'Til Tech Do Us Part 300
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."
HuH (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
Speaking from experience: (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Simple answer... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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'?
Re:Jesus Christ (Score:5, 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.
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.
Re:TiVo Issues (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 you're going to make mortgage payments, keep your career growing, keep everyone in your family as happy, maintain repairs to your property, keep your kids clothed and make sure that they do their homework despite their whining etc."
As for these couples, it's like "just wait until one of you gets bored and has a fling outside the marriage, or when one of you loses his/her job, or heck something even simpler and more likely to happen in the near future for almost any couple - one of you starts to lets yourself go, physically."
I'm not trying to whine and complain about my marriage, we make things work. But oh how I wish our major concerns revolved around the bloody Tivo!
Re:Jesus Christ (Score:5, Insightful)
been married 10 years
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.
My biggest problem (Score:1, Insightful)
As someone who isn't married (and never will be), is spouses who share an IM account. Sometimes I can get a message and not know who sent it, and not know what kind of mode to respond in (I talk differently to a close friend and a close friends wife. For instance, goatse never makes the topic list with the wife)
Please don't share IM and email, etc unless it's CLEAR that the account is shared (so a "the_whatever_family@hotmail.com" would be okay)
Re:Jesus Christ (Score:4, Insightful)
(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".
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.
Combining Blogs? E-mail accounts? Ridiculous. (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not like you have to pay extra to keep your GMail (Example.) and Blogspot (Also an example.) accounts set up how they have been. Sure, maybe you might want to make a combined blog IN ADDITION to your personal one, with both set up as contributors, or maybe make an extra "everyone in the family" e-mail account for mass e-mails inside the extended family..
But beyond that, I can't see any good reason why you'd want to consolidate.
My fiancee and I each do our own thing online. I have *chan, Ultima Online, and SomethingAwful amongst other things, she has her pet sites and
I don't know, I just find the whole thing silly. But then again, we're keeping all our finances separate for the most part, each contributing our half to the bills/groceries/etc., and splitting stuff like movies/games/other fun purchases by "Who will use this more?" (So I got stuck paying for the 360 and PS3 myself. Drat.) and it's working out just fine for us.
The only time one of us has a say in the finances of the other is if one of us can see it being a stupid purchase (Like my PS3 that she said "Don't get it, you'll never use it."
Okay, I didn't sleep last night so I'm rambling. Time to get some coffee and hit the hay.
Re:The Toilet Seat (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Jesus Christ (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.
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.
Re:HuH (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 don't always understand when is a good time or a bad time to interrupt a game or other show they aren't interested in — she will feel like you think TV is more important than she is, even if you just need ten seconds to get past a very critical part to a good stopping place. If you have a healthy relationship, she will consider your feelings and hardly ever say anything, but she will still feel it. Conversely, you probably won't say anything about missing parts of your favorite shows, but you will still feel it. Those pause and rewind buttons prevent a lot of hard feelings on both sides.
Six months seems like a long time to fix that deleting thing, but those sorts of conflicts become easier to solve the longer you've been married, and often don't even happen in the first place, as you both get more attuned to each other's needs and wants.
Re:Jesus Christ (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:TiVo Issues (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Jesus Christ (Score:3, Insightful)
I've been married for 7, and I 100% agree with you. The important part of that statement that is missing is that Women who don't take any crap from their husbands normally end up divorced as well.
I have a hard time understanding the motivations behind so many marriages. I'm happy. Do I do absolutely everything I want exactly how and when I want to? No. And either does she. Its about compromise for the things you don't agree on so that you can have all the rest of the time for the things that you do. That's the part that makes marriage worthwhile. And if that's the smallest part of your marriage: you fucked up. GET OUT NOW.
As for me: not my problem. I'm perfectly happy.
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.
Re:HuH (Score:4, Insightful)