My dogs bark at the letter carrier. They also bark at the UPS box carrier. They bark at these intruders into their territory, because the letter carrier is an unknown, a threat, and his footsteps set off an alarm in their heads. They get their hackles up, their hearts pounding, their minds focused, and they present themselves as flesh-rending crazed canines, intent on death and destruction and guess what? The interlopers leave.
So from my dog’s perspective, the cause and effect is pretty obvious. They bark and these modern day Visigoths retreat. They go away. They turn tail and run. Thus, it seems to my dogs that they have an effective tool to keep the barbarians away from the gate and to keep their world safe: they bark,.
And when an intruder happens to simply walk down the sidewalk: they bark. The trespasser, according to the story my dogs tell themselves, is aware of the immense threat they pose and probably mindful of the dog’s successes with the postal service, and so moves on up the street. This is another example from my dog’s point of view of the extraordinary effectiveness of barking.
Mind you, the from the letter carrier’s point of view, (or as we say in HTSYMBBABM speak, the letter carrier’s “reality”) there is no hasty retreat, there is no turning tail and running, there is only the next mail box to fill, the route to complete, and the kids to pick up from school. In the letter carrier’s reality, as with the sidewalk trespasser and the Man from Brown, the dogs’ barking is mostly irrelevant.
A friend of mine, Stan, comes by the house on a regular basis. At first the dogs barked and being a prudent man he waited outside the gate until I responded to the dog-bell and let him in. The dogs barked some more, but eventually they shut up. Time and time again, Stan would drop by and the dogs would bark and Stan would wait patiently for me to come to the door.
Eventually they stopped barking. Now when Stan stops by they don’t even bother to raise their heads from their sun-besotted dozing. He gives them a pat and walks on in, often commenting that I need to get my dog-bell fixed.
The cleverer of my two or three constant readers will now nod their heads and say, “I know where this is going” but for the slower, the stubborn and the neophyte I will explain how the story of the barking dog fits into the paradigm of the better man and saving your marriage.
My dogs have one tool that allows them to keep a modicum of control over their environment when they feel threatened: they bark. In their reality it is an effective tool. It seemingly generates the response they want. When Stan did not respond the way they expected, the barked and barked and barked until at some time they realized that the whole bark thing wasn’t working on Stan and they quit barking. The tool didn’t work, there was no point in using it.
Your spouse might have one tool that allows her to maintain a modicum of control over her environment when she feels threatened: she becomes angry, and when she becomes angry she seemingly generates the response she wants: you leave, you retaliate, you shut down, you give in… whatever response to which you habitually resort is the response she associates with her anger, and thus by seemingly causing that response she gains something, maybe it’s a sense of moral outrage, ascendancy, or maybe it’s simply control and thus a sense of safety.
You’ve seen this happen time and time again. It shows up as when you start talking about one thing, it leads to another, and soon you are fighting about something that has nothing to do with where you were.
Imagine it happens like this: you and your beloved are chatting and you say something that you think is totally innocent but she hears it differently and for whatever reason it scares her. Maybe it scares her because it brings up a guilt issue, maybe she feels controlled, or blamed, or inadequate. It doesn’t matter what particular alarm you set off in her brain: the sensor has been tripped and the bell is ringing. She is scared, so she goes to the one tool she has, anger, and with the expression of that anger she gets the response that you all ways give her and suddenly she is on safe ground again. Admittedly, it is unpleasant ground, her hackles are up, adrenaline is coursing through her veins, and you’re not on your best behavior, but it’s safe ground. By reacting as she expects you return to a pattern that she’s experienced before and she can anticipate the course of the next few minutes, hours or days. Not pleasant, but predictable and thus safe.
Now mind you, she’s not trying to start a fight. I know it seems like that, but remember my dogs are not trying to kill the letter carrier. They’ve just learned to bark when they hear his footsteps and because they are scared and they’ve learned that when they bark the letter carrier leaves and safety is restored.
When Stan simply stood there the dogs eventually learned the tool didn’t work with him and they stopped using it. Likewise, and this is not to compare your wife to a dog, if you can become non-reactive, if you can learn not to give tit for tat, if you can learn not to take offense and make that point clear by way of engaging in an argument, guess what will happen. Guess what will happen if you simply stand there, as Stan did, and not react to the barking?
She will quit. She will quit because the tool isn’t working for her. As I said, she’d not trying to tell you she hates you, she’s not trying to drive you away, she’s not trying to hurt you, she’s simply trying to protect herself from some fear, perhaps a fear she doesn’t want to confront, perhaps a fear of which she is unaware. And if you stop reacting, if you stop responding in king, she will either start looking for another tool or she will open herself up to introspection and try to understand the fear that is driving her anger, but she will stop barking.
I shit you not.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Arnie's Affair
Probably the best joke I heard was that Mr. Schwarzenegger justified his extramarital sexual activity by claiming he was just trying to fit in with his wife’s family.
Over at Dr. Helen the good doctor wonders why it is that women show such outrage at Arnie’s behavior when by some estimates one in ten children are not the biological offspring of the putative legal father, her point being the moral double standard but also that when men father children outside of marriage they get tasked with child support, but when women conceive outside of marriage… their husbands get tasked with child support.
There’s a little inconsistency in the proposition, because it follows that for every father who is paying child support for a kid that is not biologically his own there is at least one guy out there not paying child support for a child that is biologically his. So in that way it’s a wash… it’s not a conspiracy against men, it’s just a fallible system.
But the vast majority of the commentators on her page (a compulsion which has not struck the three followers of BetterManBetterMarriage ) feel that not only does this seeming unfairness represent a vast mysandrist conspiracy to enslave and emasculate men, but it is the leading edge of Armageddon, as willful, immoral, and unjust fornicators go unpunished and even rewarded for their iniquitous ways.
Really, this isn’t Sodom and Gomorrah, but if I were Lot’s wife and I had to put up with all that moral, bible thumping righteous indignation and blame, I would gladly look back and become a pillar of salt just to be done with it.
The bottom line is that nine times out of ten an affair is the result of a failed marriage, not the cause of it. I haven’t got a citation of authority of that, it’s just a rule of thumb. But honestly, no one has ever come to me for a divorce and said “we were doing just great until I had that damned affair.” No one sits at a bar and tells a potential sexual tryst how wonderful his or her spouse is, how happy they are, and how the feel understood, appreciated and loved.
Men and women have affairs. Is it a moral failing? There are a lot of people screaming that it is, that the adulterer is unfit to be a parent, a fraud and a hypocrite, and yet these moralist always seem to forget key tenets of their religions. Seek to forgive rather than to be forgiven, remove the beam from your own eye before the speck from your brother’s, let he without sin cast the first stone….
