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'Til Tech Do Us Part
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Sat Aug 04, 2007 10:02 AM
from the pvrs-to-match-the-towels dept.
from the pvrs-to-match-the-towels dept.
WSJdpatton writes "Marriage often requires coping with the loss of some individuality, whether it's adopting a spouse's last name or setting up a joint bank account. Now, some couples say it can be equally tricky to navigate intimacy in the digital sides of their lives. They are running into thorny questions regarding how much to share and how much to keep separate in areas ranging from email addresses to online calendars.
For some young newlyweds, this means a debate over whether to combine their blogs. Longtime spouses, meanwhile, say perennial arguments about who has more closet space are now joined by bickering over which TV shows get deleted to make room on the TiVo."
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HuH (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:HuH (Score:5, Funny)
Man I hate when my finance deletes stuff off the Replay before I get a chance to watch it.
Trust me this was around a 6 month battle, culminating in me telling her that if she didn't respect my Replay shows, I would remove all her Days of our lives and she would never get to find out what happened to Luke and boe or JR and Henry or who ever the hell is screwing the other ones wife
"I am root damn it!! quit erasing my shows!"
Trust me she got the point...
DP
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
So what ever happen to the age-old problem of leaving the toilet seat up or down? Surely this is still a pressing matter in relationships today, no? And for all those who have had that argument with their better half you can tell them that it is a unisex toilet and who said the default position is down?
But, obviously, that will get you no where. I have yet to meet male that has won that argument. I guess mostly beca
Re:HuH (Score:4, Funny)
Actually interesting enough on that issue the two warring parties have met and decided on a mutual peace accord. Since both parties would not concede defeat, nor recognize the others principles as better or right to existence, it was issued that the only logical step was to cease warring on this matter, lay down arms & establish normal trade relations until broken by either party.
Almost 5 years now and the peace accord has held.
Parent
And your user Id is Splatter! LOL (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:HuH (Score:4, Informative)
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The Toilet Seat (Score:5, Insightful)
My solution was to close both the seat and the lid. This gives neither side the advantage of default position.
Parent
Re:The Toilet Seat (Score:4, Informative)
"A good compromise leaves neither side satisfied."
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Re:The Toilet Seat (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:The Toilet Seat (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:The Toilet Seat (Score:4, Informative)
That myth [wikipedia.org] was busted on MythBusters. Poo is everywhere, no matter what precautions you take. I close my lid to avoid dropping things in.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yes. Poo is everywhere! What are ya gonna do?
Re:The Toilet Seat (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:HuH (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:HuH (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:HuH (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If the person wants to sit and the seat is up, possible ass contact with disgusting toilet water.
We have to check the position of the seat before we use it standing up, and it takes no more effort for them to put the seat down than it does for us to put it up.
You're the one not displaying logic.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Like I said in another post, equal rights also means equal responsibilities. One of those responsibilities is the same one that guys have - to make sure the bloody toilet seat is in the position you want it. You're no better than anyone else.
Re:HuH (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:HuH (Score:4, Funny)
the first time she get's that unexpected squirt you will hear the scream from the garage. It's hard though to say "i'm sorry dear, I though I told you.", when you have a huge grin on your face.
Ahh, the practical jokes on each other makes the marriage more enjoyable. She scotchguarded all the towels one morning. get out of the shower and cant dry off with any of the towels as they repel water. That one was genius.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
As someone who has been married for ten years, only the last 3 of which had a DVR, trust me that there is about a tenth the TV arguments with one than without it. First of all, being able to record your preferred show and hers at the same time automatically prevents a ton of arguments.
Second, if you don't give your wife attention as soon as she wants it — and they do
Re:HuH (Score:4, Funny)
Indeed, this is slashdot, no one here has a girlfriend, let a lone a wife.
Parent
Jesus Christ (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Jesus Christ (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Jesus Christ (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Jesus Christ (Score:5, Insightful)
been married 10 years
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Jesus Christ (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:you joke... (Score:5, Insightful)
The only times I've taken out the trash was when she was really ill, or not home because she's 'on vacation' and I've bought her a plane ticket to go see her friends for a long weekend up in MN. She does most of the house cleaning. Why? Because I have a high tolerance for clutter, she has a low tolerance. I have my own computer, my own office, and we can both be in the house and completely ignore each other for our own interests, and then get together and either do something out of the house together or watch TV/Movie/Other when we want to spend time with each other.
She's let me play a video game for 14 hours straight, bringing me breakfast, lunch and dinner while I did so. During the heart of my WoW playing I would do that every saturday and sunday and she never complained about it. She felt I needed my down time. When I quit playing I asked her about it and she said some days it was a bit much but most of the time it was OK because she had other things she could do.
