Get Smarter Everyday
“Bob Moses had learned what was needed to make dreams become realities. He had learned the lesson of power.
And now he grabbed for power with both hands.
To free his hands for the grab, he shook impatiently from them the last crumbs of the principles with which he had entered public service and for which, during his years of idealism, he had fought só hard.”
— Robert Caro, The Power Broker
Few places inspire dread quite like the DMV. You can arrive before lunch with one simple task and emerge hours later feeling as though you have survived a minor natural disaster. The chairs are uncomfortable, the lighting is unforgiving, and the person ahead of you always seems to be attempting a type of vehicle transaction never before encountered by human civilization.
So why is the DMV still this bad?
The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own for the children, and the children yet unborn.
There are stories so darkly ironic that if they showed up in a movie, you’d roll your eyes and say, “Okay, come on. That’s too much.” This is one of them.
“Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
— Margery Williams, Velveteen Rabbit
Marriage advice usually sounds painfully predictable: communicate, compromise, never go to bed angry. But couples who have been together for years often develop far stranger—and sometimes far more effective—ways of keeping the peace.
From settling movie-night indecision with the threat of Sharknado to defusing arguments with imaginary karate fights, these “unhinged” marriage hacks may not appear in any relationship handbook. Yet beneath the weirdness is a surprising amount of wisdom about sharing a life with another person.
Here are 30 unconventional marriage tricks that real couples swear by.
