If you've been married for a while, learn who your spouse is now. (I mean in a good way, by taking an hour to rediscover what his/her hopes and dreams are, what interests they've gained / lost, etc.)
He/she is probably a pretty different person than the one you married. It's easy to overlook that.
This is huge. I'm lucky in that my spouse and I talk regularly about everything from daily logistics to existential meaning. I view learning her (and updating her about me) as more of a habit than an event.
I'd say this is also valuable advice for yourself; what are your current dreams? Do you really still want all of the books on your bookshelf? Where do you want to go? Who of your friends haven't you seen, but need to? I find I don't spend enough time on that for myself.
Easy to glean the high level techniques in an hour. eg avoiding the Four Horsemen of relationship killers. But I've been working on my technique for years and feel like I'm just getting started.
I'd say that applies to being together, not necessarily being married. Nowadays, we don't all live in a religious dominant society (anymore) where it is required or normal to marry.
Very true: My marriage is legal. We didn't actually care if we were married or not, but boy oh boy immigration would rather us be married. So we are. We'd be together nonetheless, marriage was just the means of doing so.
But I think the poster's point was that this advice is basically advice for long-term relationships and really shouldn't be viewed under the light of marriage only. Since many folks don't have to be married to be a family, a good number of folks are skipping that step.
People are very dynamic, we either grow together or apart. My current success at marriage is due to a concerted effort not only to find out what interests my wife but to take an active role in it even if I don't wholesale agree. Then we can have a deeper discussion about it and that shows I care even when I don't agree.
I don't think my spouse and I could fill an hour a week with this - plus we would dread the conversation. It sounds like work.
Don't get me wrong, we talk about it. If one of us has thoughts about it, we share at the time or soon after. But it isn't like we lead busy lives or have children or in general, have a lot of upheaval in our lives. We are both over 40, and aren't changing rapidly at this point. There simply isn't that much to discuss.
> The implication being that you just don't communicate between the time you first met and now?
That's not how I meant it. My point is that day-to-day life can be so consistently busy or hectic, that couples can spend way less time together than at first. And when you have kids, grad school, careers, etc., you can end up with a surprisingly long stretch of being more like business partners than soulmates.
There may not be much you can do about diverging interests, or the diminished levels of crazy love-hormones that you had at first. But taking time to really pay attention to each other, and have real emotional vulnerability and care for each other, can be pretty awesome.
My partner and I had several years of couples therapy together, and I can confirm your thesis in thread is spot on, great comments. You have to be able to grow together, live through the parts where that new relationship energy and passion are burning lower than they used to (and not act out destructively because of it, lots of ways to accomplish this, limited only by negotiated boundaries of the relationship), but still be able to check in with each other to ensure each other's needs are being met.
IMHO marriage is about finding a teammate, not a soul mate. It is more of a business partnership than about fairy tales and romance, and I think too many folks don't understand that upfront. TLDR: You are looking for a life cofounder; choose wisely.
After many years and kids you start to take each other for granted. If you are together around your 20's, people might have changed when they are in their 30's. Values might have shifted etc.
I learned this lesson the hard way after my wife told me she was getting a divorce. By then it's too late to fix it.
Talking to each other about practical stuff is still different than asking how you see your life.
Actually, if you are together, you might not have taken changes into account as they happen gradually. What OP meant is a means of an additional self-reflection. Which happens on top of current communication (or lack thereof).
It is also not just that the person you're with changes. You change as well, and you might not be aware of that. I mean, we all age. Society changes, too. For example, we're all running around with a PDA with a bunch of radios these days. We weren't 30 years ago.
The self-reflection part hadn't actually occurred to me, but it makes sense.
When I met my wife, "PDA" meant "public display of affection." I prefer that to my cell phone any day, albeit not with a bunch of radios. Only a HAM operator would be into that kind of thing.
Yeah, for my partner that is also what PDA stands for (both non-native English speakers).
As for the radio comment: cell phones, smartphones, laptops, smartwatches, IoT in general. It all has radios these days. If not merely Bluetooth or WiFi.
He/she is probably a pretty different person than the one you married. It's easy to overlook that.