I've tried so many times through the years for Brad and Tiffany to maintain a good and loving relationship without success.
I thought the trick would be to get their interests aligned by reading magazines. That helped. They could at least have positive conversations now.
Should I try the crystal ball object to increase both of their nice and playful points?
Are they destined to be a difficult couple?
TIA

User-controlled interactions pretty much guarantee positive interactions, as long as you choose the interactions that work well with their personality. If you're letting them do whatever they want, then Nice > 5 would be good.

Thank you. I will work on upping their nice points. Yes, they're fine while I'm playing them for the most part.
When I'm playing another family on a community lot and I see Brad and Tiffany rejecting kisses and the red minus signs are flying, I'm thinking all my work with getting them to treat each other well at home is going up in flames. lol

I'm not mistaken in thinking that what playable sims do on community lots when I'm playing another family affects their relationships, am I? If I'm wrong about that, I guess I don't need to worry about the Burbs having negative interactions when I'm not playing them.

I'm trying to remember if this was one of the couples I ended up remaking and replacing. Sometimes I did that if the original Sims vexed me too much.

@dawnpage99, unfortunately, I think interactions on community lots while not controlled do affect relationship points once you go back to the houehold to play them. Which is kind of a bummer, I've always thought that makes them, well, too uncontrollable.

Yeah, for some reason, Brad and Tiffany don't really get along well like AT ALL. Sims wiki tells us it's actually Brad the one that isn't very fond of his wife, although their bios imply she was the one that didn't really want to move to Old Town. However, since he's a Gemini, he should be the one who's more attracted to her than vice-versa! I thought I was the only one who had a really hard time getting Brad and Tiffany to like each other; they just seem to not like that much being married.

The principal problem seems to be their interests: they're not terribly mismatched, but they don't have coinciding interests either. They could share a couple of magazines from Downtown, to try and find common ground. Ironically, with Tiffany's job and Brad's enormous garden, they don't have much time to talk to each other, either. Plus, Brad seems kind of jerk, always initiating arguments out of home, even though he's not specially grouchy.

My solution: send the family on Vacation. I only managed to get Brad and Tiffany on good terms again one time I booked them a travel to Vacation Island. You have to build their relationship almost from the start, since Brad only has 50 daily relationship points with Tiffany: get them to talk, do some light interactions, maybe some hug here or there... and try not to get Brad to autonomously argue with his wife. Once they hit the 80/90 mark and have a good mood, they should again behave like honeymooners!

I picked the third option: Kill them both. (Okay. That's a lie. XD What happened was I accidentally broke my ped portal (accidentally made a default replacement that was just a normal table due to some tomfoolery causing me to accidentally staple its GUID to something else that was SUPPOSED to have a cloned GUID) and a fire started and they both happened to die while sparing their son and dog because the fireman never showed up to save them.)

How sad. But how noble of them to die while saving Johnny and Tucker.

It just occurred to me that perhaps I should let the drama erupt and have them find lovers and/or separate instead of trying to make them love each other.

I always try to make my sims have happy lives and relationships so that would hard for me.

For now I will soldier on and try all avenues of having Tiffany and Brad be a happy couple before tearing the family apart.

Johnny grew up in Sims 2 to be so family oriented. Maye instead of having a good example to go by, his parents' lousy marriage motivated him to have a happy marriage and family at all costs.

Whenever I start a new neighborhood, the first thing I do is delete all of the Maxis-made sims except the Newbies and Goths.

I like to populate the neighborhood with my own people, but Bob & Betty and Bella, Mortimer, & Cassandra are too iconic to get rid of.

This is interesting because so far my Burbs have gotten along fine, it's the Pleasant couple who seem destined for divorce. I haven't done anything special like using magazines to raise interests (and not because I can't actually get to Downtown at all), so it's just their base state.

I had worked on their relationship and then ignored them for a while while playing with their kids. All of a sudden, I saw them fighting because one was in a rotten mood and the other felt romantic. The romantic gesture was rejected and that it had been insisted on and had been rejected led to bad feelings all around.

They are an odd couple, one that needs a certain amount of hands on attention. But, I have to say, I don't really like that family. They aren't really nice, at least not Diane or the children. I briefly thought of manipulating their personalities using the crystal ball, but then realized the only way to fix the kids was through a cheat or cheat object. I then thought of redoing them with an adjustment to the personality type I like more (I like nice people and Sims!), but realized that I wasn't all that keen on them anyway, so they will probably "move" out of my neighborhood soon.