When we get to heaven we are not going to be asked how we were treated in our lives, but how we treated others.
And that works in relationships too.
Sure, an affair can be the straw that breaks the relationship camel’s back, but by the same token, not being man enough to get over it can too. My money says more relationships end because of one party’s inability to let go of blame and moral superiority than because someone impregnated a domestic.
When I was in college I cheated on my high school girlfriend, and the next morning I felt like such a failure, such a heel, such a bad person. I hated myself and what I’d done and I knew there was no way I could undo it, no way I could fix it, so I learned from it and became a better man.
I don’t know what happened with Arnie and Maria, but I wonder if Arnie felt regret and remorse and stupid and ashamed, and I wonder if Maria could appreciate the pain he felt if she could find pity in her heart, if she couldn’t know that after Arnie did the wrong thing, he did the right thing, and that because of his mistake he became a better man.
I’ll never know about Arnie, but I do know this: forgiving others for their misdeeds is a gift you give yourself. Letting go of blaming others for mistakes lets you be free to find your own happiness.
Over at Dr. Helen the good doctor wonders why it is that women show such outrage at Arnie’s behavior when by some estimates one in ten children are not the biological offspring of the putative legal father, her point being the moral double standard but also that when men father children outside of marriage they get tasked with child support, but when women conceive outside of marriage… their husbands get tasked with child support.
There’s a little inconsistency in the proposition, because it follows that for every father who is paying child support for a kid that is not biologically his own there is at least one guy out there not paying child support for a child that is biologically his. So in that way it’s a wash… it’s not a conspiracy against men, it’s just a fallible system.
But the vast majority of the commentators on her page (a compulsion which has not struck the three followers of BetterManBetterMarriage ) feel that not only does this seeming unfairness represent a vast mysandrist conspiracy to enslave and emasculate men, but it is the leading edge of Armageddon, as willful, immoral, and unjust fornicators go unpunished and even rewarded for their iniquitous ways.
Really, this isn’t Sodom and Gomorrah, but if I were Lot’s wife and I had to put up with all that moral, bible thumping righteous indignation and blame, I would gladly look back and become a pillar of salt just to be done with it.
The bottom line is that nine times out of ten an affair is the result of a failed marriage, not the cause of it. I haven’t got a citation of authority of that, it’s just a rule of thumb. But honestly, no one has ever come to me for a divorce and said “we were doing just great until I had that damned affair.” No one sits at a bar and tells a potential sexual tryst how wonderful his or her spouse is, how happy they are, and how the feel understood, appreciated and loved.
Men and women have affairs. Is it a moral failing? There are a lot of people screaming that it is, that the adulterer is unfit to be a parent, a fraud and a hypocrite, and yet these moralist always seem to forget key tenets of their religions. Seek to forgive rather than to be forgiven, remove the beam from your own eye before the speck from your brother’s, let he without sin cast the first stone….
When we get to heaven we are not going to be asked how we were treated in our lives, but how we treated others.
And that works in relationships too.
Sure, an affair can be the straw that breaks the relationship camel’s back, but by the same token, not being man enough to get over it can too. My money says more relationships end because of one party’s inability to let go of blame and moral superiority than because someone impregnated a domestic.
When I was in college I cheated on my high school girlfriend, and the next morning I felt like such a failure, such a heel, such a bad person. I hated myself and what I’d done and I knew there was no way I could undo it, no way I could fix it, so I learned from it and became a better man.
I don’t know what happened with Arnie and Maria, but I wonder if Arnie felt regret and remorse and stupid and ashamed, and I wonder if Maria could appreciate the pain he felt if she could find pity in her heart, if she couldn’t know that after Arnie did the wrong thing, he did the right thing, and that because of his mistake he became a better man.
I’ll never know about Arnie, but I do know this: forgiving others for their misdeeds is a gift you give yourself. Letting go of blaming others for mistakes lets you be free to find your own happiness.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Taking Your Victim as You Find Them
There is an old adage in law that you take your victims as you find them, which means that if you negligently knock an old lady down and she breaks a hip, you don’t get the excuse of she was an old lady and had fragile hips, i.e. anybody else would be fine ergo I shouldn’t be held liable for the broken hip, but only for the bruise a normal person would have suffered.
In relationships this comes out to you have to own the effect of your words, and not excuse yourself by saying “that’s not what I meant.” You said something that was possibly merely taken out of context, but it caused pain and you have to own that, you have to take your victims as you find them and excusing your behavior by saying “you know I didn’t mean that” or “nobody else would react this way,” or any other variation on that theme that places the blame for the bad feelings that have arisen on the person feeling them.
Intent is one thing, effect is another. If you make a joke, and it not only falls flat on it’s face but comes across as sarcastic and mean, whether you intended to be sarcastic and mean is really secondary to the person who is feeling the sting of your words.
It’s sort of like saying “fuck you” and following it with the old sardonic disclaimer of “I mean that in the best possible sense of the word.” It’s funny when we attempt to soft pedal a clearly unintended and gratuitous insult, but it is not productive when we attempt to back away and disclaim responsibility for unintentional hurt.
Imagine you are carrying a ladder on your shoulder and as you turn you inadvertently clock your beloved in the head with the end of the ladder hanging out behind you. If you want, you may stand there with the ladder and say, “It serves you right you stupid git. You should have seen I had the ladder and anticipated that I would turn. At the very least you should have ducked, now get up and stop bleeding on the carpet.”
The great thing about blaming the other person for being concussed is that it means that you don’t have to examine your behavior, whether it was reasonable to be carrying the ladder that way, whether you turned too quickly, whether you should have said something before you turned, whether if, in all actuality, you didn’t care if you hurt her or if maybe even, at some dark uncaring level, you wanted to.
Or you can put the ladder down and say, “My god, are you all right? Let me help you.”
In relationships this means the better man, when he realizes that he has stepped in it takes responsibility. He takes ownership. He might say “Clearly what I said hurt you, and I apologize for that pain.” And if he’s really good, he might start a dialogue, (“tell me more”) but if he’s getting better at the very least he revisits the circumstances of the conversation in his mind and does a bit of self-analysis, examining his remarks for any passive/aggressive basis. The better man will mark for future reference the effect of what he said, recognizing that it is a soft spot for his wife and treading carefully there. The better man will note that sarcasm is at best veiled anger, and maybe next time he’ll avoid an unintentional hurt.
