Marriage 101

Tags

emotions, growth, inspiration, lifestyle, marriage, psychology, relationships

First, let’s get this straight. I am not a marriage counselor, and I don’t play one on TV. Still, I think I’ve learned a thing or two in 61 years of which nearly twelve have been lived in fair wedded bliss.

We’ve been watching a show most of you probably haven’t heard of. It’s called Addicted to Food. It revolves around a treatment center and the work of around eight men and women who suffer from extreme eating disorders, ranging from compulsive eaters, bulimics, and purgers. I don’t suffer from any of these, but I do flirt with compulsive eating. Eating emotionally. So I figured I might get a tip or two.

As one might suspect,emotional eating usually stems from issues one has from early childhood, or some other traumatic event in youth or young adulthood. One eats to keep from feeling and then dealing with the underlying issues.

Let’s face it. Most of us come from dysfunctional families to one degree or another. That is the key, here, the degree. For the degree and our personal psychological “givens” determine whether we will suppress our pain through addiction (be in food, alcohol, drugs, gambling, sex, or anything that we can dream up), or whether we will grow up, take control and responsibility and build healthy lives. 

We bring  our unresolved issues to the marriage, and whether we believe it or not, realize it or not, we expect the other person, this love of our lives, to fill the hole, making everything all better. They cannot of course, for they come with the same hole, caused by something very different, and expect the same of us.

That is the child we are. Most of us are in fact children no matter our age. Some of us, thankfully are adult about parts of our lives, and those parts allow us to function fairly normally most of the time. Some of us are fully adult and they are our models. We are lucky indeed if we have someone who can model adulthood to us.

We are children, mostly because we, most of us, most of the time, are ego driven. We are out for ourselves, out to protect ourselves at every cost. Taken to an extreme, such narcissism causes us a great deal of trouble. But even if we are empathetic and compassionate to a degree, we still look out for number one most of the time.

As babies, we cried and screamed if we were wet, hungry, or uncomfortable. As young children we began to learn boundaries–that the entire world didn’t revolve around us all of the time. As teens and young adults, we perfected and fine tuned the art of manipulation. We learned to “do for others” to get a reward. We learned to bat our eyes, we learned to laugh at the bosses jokes. We learned how to read the emotional needs of others and use them to get what we wanted.

And mostly we never saw ourselves in this way. We saw ourselves as successfully negotiating the social world. Give and take, befriend and be befriended.

Marriage, because it is based first and foremost on emotion, presents a person with a whole new animal. In the first months and perhaps years, we are all directed to the other person in our lives. We put them first, we think of their needs, we do for them, often without any real conscious thought for ourselves.

But passion fades, and one day one wakes up and finds a very ordinary person beside oneself. This person has bad breath, snores, scratches and burps, and well the list goes on. They vomit and have dirty underwear. They have bad habits, they say the “wrong thing” sometimes. They are all too normal.

This is where one’s level of adulthood becomes important.

For if we are still children, still into blaming others for past events, still victims, still looking and expecting someone to fix us and everything, we are headed for a disaster. For now, we will return to the manipulation game we have come to know so well.

Except now we are manipulating the beloved. We are doing things for them, but now we expect reward. We are choosing the right moment–their time of weakness–to get our way on some issue of the moment. We are “keeping score”.

Unless we have some measure of adulthood. If we have come to this marriage, or during it, arrived at the place where we are responsible for ourselves, then we never get to “keeping score.” We do for the beloved because we still wish to, without expectation of repayment. We take delight in the doing of it.

More especially , we don’t look to play upon our beloved vulnerabilities, rather, we approach serious issues when they are in most control, so they have the ability to make good decisions, negotiate fairly, and arrive at a mutual decision that will stand the test of time. We don’t take advantage, we don’t want to.

We don’t use the other person to shore up our own shortcomings. We can know that we are right on issue A and never have to beat a discussion into the ground until our spouse agrees that we are right. We can let them think they have won, because we know that it’s “not worth a fight”.

