I recently attended a wedding and one thing that occurred to me was how the running wedding joke to the groom is to listen to his wife and everything will be okay. That you’ll then have a happy marriage. It was a joke and I think that’s all it really is. A happy marriage doesn’t come from total submission from either side.

Being married for 2 years is a really short time in comparison to my parents or grandparents but among my friends, I was the “veteran”. So many started asking me for “marriage advice” in spite of my limited time as a married man.

So I pulled together the things I’ve learned in the past two years. Not really from my own experience necessarily but also from the experience of my parents and the many other long married couples. Here they are.

1) Eliminate any reason for insecurity

The one thing that plagues many relationships is this. A girlfriend worried that her boyfriend could have something to do with his colleague, or some other girl out there he’s been messaging.

Insecurity can turn anyone into an ugly person. It can make a normal person do crazy things.

In my relationship I do whatever I can to eliminate insecurity. If my wife wants to look at my phone and read all my messages. Sure. I let her do it. She knows my pin and I have no qualms whatsoever with her taking my phone at any time to read it. Sure to some it’s not a matter of having something to hide but more a matter of privacy but to me, my privacy with my wife is a small price to pay for her security. This works both ways. She doesn’t hide her phone from me either.

2) Understanding that men follow their heads, women follow their hearts

Men and women are hardwired differently. Men look at situations in a factual manner. Women look at them more emotionally. That’s why sometimes in the middle of an argument the guy would say “I don’t understand what is wrong here and what we’re arguing about?” and the girl says “You don’t understand how I feel!”.

So for the guys, if you’re ever in a fight with your lady, ask yourself “How does she feel right now and why?”.

For the girls ask “What exactly am I upset about here in particular… emotions aside?”.

The sooner you can bridge these two the sooner you reconcile.

3) What he/she needs to know and what he/she don’t

This is a fairly controversial point.

Most people say that they want to know everything. If you got fired from your job, they want to know immediately. If your business is doing badly, they want to know. If you made a mistake and cheated on them, they want to know. If you have cancer, they want to know.

I know a man who has been married 30 years now and when I asked him if he told his wife everything he said “Most people want to know everything. Some can handle the truth, but some can’t. Know what kind of partner you are with before you decide whether or not to tell all”.

4) Different people receive love in different ways

A married friend of mine once introduced me to a book called The 5 Languages of Love. It emphasizes that different people have different ways in which they want their partners to show love to them.

Some people measure love by the words of affirmation you give them, some by gifts or some by the quality time you spend with them. Before you do a gesture of love for your partner, find out which of the 5 languages she best receives love in. If she values quality time with her then buying gifts isn’t going to have a major impact.

I know my wife’s language of love. She needs for quality time with me to feel loved. For me I know it’s acts of service.

5) Knowing that your husband/wife is number 1

When I was a kid I told my mom that I love her and that no matter who I married in future I would always love my mom more. To my surprise my mom actually corrected me. She said

“You’re wrong. Once you get married, the number 1 person you must fight for and always remain committed to is your wife, not your mother. I’ve already had my time with being your number 1, and I won’t be able to live life with you forever. From then on, your wife takes on that responsibility, and so she must be your number 1”.

She made me promise that and I knew it wasn’t easy for her because hey… she didn’t know yet who I was going to get married to. Sometimes mothers don’t get along with their daughter-in-laws and she was preemptively pushing me to the side of my future wife. It was selfless, but as they say, if you love somebody you must be prepared to let him/her go when the time comes.

I have been spending the past couple of days with my Father. My Father is one man that I have admired and looked up to all my life. Ever since I was a kid and even now that I’m 30 I still learn something new from him every day.

Tonight I decided to sit down and recall some of the things he said to me all my life. The pieces of advice he had given me. I want to write it here, so that Fighter will always remember the things his grandfather had passed on to me. Note that some of these quotes are quotes that have probably been around that my father had gotten wind of and then repeated to me.

Here are the 12 I remember.

1) “Success is not measured by how much you have in the bank. it’s measured by a delicate balance you achieve between family, money, health and happiness”.