Now there are those among you who are saying, “Hunt, c’mon, she’s hyper-sensitive,” and you may be right, you know your wife better than I do and you may be 100% tap dead center on this, but here we are back at the premise: you take your victims as you find them. Your wife might be oversensitive, but you are not going to make friends and endear her to you by telling her. You are going to come across is insensitive, uncaring, and possibly mean and then you are going to sit around and wonder why she doesn’t want to have sex with you. Admit it: you’ve tried it that way and it hasn’t worked. Try something new. Try a different approach.
Try coming back to her after she has cooled off and saying “If you have a moment, I’d like to share something with you. I’ve been thinking about what I said about Mother Teresa and I realized that what I said hurt you, and that’s not the man I want to be. I realize I can’t take it back, I can’t un-say, I can’t un-hurt, but I want you to know I’m sorry for the pain I caused you and I’m going to be more intentional, and more careful, about the way I communicate with you.”
By saying this you haven’t blamed her, but neither have you swallowed your man-hood and become a beta-male. All you’ve done is acknowledge that what you said caused her pain (true) and that you don’t want to do that in the future (true) and you are going to work on it (hopefully true.) You haven’t said she was right, you haven’t said that she can control how you talk. You’ve simply owned your part of what happened.
And in time, she will own her part, but you’ve got to lead if you want anyone to follow.
In relationships this comes out to you have to own the effect of your words, and not excuse yourself by saying “that’s not what I meant.” You said something that was possibly merely taken out of context, but it caused pain and you have to own that, you have to take your victims as you find them and excusing your behavior by saying “you know I didn’t mean that” or “nobody else would react this way,” or any other variation on that theme that places the blame for the bad feelings that have arisen on the person feeling them.
Intent is one thing, effect is another. If you make a joke, and it not only falls flat on it’s face but comes across as sarcastic and mean, whether you intended to be sarcastic and mean is really secondary to the person who is feeling the sting of your words.
It’s sort of like saying “fuck you” and following it with the old sardonic disclaimer of “I mean that in the best possible sense of the word.” It’s funny when we attempt to soft pedal a clearly unintended and gratuitous insult, but it is not productive when we attempt to back away and disclaim responsibility for unintentional hurt.
Imagine you are carrying a ladder on your shoulder and as you turn you inadvertently clock your beloved in the head with the end of the ladder hanging out behind you. If you want, you may stand there with the ladder and say, “It serves you right you stupid git. You should have seen I had the ladder and anticipated that I would turn. At the very least you should have ducked, now get up and stop bleeding on the carpet.”
The great thing about blaming the other person for being concussed is that it means that you don’t have to examine your behavior, whether it was reasonable to be carrying the ladder that way, whether you turned too quickly, whether you should have said something before you turned, whether if, in all actuality, you didn’t care if you hurt her or if maybe even, at some dark uncaring level, you wanted to.
Or you can put the ladder down and say, “My god, are you all right? Let me help you.”
In relationships this means the better man, when he realizes that he has stepped in it takes responsibility. He takes ownership. He might say “Clearly what I said hurt you, and I apologize for that pain.” And if he’s really good, he might start a dialogue, (“tell me more”) but if he’s getting better at the very least he revisits the circumstances of the conversation in his mind and does a bit of self-analysis, examining his remarks for any passive/aggressive basis. The better man will mark for future reference the effect of what he said, recognizing that it is a soft spot for his wife and treading carefully there. The better man will note that sarcasm is at best veiled anger, and maybe next time he’ll avoid an unintentional hurt.
Now there are those among you who are saying, “Hunt, c’mon, she’s hyper-sensitive,” and you may be right, you know your wife better than I do and you may be 100% tap dead center on this, but here we are back at the premise: you take your victims as you find them. Your wife might be oversensitive, but you are not going to make friends and endear her to you by telling her. You are going to come across is insensitive, uncaring, and possibly mean and then you are going to sit around and wonder why she doesn’t want to have sex with you. Admit it: you’ve tried it that way and it hasn’t worked. Try something new. Try a different approach.
Try coming back to her after she has cooled off and saying “If you have a moment, I’d like to share something with you. I’ve been thinking about what I said about Mother Teresa and I realized that what I said hurt you, and that’s not the man I want to be. I realize I can’t take it back, I can’t un-say, I can’t un-hurt, but I want you to know I’m sorry for the pain I caused you and I’m going to be more intentional, and more careful, about the way I communicate with you.”
By saying this you haven’t blamed her, but neither have you swallowed your man-hood and become a beta-male. All you’ve done is acknowledge that what you said caused her pain (true) and that you don’t want to do that in the future (true) and you are going to work on it (hopefully true.) You haven’t said she was right, you haven’t said that she can control how you talk. You’ve simply owned your part of what happened.
And in time, she will own her part, but you’ve got to lead if you want anyone to follow.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
BECAUSE I CAN'T BE MAD AT THE DOG
A while back my dog, an otherwise well-trained and good dog, had been housebound too long due to protracted rain (she simply will not go out in the rain) and errands (my beloved and I both had things to do and we will go out in the rain) and as a result when she got home before I did…
Well, let’s say my beloved knew with her frist breath after she opened the door that the dog, a Great Dane, had allowed biological need to overwhelm both her training and her sense of decorum and there in the dining room (on the oriental rug, of course) was ample evidence that the dog was well fed.
As they say, shit happens, and if you lock a dog in a house this is not an unforeseen result. Regrettable, but until I can figure a way to teach them to use the toilet for something other than a fountain this shit, literally, is going to happen. I’ve had Great Danes for over 20 years and as a rule I pick up pretty much everything that they eat, so cleaning up the mess isn’t a big deal for me, but I wasn’t the first home.
Now there were a couple of other things going on here. The rug was a new acquisition. My beloved, who enjoys a neat and clean house, had just finished redecorating the dining room, and while she’s not a squeamish type, cleaning up dog shit is not high on her list of fun things. These and other factors all combined to exacerbate the dire effects of this event.
I knew what was waiting for me when I got home because she had called to tell me what MY DOG had done and by the time I arrived the doors were open, the attic fan was on, two or three spent bottles of Lysol spray lay on the floor while their contents hung in the air, the poop was gone and she was angry.
No, she was livid.
And better-man me embraced her anger and in the course of our discussion I asked why she was mad with me and she said, “Because I can’t be angry with the dog.” Which was true. Irrelevant, it seemed, but true. I knew and she knew that the dog would have gone outside if she could, that we had locked the doors, and hey, when you gotta go, you gotta go.
But still, it didn’t explain why she chose to be angry with me, inasmuch as I had just about as much control of the situation as the dog did. I would have opened the door had I been there, but I wasn’t there. Her anger felt like an unjustified personal attack, and I although I struggled with that, I set it aside. I didn’t take it personally because to do so would invite me to retaliate, to allow my righteous indignation to fuel an attack on her for her unjustified attack on me.
