So many people marry people they don’t like hanging out with.
When they say to marry your best friend they’re talking about that you need to like hanging out with them. You should probably like just hanging out with the person you’ve committed your life to. Because that’s what you’ll be doing most of the time.
In most romantic relationships the sex and longingly staring into each others eyes part is a relatively small portion of it. Most of your time is gonna be reading the newspaper in silence or cooking dinner or trying and failing to do a book club with your friends.
Most of the functional long term couples I’ve met just enjoy being in each others company. Not 24/7 because anyone can get tedious if they’re your only social connection. But you know. They’re friends. It’s good to be friends with the people you live with.
i was hanging out w my fiancé and she left for the restroom and an acquaintance who was apparently listening slid up to me and asked, “what’s the secret? you guys just seem to have so much fun with each other” and im like, “??? i enjoy her company and she mine? obviously i think she’s very attractive but it’s really about we bounce off each other in a fun and ridiculous way”
which is all to say i enjoy spending time with her because so much of being in a relationship is “down time.” hanging out on the couch, watching videos together, parallel play, teamwork, ya know? if you want a relationship to last, it has to agree on foundational principles of mutual acceptance of each others’ quirks: be it spending time together or alone. how much to share, and how, and how much.
sure we fight sometimes. but when we come back, the problem still exists, so it’s about solving the problem, even when it exists in one of you. so it’s deeper than just “communication.” it’s about “are the ways that you communicate with each other productive in a way that facilitates our existence together?”
and so i have to add, a part of that was learning how to communicate my needs in a way that wasn’t hurtful, which is [was, probably still is, working on it] super difficult as a man, but it is possible. it all comes from respecting your interlocutor. i love her and i know she does for me, so we can move past the fundamentals into the messy complexities of what is irking us. i don’t claim that our relationship is perfect, but if the foundations aren’t challenged, then it’s not “us” we need to argue about. it’s about the behaviors.
So what this paint company does is take iron pollution from abandoned mines that are polluting soils and rivers and makes iron based red pigment paints out of it.
Basically they realized hey no one’s cleaning this shit up, it’s polluting the streams, killing all the fish, making the water undrinkable and there’s a huge market for it so why not make money by cleaning it the fuck up?
They remove this stuff by the industrial bucket load from the rivers. The idea is if it’s in a painting, if it’s in your home, it’s not poisoning wildlife.
This looks like a shitpost but it’s actually solid advice, like, if you want to achieve a goal you have to pace yourself and be patient instead of expecting too much too soon and then giving up