2) “Be nice to people on your way up in life because you’ll see the same people on your way down”.

3) “A new car is like a pretty face. The first scratch hurts the most. But after enough scratches you don’t care anymore”.

4) “Never be cocky. Because there will always be someone bigger and better than you”.

5) “In any sport you play, buy the best and most expensive equipment so that if you lose, you have nothing and nobody to blame but yourself”.

6) “The best way to make money is from the stock market. You have no sunk cost and capital can go in and out quickly”.

7) “Sometimes the stock market has spirits. The first time your friend tells you to buy a stock, you don’t buy and it goes up. The second time your friend tells you to buy a stock, you don’t buy and again it goes up. The third time your friend tells you to buy a stock you decide you must be a fool to not buy it. That’s the stock that goes down”.

8) “How you treat your parents is how your kids will treat you”.

9) “Behind every successful man is a woman. Behind every failure of a man is also a woman”.

10) “Trust nobody. Always have your check and balance”.

11) “Most people aren’t as rich as they look. You see their assets (their houses, cars etc) but you don’t see their debts.”

12) “Buy insurance if you can’t afford the cost of something happening. If you can afford it then insure yourself”.

In light of the recent protests that KL taxi drivers are having now against Uber, I decided to write this from the point of view  of someone who sometimes uses both services.

Just a few years ago KL was listed as one city that had among the 10 worst taxis in the world. As a local it’s hard to defend that. Taking a taxi is a painful experience and here’s why:

1) You have to haggle like a fishmonger for every ride you take.

Every time you go up to a cab there is constant haggling. You tell them where you want to go and you get thrown some high round number. Like RM30 (if you’re local)… or RM50 (if you look like a tourist). And then you have to haggle.

2) No matter how much you haggle you still overpay

Then you haggle all the way from RM30 to RM15. That’s a number you can probably live with and you accept it because you’re desperate. But you know even then you’re still overpaying. You know that if they had gone by meter, the ride would probably cost you less than RM10 instead. Nobody likes to feel cheated.

3) The condition of our taxis

As the article above rightfully said, many taxis in KL are old and in poor condition.

4) Drivers are picky with where they go. They don’t often want to go anywhere that has traffic.

That’s basically EVERYWHERE in KL especially during peak hours. It’s amazing how difficult it is to get a cab during peak hours. Not because there aren’t any but because they often refuse to travel to a certain destination during peak hours. Meanwhile the rest of us that need to get somewhere (and can’t help that it’s during peak hours) are stuck with few other options.

5) Safety

When it comes to safety I think our local taxis suffer from a rather negative perception because of high profile cases like this.

Enter MyTeksi

There are many taxi apps in KL (Easytaxi, Taximonger etc etc) but I’m gonna talk about MyTeksi here because it’s widely used.

I really like  MyTeksi because they solved a real world problem for many of us KL people and they did it very vey effectively (making them in my opinion one of the most successful tech companies in the region). They effectively solved problem 1) and 2) above which is a huge part of the pains of taking a taxi in KL.

I don’t know any of the founders or owners of MyTeksi but I became an advocate for them. Every time a friend of mine from overseas came into town I got them to download MyTeksi and they all loved it.

Then came Uber

When Uber first came in I was impressed. What impressed me wasn’t really the app itself because I thought MyTeksi is already a really well made app. What impressed me was the service and of course the comfort of the newer and well taken care of Uber cars. Plus it charges everything to your credit card automatically so it’s a cashless system. No need to ruffle your pockets for change.

But here’s another thing that matters much more than comfort and convenience and that’s reliability. While MyTeksi solved the problem of haggling with taxis, another problem persisted and that’s problem number 4. Taxi drivers are picky about where they pickup customers and where they send them.

The past few times I have tried to get a taxi from MyTeksi I have failed. Sometimes even with an RM5 tip I don’t get any cars. Or sometimes I do get assigned a driver but the driver calls me 5 minutes later and tells me to cancel my booking because it’s too jam and he doesn’t want to come to where I am.

