Like Abe Lincoln always said, take anything you see written online with a grain of salt and, until you see conclusive evidence otherwise, assume it’s a creative writing exercise.
Eh to be fair, that rule is from a time where real girls on the Internet were a lot less common (though obviously they existed) and people still fell for the beautiful Spanish girl scam. And bought "girls" stuff on MMORPGs. And so on.
I am an irascible fool. I’ve spent the majority of the last decade in various stages of depression. I’m overweight, often disheveled, long winded, and ramble about deeply irrelevant technology topics, or unsolvable and depressing political issues. I’m kind of a miser, I never think about fun, and I don’t generally like people. I’m opinionated, judgmental, and quick to speak my mind.
My wife is so beautiful that last week while walking the dogs, some guy circled the block to rev up his engine and take off in front of her while him and his passenger stared at her, engine roaring, running a stop sign in the process and coming within a foot or two of clipping another vehicle that did not have a stop sign. Yesterday, some teenager on a moped nearly fell off trying to awkwardly spin around a roundabout so he could “sneak” another glance at her. Early on in our relationship, we went to a professional networking event, and a man who was supposed to be an HR rep waited for her to go to the restroom so he could tell me how beautiful she was. Three years ago, a friend of a friend asked us for a threesome at a party, and her words to my wife were “I just want to please you and serve you.” She didn’t even look at me. (We didn’t go for it. She smokes.)
My wife is so annoying.
Last week I was trying to get dressed for work and she bum-rushed me for a hug while I was trying to button my pants. And my dumb ass got annoyed about it. She routinely tells me she thinks I’m beautiful, and very charming. She will sometimes just lean around a corner to look at me and squeal. She literally just walked into my office to rub my chest and tell me I’m a babe (like 30 seconds ago). She tells me at least once a week that she gets butterflies around me. She’s giddy and giggly to see me. She’ll text me to tell me she misses me when I’m out of the house for more than 30 minutes. She writes me love letters. (I write her love letters too, I’m not that awful.) She takes pictures of me all the time. There’s a whole album of photos of me that I sometimes just catch her looking at. If I send her a voice memo, she saves it so she can listen to my voice later.
My wife is the best.
Some people just love their partners in expressive and visceral ways, even if their partners are just Monument, a weird and flawed human. But I do my best, and I won’t ever quit.
I don’t get it either. We met in a group chat in 2016, and that lady was like “I choose him, that man that’s like 10 years older than me and a total weirdo and is probably going through some sort of mental health crisis.” She then flirted with me (while I tried to avoid her, because I fucking knew this would happen!) until I relented and sent her pictures of my butt, and then she sold her house and moved across the country to bother me forever. (Some details omitted.)
The real story is… actually that, just less dramatized. We met via a chatroom attached to a subreddit, some folks in that chat formed their own group and we both joined it. Rather - it was formed around her. She was in the process of ending her marriage. We all gave her advice and care, while also being perverts and weirdos that flirted with one another. Several months after her divorce was final, I noticed she started talking to me a lot more, and was sending me DM’s instead of the main chat. Heck, she once asked me if she was attractive, and I remember telling her that any man would think she was - not wanting to tell her she was achingly beautiful. A member of the group had begun to overstep and get creepy. He actually chased off someone pretty cool because he was sort of obsessed with her. I didn’t want to be ‘that guy’ but I also had my own thing going. I was dating a woman in a poly situation, and she was married (all on the level, all parties fully informed and consenting). I enjoyed dating around and generally being a deviant. I had previously had long distance relationships, and I knew they were horrible and hard and awful.
One day, after weeks of flirting back and forth, my wife asked what I was up to, and I told her I had just gotten done taking butt photos for a woman that I used to take butt photos for. (A nonsexual thing, she just liked my butt.) And my wife said I should send her some next time. So I did, and she reciprocated, and I sent more photos, and she sent more photos, and then we had phone calls, then video chats, the thing that made me fall in love with her happened*, and then we had an in-person visit, followed by several more during the most happy and heartbreaking year of my life while I found a better paying job to get a bigger apartment before she moved to live with me. It took a while. We moved in together on our first anniversary.
*She recorded a video of herself singing me happy birthday. It’s probably the most backed up file I own.
yeah hard to imagine that, my gf finds me less attractive than a bag of potatoes. she's nice to me, but she does not look at me, and pigs fly more often than she touches me.
Yeah, it gives big "Where are the females like this?" energy, I can definitely see it being written by a lonely chauvinist dirtball. I hope not because it is cute, but the Internet is the Internet, so...
Every single long term relationship I've ever been witness to has been defined by either eventual resentment between partners, or a pervasive sense of apathy between them. The people I've seen who really "make it last" aren't affectionate towards one another after being together for decades: they're codependent. One person supports another person's narcissism and the other person facilitates their partner's alcoholism. That sort of thing.
On a more fundamental level, I'm not sure I even believe that the concept of lifelong partners or lifelong marriage is natural for human beings. Being a part of a community, sure, but being emotionally attached to the same person in the same way forever? Not really. I think it's in our nature to constantly grow, and that typically means growing apart. In fact, that might be a lot healthier for people than the alternative.
I think you should ask people who've been together for a long time about that. I've been with my wife for 13 years and we still tell each other we love the other and find them pretty.
If anything, she facilitates my non-drinking, making me realize how much it harms me.
Maybe I'm a narcissist. I don't think I am, but, if I were, you wouldn't trust me to tell you.
Is it the perfect love story you see in the movies? No, and realizing it just can't be that way might be the reason why we've stuck together for so long and didn't downgrade our relationship to us being simple roommates with a shared past.
Right. That's why I didn't say "it's impossible for things to be this way," but instead said "this is what I've seen." It's possible that I've just happened to see the worst of long term relationships by virtue of bad luck or environment. I don't discount that possibility and I'm not saying that my limited experience of the world represents the sum total of all human potential.
We're planning our 30th anniversary party. We still flirt and are both best friends and lovers and don't pass each other in a room without a caress or joke. I'm not bragging so much as to say it happens. Sometimes people keep the remnants of their initial crush and combine it with respect and lust for a whole lifetime. The Pheromones are very strong.