I think it might take a while for most people to be able to be honest with each other.
You have to start by being honest with yourself. Many people are not. But it's very difficult to earn someone's trust when you start off not being worthy of it. A relationship that starts off with dishonesty and distrust is going to be shaped by the effect of that dishonesty and distrust. It will probably always have a large component of dysfunctionality that will be difficult to reshape. The people will often be better off making a clean start with someone else after they become different, better people--especially since it's unlikely that both will improve at the same rate. Of course everyone makes their own choices and some people are "settlers." They "settle" for something that's become comfortable through familiarity.
It's not that easy to be honest with yourself, even.
Well there ya go. Until you reach that point you haven't exactly matured and your relationships are not going to be all that great. As my favorite
Demotivator poster says, "The only common factor in all of your failed relationships is you."
And having loud fights with breakups is not so good for the kids.
Eh, there are cultures in which loud fights are the norm. As long as the kids know their parents have love and commitment, the rest is just what they learn to accept as the normal dynamics of relationships. We have this thing in our Anglo-American culture that it's not permissible to express strong feelings, especially negative ones. Everyone should spend more time with Jewish, Italian or Latin American people and get over that. It's not healthy. As for breakups, well we weren't even close to married. Once you're married you have to decide whether staying together and hating each other will be better for the kids than going your separate ways. Kids aren't stupid.
How many of those fights were about misunderstandings?
None. They were about
who we are. We helped each other sort out our shortcomings from our annoying but mostly harmless eccentricities, and decide which of them might be worth trying to overcome. Thirty years later we're still doing it and we still fight occasionally, but they're more focused, more productive and shorter.
I think if I had kids I would snoop on them until they were reasonably grown up. It would be highly irresponsible not to. Children are not in the same category as adults
Yeah, that's a difficult issue in the "pedocracy" that is modern America. In many ways children have rights that trump the rights of their parents and even the adult citizenry at large. Yet somehow parents and the whole damned "village" are expected to raise them to be good citizens with Big Nanny applying her Wal-Mart style "one size fits all" laws to individual families.
I remember what I was like as a kid, and by most standards I was a fairly "good" kid. Privacy is a right and rights come with maturity. All children do not mature at the same rate. Kids who post pictures of themselves in sexual situations on the internet and then complain because their parents find them and punish them are not ready for the right to privacy.
If my husband EVER went through my purse....I would come undone.
My wife hasn't carried a purse in 25 years. She decided that since men don't carry them, it is clearly possible to get along without one, and it sure decreases one's chance of being mugged. Keys and money in her pockets, everything else in the glove compartment, which I often have to search to find something she needs.
oh come on. I don't trust my husband around choc chips and he doesn't trust me around cheesecake.
Many of us have a bad habit that we don't mind our spouse helping us curtail. That's one of the things that comes with marriage.
Whats with the privacy hangup?
I understand that the privacy that Americans (and a few other Western countries) hold so dear is cultural, not a universal human trait. One of my Indian friends took a job as a consultant and went off on his first week-long business trip. When he returned home his wife was shaking and crying after being alone in their apartment every night for a week. In her whole life she'd never been alone for more than a few hours.