So I listened, and I mirrored, and eventually she felt heard and calmed down and somehow the sun rose the next morning and life went on, but her response has stuck with me…. she was angry with me because she couldn’t be angry with the dog. She’s not crazy so that has to make sense.
And finally, last night, it dawns on me: duh! The dog hasn’t studied Imago, the dog hasn’t read HTSYMbBABM, the dog’s only response to her anger is to run away. The dog cannot be a vessel for her anguish, the dog cannot embrace her anger…
But I can.
So it makes sense that she shares her anger with me (the only way she knows how), because I have shown her that I won’t run away from it, that I will embrace it, that I will be there for her.
Now some of you are going, “Hunt, come on down off the cross, it wasn’t right for her to be angry with you because of something the dog did. Grow a set and tell her to shut up.”
Yeah, you’re right about the first part, but telling her she’s wrong is not going to help things. It is enough that I know it, and as for the second part, grow a set, I got a new and improved set so I don’t have to prove I have them (to you or her) by telling her to shut up. There are better ways.
So here’s the insight: when your beloved is angry with the world, maybe it’s something that happened in her family, maybe it’s something that happened at school or work or maybe, god forbid, it has something to do with the dog, understand that you, her spouse, represent her safety zone. She may not do it gracefully, and it may not be a lot of fun, but she is turning to you in anger because you are the only person she can turn to, and for now, the only tool for expressing herself is anger.
She cannot blow up at her boss, her teacher, her mother, her neighbor or her dog because it will serve no purpose. They will run away, the will fight back, things will go from bad to worst. She is angry, and she can’t get mad at the dog, so guess what? You’re elected. Don’t get me wrong: getting angry at you is not good relationship maintenance and depending on your tolerance it will have to change at some time, but it is a very natural and common behavior for all of us.
You’ve done it. You’ve popped your cork at someone because damnit enough is enough and that person just picked the wrong person to fuck with…. And if you have done it then you cannot blame your beloved when she goes there.
And you’re elected because 1) you volunteered, (maybe the vows should be to love, honor, respect and embrace her anger) and 2) you (if you’ve read the book and done the work) got the skills: you can embrace your beloved’s anger. You can listen, you can understand, you can be supportive, and in her world the odds are you are the only person she can turn to (seemingly on) when the chaos of an unfair world make her fear and it shows up as anger.
You can take it in knowing that it’s genus, while superficially you, is elsewhere, and by not reacting to her anger, by not blaming her for being angry at you for something you didn’t do, by not allowing yourself to believe the lie that she is angry with you, you can help her survive the moment, transcend the anger, and perhaps grow.
My beloved became angry and the only recourse she had, the only tool in her box, was to blame me. Why? Because the dog couldn’t help her, and I can.
Well, let’s say my beloved knew with her frist breath after she opened the door that the dog, a Great Dane, had allowed biological need to overwhelm both her training and her sense of decorum and there in the dining room (on the oriental rug, of course) was ample evidence that the dog was well fed.
As they say, shit happens, and if you lock a dog in a house this is not an unforeseen result. Regrettable, but until I can figure a way to teach them to use the toilet for something other than a fountain this shit, literally, is going to happen. I’ve had Great Danes for over 20 years and as a rule I pick up pretty much everything that they eat, so cleaning up the mess isn’t a big deal for me, but I wasn’t the first home.
Now there were a couple of other things going on here. The rug was a new acquisition. My beloved, who enjoys a neat and clean house, had just finished redecorating the dining room, and while she’s not a squeamish type, cleaning up dog shit is not high on her list of fun things. These and other factors all combined to exacerbate the dire effects of this event.
I knew what was waiting for me when I got home because she had called to tell me what MY DOG had done and by the time I arrived the doors were open, the attic fan was on, two or three spent bottles of Lysol spray lay on the floor while their contents hung in the air, the poop was gone and she was angry.
No, she was livid.
And better-man me embraced her anger and in the course of our discussion I asked why she was mad with me and she said, “Because I can’t be angry with the dog.” Which was true. Irrelevant, it seemed, but true. I knew and she knew that the dog would have gone outside if she could, that we had locked the doors, and hey, when you gotta go, you gotta go.
But still, it didn’t explain why she chose to be angry with me, inasmuch as I had just about as much control of the situation as the dog did. I would have opened the door had I been there, but I wasn’t there. Her anger felt like an unjustified personal attack, and I although I struggled with that, I set it aside. I didn’t take it personally because to do so would invite me to retaliate, to allow my righteous indignation to fuel an attack on her for her unjustified attack on me.
So I listened, and I mirrored, and eventually she felt heard and calmed down and somehow the sun rose the next morning and life went on, but her response has stuck with me…. she was angry with me because she couldn’t be angry with the dog. She’s not crazy so that has to make sense.
And finally, last night, it dawns on me: duh! The dog hasn’t studied Imago, the dog hasn’t read HTSYMbBABM, the dog’s only response to her anger is to run away. The dog cannot be a vessel for her anguish, the dog cannot embrace her anger…
But I can.
So it makes sense that she shares her anger with me (the only way she knows how), because I have shown her that I won’t run away from it, that I will embrace it, that I will be there for her.
Now some of you are going, “Hunt, come on down off the cross, it wasn’t right for her to be angry with you because of something the dog did. Grow a set and tell her to shut up.”
Yeah, you’re right about the first part, but telling her she’s wrong is not going to help things. It is enough that I know it, and as for the second part, grow a set, I got a new and improved set so I don’t have to prove I have them (to you or her) by telling her to shut up. There are better ways.
So here’s the insight: when your beloved is angry with the world, maybe it’s something that happened in her family, maybe it’s something that happened at school or work or maybe, god forbid, it has something to do with the dog, understand that you, her spouse, represent her safety zone. She may not do it gracefully, and it may not be a lot of fun, but she is turning to you in anger because you are the only person she can turn to, and for now, the only tool for expressing herself is anger.
She cannot blow up at her boss, her teacher, her mother, her neighbor or her dog because it will serve no purpose. They will run away, the will fight back, things will go from bad to worst. She is angry, and she can’t get mad at the dog, so guess what? You’re elected. Don’t get me wrong: getting angry at you is not good relationship maintenance and depending on your tolerance it will have to change at some time, but it is a very natural and common behavior for all of us.
You’ve done it. You’ve popped your cork at someone because damnit enough is enough and that person just picked the wrong person to fuck with…. And if you have done it then you cannot blame your beloved when she goes there.
