Pointedstick wrote:
Although that Valentine's day gift is basically every man's dream come true, it's not the kind of thing that screams out "stable long-term relationship" to me. The ugly truth is that in a healthy and functional marriage, there's going to be a lot of dead time filled with boring stuff, drudgery, hard discussions of feelings and emotions, arguments, fights, hurt feelings, and the like. How the two partners deal with these stresses is one of the biggest things that I think determines the health of the marriage. Seekers of constant excitement, pleasure, and novelty will quickly tire of the boring regularity that inevitably creeps into every long-term relationship.
I'm glad you got to experience the dream, but don't let it change anything you were thinking before. You two are still in the courtship phase and that kind of thing is going to dry up once you're married. It has to; that kind of excitement can't be kept up for long in anybody without leading to burnout and exhaustion. A healthy marriage is much more of a marathon than a sprint.
Valentine's day threesomes are the granite countertops of a stable long-term relationship; the foundation is each partner's stability, emotional maturity, communication skills. If you've personally witnessed and experienced how both of you have those in spades, then go ahead and buy the granite countertops.
Im my opinion, the best people to ask for marriage advice are those who have been married for multiple decades, and especially those who have been divorced once first. Their perspectives tend to be very wise. So Ignore all the crap I just said until I'm 70.
Haha, looks like I just commandeered two threads. Guess that's what happens when you casually inject what amounts to a porn fantasy into serious conversation.
I totally agree with your assessment of what's important for the long-term, and had I not met her, I would have forever assumed (like everyone and their mother) that emotional maturity/communication skills and a propensity for kinky threesomes were mutually exclusive. I mean, threesomes are exclusively the domain of club-sluts with daddy issues doing lines off some rockstar's chest, right?
Her communication skills and willingness to a) express intense feelings in a non-combative, non-accusatory fashion, and b) ask me for exactly what she wants/needs without expecting me to read her mind (and resenting me when I fail to do so) are unlike anything I've ever experienced with a woman. Her more male disposition in terms of being direct is the source of constant exasperation with her female friends' complaints about their boyfriends/husbands, which she usually diagnoses as mostly her friends' faults for attempting to manipulate rather than communicate. From what I can gather, her rather unique attitude and capacity to engage with her emotions in this way resulted from sustained exposure to her mother's good example growing up, as well as a lot of deliberate practice and hard work on her part.
Considering marriage isn't a new post-Valentine's day conclusion. I started thinking she was the one within mere weeks of dating, and in all my previous relationship experiences, my head has never before gone there.
As for threesomes, we've had them with three other girls prior to this. She's truly wired differently when it comes to jealousy. She explained this to me a few times, but I didn't really believe her until the first time we actually had a threesome and I experienced not only the complete lack of jealousy, but the depth of her excitement and vicarious enjoyment at seeing me inside another girl. Leading up to the first time I must have initiated like 10 "are you sure?" conversations expressing that I didn't want to do it if there was the remotest possibility it was going to induce bad feelings for her.
As long as she knows I'm being completely honest with her in our relationship in general and feels secure in my love for her, she knows sex can be just sex, and doesn't feel threatened by other women if she's part of it. And it's not like it's just about me, she's thoroughly bisexual. Though the field admittedly borders on pseudo-science at times, evo psych would suggest that being in close proximity to other women desiring me heightens her appreciation of and attraction to me, but without the destructive downsides of jealousy in her case.
Compared to previous relationships, the freedom to express (and every once in a while follow up on) my physical attraction to other women without passive-aggressive jealous reprisals is unbelievably liberating. Not having to continually be in a state of hyper-vigilant self-censorship ("oh shit, hot girl, act like I don't notice her"), and in fact being able to share and enjoy that integral part of my psyche with her, has helped foster a level of honesty and intimacy unlike anything I've ever experienced. I also have noticed that I think about other women a lot less than I have in the past, and I suspect it's because they're no longer entirely off-limits. Forbidden fruit tastes the sweetest etc.
I, on the other hand, am not even remotely ok with other guys (girls are fine), and even her mentioning a previous sexual experience with a guy is liable to trigger all of my jealous, mate-guarding instincts. We've talked about it, and she's completely ok with the asymmetry here (like I said, not a feminist).
Though I haven't been married, I have to imagine that as long as it's honest and not to excess, the occasional injection of sexual novelty must surely aid in long-term marital satisfaction. At least or especially for a libidinous guy like myself that has historically experienced a relatively high degree of sexual choice. Freud once said (I think in a letter to Jung?) that the only recipe he'd found for a happy marriage was a license for infidelity.
But anyway, while this element of our relationship is interesting because it's rather unusual, it's sort of off-topic because it's, as you say, the "granite countertop" of our relationship - not the criteria by which I'm evaluating her suitability as a long-term partner.
People tend to have very strong Judeo-Christian influenced opinions about this kind of thing, which would unfairly lead them to question her and my judgment in general. People with those opinions may still have tremendously valuable insights to offer about relationships and marriage in other respects, and I'd rather them honing in on our sexual deviancy not obstruct my being able to learn from them.
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