We don’t care about clothes on the floor, toothpaste squeezed wrongly, or toilet paper placed incorrectly. If there are pliers on the kitchen counter, or the wrappings of a candy bar on the bedroom dresser, we smile, place things where they belong and thank our lucky stars that we have someone who is otherwise so good to wake up next to.

We don’t sweat the small stuff. We work on our own failings and missteps. We know that as we mature, our ability to bring a mature attitude to the partnership of marriage increases. We can ask for help, we can ask for opinion, but in the end, the work is ours. And if we are very lucky, we married someone who pretty much does the same.

If the benefits were only to ourselves, that would be enough. But they redound to the marriage itself, making it stronger, more flexible, more compassionate.

And that is what makes a marriage something to be prized as a most precious possession.

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Ahead of That Curve

Tags

Internet, marriage, newsgroups, Online dating service, relationships, The Contrarian

I was reading an article in the Boston Globe today, realized that I had never really talked much about how the Contrarian and I met and married.

We first met via the Internet, a process that now comprises something like 22% of all heterosexual relationships.

In our case, it was not via such things as EHarmony or other similar dating sites. A few of those were around, but they were as I recall, pretty much self-entry kind of places. Free of charge.

Most interactions occurred by a device called mIRC, knows as Internet Relay Chat. You entered rooms and spot to whomever about whatever. But we did not meet that way, though we used it as a tool for better communication during our “courting.”

I don’t know if there were such faces as Facebook back then, in the last century, 1998, to be exact.  But if there was, it was off my radar and his as well. We didn’t meet that way either.

No we met via the “news groups.” I think they still exist, though I haven’t look at them in years. It was part of you e-mail process and you looked up hobbies or interests you had, and subscribed. People left messages, and you responded or wrote your own.

I was living in Connecticut at the time, and the Contrarian was here in Iowa. He had been a long user of newsgroups, but for me, it was fairly a new thing. I’m not sure how I found it or even heard about it.

There were plenty of men seeking women, and so forth, and I posted on a women seeking men. I made it clear I was looking for a long-term relationship, would relocate, and general information about me, age, education, and so forth.

The Contrarian responded with a lengthy e-mail about himself. We began to write back and forth for a few days, and felt very quickly that we had found something significant in each other. We made plans quickly for me to visit him.

I had a number of online friends (men mostly), from IRC, many whom I had met. I left them the pertinent information and flew off to Iowa on February 1, 1999, only about two months after we had started communicating.

I arrived in O’Hare in the early morning, and was supposed to connect with a flight into Eastern Iowa Airport. Fog was my nemesis. I spent the day in the airport and finally got a bus late in the day. I arrived very tired somewhere around 9 pm that night. Not an auspicious beginning.

But within a few days, we felt very sure of “Us” and I notified my moving company to set a date for packing me up. I returned three weeks later to Connecticut, and the Contrarian followed by plane about two weeks later.

Oddly, he got snowed in in Chicago, and ended up on a different flight. I too had to wait a good while for his flight to arrive.

We left Connecticut by car on March 16, arriving back in Iowa on the 17th. And well, that about says all there is to say. We married in September of that year, and are now approaching our eleventh anniversary this September.

Telling people, early on, of our method of meeting, usually brought some stares and some “wows”. Most people had tales to tell of Internet meetings going awry, and the media usually reported stories of dead women who had gone off to meet serial killers.

Plenty of folks gave us that “look” that said, “it will never last.” You can’t build a relationship over a computer! And truthfully, I knew a couple of such relationships that had gone sour  after some months. But I suspect that the statistics are pretty much the same as the more “normal” means of meeting.

