The happy relationship letter

"A friend sent me a link to your site a few weeks ago and now I am hooked. You recently asked for positive stories of relationships and I wanted to share mine. First off, for us, the key has been commitment. I have been reading the last few weeks of letters and responses and my heart goes out to the people who were dating psycho liars. Let me restate the key to a solid relationship, do not go out with psychos. After you have weeded out the psychos, the next step is finding someone you can commit to. My wife and I have been together 14 years and dated and lived together another 4. The minute I saw her I knew she was special. We started kind of fast, I think we slept together the first night we met, if not the first, certainly that weekend. While her beauty attracted me, her brains and attitude have kept me interested. Again, let me stress, when you commit to someone and take that seriously, then I think everything else will work out. If, on the other hand, you have a wandering eye, cruise for easy lays online or visit prostitutes while traveling, you are not really committed to anything but your own ego. My wife and I lead fairly separate lives, we both work, we both have active lives beyond our relationship, but we make a point to include on another in social gatherings and even sporting events, although she hates football, she now goes to the university games with me during the season. Have we ever had a fight? Hell yes. A knock down drag out fight? Yes, but maybe twice in almost 20 years. It just hardly ever gets to that point. Do we still have sex after almost 20 years together? Yes we do, not nearly as much as we did that first weekend together :), but we are frequent partakers in a healthy sexual life. I trust her and I know she trusts me, when we got married, we made a vow to one another and did so in front of family and friends and we took that seriously. What I see around me in failing relationships and some of the letters you have published seem to be people who either can not be faithful, or believe they have some right to getting some strange on the side no matter who gets hurt. I knew very early this was a woman I wanted to be with and part of our commitment included monogamy. I would have it no other way and while I am ill at ease speaking for her, I am pretty sure we are on the same page on that. There is no road map to a happy relationship, but what works for us is honesty, respect, sexual compatibility and the desire to make it work, not matter what. My advice to your readers is be open about what you want, be honest about who you are as a person and accept that others are not just like you and do not get attached to psychos, because they will drag you down to their own little hell. Two questions, do you ask people if it is OK to publish their letters? Also, what is your background?"

First, thank you for the letter. I would so much publish letters from happy people than people getting ready for an STD screening.

To answer your questions, I often try and respond to letters sent to me via email, to ask follow up questions and see where that goes. I have asked people if it is OK to publish their letters, and I have not asked some. It depends. I also edit letters to remove things that might indicate who the person is, or who the psycho lover is.

My background? Well, to answer the subtext of your question, I am not trained to answer questions professionally. I have been in therapy and did not always like it. The questions sent to me, for the most part, appear to be real so I try to answer them as best as I can. Sometimes I just get pissed that people are scummy and I lose it.

Then again, scummy people need to be called on it, because my sense is, there is a swatch of people out there who feel entitled to do whatever they do, cheat, lie, steal and then are offended when someone calls them scummy. Oh well.

Again, thank you for sharing a loving relationship story. You letter came in earlier this week, but I have been literally swamped with all sorts of drama.