Best Of

Marriage is hard

Must admit it always worries me when people say stuff like this. I'm only six years and in only one kid, but tbh it's been piss easy so far. Don't piss on the floor, don't fuck a co-worker, don't be a raging alcoholic, job's a good un.

(Also those three are only guidelines)

Come back when you're 15 years in.

We're not that far in it's 8 years for us in April but there are events (like two miscarriages for us in a row in fairly short succession) that can be very tough on both people and you feel as though you have no one to turn to. In the end my best friend and his wife came over helped us have a "clear the air" evening where we both just let it all out and communicated properly for what felt like the first time in a few months. I think if it hadn't been for that we'd have been on the fast track to divorceville. What's completely wild is that fundamentally we were both on the same page, that we wanted to keep trying, that neither of us blamed the other one (especially me, I absolutely didn't blame her though somehow she felt that I did) and because my best friend and his wife had been through a very similar situation they were speaking to us both from experience.

It really, really helped to have that support from our friends and I think that's where religion used to play a big role in marriages which was probably a really big net positive that people are missing.

I do wish people would lay off @HYUFD and the abuse. Yes, he likes to post slightly dogmatic highly traditionalist High Tory views, and then stubbornly digs in when challenged, but that's no reason to be nasty.

I'd say the best way to lower divorce rates would be more marriage courses and marriage counselling.

Marriage is hard and we've had some tough moments. We still hark back to the all weekend marriage course the CofE ran for us before we got hitched in our local church, which we still find useful.

Apprently the way to reduce divorce is to have less lavish and expensive weddings based on a US study.
'According to the data, women who spent more than $20,000 on their wedding were 1.6 times more likely to eventually divorce than women who spent between $5,000 and $10,000'

The logic is apprently twofold, 1 Finances are prominent reason for divorce so starting off with a financial millstone of paying for the wedding and everything around it is not a good start and 2. its been theorised if you are that concerned about impressing everyone else with a lavish do maybe you havent quite got the focus on the relationship itself.

I think it's a case of correlation not being causation here. People who want lavish weddings are more likely to get divorced, the lavish wedding is part and parcel of the personality of the people in question.

I think the best advice I had about weddings was from my dad - if you make your wedding day the best day of your life by spending all this money and effort everything afterwards is destined to disappoint.

My wife and I had a very small (by Indian standards) ceremony with close friends and family. Neither of us wanted a big to do and the thought of doing so still gives me cold sweats. I think in total there were about 50 day guests and an additional 20 evening guests. My mum was worried about people in our extended family being offended but almost everyone understands that some couples want their weddings to be personal to them, I think we had one distant aunt who was upset enough to phone my mum and have a moan.

Yes, ignore these fools

If you absolutely insist on spending 20-30k on a wedding (why???) spend 5-10k on the ceremony - find a nice civil place, a decent gastropub, serve curry and wine and make sure everyone has enough booze. Then spend 20k on a magnificent honeymoon

Better still spend a lot lot less

My wedding cost about £700, and most of that was oysters and champagne for five at Sheekeys, and my marriage was blissful, and only ended by the age-gap, there was no acrimony and no lack of love. Happily our honeymoon came free, courtesy of the Knappers Gazette sending us to several Anantara and Aman hotels in Oman

Ours was £9k, we didn't have an official photographer just got people to add their snaps to a shared album and printed the best ones. Some of our friends are brilliant artists and took some amazing pictures and one of my uncles is a camera enthusiast so he had an amazing Leica film camera which he used for some portraits later in the day after the ceremony out in the grounds of the venue, those are absolutely incredible.

In comparison one of my cousins had a £75k giant wedding, divorced 3 years later.

oh god yes. I WEEP at the money spunked on insane gaudy weddings, £50k and up, and then I hear they've split within a yearor two

All that time and effort...