And you’re elected because 1) you volunteered, (maybe the vows should be to love, honor, respect and embrace her anger) and 2) you (if you’ve read the book and done the work) got the skills: you can embrace your beloved’s anger. You can listen, you can understand, you can be supportive, and in her world the odds are you are the only person she can turn to (seemingly on) when the chaos of an unfair world make her fear and it shows up as anger.
You can take it in knowing that it’s genus, while superficially you, is elsewhere, and by not reacting to her anger, by not blaming her for being angry at you for something you didn’t do, by not allowing yourself to believe the lie that she is angry with you, you can help her survive the moment, transcend the anger, and perhaps grow.
My beloved became angry and the only recourse she had, the only tool in her box, was to blame me. Why? Because the dog couldn’t help her, and I can.
Saturday, April 16, 2011
A Manifesto Worthy of the Marx Brothers
First off I’d like to appreciate Pajamas Media, Bill Whittle and the Trifecta for exposing me to what I am about to share with you. Going online is like going to Shinsengae Centumcity Department Store (the worlds largest, sorry GUM) and being asked as you checked out if you found every thing you wanted: there’s just no way to know if you did. On the internet there is such a tsunami of information there is simply no way to find all the stuff you want. Pajamas Media is a great bird dog for pointing out interesting game and I recommend them to you.
I’ve taken issue in past blogs with the simplistic theory of the Alpha Male, and now in all fairness I can take on the equally sophomoric philosophy of what the Alpha’s would call Beta Males, but I’d put them a little further down the continuum… maybe theta’s or zetas.
The proponents of Alpha Maleness cling to an atavistic understanding of the relationships between man and women which comes down to this: real men are not pussy whipped. They meet their obligation to provide the occasional ibex on the cave floor and otherwise do exactly what they want and to hell with anything the little woman has to say. In the Alpha male world a guy is either an alpha male or a pussy whipped loser.
Enter now “A Manifesto for Conscious Men.” It is the product of Gay Hendricks and Arjuna Ardagh, and like all good manifestos it has a web page, a facebook page (where you can read the screed) and if you can stomach it, a Youtube video.
The manifest starts off by embracing one of the cardinal sins to those who would be better men: apologizing for something you didn’t do, for Hendricks and Ardagh encourage all men to assume responsibility and atone for all the oppression and abuse of women at the hands of men since time began. They apologize for religion, for science, and even for unconscious actions. They don’t get around to apologizing for the Holocaust despite the fact that it killed millions of women, but I’m sure, had they thought of all those horrid alpha male Nazis with their Heidelberg scars they would have realized that all of the Third Reich was essentially misogonistic performance art and made their mea culpas.
Here’s the thing: I’m not going to apologize for slavery. Not to the blacks of America, nor the defeated soldiers marched into Rome under the banner of Julius Caeser, nor for Aparteid, jim crow, or even the holocaust. I’m not going to take responsibility for the burka, or female circumcision or the abandonment of Chinese female babies.
I won’t apologize because I didn’t do it. I’ve got plenty of my own shit to take responsibility for in my struggle to be a better man, and I don’t do myself, or the woman I love, any favors by nailing myself to the cross and taking responsibility for the fact that some Neanderthal male beat up a homo erectus female in a cave in Provance six thousand years ago.
Within the first sentence of the manifesto, bolded for emphasis is the commitment to becoming more "conscious" in every way, which is a great and noble endeavor for anyone, male or female. The problem is, however, that the manifesto then propounds a series of trite and false assumptions about women in general which it proposes other men adopt unchallenged.
According to Mssrs. Hendricks and Ardagh, all women have a deep connection to the earth, have an intuitive understanding of how to heal the planet, a profound capacity for feeling, a wisdom of the feminine hearts, a capacity for peaceful resolution of conflicts And can listen to their bodies and have an innate sense of compassionate justice.
Men, however start wars and pollute the earth. Really, these guys make the Alpha Male crowd look good by comparison. If Hendricks/Ardagh propose anything, it is for other men to divest themselves of all rational thought and to be conscious of nothing but the pablum of this manifesto.
There is only one part of the "manifesto" that speaks to me and that is the third paragraph which says "I commit to owning and stewarding a masculinity that honors and celebrates us as equals." That makes sense, but seven paragraphs later this modest proposal that men not only honor and worship this ersatz female god that walks among us paternalistically recognizes that while a woman’s body belongs to herself, the soulless commercialization of her beauty is wrong. I don’t know what that means, but it sounds a lot like this. If we are equals I don't get to decide what is right or wrong for her. She can pose for Playboy or Vogue. It is her right.
Here’s the truth: if you want to honor and respect the woman in your life, understand and honor the woman in your life and not some pseudo gaia projection of collective male guilt. The better man desires to have a mature and meaningful relationship with his beloved and that, my friends, requires first and foremost bringing his best game to the table and second, not polluting his mind with false expectations of what his wife is. We are all imperfect, male and female alike and in good relationships we both strive to be better.
two typos fixed 4/17
I’ve taken issue in past blogs with the simplistic theory of the Alpha Male, and now in all fairness I can take on the equally sophomoric philosophy of what the Alpha’s would call Beta Males, but I’d put them a little further down the continuum… maybe theta’s or zetas.
The proponents of Alpha Maleness cling to an atavistic understanding of the relationships between man and women which comes down to this: real men are not pussy whipped. They meet their obligation to provide the occasional ibex on the cave floor and otherwise do exactly what they want and to hell with anything the little woman has to say. In the Alpha male world a guy is either an alpha male or a pussy whipped loser.
Enter now “A Manifesto for Conscious Men.” It is the product of Gay Hendricks and Arjuna Ardagh, and like all good manifestos it has a web page, a facebook page (where you can read the screed) and if you can stomach it, a Youtube video.
The manifest starts off by embracing one of the cardinal sins to those who would be better men: apologizing for something you didn’t do, for Hendricks and Ardagh encourage all men to assume responsibility and atone for all the oppression and abuse of women at the hands of men since time began. They apologize for religion, for science, and even for unconscious actions. They don’t get around to apologizing for the Holocaust despite the fact that it killed millions of women, but I’m sure, had they thought of all those horrid alpha male Nazis with their Heidelberg scars they would have realized that all of the Third Reich was essentially misogonistic performance art and made their mea culpas.
Here’s the thing: I’m not going to apologize for slavery. Not to the blacks of America, nor the defeated soldiers marched into Rome under the banner of Julius Caeser, nor for Aparteid, jim crow, or even the holocaust. I’m not going to take responsibility for the burka, or female circumcision or the abandonment of Chinese female babies.
