Advice from my grandmother: “Never let him know you can mow.” 

Throughout my grandmother’s life and marriage, gender roles were well defined and generally understood.  To the extent she let her partner know that she could take on his roles as well as her own was to increase her workload and resentment and decrease his sense of responsibility and pride of accomplishment.   

Today’s aversion to gender-based roles with none to take their place means we are constantly letting him/her “know [we] can mow.”   When one person stops doing what he/she thought had been his/her role because the other started doing it, both wonder about the seemingly invisible source of the tension.  To the extent the old gender-based roles no longer hold, whether by virtue of a change in expectations, income production, same sex relationship, or multitudinous other reasons, the uncertainty breeds friction and lop-sided responsibilities.   

As in so many other aspects of marriage, happiness lies in communication.    Should you keep lists of who does what?  A weekly rotation of irksome chores?   Tally up the tasks at the end of the week and decide who buys whom dinner?   Any of these methods can be effective.  But I will admit, now in my third marriage where gender-based roles are mostly adopted and assumed, dare I say this politically incorrect thought: it works really well. 

Great wedding advice: can you ever have too much?  This column from the June 13^th’s Boston Globe is well worth reading…the comments too.  

http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/06/13/advice-from-years-marriage/GBJoTrEesk3gYsqG4n72DL/story.html?s_campaign=8315

My favorite among the several good ones is this: “You know when you’re lying in bed and there’s a line down the middle, and you’ve had a massive fight?  I put my toe over the line.”   Yes choosing to overlook the irritants is important, as is practically a saintly level of forgiveness.  Some people think it stops there: “Well, I forgave him/her, isn’t that what matters?”   Yes and no.  It does matter.  But more than forgiveness is reconciliation.  You could make the case that forgiveness with distance isn’t forgiveness.  I find forgiveness with distance simply ineffective in the relationship.  If you have too much pride to be the one who sticks his/her toe across the middle, then you’re putting your pride before the relationship.  Thus starts the simmering pot that will boil over again.  Forgiveness requires the complete act of reconciliation, either by bravely initiating it or by gracefully accepting it.

Also, in the comments section, there is one piece of “good advice” on which I blogged the opposite on June 3.   There are several great bits of advice in the column and a couple not-so-good bits.  Any on that page, or from this blog, that would make a difference in your relationship? 

After reading the first entries in this blog, a friend of mine remarked that they primarily reflect pain.  While I hadn’t felt that as I wrote, there is no question her observation is true.  My parents didn’t get along for 56 years; I’m in my third marriage.  So, this blog may not resonate with those of you raised in happy families spawned by a good marriage.   Or perhaps you married/are marrying a person from very different background, a mixture of a dysfunctional family and happy one: read on.

It is worth contemplating the notion that we all marry our parents in some way or another (although this usually isn’t evident until years later).  If you grew up with a good model, chances are you’ll have a good marriage.  I grew up with one alcoholic parent and one angry one.   There were legitimate reasons for both, but a kid couldn’t see that.  Had counseling and introspection been fashionable at the time, maybe they could have averted the tragedy they lived.  They modeled poor relationship skills and embodied little notion of respect and affection for each other. Yet I’ve married characteristics of both of my parents in all three marriages.  The good news is I finally picked their best attributes instead of their most injurious.

So this blog is about my painful road to a good marriage, what I’ve learned from understanding my parent’s marriage and all three of mine.  My disfigured marital history is a part of me, and I am thankful for the wisdom thus gained.  It has equipped me for the deeply satisfying and contented marriage I have today.

Let’s say you’ve hit a rough patch.  This could be a divorce-threatening rough patch or just any old rough patch.   So you talk to your friends about it, right?  About the inadequacies of your spouse, the injustices you have to carry every day.  You ask your friends, “Why doesn’t s/he clearly see how wrong s/he is?”   Your friends are likely to be nodding in agreement, “you poor baby,” and “you’re so right,” or they simply join in the criticism of your partner.  Says your friend “I never thought he/she was your type” or “he/she has never put you first.”  That’s the kind of support you can expect from most “friends”. 

Here’s the first big problem: your behavior.  Do you talk about your other friends that way?  Why, in adulthood, is the last person you stop being catty about is your best friend, your partner, your wife/husband?   You’ve matured to the point you don’t talk about other friends to friends, yet you still believe it’s OK to talk about your spouse.  What if your beloved (supposedly) actually heard what you were saying?  Would you be embarrassed?  Would you be sorry?  Would your relationship suffer?