Clearly, people aren’t afraid of this method any more. I’m not sure it’s better than other methods of meeting people. Smart people I think find it an easier medium to fess up the truth about yourself. After all, you can only communicate by mail and phone so long. There is no point in lying about things that will be discovered at meeting. But then, perhaps some thing that by then the person might care enough to ignore the extra poundage or the lesser stature. I’m not sure.

All I can say is it worked for us.

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Honor Thy Mother

Tags

Autobiography, conditional love, mothers and daughters, parenting, psychology, relationships

Mother-daughter relationships are some of the more complicated ones we have. As I mulled over the idea of writing this, I seemed always to devolve into a “defense” of my position. Nothing would delight me more than than you agree that I made the right decision. I want sympathy, not coherent criticism.

Yet, I instinctively know that I don’t really want that at all. I don’t want it to be a her side, my side kind of thing. I want to explain myself, and express my continuing questions about whether I’ve made the right decision. How does this all square with my faith?

So, I shall begin. If I can say it all in one post, I cannot yet say. It will take as long as it takes. I will try to be honest.

I’m not sure when I realized that my relationship with Mother was dysfunctional, and not the norm. I certainly didn’t feel that way as a young girl still living at home. My mother was no better nor worse than most of the other mothers I encountered. Let me state clearly, I was not physically abused unless you think that the average spanking and a couple of slaps here and there are abuse. I did not consider them as such.

My parents had similar parenting styles, learned no doubt from their own experiences as children. Both were clearly (knowing what I know of their upbringing) the victims of conditional love. And so they practiced it as the only kind they knew.

Without delving into specific instances, I can only relate that there is nothing quite so exquisitely painful as entering a house and being met with a cold stare, a turned back, and one word responses. Your mood falls, your stomach clenches, and you wait in silent emotional agony, as you search your mind trying to figure out what you have done wrong now.

The game that ensued usually only took minutes to play out and become the lecturing, demeaning diatribe of how incompetent you were, yet one was draw to the flame much as the proverbial moth. I never learned to simply go to my room and wait it out. For in truth, that would never work, you never got off the hook that way.

I had no siblings to be comforted by. I had no idea that this behavior was emotional blackmail. I assumed it normal. On the up side, along with being siblingless, I learned to be rather independent, a good quality to acquire.

What I mean by emotional blackmail, is that the indictment eventually came to the following questions: Was I incredibly stupid? Had I no common sense? Was I so selfish and self-centered? And then followed the comparisons with the ethereal “other people’s kids” who didn’t exhibit all these awful qualities. I was an embarrassment, an unnatural burden (chubby, braces, glasses–a wonderfully self-esteem trifecta to begin with!).

I was smart at books, and stupid at life. So it went.

But, again, I must point out, that I did not overall feel abused in any way. I thought it normal. But, you can understand why I was happy to graduate from living at home to having my own life.

Somewhere, as an adult, I started meeting women professionally who had quite different relationships with their mothers; and I could witness, sometimes,  a mature mother-daughter relationship. You mean you call your mother every day? I had to steel myself to call once every three months!

As I entered my 30’s and then 40’s, I began to resent this upsetting in my life. Why should I have to endure such periodic rejection. There was never an apology. I should point out that my father did exactly the same thing and when I lived with him in his last months, I was subjected more than once  to the same childhood agonies, and I admit I never outgrew the queasy stomach that ensued.

Still, I let the relationship limp along, getting through somehow, and breathing a sigh of relief once the dutiful call had been made and I was free from all this for another quarter year. Yet, the insanity of it all, seemed to escalate in some sense, and my patience and endurance grew weak.

A number of incidents seemed to coalesce into a condemnatory document in my mind that in the end, I could not ignore. I determined to end this circus of a relationship, this unhealthy misery inducing thing that was Mother and me.

Tomorrow I’ll explain what happened. You may in fact wish to hold off comment until I’ve finished.

Who Do You Really Know?

Tags

friends, human stories, knowing someone, psychology, relationships, sociology

It takes me forty minutes give or take to get to church on Sunday. I don’t listen to music. I think. I figure, hey I got this brain, might as well use it.