I won’t apologize because I didn’t do it. I’ve got plenty of my own shit to take responsibility for in my struggle to be a better man, and I don’t do myself, or the woman I love, any favors by nailing myself to the cross and taking responsibility for the fact that some Neanderthal male beat up a homo erectus female in a cave in Provance six thousand years ago.
Within the first sentence of the manifesto, bolded for emphasis is the commitment to becoming more "conscious" in every way, which is a great and noble endeavor for anyone, male or female. The problem is, however, that the manifesto then propounds a series of trite and false assumptions about women in general which it proposes other men adopt unchallenged.
According to Mssrs. Hendricks and Ardagh, all women have a deep connection to the earth, have an intuitive understanding of how to heal the planet, a profound capacity for feeling, a wisdom of the feminine hearts, a capacity for peaceful resolution of conflicts And can listen to their bodies and have an innate sense of compassionate justice.
Men, however start wars and pollute the earth. Really, these guys make the Alpha Male crowd look good by comparison. If Hendricks/Ardagh propose anything, it is for other men to divest themselves of all rational thought and to be conscious of nothing but the pablum of this manifesto.
There is only one part of the "manifesto" that speaks to me and that is the third paragraph which says "I commit to owning and stewarding a masculinity that honors and celebrates us as equals." That makes sense, but seven paragraphs later this modest proposal that men not only honor and worship this ersatz female god that walks among us paternalistically recognizes that while a woman’s body belongs to herself, the soulless commercialization of her beauty is wrong. I don’t know what that means, but it sounds a lot like this. If we are equals I don't get to decide what is right or wrong for her. She can pose for Playboy or Vogue. It is her right.
Here’s the truth: if you want to honor and respect the woman in your life, understand and honor the woman in your life and not some pseudo gaia projection of collective male guilt. The better man desires to have a mature and meaningful relationship with his beloved and that, my friends, requires first and foremost bringing his best game to the table and second, not polluting his mind with false expectations of what his wife is. We are all imperfect, male and female alike and in good relationships we both strive to be better.
two typos fixed 4/17
Saturday, April 2, 2011
YOU ARE NOT YOUR WIFE’S THERAPIST
It is not your job and it is not your skill set, and most importantly, it is not the relationship you want. If you want to be your wife’s therapist, get a divorce, get your PhD in either psychology or psychiatry and then give her a call after you have set up your office, but guess what? She probably won’t want you as her therapist then any more than she does now.
Consider Mary is angry and she is angry about something she’s been upset about before. You stay out too late with your friends. You’ve done nothing intrinsically wrong, and in point of fact you do everything right: this isn’t a regular issue and you call her to tell her that you’ll be late and in fact you are not too late but when you come in she is seething.
When this has happened before (footnote) you embraced her anger, you mirrored her, and after a while you discovered that her anger stems from her fear that she’s not important in your life, that she feels you would rather be with your friends, and ultimately this all goes back to the rejection she felt in prior relationships where she had been betrayed, and possibly even further back to formative issues with her parents.
After a lot of patience and mirroring she calmed down and her anger passed and life was good.
But now, coming back from time with your friends, you sense her anger because she’s got that tone of voice and it’s about twenty degrees colder in the room where she waits for you and because you’ve had the discussion with her before you have a good idea of what’s going on and because you love her and because you don’t want her to be angry you say:
YOU: C’mon Mary, you know this isn’t about me. You know I love you and that your anger is merely a defense against your fears of betrayal so why don’t we talk about that?
Which would be a great line for her psychologist to say in the safe confines of the counseling room and could have all sorts of therapeutic benefits because, guess what? Mary wouldn’t be mad at her therapist and thus maybe Mary could hear it. Mary is paying her therapist for that sort of insight and Mary wants her relationship with her therapist to be one that includes reality checking. Mary wants her relationship with her therapist (as does her therapist) to be a relationship of un-equals, a relationship of professional distance.
Mary wants you to love her, and she can’t love you if you try to create a therapeutic relationship. You job as a better man is to let Mary work on her own shit. You can listen, you can mirror, you can validate and empathize but the second you get into psychoanalysis you shatter your relationship of love and create a dynamic where you are the rational and she is the emotional, where you are the adult and she is the child, where you are right and she is wrong.
Now it could be if your beloved is evolved almost to the point of transcendence that she’s going to pause, listen, and say
MARY: Thank you for that profound insight. I always appreciate it when you help me identify my growth points. Let’s have sex now.
But the most likely scenario is that Mary is going to feel attacked, because no matter how carefully you tread you are right up against her soft spots, her tender areas, her buttons if you will, and pointing out, however well intentioned, no matter how lovingly phrased, that her anger is misplaced is going to effectively tell her she is wrong. You are going to tell her something you intend to be kind and understanding and she is going to hear:
YOU: WRONG. WRONG, WRONG, WRONG! I CANNOT BELIEVE YOU ARE SO STUPID; THAT THIS IS STILL AN ISSUE. YOU KNOW I DID EVERYTHING RIGHT AND YOU ARE OUT OF LINE…..
And since that is what Mary is hearing, you can imagine she is going to react pretty much the same way she would if you had actually said it. It won’t be pretty. At best you continue your half-assed attempt at therapy and things will get worse, At worst you become reactive and it all goes to hell. You won’t go to bed until late, you will not sleep well and you will not wake up happy. Don’t go there.
So you do what you did before: you embrace her anger, you hear her out, you mirror and you let her talk. This works. I know it’s hard, I know it’s repetitious, I know there’s a part of you that wants to scream.
YOU: I have to do this again? Haven’t we been over this? Why can’t she clean up her side of the street?
But screaming that is just like pissing into the wind: it’s just going to blow back on to you. Don’t do it, it’s non-productive, it is in fact just an invitation to destructive behaviors and regression on both of your parts.
By mirroring Mary you allow her the room to hear herself, you allow her the chance to put her thoughts in order, you give her the opportunity to reinforce the insight she had before, you give her the safety she needs to face her fears and to let go of the bad behaviors they engender.
More importantly, you show her, rather than tell her or perhaps even yell at her, that you love and respect her.
And it could well be she is never going to get over it. It could be she’s not going to get over it because she’s never, ever, going to clean up her side of the street, she is never going to venture into introspection and growth, and maybe you will have to move on to a better relationship, but honestly if that were the case the mirroring wouldn’t have worked first time around. It took you a while to get where you are, but you did (albeit dragging your feet and feeling blindly in the dark.) Give her the credit you have given yourself and recognize it will take her a while too, but it’s worth the wait.
It could also be that this is always going to be an issue that will crop up when she is under stress. This is normal. Some stuff goes so far back it just isn’t going to get fixed, completely fixed and healed, in our life times. Like a bad back or a rotator cuff injury you have to accept that it is going to get inflamed and hurt every so often.
