Relationships Talk

Alexis Ohanian may seem like the superhero of husbands. He’s gone so far as to commission a billboard praising his wife, Serena Williams, after all! But despite his grand gestures, the businessman actually has a down-to-earth perspective on marriage. He just spoke with Access about that rumored spontaneous trip to Italy and explained what really went down. He also shared his best—and surprisingly simple to follow—relationship advice.

“You’re running all these different companies, flying all over the world, and you still have time to fly your lady to Venice when she wants Italian food?” Access began the interview. “Were you just doing it for the ‘gram, or did you really fly her to Italy for dinner?” As it turns out, the social media post making it seem like the trip was on a whim was slightly misleading. 

RELATED: Serena Williams Says She Wanted a “Strong” Wedding

“We had planned this vacation for a little longer than I think the Instagram implied, so it wasn’t that spontaneous,” Ohanian admitted. He went on to explain that adventures abroad are far from the only way to impress your partner.  

“I know there are a lot of husbands and boyfriends out there angry at me, but I mean, my wife deserves the best,” he joked, before claiming he’s “far from the perfect husband.” “You’ve just got to look for your opportunities and make the most of them,” he explained. “It doesn’t take flying your family to Italy. I mean, I think if you’d ask my wife, the most romantic things I’ve ever done for her have been just being there when she needed me.” According to him, “That’s really all y’all have to do.”

When my wife bought a baby bottle, she didn’t think it would come with a fight. I was certain my daughter was too old for her bedtime milk bottle. After months of use, the bottles had collected mold so I tossed them, thinking it was a perfect opportunity to stop using them. When I saw my wife got new ones, I lost my cool.

Flipping out over a new baby bottle wasn’t my finest hour. But I can take some small comfort in knowing that I’m not the first husband to get angry over a spouse’s purchase. Buying stuff for our kids is more of an emotional act than we often give it credit for. As New York City Psychotherapist and parent coach Olivia Bergeron noted, we’re often driven to make those purchases by guilt or fear. 

“Purchasing in this culture can be very problematic,” Bergeron said, adding that a lot of moms and dads fear they’re not doing enough.“And that I think a lot of parents feel a lot of guilt.” This type of thinking causes a lot of issues. Below, Bergeron and a legion of parents discuss the most common fights caused by kid purchases, why they happen, and offers some perspective so you can settle them without losing your cool. 

Baby Things For Kids That Might Have Outgrown Them

Parents don’t always agree on timelines for child development and some purchases land on the fault lines of the disagreement, such as my replacement baby bottle. This results in couples often sparring over the need to buy baby items such as pacifiers and diapers as their kids get older. Both parents are driven by a variation on the same fear: they don’t want to make a mistake as parents that’ll harm their kids. But Bergeron stressed that kids develop at different rates. Milestones are misleading: There’s no sense if worrying about some specific age when kids should stop using a bottle, a pacifier, or diapers. The fight was silly because it wasn’t about the bottle; it really stemmed from our need to work together on our daughter’s sleep routine. Once we were on the same page, we ended nighttime bottles a few weeks later.

Pink Stuff For Boys

One Christmas, a relative bought her three baseball-obsessed boys batting gloves. She gave each boy a glove in their favorite color, including a pink one for her youngest boy. When her husband grumbled about the pink glove, she snapped back, saying pink was the boy’s favorite color and he needed to deal with that. It’s an inherently ridiculous exchange when you consider history. The idea that blue is for boys and pink is for girls didn’t take hold until the mid-20th century. Bergeron said a child’s color preference is driven more by curiosity than gender and it’s better for parents to give them room “Their interests will change over time,” she said. “Refrain from judging their choices as they explore. Their ‘job’ as children is to explore.” Worrying about it is ridiculous for you today and may leave your son ill-equipped for the fashions of the future.

Violent Video Games

Guns and gun-related violence are flashpoint issues for today’s families, which Bergeron said is understandable. When parents are on opposite sides of the gun debate, they need to talk about what values they want to teach their children, which is not going to be a fun or easy conversation. It helps, however, to make a distinction between real life guns and games that use guns. While the American Psychological Association said there was a clear link between violent games and aggression in a 2015 review there’s a growing consensus among researchers that video games don’t lead to violent behavior. In March, Patrick Markey, head of the Interpersonal Research Laboratory at Villanova University, told Gizmodo  that the last five years have yielded an “explosion” of research concluding that gamers aren’t prone to aggression. In any case, the argument is not so much about video games as it is limiting the stimuli your kids spend their time with. Start the discussion about screen time limits first and then go from there.