If I want something, i buy it. She knows I'm not going to starve the family for the next big gadget, computer, tv, whatever. Weirdly, she doesn't like to go shopping, she doesn't like to spend a lot of money, the nice clothes she's own I've actually found online and ordered them for her and surprised her for a birthday, an anniversary, or just because I was tired of seeing her wearing cheap ass t-shirt & shorts in the summer and thought she should dress up every once in a while to maintain her sanity and remember what it is like to be an adult.
She also has the important job, she's just underpaid. She stays at home with our 5 and 3 year old kids. I work. She may go back to work after our youngest starts school but at this point we don't really know what the plan is, as she never got herself started in a career she enjoyed.
I'm sure she has a list of things she likes to do, but she doesn't surf forums, she doesn't do much on the internet. She uses her laptop I got her three years ago for email, and to read the fark headlines and laugh. Yet somehow we met on the internet in '96. When we finally met in person I asked her how she found me and she showed me. (Long story, but gist of it was, late night, studying for MCSE in late '95, coworker bets me $100 I wont' post an online ad on a dating place as I'd been single for three years at that point, so I did)
She went to webcrawler, searched for 'personal ads' picked the first one she found, searched based on how far away they were, picked two people, me and some guy that lived near where her mothers family was, I answered. That was it. Her email consisted of double clicking on an icon in Win 3.1, it was a terminal client that logged into a dec unix box, when the $ she knew to type in 'mail' and new she could read, but if she hit anything other than r she never knew how to get it back.
I'm not a big fan of religion, or fate, or whatever, but to this day I have no clue how all that lined up in such a way that I've managed to find someone like her through a bunch of random little events.
There is no 'you do this and i'll let you do something you want' give and take in our relationship, we each do what we like, and we like each other. I've had more people I know over the years exclaim in disbelief when I've called her at 3 AM while in a club in some foreign city to say hi, or how I'm in Vegas at 5AM drinking texting away as she is waking up on the east coast letting her know i'm in some burlesque bar and think I just saw a porn star she might know the name of. Stuff like that.
It can happen, but near as I can tell, it's rare as shit for something like that. I don't know a lot of other guys my age that have a free flowing open relationship where there aren't things like 'if you take out the trash I'll sleep with you tonight' type of trades or other odd things. To me, it's a foreign idea.
Parent
Re:Jesus Christ (Score:5, Insightful)
Been together/married for 19 years.
Cooperation is good, along with having ones own space. "Space" = gear, too.
Wife and self have seperate workshops, seperate computers and peripherals, seperate vehicles and seperate tech in general.
Anything that is best set up for one person should belong to that person.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You may joke about me paying an outragous amount for service, but at least I'm not stuck with a long term contract that's guarenteed to suffer a reduction of service quality over the life of the contract.
TiVo Issues (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like in everything else, it's about creating a solution to keep both people happy. Concerned about merging your blog? How about the two of you just start a new blog together and keep your old ones personal.
Is this really that hard people? This sounds like an author in search of a problem to write about.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed. I didn't RTFA, but after reading the summary I couldn't help but think to myself
I don't even know how to finish that sentence!
It's like a middle aged person listening to a bunch of teenagers whine that they have to do homework. The middle aged adult can't help but think to him/herself "just wait until you have to figure out how yo
Re:TiVo Issues (Score:5, Funny)
Look, if the average person out there had basic problem-solving skills, many of us would be out of work... : p
Parent
Re:TiVo Issues (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Simple answer... (Score:5, Insightful)
Do what I did and buy two. If you're going to argue, at least pick something worth arguing over. Television isn't worth the expended energy.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Mod parent WAY up! (Score:4, Insightful)
Dude, spend an extra $15 a month and get a second NetFlix account.
If she ends up dying of cancer at least you'll be able to say that you got to watch the movies YOU wanted. What the fuck, people? Get some perspective! Are you that hung up on the trivialities of your life that you can't work around them? Grow up and start acting like an adult.
Parent
Speaking from experience: (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Speaking from experience: (Score:5, Insightful)
"If couples do everything together, they will burnout on each other pretty fast."
My wife and I work together, we drive to work in one car. We do the shopping together. It hasn't bee a problem for us.
"Trust me, it happens. You maybe in love today, but tomorrow maybe a different story, so it's much easier and cleaner to leave when couple have separate accounts."
That is such a bad attitude it boggles my mind. Why do you want to make it clean and easy to end a marriage? What about if you have kids? Should the wife deal exclusively with the girls and father exclusively with the sons?
If you are not talking about being married than yes keep that separate but that definition of not being married. I think part of the problem is too many people are becoming sort of married. It is easy to rush in to living together or even getting married of you plan on making it easy to end. That is one of the things that is really messed up about world today. If you are going to get married get married if you are not then don't. Don't sort of get married and don't rush into it.