But like a bad back or a rotator cuff injury, you know it won’t last forever, you know how to treat it and if you keep at the exercises and the work the frequency and duration of the events will dwindle.
And one night you’re going to call and say “Honey, I’m going to be a bit late tonight…” and Mary is going to feel that familiar fear and even if she can’t set it aside she going to recognize if for what it is and let it go because you’ve given her the support she needs to do her work.
Consider Mary is angry and she is angry about something she’s been upset about before. You stay out too late with your friends. You’ve done nothing intrinsically wrong, and in point of fact you do everything right: this isn’t a regular issue and you call her to tell her that you’ll be late and in fact you are not too late but when you come in she is seething.
When this has happened before (footnote) you embraced her anger, you mirrored her, and after a while you discovered that her anger stems from her fear that she’s not important in your life, that she feels you would rather be with your friends, and ultimately this all goes back to the rejection she felt in prior relationships where she had been betrayed, and possibly even further back to formative issues with her parents.
After a lot of patience and mirroring she calmed down and her anger passed and life was good.
But now, coming back from time with your friends, you sense her anger because she’s got that tone of voice and it’s about twenty degrees colder in the room where she waits for you and because you’ve had the discussion with her before you have a good idea of what’s going on and because you love her and because you don’t want her to be angry you say:
YOU: C’mon Mary, you know this isn’t about me. You know I love you and that your anger is merely a defense against your fears of betrayal so why don’t we talk about that?
Which would be a great line for her psychologist to say in the safe confines of the counseling room and could have all sorts of therapeutic benefits because, guess what? Mary wouldn’t be mad at her therapist and thus maybe Mary could hear it. Mary is paying her therapist for that sort of insight and Mary wants her relationship with her therapist to be one that includes reality checking. Mary wants her relationship with her therapist (as does her therapist) to be a relationship of un-equals, a relationship of professional distance.
Mary wants you to love her, and she can’t love you if you try to create a therapeutic relationship. You job as a better man is to let Mary work on her own shit. You can listen, you can mirror, you can validate and empathize but the second you get into psychoanalysis you shatter your relationship of love and create a dynamic where you are the rational and she is the emotional, where you are the adult and she is the child, where you are right and she is wrong.
Now it could be if your beloved is evolved almost to the point of transcendence that she’s going to pause, listen, and say
MARY: Thank you for that profound insight. I always appreciate it when you help me identify my growth points. Let’s have sex now.
But the most likely scenario is that Mary is going to feel attacked, because no matter how carefully you tread you are right up against her soft spots, her tender areas, her buttons if you will, and pointing out, however well intentioned, no matter how lovingly phrased, that her anger is misplaced is going to effectively tell her she is wrong. You are going to tell her something you intend to be kind and understanding and she is going to hear:
YOU: WRONG. WRONG, WRONG, WRONG! I CANNOT BELIEVE YOU ARE SO STUPID; THAT THIS IS STILL AN ISSUE. YOU KNOW I DID EVERYTHING RIGHT AND YOU ARE OUT OF LINE…..
And since that is what Mary is hearing, you can imagine she is going to react pretty much the same way she would if you had actually said it. It won’t be pretty. At best you continue your half-assed attempt at therapy and things will get worse, At worst you become reactive and it all goes to hell. You won’t go to bed until late, you will not sleep well and you will not wake up happy. Don’t go there.
So you do what you did before: you embrace her anger, you hear her out, you mirror and you let her talk. This works. I know it’s hard, I know it’s repetitious, I know there’s a part of you that wants to scream.
YOU: I have to do this again? Haven’t we been over this? Why can’t she clean up her side of the street?
But screaming that is just like pissing into the wind: it’s just going to blow back on to you. Don’t do it, it’s non-productive, it is in fact just an invitation to destructive behaviors and regression on both of your parts.
By mirroring Mary you allow her the room to hear herself, you allow her the chance to put her thoughts in order, you give her the opportunity to reinforce the insight she had before, you give her the safety she needs to face her fears and to let go of the bad behaviors they engender.
More importantly, you show her, rather than tell her or perhaps even yell at her, that you love and respect her.
And it could well be she is never going to get over it. It could be she’s not going to get over it because she’s never, ever, going to clean up her side of the street, she is never going to venture into introspection and growth, and maybe you will have to move on to a better relationship, but honestly if that were the case the mirroring wouldn’t have worked first time around. It took you a while to get where you are, but you did (albeit dragging your feet and feeling blindly in the dark.) Give her the credit you have given yourself and recognize it will take her a while too, but it’s worth the wait.
It could also be that this is always going to be an issue that will crop up when she is under stress. This is normal. Some stuff goes so far back it just isn’t going to get fixed, completely fixed and healed, in our life times. Like a bad back or a rotator cuff injury you have to accept that it is going to get inflamed and hurt every so often.
But like a bad back or a rotator cuff injury, you know it won’t last forever, you know how to treat it and if you keep at the exercises and the work the frequency and duration of the events will dwindle.
And one night you’re going to call and say “Honey, I’m going to be a bit late tonight…” and Mary is going to feel that familiar fear and even if she can’t set it aside she going to recognize if for what it is and let it go because you’ve given her the support she needs to do her work.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Playing With Myself
Get your mind out of the gutter: I’m talking about solitaire.
I want to thank Wes Cherry. It used to be that the zeitgeist of America was its mobility. The one thing that everyone had in common with everyone else was that they had moved from someplace else to where they were and were probably going to move again, then the two World Wars established a commonality of experience and understanding.
Television came along and the collective unconscious was forever affected by Lassie’s bark, warnings to Will Robinson, the bark of M16s in Vietnam and those funky bass solo riffs that began Seinfeld. But now, thanks to Wes Cherry and his transformational programming skills, we have a commonality that transcends all national borders, a new international zeitgeist: computer solitaire. Everyone plays it, and everyone plays the same game by the same rules, even inlcuding the one-card cheat on the deal-three option.
The thing I like about Mr. Cherry’s computer solitaire is that it lends itself to so many analogies to life.
Like life, if you make a bad, uninformed or simply unfortunate choice you cannot go back and change it. No mulligans, no do-overs.
Also like life (but unlike analogue solitaire (real cards)) once the game is over you can not turn the unexposed cards over and figure out what might have been: if on the last play you could move either of the red fives onto a black six you get to chose one and if it reveals an unplayable card you are done. No peeking into what might have been.
Also like life, so many decisions have to be made upon inadequate information, inadequate often times because it’s simply not available, often times because you weren’t paying attention… (Is the other eight in the discard pile?) And like life you are inexorably bound by those decisions.
