Relationship Advice No One Asked For! Fun For All!

Anytime anyone spouts advice on a blog, you should probably take the advice with a grain of salt.

When I spout advice on my blog about anything -- especially about relationships -- you should take it with a whole, giant margarita glass rim of salt. Plus the tequila.

I am sharing this with you now because it's been on my mind a lot lately, for a few reasons. Mostly because I've just entered into a new, wonderful marriage...and thus, it seems like a good time to remind myself why my first marriage went up in big shooting orange flames.

(I am also sharing this with you because I was not kidding when I said I was going to start blogging like mad. Muahahahahaha!)

Luckily for the internet, the entirety of My Relationship Advice can be boiled down into just two pieces, as follows.

(And don't worry, we'll be back to all kinds of blogging hilarity any minute now.)

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Piece of Advice Number One:
Being Passive-Aggressive is destructive to you, to your partner, and to your relationship. It is also dishonest. It is your job, as a grown-up, to say yes when you mean yes and to say no when you mean no. If you aren't sure how you feel, it's not your partner's job to figure it out.

Being passive-aggressive can take on about a bajillion forms, and I am pretty sure there aren't enough blogs in the world to cover them all. Especially when there are so many cute cats to take pictures of.

But there are some really really straightforward ways to avoid being passive-aggressive in your relationship. Trust me on this.

If your partner asks you about something you don't like, do not say "okay" if you don't mean it. The moment you say "okay" or "fine" or "sure" or "I guess so" -- even if you sound kind of sad when you say it -- the onus is on you. You don't get to say yes if you mean no. You especially do not get to say yes if you mean no and are going to spend the next days, weeks, or even years holding it against your partner.

Now, this can get tricky, especially when the whole point is that you wish you weren't being asked the question in the first place. You want your partner to know the answer is "no" without you having to be the one to say it.

Let me use an example from my current relationship.

Last Thursday, Ish asked me if I'd mind if he spent Saturday afternoon with a friend. I looked at the calendar and realized it was Valentine's Day. I immediately felt hurt. I was, momentarily, at a loss for what to say.

• If I said "Sure, fine," I'd be lying. I didn't feel fine about it, and that disappointment in me would likely seep into our relationship.

• If I said, "No," I'd feel guilty for saying so. I don't want to force my husband to spend Valentine's Day with me.

What I really wanted was for him to not have asked the stupid question in the first place. You know? And that was what I said to him.

I told him that I felt bad that he'd rather hang out with a buddy on Valentine's Day than with me. I didn't like saying it. I felt a little stupid and exposed, and I wished he'd just magically known where I was coming from. Like, of COURSE I would want to spend the day with him.

But then his response surprised me. He apologized, and said he didn't see it that way. He didn't think much of the "holiday" and had no idea I put any stock in it -- we'd never had a conversation about it. He said we'd already made special plans for that morning and evening, and thought a few hours in the afternoon wouldn't make a lick of difference.

Let me just say that this example would have gone very, very differently in my first marriage.

I dunno, I've just seemed to witness this a bunch lately with some couples I know. The case of, "I said it was okay because I love him and want him to be happy!" Which is very nice and wonderful and good if you can live with your making-him-happy decision. But if you hate your decision and it makes you unhappy, and you find yourself complaining about it, and even perhaps adding it to an arsenal of "Things I Do For Him Because I Love Him"...um. I don't think it takes long for that arsenal to breed resentment. And that resentment will come out eventually.

Which brings me to...

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Piece of Advice Number Two:
All the improved communications in the world can't make the person you're with be a different person. If your partner wants something other than what you want, (or simply IS something other than what you want) you either have to accept it or move on.

This seems kind of "duh"-y, but it'll sneak up on you.

No matter what relationship you're in, there will come a time or two or forty when you realize you have very different ideas about something. You'll want one thing and your partner will want another.

In my first marriage, we spent a lot of time figuring out how to communicate, how to compromise, how to find common ground in those situations. Yay for us.

But...if we were so good at figuring that out, why were we still so unhappy?

Ah-ha! Because there is ANOTHER part!

What we didn't realize for far too long, what no one told us, was: Okay, yes. All relationships require compromise. But there is such a thing as too much compromise.

It's great if you can be all honest and forthright about how you feel in any given situation, but what if your partner seems to never want what you want?

I knew of a woman whose husband couldn't do anything right. He mishandled bill-paying. He was a bad driver. He went about vacation planning all wrong. He couldn't even load the dishwasher properly. The list went on and on and on.

Of course, what this really meant is that he wasn't doing things the way she would have, or the way she wanted him to do them. These were all just surface-level issues, but they all pointed to the same thing: he wasn't what she wanted him to be.

I know plenty of couples who have very little in common, who come at everything from almost entirely opposite perspectives, and who absolutely delight in each other's differences. But the flip side of that is exhaustion -- feeling like everything is a compromise, and that every compromise is a struggle. You wish that just once you didn't have to "put up with" something to get your desired result.

And all of this is my long-winded way of saying it's not, actually, always easy to recognize it; sometimes we get too deep in. Sometimes the little things that bug us are really just the little things. But sometimes they're not.

You have to be honest about the difference. And it's probably a good idea to move on if you (allow yourself to) realize you're angry at your partner for simply being who he or she is.

You will both be happier for it.

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Okay, so yes? No? Do you agree or am I nuts? Am I missing a big point in here?

Also, is this stupid for me to be blogging about?

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~ Previous entries you might want to read ~

Related to this post: The one at the beginning of my divorce story where I realize my husband will never want to go to the stupid party with me.

From the archives, mid-February two years ago: A post about PORN CHARADES! With no pictures because I accidentally renamed them all in Flickr. Oops. (But rules for Porn Charades can be found in the comments!)