“Be with a man who ruins your lipstick not your mascara.” – Unknown

I was watching a reality show recently (yup, my guilty pleasure!) about Americans who find love in foreign countries and there is a couple where the American woman is a bit neurotic and her Australian girlfriend is a bright, bubbly, very loud (in a positive way) and sparkly person. In almost every interaction on the show, particularly when they are around the sparkly girl’s friends, you can see that the relationship is draining her happiness. It made me think of something I heard somewhere (probably on a coffee mug or a t-shirt), “Be with a man who ruins your lipstick not your mascara”.

I recall a family member of one ex-husband (before we were married) telling me how much they loved being around me because I was always smiling and happy. Fast forward a few years into the relationship and I realized I was no longer smiling and happy most of the time, because my relationship was sucking the happiness out of me.

In contrast to this, my fourth husband (to whom I have been happily married for almost a decade) generally only ruins my mascara by making me laugh too hard. There are a number of factors that have gone into this being a successful relationship, but one of the main ones is that he makes me laugh WAY more than he makes me cry. That isn’t to say we haven’t had our share of challenges, or that we haven’t argued, yelled, said things we didn’t mean and in the moment, stopped being supportive. But it never lasts long. We always BOTH acknowledge when we’ve been wrong and work to get back to a place of supportiveness and happiness.

We try to see the humor in any situation and make each other laugh. We also share the same, admittedly sophomoric, sense of humor. I am amazed by how frequently one of us makes a joke in reference to something we’ve just observed, and the other says, “You read my mind!”.

I have also learned how to use well timed humor to diffuse an argument. One example that comes to mind was an argument that morphed into me bitching about having to “do everything around the house”. This is patently not true; we actually both pitch in to keep the household running, shifting to do more of our “fair share” when the other is busy. In that moment,  I was just being dramatic, and I quickly realized that I was being unfair, and that the argument was actually pretty stupid, as most of them are. I can’t even recall at this point what started the fight. I did know I wanted to get out of it, so I went with humor. To paraphrase, I said something like “I do everything, I cook, I clean, I take care of the dogs…all you have to do is go to work and come home, then have dinner and get a blow job. I’m like a hooker that does your laundry!”. He busted out laughing (although he tried hard not to). Thus endeth the argument.

In my experience, humor, particularly a shared sense of humor, is crucial to a happy and healthy relationship.  It is a shared connection that will grow over time, resulting in your own language of inside jokes and callbacks (a term stand up comedians use to describe revisiting a joke within a set).  I believe that this fosters intimacy and, when times get challenging, as they will in long term relationships, your shared history of humor can be a thread that binds you together and reminds you of why you love your partner.