Via Dumb Little Man blog, there are 10 tips for a successful first year of marriage. I agreed with just about all of them, except for number one, which I mentioned in the comments. Point 1 states that you should approach the marriage with a 50/50 attitude, expecting to give your fair share. My disagreement was that a 50/50 attitude magically does not equal 100%. When you feel like you're giving 50, you're fair share, your spouse probably feels like you're giving less or he/she is giving more. Approach it with the 80/20 expectation, where more is going to be required than your fair share and somehow it will work out to equal 100% of what you need. Another commentor stated that she believed you needed to approach it with 100% attitude. I disagree with that also because that would imply that everything depends on you and you have to do everything, you can't expect anything from your partner. Obviously, this can cause more problems that it solves. There's no partnership there. The point is, don't be counting up who's turn it is to do chore a or b. Do it even when you did it last time. Give a little bit more. I heard recently one woman's advice saying that her first attitude in the beginning of the marriage was to hold back, to give herself over completely. When she did this, her husband responded in same. When she completely trusted and gave herself over, he responded equally. When you give more than your fair share, your spouse will most likely do the same. That is what a marriage needs.

I also mentioned in the comments something I read in the book, "Men of Valor" by Robert Millet. In any relationship, he has two pieces of advice that he believes removes most contention and arguments.

1. Choose not to be offended
2. Assume the best (referring to another's intentions, I believe)

Now, that's some good advice. It seems like a lot of relationships, including relationships in church callings, between friends, siblings, etc, would be greatly affected if we all followed those two pieces of advice.

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A study was recently released that dives into what makes youth happy. Apparently, this is surprising to those in the marketing world, but I don't see why. It is common sense. The study says that youth are generally happy with their lives and optimistic about the future. Those that are sexually active reported lower levels of happiness. Those who claim that spirituality or religion is important to them reported higher levels of happiness. Many felt that family and loved ones were very important and those reported high levels of happiness. Basically, family and religion have a connection with happiness. Getting involved in sexual relations too early also affects your happiness. This doesn't seem surprising to me, but yet it made the news today. Source

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I am in charge of activities in our singles ward and there are two services that we are going to try out this next week to help inform people of the many activities that we have going on. You see, with singles wards and activities, there is always the problem of making sure people know about what is going on. You can make flyers, you can make phone calls, you can make announcements, but will people actually remember and will you actually have the time, even with your entire committee helping out? We have also recently had the issue of someone planning an unofficial activity on short notice, fully willing to invite everyone, not having time to call everyone, and so only some people find out about it, and others are hurt or offended that they did not know. These two services can help us out with this.

1. Phonevite.com - We are going to send around a sign-up sheet where people can sign up to receive either one phone call a week to learn about official ward activities or one phone call a week to learn about unofficial things that people are doing and are willing to invite everyone to or both (two phone calls a week). Then I will enter the phone numbers of those that sign up, save them as a phone book list, and then each week I will record a phone message and send it out at the beginning of the week on the official ward activities. Towards the weekend, I will send out a message on all of the happenings, unofficial activities. Each person on the list receives a phone call with the recorded message. If the person doesn't answer, the system is smart enough to leave a voice mail.

2. http://www.textmarks.com/ - Txtmarks allows people to send a text message whenever they feel like it, to a certain number, and receive back what information I have input into the website. So, at any given point, someone could be sitting at home, wondering what is going on in the ward. They send a text message to this number and receive back that people are invited over to so and so's house. It is like the previous, but via text message and on demand. This service also allows subscriptions, which means that the subscribers all receive a text message when the message is changed. But I don't believe we'll be using the service like that, because it negates the whole on-demand thing.

I will let you know how it goes.

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