A second big problem: venting to your friends tends to reinforce your view of the world instead of thinking about your partner’s view of the world. Spoken words intensify your beliefs.  The more often you cite the same complaint, the deeper you hold it.  Whereas before you thought you might be right, now you know you are right.  And the more friends you talk to the more right you get.  Well, that’s sure helpful, isn’t it?   Nope.  It’s not.   What do you learn from listening only to people who agree with you?

If you are lucky enough to have a friend who will be truthful with you, who will tell you that you are wrong, who will tell you that being right isn’t as important as being in the relationship, that’s a friend worth talking to.   A good and true and thoughtful friend will search for your partner’s viewpoint.  This friend will help you see where you might be wrong, to help you go home committed to smoothing out the rough patch instead of knowing how right you are.  This friend is worth listening to.

Stress is the enemy of the businessman.  It’s also the enemy of a good marriage. When you’re facing significant stressors – a marathon of overwork is behind you and another one is in front of you.  Or you’ve just had your second child.  Or you’ve had to move and your first house isn’t selling for what you bought it.  Or one or both of you is miserable in your job/s, feeling trapped.  These are the times you start snapping at each other, often without even noticing.  However, one of you will notice: the emotion may fade away for the snap-er, less likely so for the snap-ee.  As your spouse becomes the sponge for your stress, he or she will begin to protect him/herself emotionally.  Distance in a couple usually starts here.  That distance can grow faster than you think.  To keep this from happening: apologize, better with hug than without, but even the bare apology works wonders.  The apology is essential, no matter how small the snap.  

Even more important than the apology, though, is snap prevention.  Work with your partner to intentionally disrupt the cycle of stress.  “Date night” is one strategy but only if it’s used right.  Going out to dinner so exhausted you only bore each other will increase stress.  Disrupting the stress cycle requires knowledge of who you are as individuals and as a couple, and what gives you pleasure and relief.   Two proven stress releasers: laughter and exercise.  Go to a funny movie, race each other, do something silly with friends.  Figure out what works for you.  Do this often.  Do this when you are least likely to feel like doing it, that’s when you’ll need it the most. 

I wish I’d found this quote before I wrote about the Mutual Non-irritation Pact.  William James summed it up nicely:  “The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.”  Generally speaking, the more irritants you overlook, the happier the marriage.

Sometimes he/she drives you crazy!  And it’s more than just the toothpaste tube cap.  It’s leaving all the kitchen cabinet doors open.   It’s clothes strewn all over the floor.  It’s never picking up the mail.  It’s never – ever – picking the restaurant.  It’s answering the phone every time it rings no matter what the two of you are engaged in.  It’s asking you questions while you are obviously in the middle of something important.  It’s yelling at you from another room.  But you don’t say anything because “these are small things,” right?  Oh, you seething mass you!  Or you do say something.  Every time, all the time, you can’t help yourself.  You exasperated nag, what a joy to be around you!  How to stop the madness?  What you need to recognize is that there are two parties to irritation, the irritator and the irritatee.  The irritatee can do very little to change the irritator, but the irritatee does have one extremely powerful tool: he/she can choose not to get irritated. The cabinet door is open.  Look at it.  Close it, gently.  Smile at the thought of your darling spouse’s eccentricities.   It is a choice to be or not to be … irritated.  This tool is most powerfully executed in the Mutual Non-Irritation Pact.  Both of you choose to accept the annoying habits of the other without irritation.  It’s surprisingly easy to do and it’s a nice way to live.

To avoid arguments, a friend wise but never married suggested at a wedding shower: “Whoever cares about it most should get his or her way.”  What could be wrong with that?  This may seem like a logical way to keep the peace when controversy or differences arise, one which would require a minimum of effort.  It may start out this way, but I have field experience to suggest that isn’t the end of the story.  The rule can quickly turn one party, perhaps unintentionally, into a bully who quickly realizes, perhaps unmindfully, that all it takes to get what he/she wants is insistence.  And it turns the other party, who is likely the less confrontational by nature, into a seething mass of unspoken resentment.  He/she may never be able to match the intensity the other brings to the issue and the decisions will quickly start to seem wrongly one-sided.   You’ll be following a rule you both agreed upon and changing the rule is likely neither a battle the pacifist will want to pick nor one the bully will want to lose.  Best if you reason through decisions big and small until a pattern emerges that comfortably creates equity.