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How to Have a Happy Marriage: The Dance-off Edition

 If you are married, this post is for you, obviously.

If you aren’t married, stay with me. I promise you’ll love it.

We all know what a marriage is – two people leading a life together, building a home and perhaps a family, living out their lives until death. There are tears, laughter and all the usual memories that make up a relationship. This is the kind of partnership that requires constant work on that evergreen question – how to have a happy marriage.

But that’s not the marriage I’m here to talk to you about.

I’m here to talk to you about a different kind of marriage altogether which ended up saving the one with my husband.

The marriage with my best friend.

I often wondered why my relationship with her was so simple – it’s easy and breezy and flowy – while my relationship with my husband felt like ‘work’ a lot of the time. What was present in my relationship with her that was absent in the one with my husband?

They were both people. They both loved one awesome person, me. They both shared fundamental beliefs and common interests with me.

So, why did I seem to fight more with him and rarely with her? Why was I constantly asking her about the secret to a happy marriage when I should have been figuring it out with him?

I would love to say here that the answer hit me out of the blue one day. There was a bolt of lightning and insight flashed.

Nothing like that, sadly.

It dawned on me very gradually through multiple arguments where neither of us could seem to compromise.

We weren’t getting along because we were seeing the value of love very differently in our friendships compared to our relationship with one another.

Many times, I’d seen my husband pick up the phone to invite one of his friends over to hang out. If he declined, my husband would hang up with a cheerful, “Chill, maybe next week, bro.” When I told him I couldn’t make dinner because I was being held up at work, he’d grumble and grouse, leading us into that inevitable fight.

I was guilty of it too.

Why on earth were we treating these relationships differently? We loved to claim that we had married our best friend but the reality was, we were treating each other like anyone but.

So, I came up with a plan. When we were in school, every time my best friend and I got into a fight, we’d make up by holding hands and dancing to our favourite song. The Ketchup Song, anyone?

Every time my husband and I fought, I challenged him to a dance-off. We’d take turns choosing the song and no matter what, no matter how mad we were, we would have to stick it out and dance till the end. If we could learn the steps and dance along to the song, even better.

The result?

I have married my best friend :)

We always, always end up in splits, goofing off and helping each other stumble through some complicated choreography that we wouldn’t be able to master if our lives depended on it.

The anger dissipates like vapour.

All that’s left is laughter and a earworm. Nowadays, it’s Despacito – The Ketchup Song of this generation.

If you value the person who loves you, they value you right back.

That’s the only transaction any relationship needs.

And it’s the secret to a happy marriage.

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