“Obnoxious” Books, Movies And Games

Massachusetts mom of two Hope Roth wanted her kids to love books. Nonetheless, she was wary of resorting to books about talking toilets and bionic booger boys. “I was not happy when my husband bought my daughter all of the Captain Underpants books,” she said. “I think they’re obnoxious.” She’s not alone in that opinion: the series has polarized parents since its first publication. But when you remember that “obnoxious” is in the eye of the beholder, and that one parent’s charmingly energetic toy or game can easily be another’s headache, the fight starts to seem pretty silly. Roth reached an Underpants accord that other parents could use as a model for their own negotiations over polarizing cultural materials. Since her husband bought the book, he accepted the sole responsibility for its content. “The compromise is that [my husband] reads them to our daughter and I don’t,” Roth said.

Adult Dress Up Items For Young Girls

While Connecticut mom Ellen treasures the rainy afternoons she spends with her preschool-age daughter painting nails and trying on lipstick, her husband Rob is uncomfortable with the at-home salon sessions, saying his daughter’s too young for makeup. Bergeron said Rob’s discomfort is understandable, to a degree. “You don’t want your daughter looking like she’s way older than she is,” she said. “So you want her to treasure the time as a child for as long as she can.” 

However, Bergeron said that Rob and other dads with makeup anxiety should think about how his wife and daughter use their beautification sessions. It might help them view the nail polish and lipstick application for what it is: harmless cross-generational girl-bonding. Here, at least, Ellen isn’t Mama June pushing Honey Boo Boo for the spotlight. She’s a mom sharing a fun activity with her daughter. “She’s connecting with her daughter in a way that she feels is special for her as a mom,” Bergeron said.

Pets

One day, New Jersey father of three Jerry Fernandez came home to learn his family now owned a gecko. His boys really wanted a dog and the lizard was the latest in a parade of substitutes. “We were starting to look a zoo,” he said. “Two birds, a turtle and now a lizard. All this to hold off on buying a dog.” Bergeron said it’s critical for families to talk about pets ahead of time. “It’s a big responsibility, and very often, obviously, it falls to the parents to take care of the pet because the child can kind of lose interest.” If you or your kids can’t reasonably care for a pet, then you shouldn’t get one. 

Marriage is work.

Marriage isn’t something that people should enter into lightly, but that doesn’t stop a lot of people, hence the divorce rate being what it is. Frankly, unless you’ve actually been married, it’s hard to know a great deal of marriage advice, or how it really works. 

I’ve spoken to many of female friends who are married about the experience of making a marriage work, of seeing how the reality of marriage can differ from your expectations going in. They never held back, and I learned some important nuggets of information that I’ll save should I ever tie the knot (gag me, no disrespect).

RELATED: 21 Small (But Crucial) Pieces Of Marriage Advice I’ve Learned After 10 Years Of Marriage

But it’s not a subject I have ever broached before with my male friends who are married. Probably because, by and large, if I were to ask what men think and task them to describe how they make marriage work, they would give me the hairy eyeball and ask if I was drunk. The truth of the matter is that whatever they might want you to think, men definitely have their own opinions about marriage.

Ask any man you know if he had any idea what marriage advice he would give a young couple considering marriage, and he’ll emphatically holler “yes,” and the men of Reddit’s AskMen subforum have written it all down for your edification. Here are the best tips they have to give for other men considering marriage. 

1. Date each other.

“‘Don’t stop dating your wife,’ said Chris Rock. Just because there’s a ring on the finger doesn’t mean you stop planning nights out together.”

2. Know why you’re together in the first place.

“You better know why you’re marrying her, and it better not be ‘because you think you should’ or ‘well, everyone else thinks it’s time.’ You better know how to have deep, meaningful conversations with her. You better know how to fight with your spouse. You’re going to have disagreements and you best know how to handle them without it turning into a war. You better know how to live together. You better know how to play together. You better know how to get away from each other.

You better both be on the same page when it comes to kids, finances, sex, and religion. (On that last one that doesn’t mean you have to be the same faith, but if you’re different faiths or mismatched theist/atheist, you better be cool with how the other person feels). You better be wanting her to have what makes her happy (and she should want you to have what makes you happy).”

3. Only get married when the time is right.

“If you are in ANY way, shape or form doing it because you think time’s running out, you hate being single, you think you wont get another girl, don’t do it. I know so many women, and to a lesser degree men, that marry because they’re scared of the unknown alternative.”

4. Remember that nobody’s perfect.

“Try to judge things on a more objective standard. Also remember nobody is ever going to be 100 percent perfect. If you’ve found someone who’s objectively good for you, shares your values, wants to live the same kind of life, is physically compatible, and deeply committed, that’s what counts. The idea that there’s ‘one’ person out there for us also devalues existing relationships.”

5. Know that things happen.

“If your life is crap before you get married, it will be crap after you get married. Get your crap together, be happy, and only then will your perfect mate will come.”

6. Look at problems differently. 

“It’s really important to have the emotional vocabulary that will let you talk about problems in and around the marriage. Often, ‘problems’ are opportunities in disguise — e.g. You have a misunderstanding and you can some out of it better understanding the other person’s perspective, and knowing them better.”