The thing I’m wondering is… if it’s too far for you why did you agree to it in the first place? Now I have to go through the whole process again of trying to put out another cab.

Uber totally solves this problem. When an Uber driver is coming.. he comes no matter what. It doesn’t matter if there’s heavy traffic, or if there’s an Alien Invasion and they blow a crater on Jalan Sultan Ismail… he will come.

But still… all these benefits of Uber have one downside. It comes with a price. It’s a lot more expensive than a regular taxi.

But then came UberX

The budget version of Uber that fetches you around in Toyotas or Nissans or Myvis and can cost you as much as half of what a regular taxi will cost you but has all the other benefits above from the good service to the everything else.

Why would anyone take a taxi now? I know I haven’t. I’ve seen been active on using UberX whenever I had to. So when I saw taxi drivers protesting about Uber and how it doesn’t follow regulations and all it baffled me. It baffled me because many of our local taxi drivers aren’t exactly known for following regulations. Look at how many of them refuse to use a meter?

Now I know not all taxi drivers are bad. I have met good ones who use meter without asking and I often give these ones a tip because I appreciate not being swindled in a city where it’s almost acceptable to not go by meter. After all, taxis are a service industry and in service industries it’s not all about price. People often don’t mind paying for good service.

So yes there are good taxi drivers. But the bad ones just really take the cake and I hope that Uber does bring one thing:

That the bad taxi drivers will know that people have options now and then perhaps… perhaps they will change their service levels. With that.. maybe one day KL taxis will be known as one of the best 10 in the world. In that world MyTeksi will prosper and taxi drivers in KL won’t have to worry about Uber.

Today’s topic was a thought inspired by an event from two days ago. If you haven’t been following my Dayre, Shorty got into a car accident yesterday. You can read it here or to keep a long story short I’ll just summarize it in points.

– Taxi driver hits Shorty in the back.

– Taxi driver tried to intimidate Shorty to paying him even though he was the one who knocked her from the back.

– I came and saw that the bully was an old man. I sympathized with him so I decided to help him out. Paid him RM150 even though he wanted RM600-800. I paid him just to help him out because I felt bad for him.

– Some people felt I shouldn’t have helped this bully. And that he was trying to swindle us.

I did receive one comment though that said it’s okay that I went easy on him and chose to help. Because good things happen to good people… or well that’s karma.

So that inspired my article today. Karma.

Note that I refer to Karma here not in the Buddhist or religious standpoint. I refer to Karma really as the general belief many of us have that good things will happen to people who do good things and bad things will happen to people who do bad things. And I’m talking about these things happening in this life… not another life or an afterlife.

I was brought up to believe in karma. That people who do good things have good things happen to them and people who do bad things have bad things happen to them. For a while I did believe in it and I admit that helped motivate me to do more good things whether it’s just helping a friend or do charity. In that way I have to say that even the most “altruistic” good thing I did then wasn’t truly purely “altruistic”.

Today though I don’t believe in karma. Here’s why:

1) People you help often don’t remember or appreciate it

Remember a story that goes something like this.

– A poor boy was looking for food.

– A grocer who saw him decided to help him out and gave it to him for free.

– Many years later the grocer fell sick and had to pay a big hospital bill.

– But the bills were paid in full by the doctor, who happened to be the boy who he gave food to many years ago.

They even made it into a viral Thai commercial.

Well in actual fact, that story never happened as you an see from this Snopes article.

The truth is in real life, most people don’t remember the good that you have done for them. In fact to some extent we’re wired in a way that makes us remember bad things that people do more than good things.

So if even the people you help most likely don’t remember what you did to help… how can they one day want to do something nice for you in return? If you’re helping someone with the hope and expectation that that person will repay you some day… odds are your return of investment is going to be zero.

So we’re really only left with “luck” or “coincidence” or the presence of some greater karmic power that will reward good people. That’s really hard to see.

2) Society today don’t admire good people. They admire powerful or wealthy people.

