Sunday 4th May 2025: Important ideas I have come across

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Over the last few days, I have come across a few powerful ideas on relationships I would like to share here:

https://medium.com/@doctorbecky/a-lazy-effort-in-mate-selection-often-predicts-divorce-b2f2d601cb73

This post includes a very powerful paragraph about compatibility which I have copied and pasted here:

“Human beings living the path of least resistance theory of mate selection tend to talk themselves into settling on someone for whatever reason that makes sense at the time, not spending much effort or time on the personality of the person, things they have in common, the little things they do that annoy them, division of labor, how flexible and spontaneous they are, their beliefs and values, hopes and dreams for the future, how they feel about money, children, and discipline, maintaining their health, how interested they are in personal and spiritual growth, how they visualize their career life and how a couple divides financial and household responsibilities, how willing they are to ask for help when needed and much more.”

Now here is the thing: from the list above, it might be obvious to many others as it definitely is obvious to me that you will simply never find someone with whom you are 100% compatible. So then many of the couples we observe around us, who seem to have admirable or desirable marriages, will also not be wholly compatible with one another either! And yet they clearly manage to make it work. Reflecting on this matter later, I was thinking that maybe this might be an idea: to find the person with whom you are best compatible, with my typical strong emphasis on character, and then you proactively address the areas of incompatibility, and find ways of addressing them beforehand, or compromising. So in other words you proactively “own” the incompatibility and deal with it and plan around it before it has a chance to fester into a disagreement. One big example might be regarding the big issue of money. So say you have found an excellent man, with excellent character, but you and he have very different ideas about money?  One of you might love to spend “generously” while the other might be a lot more careful? One way of addressing this is something I have discussed before on this blog, years ago, and it is this: if each partner within the marriage is allocated their own funds which they can then spend or save as they wish, while there is a joint account to pay for general family expenses eg rent or mortgage, daily feeding etc.  Some areas of compatibility are non-negotiables, of course. For instance for me, my husband has to share my outlook on faith.  In fact, I find myself spiritually incompatible with most supposed “Christians” I have come across, even supposed “Born-again Christians” because even though we technically believe in the same God and we understand Him through the same Bible, in practice we emphasise completely different things in our faith, and to all practical intents and purposes we practise different faiths, and I really do mean completely different faiths.

Unfortunately, a complication appears to be that many of these Christian men do not appear to understand that there could possibly be a different way of looking at faith other than their own or that anyone could see their approach as deeply flawed. So they start making romantic overtures towards me while my heart just sinks, and I have to start thinking of diplomatic ways to gently turn them down. Or if I happened to be brave enough to express my disagreement, they immediately start trying to loudly convert me to “the truth” of their way of thinking. Now here is the thing, I have to acknowledge that I myself have done that to many people, I have argued with countless people about faith, tried to convert people to “the truth” of my way of thinking (whisper/grumble – well in my case it actually is true! But obviously everyone thinks the same about their opinion.) The difference now is that I hope that I am a little more sophisticated in that now instead of just blindly arguing I can truly listen to others and find out ways in which I could learn from other people. You know, I definitely believe that my faith is right, as in factually correct, and I definitely believe that my approach to faith is factually correct. However in that I am learning more and more that there is so much to learn from other people, even if they and I disagree on what is factually correct. However those Christian men that I am currently talking about here have apparently not learned that yet, so they will just argue and argue in a bid to convince. Furthermore, some people apparently think that convincing someone boils down to shouting as loudly as they can. (And yes, I used to be that person too! Apologies to anyone who has ever found themselves on the receiving end of that!) Now that I myself am on the receiving end of that, I see how futile it is to keep arguing with someone who refuses to engage with what you’re saying, so I just remove myself.  In a phrase, it’s all about emotional intelligence. At any rate, I know that I am not compatible with these men, and I don’t bother to communicate with them as I know that it will end up in a big argument.  Interestingly in the process of finding the link to the above article I wrote a very long response to someone else’s response to my response to his initial response on someone’s article – are you keeping up?!  So basically someone wrote an article, that is a woman wrote an article essentially saying that her husband refused to pull his own weight at home, and she eventually got frustrated and divorced him, a man wrote a comment on the article suggesting that she had “thrown her husband under the bus” by not giving a rounded picture of him as a person, I responded to his comment essentially saying “er, that’s not relevant here”, he then responded to my response and I finally responded to his response to my response.
If you want to read that thread, it is available here: (the original article is paywalled, but you can still read a few sentences from it.)
https://medium.com/@demian_mollering/i-think-this-is-quite-an-unempathic-piece-in-the-way-you-throw-your-ex-under-the-bus-as-some-sort-6d111c426bb7
So anyway my point is that I often like to have the last word! So a lesson that I need to learn is that I really don’t need to do that. I don’t need to convince everyone of the validity of my argument every single time, I can just let it go without spending all my time writing out endless long responses. So if I were to get into an argument with someone, I have a tendency to just keep arguing. So that is another reason to avoid interacting with any of these men in the first place. That is counterintuitively why expressing my own viewpoints requires bravery: not that I am incapable or daunted by the thought of an argument, but rather because I know myself that I never back down, and I know that once I cross that boundary I will be stuck in that argument forever, which will likely get angrier and angrier, especially if there are certain types of frustrations involved, shall we say!