My wife and I have separate bank accounts but she is on mine and I am on hers. We have separate email address but I don't find that any stranger than have separate cell phones. As far as blogs and fighting over what gets deleted from the Tivo??? If that is a problem in your marriage or relationship you have MUCH MUCH MUCH bigger problems. The making room on the Tivo should be a five minute discussion. Blogs??? Good freaking grief.
Parent
Re:Speaking from experience: (Score:4, Informative)
That can be a really bad plan. If you or your wife die then that account will be locked away from you until the estate is settled. Why not each have access but don't use it? You put your wife's name on your account and your name on her account. You then lock away your bank card for her account and she locks away her bank card for your account. My wife and I have separate accounts because of bank cards. We have one savings account but our living money is in our personal accounts. That way I don't get over drawn getting gas because my wife just bought groceries and hadn't transfered more money into the account yet.
I really suggest that you and your wife to be work out your money problems before getting married. Just having different accounts will not prevent the problems you fear. What happens when you two decide that you want to same for something big? Like a house, car, college for the kids, vacation, and retirement,
The biggest problems in marriage happen you and your wife don't share the same goals in life. Marriage is supposed to be forever. You two need to start planning for forever.
Parent
Share everything. (Score:5, Funny)
If you're a guy, let your wife know that you like to masturbate to bukkake photos online. In return, she can masturbate to photos of well-hung men of various other racial groups.
Furthermore, if you're a guy, let your wife know that you send raunchy emails to your secretary from a rather anonymous Hotmail account. And your wife will tell you about how she and her friends from the spa exchange pictures of their husbands' cocks on a phpBB forum they set up.
So in the end, everyone is open with what they do and what they like. There are no secrets. And your marriage is strong, just because everything is in the open.
Vi vs Emacs (Score:4, Funny)
(but sometimes I wonder why anyone would marry a vi person anyway)
You are not fusing genetically when you marry (Score:3, Insightful)
I would say that it it's beneficial for the relationship to explicitly make sure both people have a space (physical, mental and time) of their own that the other does not intrude on without a go-ahead. If you have the space, a room of your own - even if it's the size of a closet - is a great idea. That's where you store all the stuff that's yours (like clothing - no more arguing about closet space), and that's where you can do work, keep your hobbies and so on. And since it's yours, there's no argument about cleaning up or anything. Same thing with having non-common friends, times when you go out for some activity on your own and so on.
Make sure you both have room to remain yourselves and the relationship will be stronger and more stable for it.
Re:You are not fusing genetically when you marry (Score:5, Interesting)
When my common-law partner and I had children and moved in together for the first time we quickly disolved into a complete mess. I played my fair share in that. My biggest issue, looking back on it, was that I put far too much stock in what other people thought that MY marriage should be. People start treating you differently. Parents and friends try to, innocently, impose their ideals on you regarding what it means to be married and to be a parent and how you should behave and what your role is etc.
It also doesn't help that not only do you have your own family trying to be helpful, but your spouse's family, who may have been relatively distant before you actually moved in together, all of a sudden begins to act like they've known you all your life and you get the expectations from them too.
In my case it went down something like this. My family is relatively small and likes to get together every couple of months to celebrate someone's birthday. When multiple people have a birthday in the same month we merge the gathering into one and we get together for 3 - 4 hours and we try hard to plan it around everyone's schedule. The idea of celebrating something like an anniversary was entirely foreign to me. Sure, my marreid relatives celebrated, but they went out for dinner just the two of them. It wasn't a family event. My wife's family, on the other hand, is massive and they get together at every single possible opportunity (birthdays, anniversaries, 'just for the heck of it' bbqs and pool parties etc.) and they make it an all day and all night event and everyone is expected to be there. This wore me out. My wife and I had to balance two family responsibilities, but I never cared much for my wife's family and being forced to spend a great deal of time with them and listen to all of their expectations and 'advice' drove me to the point where I wanted to end it after about a year. If I didn't step up and be part of their family then somehow (in their eyes and, after absorbing so much of their opinions, in mine as well) I wasn't a good husband and father.
Of course, in the end, we compromised and worked it out. But my point is that I found when we moved in and started treating our relationship as a marriage, that the expectations on us from others grew exponentially over night. I wasn't prepared for that. We've been living together for 7 years now and I found that the most important thing is to concentrate on what the two of you want out of your relationship and to ignore all outside 'advice', regardless of how positively intentioned it may be. Every single person goes into a relationship wanting unique things out of it and most people are a little vulnerable in the beginning because they don't truly know what they're getting themselves into. And so at that point they're more likely to pay attention to what other people have to say. Particularly if there's children involved because (most) people want to be the best parents that they can be. But putting too much stock in what other people, particularly family, thinks can really drive you mad.