There must be a cause-and-effect at work here, indeed several. If a wedding is massive and insanely pricey it suggests there is a lot of familial and social investment in that wedding, as a statement, and it may not speak of true love at the core

If the couple has the guts to say No, we want a small wedding, and they bring it in under 10k or even under 5 or 1k, that means they are really committed, all that matters to them is their love (and their close friends and family) and that's why they last

What I really didn't like about the wedding is how formulaic it was. I've been to more weddings than probably most people in the country that aren't priests of some kind (seriously there was a summer a few years ago where we went to 16 weddings in 9 weeks) and they all fall into three categories - the first is the big lavish do with ~500 people, the guests are looked after but it's clear they've spent upwards of £50k on it and it's down to familial pressure as you say. The second is the big, cheap chaotic wedding where they've got a small budget but weren't able to tell their parents "no we don't know who that is so we're not inviting them" or "we haven't seen that uncle and aunt for 10 years so we're not inviting them". The final is the smaller event which varies from 20 people in a registry hall and then dinner/drinks at the pub nearby or 50-100 people at a church and nearby venue in the evening. By far the third category always has the most memorable weddings (for the right reasons). It's not even close.

My wedding was lovely - happiest day of my life - but for the purposes of this discussion neither small nor lavish so not particularly interesting.

I want to tell you instead about a friend of mine who had a surprise wedding.
His family situation was difficult - both his parents and his other half's parents had had acrimonious divorces and could barely bring themselves to refer to the other party by name, let alone share any civillity. Any attempt at negotiating some sort of wedding arrangement had for this reason floundered before it started. Meanwhile, their relationship had plodded happily along and they'd had a daughter. When the daughter was one year old, they combined a Christening with her first birthday party - and most of their famillies, including all parents had swallowed any differences and turned up (a Christening being a rather less socially demanding occasion than a wedding), along a thoroughly satisfying nnumber of friends. The daughter was Christened, and the vicar gave a little homily, which touched briefly - to some worried and disapproving noises in the congregation - on the fact that the parents weren't married and that the church had traditionally disapproved of that sort of thing. On this - which was of course a pre-arranged cue - my friend and his partner looked at each other thoughtfully for a beat, before he went down on one knee and whipped out a ring - to more gasps and cheers from the congregation. The vicar (who was completely loving this) then gave her next line of the performance, which was "we've got 25 minutes now, if you want", to which the couple of course assented, and the bride then beckoned her father, whipped off her coat to reveal a wedding dress underneath, and the confused but happy congregation headed down to the other end of the church to witness the unexpected wedding. It was all done so quickly none of the warring parents had a chance to fall out with one another.
There then followed a slightly confused but delightfully happy party at a village hall with a buffet and a children's entertainer (for of course it was also a one year old's birthday party), before the couple waved everyone off at 6pm in order to take their daughter home for bath and bed, before settling down to watch Sunday night telly, still in their wedding gear.
It was about as cheap a wedding that it was possible to have. But more memorable than most, and brought the couple no less happiness than a wedding of ten times the cost.
Happy to report they are still happily married 12 years later.

For my wedding we didn’t even send invitations—just screamed the date and time out the window and hoped word got around.

The ceremony? Held in the staff canteen at my cousin’s job down the industrial estate because the fluorescent lighting “set the vibe.” The registrar did the nuptials on one of those plastic trays you slide round the rails, and then chucked it back in the trolley rack, whilst some of my mates threw ripped tissues at us and cheered Oi! Oi!

For food, we raided the vending machines but only gave our twelve guests 75p each and called it a lucky dip. The cake was a stack of pancakes we pilfered from Tesco and topped with a tealight. Our rings? Stolen coke can tabs. And for the honeymoon? We took the bus to the next town and walked around the petrol station car park, sharing a single bottle of White Lightning, before I slashed in the Car Wash, she vommed into the plastic bin, and then I tupped her behind the kebab van before grabbing a bag of chips from Mustafa and then staggering back home.