So anyway this is an example of a non-negotiable for me. Ironically, I am 100% sure that even if I was to find a man that was sufficiently compatible with me on faith, even then between us there would still be long arguments…about faith.  The difference is the way we would argue. The fact is that I actually like arguing, that is, the process of debating ideas, refining ideas (or “refinding” as I accidentally just typed!) Literally exactly like I do on this blog.  The difference with doing it with someone else is that you can introduce someone else’s perspective. So it is not a combative thing, or needing to be right. It’s more a matter of asking “What do you think about this?”  “Yeah, I do see what you’re saying, but how about this though?” “Yeah, but to be candid, don’t you think that…?”  Yeah, but to be candid, yeah, in all candour I do tend to be right about things. Because I immerse myself so deeply into topics that before I ever mention them I tend to already be deeply knowledgeable about them (thank you internet!) So I will just say something in passing. And then someone who may have caught a whiff of the scent of an idea somewhere usually random and unqualified will challenge what I have said, and then I will want to prove that I am right and – yeah. Anyway, this is all a lesson in maturity for me that I don’t have to let myself get drawn into these silly, pointless arguments so easily. If I’m to be honest, this is often an expression of ego on my part. Hopefully between my husband and me these explosions of ego will be kept to a minimum, and this minimisation of ego is what contributes towards having healthy, productive, mutually nourishing discussions rather than empty, pointless arguments.

So anyway, all of that was one resource!
The next resource is this, a YouTube compilation video of what people wish they had known before they got married. The topic of the video directly correlates with the theme of this blog, which is about what I can do before marriage to best enhance my chances of marital success. Perhaps that is why I find this particular video to be so useful, out of the dozens, possibly hundreds of similar videos I  have previously watched.  I have to explicitly make the point here that the advice given by the Muslim ladies on this video is deeply valuable, and this follows on from my point above about being genuinely open to learn from others who do not share my opinions or outlook on faith. To be clear the advice given by the Christian ladies on here, and the initial Jewish lady is also strong, but it is not so surprising that I would be impressed by them as they more closely correlate to my own existing values:

Finally, this last one is not a specific resource but a revelation: After being deeply struck by the advice given by the Muslim ladies in the video above, I watched a video made by a strikingly beautiful Muslim woman about her divorce. This then of course triggered the YouTube algorithm to serve me similar stories, so my YouTube front page (has this thing got a name?) was flooded with diverse divorce stories, mainly from women. And I skimmed through a few, watched the first few minutes of several. And here then, is the revelation: a reliable cure for feelings of marital desperation is to watch a divorce story or two. Watching someone else’s divorce would not cure me of every desire to get married altogether. However what these stories did was encourage me to be extremely careful to ensure true compatibility with my spouse, and to take the time to build a strong foundation beforehand. IE put all feelings of desperation to the side in favour of carefulness and caution.

And you know what? Watching all these divorce stories also made me realise/decide something: since I have waited so long, I am going to do my best to make the very best marital choice I possibly can with all the advice and resources and prayers that are available to me. But once I have made that choice, I am going to stick with it, I am not going to walk away for reasons of incompatibility. I know that I personally need that stability, and I would like to be able to offer that to my husband too. As long as both of us are demonstrating strong character and willingness to communicate with one another, I would say whatever it is, let us work through it, let us work it out, let us keep moving forward. Which is not to say that any of these women acted any differently by the way, or were in any way casual or cavalier about ending their marriages. In fact, in a number of the cases, it was the husband who made the decision to leave. Furthermore, each one of the women went out of her way to be gracious to her ex, which truly impressed me. You know I would not be like that. I would just say it as it is. I would not be afraid to express my anger or frustration. Which is another reason why I have to make an amazing choice from the outset.

Finally, I have said this before, but watching a few of these stories reminded me: my aim is to keep my relationship and my marriage off social media. I might acknowledge that I have found the man, but that is going to be all. No wedding nothing!  The truth though is that I am very comfortable speaking about myself and I don’t know how easy I would find it to not use my own marriage as an example or refer to my own marriage. I have previously said that for my husband’s peace of mind I will end this blog when I get married – ie not delete it, but stop actively writing content. Who knows, there might be a viable way to continue it without actually writing the content myself? I can’t think of any way to do that right now, but perhaps an idea might occur to me in the meantime…. perhaps post tiktok compilations like everyone else?!