RELATED: 5 Pieces Of Marriage ‘Advice’ That Are Actually Total BS

7. Pick your battles.

“Not everything is worth fighting about. There’s more give than take in a successful marriage, by each party. She won’t get mad at you for wanting to go play golf on Sunday morning and you don’t yell at her for leaving clothes on every horizontal surface. Marriage isn’t a game of perfect, it’s an ongoing process of makes choices to make everyone the least unhappy most of the time and sometimes ecstatically happy.

Learn to cook, and learn to cook well. Then do it, a lot. Clean the toilets. Do the dishes. Don’t brag about doing either task. You don’t have to do everything together. You’ll both need time apart. Different hobbies are okay. Kiss her everyday like she’s the most important thing in the world. She is.”

8. Know the math.

“Only works if you both do this: give 60, expect 40. If you both can keep that attitude, you will have a fantastic marriage. Don’t be with someone who is mean or who talks down to you. I’ve been married 16 years to a awesome woman, but all our friends are married couples for the most part. Great to us but almost everyone has a spouse who talks down to the other spouse. It’s one of those things that just picks at you and picks at you and causes resentment. Don’t put up with that. Ever.”

9. Understand that marriage isn’t about winning. 

“When/if the arguing gets serious, remind yourself that there’s no ‘winning’ against someone you truly love.”

10. Don’t let yourself go. 

“Use marriage as a reason to get in better shape, dress better, pay more attention to your appearance in general. Do not use it as an excuse to let yourself go.”

11. Learn about the two types of disagreements.

“Don’t sweat the little things. If something isn’t worth getting divorced over, it’s not worth fighting about. You can disagree, but if you can’t disagree without fighting, one or both of you are too immature to be married. Remember there are two types of disagreements. One that can be worked out and one that can’t. The ones that can be worked out can only be worked out rationally and calmly. And the ones that can’t be worked out won’t be worked out either way. So why fight, ever?”

12. Know what your vows mean. 

“‘Through better or worse’ means everything. I have a friend whose wife cheated on him for years. He never thought of divorce and we would rag on him. He said, ‘I can’t control her anymore than I can control the weather.’ Come to find out he was wrong. She eventually filed for divorce from him because she wanted to marry some rich guy she met in New York. My buddy refused to sign the papers for years. Until she came back to Alabama and rekindled their love. Now, they go down to that beach where it all began every summer with their kids.”

13. Take your time. 

“Date a while, live together first, then decide if you wanna marry her. A lot of couples hate each other or do a 180 after moving in together, so if you haven’t yet, avoid getting married to them.”

14. Love is key. 

“While not married myself, I can tell you some marriage advice from watching my parents’ marriage fall apart. Never change. Be the same person today that you were when you exchanged phone numbers. Be willing and eager to listen. Take a deep breath every now and then. Be a team. If things start to get stale, go travel, surprise them, be spontaneous. Never stop loving.”

15. Overcome your dislikes.

“If you can’t name ten things about her that you don’t like, then you don’t know her well enough.”

RELATED: 15 Seemingly Minor Things That Mean The World To Women

Rebecca Jane Stokes is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York with her cat, Batman. She hosts the love and dating advice show, Becca After Dark, on YourTango’s Facebook Page every Tuesday and Thursday at 10:15 pm Eastern. For more of her work, check out her Tumblr.

Houston luminary Slim Thug considers himself an expert at many things, and apparently, that includes marriage advice. On Wednesday morning (Aug. 2) he dropped by the studio of 97.9 The Box to share a very interesting conspiracy theory: Ciara and Russell Wilson’s marriage isn’t what we think it is.

While there isn’t much context regarding how The Wilsons became a topic of discussion, Thug didn’t hesitate to unload his theory. “Do a woman who used to talk to Future really want a Russell Wilson?” Thug asks the show’s hosts. “I don’t believe it. I think it’s all for financial stability.”

If you recall, Ciara and Future’s relationship crumbled shortly after cheating rumors began to swirl in the midst of making their engagement public and welcoming their adorable son baby Future in 2014. Soon after their relationship fizzled, Ciara became romantically involved with Seattle Seahawks quarterback Wilson. They’ve since gotten married and had a baby of their own, but Slim Thug simply isn’t buying it.

“No hate, I bought his shoes the other day… I’m just saying I have no personal issue with him, or her, God bless them,” he clarified before further explaining why he doesn’t think their relationship is legit.

“He’s just a corny dude, ain’t nothing wrong with it,” Thug says. “I ain’t gonna say corny cause that’s hatin’ but he’s just like a square…I don’t believe a girl coming from a street dude could even adapt to that.”

Or, perhaps the lengthy legal battle which has ensued between Ciara and her former fiancee Future was enough to make her never look back.

Press play on Slim Thug sharing his thoughts on Ciara and Russell Wilson’s marriage below.