Best day of my life.

I do wish people would lay off @HYUFD and the abuse. Yes, he likes to post slightly dogmatic highly traditionalist High Tory views, and then stubbornly digs in when challenged, but that's no reason to be nasty.

I'd say the best way to lower divorce rates would be more marriage courses and marriage counselling.

Marriage is hard and we've had some tough moments. We still hark back to the all weekend marriage course the CofE ran for us before we got hitched in our local church, which we still find useful.

Has anyone watched Love After Lockup?

It's a reality TV show that follows people who fell in love with inmates (and, yes, there are prison dating websites in the US). It's full of people who are completely deluded about what marriage is about: people whose only wish is to be married, and it almost doesn't matter who they will be marrying.

If you want to lower the divorce rate, then I would start with educating people about the realities of being married.

At Company Y, we were developing a computer for browsing the web, with a bespoke browser from another Cambridge firm. As such, we would get sent in websites that did not display properly. One of these was (from memory) prisonbabes.com, or somesuch.

It was women in prison wanting to meet men. Whilst 'testing' the website, I came across one young lady who was in for life, and whose marital status was widowed...

… and having met we’ve been happily married for twenty years. She gets out next Tuesday.

... The doors were thrown open, and in they came. Each of them, as he entered, brought some different report of their numbers. It must have been impossible, as you may conceive, in the lobby, crowded as they were, to form any exact estimate. First we heard that they were three hundred and three; then that number rose to three hundred and ten; then went down to three hundred and seven. Alexander Barry told me that he had counted, and that they were three hundred and four. We were all breathless with anxiety, when Charles Wood, who stood near the door, jumped up on a bench and cried out, "They are only three hundred and one." We set up a shout that you might have heard to Charing Cross, waving our hats, stamping against the floor, and clapping our hands. The tellers scarcely got through the crowd; for the House was thronged up to the table, and all the floor was fluctuating with heads like the pit of a theatre. But you might have heard a pin drop as Duncannon read the numbers.

Then again the shouts broke out, and many of us shed tears. I could scarcely refrain. And the jaw of Peel fell; and the face of Twiss was as the face of a damned soul; and Herries looked like Judas taking his necktie off for the last operation. We shook hands, and clapped each other on the back, and went out laughing, crying, and huzzaing into the lobby. And no sooner were the outer doors opened than another shout answered that within the House. All the passages, and the stairs into the waiting-rooms, were thronged by people who had waited till four in the morning to know the issue.

We passed through a narrow lane between two thick masses of them; and all the way down they were shouting and waving their hats, till we got into the open air. I called a cabriolet, and the first thing the driver asked was, "Is the Bill carried?" "Yes, by one." "Thank God for it, Sir." And away I rode to Gray's Inn,—and so ended a scene which will probably never be equalled till the reformed Parliament wants reforming; and that I hope will not be till the days of our grandchildren, till that truly orthodox and apostolical person Dr. Francis Ellis is an archbishop of eighty.

I do wish people would lay off @HYUFD and the abuse. Yes, he likes to post slightly dogmatic highly traditionalist High Tory views, and then stubbornly digs in when challenged, but that's no reason to be nasty.

I'd say the best way to lower divorce rates would be more marriage courses and marriage counselling.

Marriage is hard and we've had some tough moments. We still hark back to the all weekend marriage course the CofE ran for us before we got hitched in our local church, which we still find useful.

Apprently the way to reduce divorce is to have less lavish and expensive weddings based on a US study.
'According to the data, women who spent more than $20,000 on their wedding were 1.6 times more likely to eventually divorce than women who spent between $5,000 and $10,000'

The logic is apprently twofold, 1 Finances are prominent reason for divorce so starting off with a financial millstone of paying for the wedding and everything around it is not a good start and 2. its been theorised if you are that concerned about impressing everyone else with a lavish do maybe you havent quite got the focus on the relationship itself.