was recently published in the love stories anthology and has a copy she will sign out and send to the person with the best summer love story.

It can be any sort of summer love story – gay, straight, young, old – and all you have to do is send it in to Lyndsey. Her email address and the post announcing the contest are here.

Not only will the winner receive an autographed copy of the anthology, the winning submission will be posted up on Lez Keep It Real.

The contest is officially open, so send in your love stories and perhaps even do yourself and your partner a favour by remembering how and why you fell in love.

Good luck!

Considering this site is here to talk about Long Relationships, I thought you might find this little bit of weekend entertainment amusing. It’s videos like these that make me glad I am out of the dating scene…and make me miss the roller coaster a bit, too. (Not that there aren’t plenty of highs and lows in marriage!)

This is a video from a post on YouTube Digger, and the full title is actually:

(more…)

Hello and happy Friday! Fridays are a lovely day. There’s all the hope and excitement for the weekend or even for Friday night when you might be going out with friends or staying in to cuddle with your significant other.

As you may have guessed it, Long Relationships has a new writer. I’m not new to 451, but I am new to the Dating and Relationships channel.

A note about previous posts: For right now, I’ve put them all in one category - Previous authors. I know it’ll be terribly annoying for anyone to find anything on this site while it’s that way, but I promise I’ll be going through them and putting them in to the new categories I create.

About me… You might know me from the other sites I write for here on 451 - Fiction Scribe, Write Anyway, The Book Stacks, and YouTube Digger. I’m a twenty-something formerly of the US, now living in Australia with my husband (who, yes, is a sexy Australian).

I’m not here to shout I know more than anyone else about keeping relationships going. I’m not a psychologist, and I’m not a marriage counselor. However, I have always had a passion for writing about relationships, so I hope I can provide some interesting posts on maintaining long relationships.

If you ever feel the need to contact me (I’ll be asking for personal stories and such in the future) there is a “contact me” button under the site description that you can feel free to use.

Thank you very much. I’m looking forward to posting more.

JM