Today, I continued a think on the subject of reconnecting with old high school classmates and what I was learning from the experience. I try to learn from things, I helps in not making the same mistakes again and again.

Actually, I was working up a blog post, this one in fact. To anyone following me, they probably assume I’m talking to a midget or on a cell phone. I talk out loud and I can be animated. I was maybe 2/3 of the way in when the Eureka moment occurred. That is when I stop dancing around a subject and figure out the “angle.”

The angle is the reason for the post, it’s theme if you will. I had thought it might be about how we probably choose our “friends” in high school by rather limited and stupid means, and we miss the true gems who are there because they don’t somehow fit the mold of the proper “classmate/friend.” No doubt that is true, but it’s really not the point.

Okay, tired of being in suspense? What do you mean when you say that you know someone? It can mean an awful lot of things can’t it? It can mean you’ve met the person, at the minimum. It can mean you know the insides of this person, how they think, at the maximum.

But I’m talking about the in between assumptions we make about those we claim to know. Case in point. I grew up in a school district that was decidedly working class. Moreover, it was fairly small by most people’s standards. I would hazard that nearly half of the kids I started kindergarten with, I ended up graduating high school with. We had a graduating class of 103 as I recall, not big at all. So for thirteen years, I spend nine months of each, and then some summer with these folks.

You’d say I knew them. I’d say I knew them. And I guess I did. I knew how they dressed, how relatively smart they were, who they palled around with, how good they were or not at sports, how comfortable they were in front of the class. A whole plethora of pieces of information that added up to “knowing” a human being on planet earth as opposed to someone I passed by in the street whom I could make but the most superficial judgments about.

I knew some of them well enough to make a few “educated” guesses about what they might do in the future. I might guess that J would marry L, or that P might become a music teacher. I might be right or wrong, but my guess was based on some “experience” with the person that gave me a better chance of prediction that a stranger would have.

Flash forward from graduation night to forty plus years later. Discover one of your “classmates,” one that you knew in this fashion, but never were “friends” with in the “hanging out” kinda way.

Ask them the simple question, what have you been up to? Tell me your life’s story in 100 words or less. I guarantee you will hear things that you would NEVER have imagined in a million years. And that won’t be the exception, it will be the rule.

Yet to each of those surprising-you people, their lives unfolded in ways that seemed, at least at the time, to flow rather obviously and logically from point to point. It fit their personality, their talents, their weaknesses rather well. But it shocked the bejesus out of you, because, well, .  . . you didn’t really KNOW them at all.

And that’s both sad and exciting at the same time. Sad that we can spend so much time with people over so many years and yet barely know who they are. Exciting because we realize that every single person has a fascinating and totally unique story to tell, their own way of living out their humanity, often so very different from our own.

Take it down a notch. Fifty-nine years ago, give or take a month here and there, a bunch of babies mewled and sucked on bottles, oohed and ahhed over by family and friends. The world in all its splendor, spread before them. They were all in the same relative economic situation, most with both parents, all living in the same kind of houses, and later taught by the same teachers. Yet look at what happened to them?

Life happened, with its unbelievable array of choice and forks in the road. And the most unlikely people became this and the most unlikely of people became that. And the road they traveled resembles those cartoons where there is the kid who travels his neighborhood, up and over fences, down the sidewalk, in the front, out the back, and so on. That is us, all of us seemingly moving along routes that seemed oh so normal and usual for us at the time.

I’m not sure what the point of this is, but it suggests to me that there is a gold mine out there in missed opportunities. In our wildly different ways of working out life’s challenges, we can find answers and we can find the place of relating. We find our sameness in our very different ways of expressing this opportunity of being human.

 Don’t miss the next opportunity to really “know” someone better. Listen more, talk less. You’ll be wiser for it, and when you do talk, you may have something a bit more important to say.