I know people who spend a great number of years of their lives doing social work. Really committing their lives to helping other people and many if not all of them go unrecognized by society. One of the people we’ve had in history that is most famous for being a good person and helping many others is Mother Teresa. That’s one. We haven’t had many more people in our generation that are known because they simply do good things.

In contrast Steve Jobs is one of the most admired entrepreneurs of our time. If it weren’t for him, we would possibly still be using Blackberries today with their cursed error messages that nobody could ever understand.

Still he wasn’t necessarily a “good” person in the way society deems a good person. When he joined Apple he shut down all the charity programs Apple was involved in and never restarted it (until Tim Cook finally took over). He also got his girlfriend pregnant and then refused to accept that the child was his until much later on.

And well there’s a whole other article here about how he was a bit of a jerk.

But modern society doesn’t care about all that. It’s because we don’t care about good people. We care about successful people regardless of how they are as a person or whether they’re good or bad.

3) The Bad Get Away with Being Bad

This happens way too often all over the world. Throughout history there were dictators or leaders who were responsible for some of the worst atrocities. Many got away with them easy. Some like Pol Pot lived on till the end and some like Hitler ended things in his own terms.

Bad people get away with it. So if there really is karma… then why do they?

The thing about realizing that I don’t believe in Karma is that I live a happier life. Why?

1) I have no expectations in getting something back in return when I do something nice for someone. So that means I get disappointed much less.

2) I realize that we all need to be good not because of the potential rewards we might get for being good. But because the world needs goodness… and if everyone is good to each other then maybe the world becomes a better place to live.

3) I don’t get frustrated when bad people get away with doing bad things because I understand that’s how life works.

I don’t believe in karma now… but I would like to believe in the goodness of people.

I’ve been together with my wife for 6 years now and there’s one thing I can say about us. Never have we paid more attention to each other than in the first 3 months of those 6 years. In that first 3 months we were focused and undistracted. Driven by the new experience and the burning desire to learn more from each other we talked for hours. Undistracted. Hours than often felt like minutes.

Then as the years passed the following things happened:

1) I started getting very distracted with work

2) I started getting new hobbies that I spend lots of time on. Cycling, golf or even computer games.

3) We had a baby.

All of the above things took two things from us: Time and energy. So much that by the end of dealing with all three we’re often tired and hardly have any quality time together.

What is quality time? Over the years I’ve learned that quality time isn’t watching a movie or a TV show together. It isn’t both of us hanging around in the same room for hours doing our thing.

Quality time is the time we spend talking to each other totally undistracted by anything. Not even looking at the phone for a short 3 seconds to check WhatsApp messages.

I first experienced that by accident. Shorty and I happened to be exhausted after our long days and laying around on our beds when we started talking. We started talking about our days, about the latest gossip that’s around our circle of friends… history… whatever. We just talked. As we talked I got to know more about the things that made her happy that day and the things that made her sad or things she learned. I felt like even though I was out working the whole day, I was still there for her by the end of it.

Quality time is important but admittedly isn’t something we do consistently too. It’s always too tempting to spend that 15-30 minutes of our night watching the latest episode of Orange is the New Black or just going to bed early. Today though I pledge to take 15 minutes of each day I have for the next week to lie or sit down and talk to my wife about anything at all. Undistracted by the calls of my baby or the beeps of my phone.

I want to write it here because that means I commit to it. That I can’t turn back. In a week I shall see the result and whether it has helped me build a better relationship with my wife.

If anyone else feels they can spare 15 minutes a day to have an undistracted uninterrupted conversation with your partner, try it out. I’d love to hear your results at the end of a week.

During Chinese New Year, tradition has that the following conversation starters are normal and somewhat acceptable.

If you’re single, you get asked when you’re getting married.

If you’re married, you get asked when your first kid is coming.

If you’re married for long enough, you eventually asked why you don’t have kids yet.

Today I want to talk about why 2 and 3 are the most inappropriate questions you can ask a married couple.

Here’s why.

Do married couples want to start a family?