In other words, different strokes for different folks. Some people will want to merge every aspect of their lives and be completely happy with that arrangement, other people will want more independence. There is no "right" marriage or relationship. Everyone needs to figure out what's best for them and ignore all outside influences.
Parent
I've crossed that bridge (Score:4, Insightful)
We used to keep separate bank accounts, but consolidating everything helped keep us more organized. That's been the theme throughout our whole marriage. I do think that we play nicer than most couples. There are many things we share. For example I run 4 workstations, and my wife and I use them all. If one of us is on one, the other will go to another one. If we need to use something on box, IE a computer that has a VPN client installed, then we'll switch. We keep common email addresses, and share all the account info... mostly because we know each other's passwords. It's easer that way, and if you can't trust, or play nice with your spouse then you have more important issues.
We do keep separate blogs, but that's mostly because my wife runs one for her company, and I run a more personal one.
Geez. (Score:5, Insightful)
Just the same as what radio station will we listen to, what will we both watch on TV, we like different foods, etc. etc. Is this some journalism student trying to come up with an 'angle' on a 'story'?
(sigh) if you RTFA and think that way... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've had 15 years of marriage (and have two kids). Judging by the character of the posts, I'm pretty much a senior citizen by slashdot standards, because apparently I'm about 13-15 years older than the majority of posters here. I can tell you now, the writer of the original aritcle has their head up their ass. For that matter, anyone who thinks in the terms listed in the article really DO have their head up their ass, and shouldn't even bother getting married.
There are lots of solutions to the issues in the article, but none of them work as well as "here, just borrow my account to browse instead of me logging out" or "honey, whatcha reading in your email?" or any other form of give-and-take, which needs a foundation in TRUST. It's not "boyfriend-girlfriend on the playground at recess". It's a marriage. There is a simple solution: FOR SHIT'S SAKE, GROW THE FUCK UP.
Marriage is like a bridge, and each spouse holds one side of the bridge up. It takes both sides to keep it up and going. Sometimes, one of the two has to put the bridge down (for rest, health reasons, "me-time", family emergencies, whatever...doesn't matter, it happens), for just a breather - and the other one has to carry the load. If the marriage is working, that person comes back and picks up their end of the bridge. But the bridge won't stand up forever if only one is left holding everything up, or if both spouses can't agree to share the load and the bridge never goes up to begin with.
Guess what? Marriage takes an EFFORT. You will do HARD INTERPERSONAL WORK. Work that requires you hold up your end of the situation. It's you and your spouse choosing to share life - all of life - and all of each other, the good parts, and all the bad parts. If she can't deal with those things in you that are a part of you, or you can't deal with those things in her that drive you crazy, then it's just not gonna work. Ever. You need to find - gasp! - compromise. And it seems that the younger groups of today seem to have less and less of this critical quality that's needed for marriage.
This isn't me trying to troll. It's me trying to slap some sense into someone's thick skull. Seriously. No fool'in. If you have a friend that's about to get married, and they think they way they do in the article, you need to print this out, roll it up, walk up to them, and slap them upside the head - repeatedly. They need to really think about something as serious as this before just waltzing off to the land of eternal Tivo replays and iPod picks. Because it has nothing to do with tech. It has everything to do with "these people need to seriously grow the hell up".
Tech is really a big marital issue for some? (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's take a few examples:
Really? They're talking about the same computer here. Now, my wife and I both make very heavy use of our computers, so she has her own Mac Powerbook, and I have my own computers. We share common files and have ample storage with a simple Linux server in the basement loaded with hard drives.
We've set up a mail server with lots of virtual aliases. For a while we had a combined alias, but it started getting spam so we dropped it. We haven't really missed it since. For online accounts (utilities, credit cards, etc.) that we both want to receive the notifications for, it's a trivial matter to have the mail sent to both real email addresses.
Even if you don't have a mail server, don't gmail or Yahoo or something allow you to automatically forward an address to multiple accounts? I'm sure there's some convenient online resource that does that.
Wow, that's just...mean. We signed up with Netflix after they had the separate queue feature (this was over 2 years ago). For 3 DVDs at a time, we each get one at a time, and we have a shared queue for movies and shows we know we want to watch together.
Even if they didn't have this feature, it wouldn't have been too hard to share equitably. But getting up at 5am to put your movies on the top of the queue is not playing fair.
Every couple has to work out their own relationship and budget. Still, tech issues aren't worth causing fights over; they can usually be resolved with a little time to find a fix or at worst, a little money.