[Youden]

> But through the years I've experienced relationships that transform from pure love and admiration to pure confusion and being on completely different pages. This may be because I'm young, and maybe relationships become more straightforward later in life. But something tells me people never become less complicated, maybe they just become more complacent.

I know everybody is different but the key for my relationship with my wife has been open communication. There's a clear pattern for us: when we don't talk about a problem, we end up getting upset with each other, but when we do talk about the problem, we come to an understanding and everything is fine.

Another key is that we love each other and if we disagree on something, we're both willing to find compromise.

There are a few big issues where a compromise might not be viable, like having kids or where to live (we're from two very distant countries), but we made sure we agreed on those pretty early on.

My point here is that I don't think age is the solution. Relationships are work. It can't all just be fun and games, you need to talk each other about stuff, build up trust that doing so is safe and be willing to compromise for each other. This is work and without it, the relationship might very well fall apart.