First let me answer the question bluntly. Do married couples want to have kids? Well this depends on preference but you can safely say that most (not all) married couples want to have kids. It’s just a matter of when and when. The first when is for when they’re ready to have kids. The second when is for when they are lucky enough to conceive.

It is harder to have a baby than you’d expect

Before we get married and try to have kids, we often are filled with paranoia that it’s really easy to get pregnant and accidentally have a child out of wedlock. We hear about other couples in college getting pregnant and then forced to quit their studies halfway. Or we hear about couples that got pregnant and were forced to marry quickly.

Over the years I learn that this paranoia is very much exaggerated. Yes some people are more fertile so for them it’s easier to conceive. For a lot of other people though, having to conceive a child is quite the opposite.

When you see a fertility doctor, you’re normally asked how long you’ve been trying to have a baby. You are only considered to have fertility issues only if you’ve been trying for at least a year and when I say infertility, I don’t mean just the female in the relationship. Often the problem stems from the male too.

So it takes at least a year of trying for the most average people to start a family. For the ones who have to fight harder, it takes longer.Or for some… it just doesn’t happen.

Peer pressure

For those who it doesn’t come easy for, it doesn’t help that it would appear to them that everyone around their age group is having babies without too much trouble. Each new photo of a newborn baby on a Facebook feed is met with happiness but also disappointment and wonder on when your turn would come.

Then there is the cost of these expectations.

The Cost of Expectations

Few things test the strength of a marriage more than the challenge of trying to have a baby. Everyone starts with expectations of being able to conceive and the longer and longer this drags out without success, the more stressful it becomes on the relationships. The constant cycle of hopes and disappointments lead to fights and sometimes those fights get enough to end a once happy marriage.

Now put yourself in the shoes of a newly married couple who has been trying really hare to have kids but have had little luck.

A friend comes up to you and asks you (sometimes in front of everyone) “When are you going to have kids?”

The real answer is complicated. Behind the scenes you fight this battle in secret. A battle of constantly seeing doctors after doctors. Taking hormones and all the needles you need and spending more money than you have ever spent on anything else. A battle where your hopes of victory lie in whether your period (or wife’s period) comes or not every month… and for all the many months before.. you have only met disappointment and defeat.

So when someone publicly asks you that, your real answer is “I am trying” but sometimes you lie and you say “We’re not ready yet” because you don’t want to talk about it more than you already have.

But nobody ever means any harm by asking that

That is true. “When are you going to have kids” is a question that is most often asked in the most innocent manner possible. It’s a conversation starter but the thing is that most people don’t understand the sensitivities that lie within. I was one such person that asked these questions because I was ignorant to the challenges that married couples faced behind the scenes. And now I know.

If you really really had to ask because you really really wanted to know?

Well.. maybe you could just ask “Are you planning to have kids?”.

My Personal Story

My inspiration to write this is from the stories of the many friends I have who have tried and are still trying to have kids. The feelings I describe here come from them.

Personally I have been lucky. Before my wife and I got married, my wife told me she suffered from PCOS which was the most common cause of infertility in women. As much as I wanted to start a family and have kids in my life, marrying my wife would mean I face the possibility of never having my own kids. We discussed various options from the different medical treatment to even adoption. In the end I decided to stand by my wife and get married to her regardless. I decided that it was a battle I wanted my wife to face with me by her side…. not with anyone else.

So you see, I began our marriage with very low expectations. I expected a long drawn battle for years before I even started trying. When people asked me when I was going to have kids, I told them outright that my wife had PCOS and so it would take us some time before we did.

I felt the peer pressure, but not having expectations made it a lot easier for us to cope. We got lucky too, because half a year or so after we got married, we had Fighter.

My hope of writing this is to shed some light of the sensitivities of this question. Something most people don’t realize when they ask it even with their best intentions. Heck I know because I’ve done it. So share this entry, tell a friend or whatever. I hope one day regardless of whatever phase in life we’re in, we would understand this.

Perhaps a simple “How are you?” would be a good enough conversation starter.