EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK: You should like your partner

Featured photo: We like to have fun around here.

I’ve been watching a lot of “Love is Blind” these days. Now in its seventh season, I’m obsessed with the show’s premise where people date for about a week and get engaged to each other without having ever seen each other. It’s the best and worst of reality TV.

But something interesting has come up in the past couple of seasons that I sometimes see in everyday life.  After the couples actually meet in person and try to live together, they start to fight, they bicker, they nitpick. And eventually, it becomes clear that they don’t even like each other.

Now, of course when you’ve been with someone for a long time (or even a short time in the case of “Love is Blind”), you’re going to fight. They’re going to do something annoying that pisses you off. But if you’re choosing to marry someone and spend the rest of your life together, I think the bare minimum should be that you at least like each other. Right?

Love is kind of different. A lot of times people still have love for each other but don’t treat each other well. They love each other but have resentment. They love each other but don’t necessarily like spending time together. But to me, liking each other is as important, if not more so, than loving each other.

Sam and I have been together for 10 years now, married for three.

And we still like each other. We are each other’s best friend. We take walks together, talk to each other, make jokes, poke fun, take naps together. It’s kind of like having a sleepover with your favorite person all the time. It’s great.

Sure, we don’t have kids, which reduces the amount of stress in our lives tenfold. But also, we chose to be together because we genuinely enjoy each other’s company. And like I said in my wedding vow, I wake up and choose to be in this relationship everyday.

We celebrate each other’s wins, pick each other up when we fall, call each other out for being wrong and make fun of each other just because. And we’ve decided that if that ever stops being the case (although we don’t think it will), we just won’t be together anymore. Life is too damn short to choose to hitch your life to someone who you don’t even like, or worse, who doesn’t like you.

I mean otherwise, what’s the point?