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We’ve Been Married for 20 Years and Don’t Hate Each Other. Here’s How We Do It.
Go to bed angry, appreciate each other out loud, and other lessons
Co-authored by Rob Cottingham
It’s our 20th wedding anniversary. This feels like both a blessing and an achievement, and we wanted to celebrate by sharing what we’ve learned — and what we’ve recognized in retrospect — about how to make a marriage work over the long haul.
The truth is, happiness in marriage is largely a function of choosing the right person in the first place. (It tells you a lot about our compatibility that we both thought that writing a marriage guide would be a fun way to spend our anniversary.) But once you’ve found that person, there’s still plenty that goes into the care and feeding of the relationship.
How to find the one
For those of you who are looking, here’s what we think matters.
Go for similar tastes, but opposite temperaments. We both love Star Trek, vivid colors, technology, and progressive politics. That makes it easy to decide what to watch, how to decorate, what to spend our money on, and which causes to invest in. But in terms of temperaments, we’re opposites: Alex is intense and high energy, while Rob is easygoing and relaxed…
