You, shiny, new distraction and procrastination device, you!
So, today, I'm going to tell you the best relationship advice I've ever heard and review a book I've never read. The book is titled: You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up: A Love Story by Annabelle Gurwitch and Jeff Kahn. While I have never read this book but I wholeheartedly intend to read it, eventually, one day.
According to the amazon.com description of this book, it sounds like this book is mainly about Annabelle and Jeff's personal experience with their 13 year marriage. However, I previously read a little blurb about this book in some magazine (Psychology Today, I think) and I wrote down what I thought was the subtitle of the book (apparently it's not), "Your marriage will thrive when you ignore conventional wisdom and do what works for you."
This immediately struck me as the best relationship advice ever. Not only is it easy to implement but I can ignore every one else's advice and stick to my guns!! No, really. I feel like once you hit a certain point in a relationship, maybe a year more or less, you kind of know the drill or at least you know enough to get the relationship that far. I think so many young adults like myself look at marriage so differently than generations before us. We're constantly told that the divorce rate is skyrocketing, we see scandals involving cheating (Sandra Bullock, Tiger Woods) and it's just easy to think, "wow, relationships, marriages in particular, are doomed."
In light of this, some people have decided they don't want to get married at all. Others opt for living together a good amount of time before marriage, some don't even want marriage, they'd rather just live together. Others plan on getting married later or decide to date lots of people. Relationship advice, as always, is abound. I think we may be even more likely to listen to it now because so many of us realize a relationship ending is all too real.
Personally, I'm always interested in relationship advice. I've learned from my parents that a relationship isn't easy and that it takes work. It seems natural for me to strive my hardest for a good relationship. Since I've been dating Austin for two years, I've learned a lot about relationships. When we first started dating, it was the first serious relationship I ever had and it got serious very quickly. My friends had not been through any similar experiences but I asked anyways, does this seem normal to you? Do you think we fight too much? Do you think we are too engrossed in each other? Just the other day, I found myself saying to a friend, "Gosh, it's only been two years but it feels like it's been so much longer because of the comfort level we're at--I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing." She immediately retorted, "I don't think it's anything, it's just normal."
What I've found to be most troublesome to our relationship at times is when I try to make it a good relationship. If I try to analyze what is going wrong or right too much, if I ask for advice I don't really need and if I listen to advice that I don't really need, more often than not, it's more damaging than helpful.
My father may think I need to date need someone never every few months, my best friend may think that it's weird that my boyfriend will tell me when he thinks some chick is mega-hot, and my other friend may think we text way too much but the bottom line is what we think. Turns out, these things work for us and these things might not work for you.
Bottom Line: People are constantly giving out relationship advice, be it generic "conventional wisdom" or be it from experience. Either way, the best advice I could give you is to do what works, if it's not working, first, pinpoint what exactly isn't working, TALK (with your partner!! eesh, people), and then try something new. If it is working, don't question if it's normal or if it's recommended. Everyone in the world may say you're doing it all wrong, but if it's working for you, just say 'Shut Up'*.
*Handy Hint: This relationship advice works if you're already in a pretty stable, functional relationship (but wait! what's a stable, functional relationship?? Okay, I may need to blog on this more for those confused souls out there). For now, don't be stupid when trying to apply this advice.