In my book, How To Save Your Marriage by Becoming a Better Man, I talk a bit about decision making paradigms, and I focused there on how important it is to make decisions that take you somewhere rather than decisions that protect you or are fear based, but Mr. Cherry’s program affords an excellent platform for expanding that analysis.
Consider this scenario: you’ve about halfway through the deck, and you play a red seven off the deck onto a black eight, revealing the prior discard, a red three. You move your black six off the five pile to your newly played red seven and uncover the other red three, and as fate would have it, you have a black four showing on the two pile. What do you do? Play the three from the discard pile or from the five-pile?
Or worse, you move the last card in a pile over to another, but you have two kings already in play, one on the six pile and one on the four. Which one do you move to the vacant spot?
And like life, you can ponder and dither and worry over these decisions for minutes or even hours and come no closer to a rational plan of action.
Perhaps a card counter and master mathematician could make an informed decision in either case based upon the cards already discarded and the order they were in when taken in conjunction with the cards then showing and the number of concealed cards remaining in each pile. Likewise in life a trained psychologist who is as wise as the Dalai Lama and as logical as Star Trek’s Spock might be able, under the proper circumstances, to make the right choice in a relationship: Should I move on? Have I done all I can do? Should I be angry? Should she apologize?
All of these are, at times, as unknowable as “Should I move the red king from pile two or the black king from pile six?”
Thus in Mr. Cherry’s solitaire I made some policy decisions, I established some protocols for how I would deal with unknowing choices. For example, if I have a choice of moving either of two cards from piles to a new pile, all things being equal, I move the one furthest away. I have two exceptions to that rule, the first being to work the “mine that’s producing”: if I turn up a double choice as I am running through a pile, I’ll move that card. The second caveat to the rule is if moving one of the two cards will create an open spot and I have a king to play.
Now here’s the thing you need to remember: my rules are pretty arbitrary. Sure, I did a little thinking about how to bring as many cards into play before I decided to add the exceptions, but the rule about the moving the furthest card is purely arbitrary. I have to move one of them and in order to avoid the unpleasant dithering, second guessing and worry, not to mention moving the game along, I have simply chosen to move the furthest card.
There always remains the possibility that had I moved the other card I might win, or I might not, but as I have no way of knowing it’s truly immaterial. As the saying goes, “You pays your money and you takes your chances.”
So too in life, you have to set some arbitrary guidelines for how you are going to make your decisions. In my experience most people kind of go on an ad hoc gut feeling approach about things which leads often to widely varied responses to similar circumstances.
Take the situation where perhaps you suspect your beloved may not have been truthful about some little thing. Early in your relationship you’ll probably let it slide and forget about it, but later in the relationship, when perhaps you are not as trusting, it becomes an issue and a question that worries and nags at you. Further on, when your impression of your beloved is tainted by your growing resentment it becomes not only of tantamount importance but yet another example of betrayal, demonstrative evidence that you should either pack your bags or kick her out.
In all three instances you come to different conclusions about how to react based upon no discernable facts, but rather about how you feel about your partner at the moment. It is the functional equivalent of moving one king over the other because you “feel lucky” or “it seems right.”
Thus, one rule I have made about my relationships is that I construe everything in the light most favorable to my beloved. If she says while doing something else “Will you take out the garbage” I could construe it to mean “why haven’t you taken out the garbage” “didn’t I tell you to take out the garbage” “you never take out the garbage” “stop that unimportant shit and do what I want” “the least you can do is take out the garbage” “I hate you and the horse you rode in on” and with each of those constructions I will generate an antipathy towards her that is, in all likely hood, completely spurious and unfounded. Alternatively, I can take it as meaning “please take out the garbage” which is a reasonable enough request for me to make of her should the situation be reversed.
But what about the lie? What about the exceptions and caveats to the decision making process?
In law we have different standards of proof. For a criminal conviction the jury must find beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant committed the crime. That comes out to about ninety-five percent sure. In a civil case the jury has to find by a preponderance of the evidence that the defendant committed the tortuous act or breached the contract. That means it is more likely than not that it happened, or say fifty-one percent. In some instances it has to be clear and convincing evidence, figure seventy-five percent, but in no case does a jury have to find absolutely, one-hundred percent sure that something happened.
In relationships, we generally don’t bother placing any kind of standard on our decisions. If we are angry were generally one hundred percent sure of whatever fact serves our interest best, and if we are worried we wonder if we shouldn’t be one hundred percent sure before we do anything about the thing that scares us most. Some people simply believe what they want without regard as to whether there is a ten or a ninety percent chance they are right. If you were to take this approach playing solitaire you would never play the game consistently and you would spend a lot of time blaming yourself afterwards for your poor choices. “See? I should have moved the red king!” you might say, but you would be saying it because you had no foundation for the decision in the first place. When everything is hit or miss, there is no responsibility.
So, long story short, decide what your standard of proof will be: fifty percent, sixty percent, seventy… it is your call, you just need to define it and apply it consistently. If you have set a boundary and you suspect it has been crossed and your burden of proof is met then you say, “Honey, we gotta talk” and you act upon your convictions, accepting the consequence of being wrong with the same grace as if you’d been right. You don’t get do overs or mulligans… but you do get to move on with your life.
I want to thank Wes Cherry. It used to be that the zeitgeist of America was its mobility. The one thing that everyone had in common with everyone else was that they had moved from someplace else to where they were and were probably going to move again, then the two World Wars established a commonality of experience and understanding.
Television came along and the collective unconscious was forever affected by Lassie’s bark, warnings to Will Robinson, the bark of M16s in Vietnam and those funky bass solo riffs that began Seinfeld. But now, thanks to Wes Cherry and his transformational programming skills, we have a commonality that transcends all national borders, a new international zeitgeist: computer solitaire. Everyone plays it, and everyone plays the same game by the same rules, even inlcuding the one-card cheat on the deal-three option.
The thing I like about Mr. Cherry’s computer solitaire is that it lends itself to so many analogies to life.
Like life, if you make a bad, uninformed or simply unfortunate choice you cannot go back and change it. No mulligans, no do-overs.
Also like life (but unlike analogue solitaire (real cards)) once the game is over you can not turn the unexposed cards over and figure out what might have been: if on the last play you could move either of the red fives onto a black six you get to chose one and if it reveals an unplayable card you are done. No peeking into what might have been.
Also like life, so many decisions have to be made upon inadequate information, inadequate often times because it’s simply not available, often times because you weren’t paying attention… (Is the other eight in the discard pile?) And like life you are inexorably bound by those decisions.
In my book, How To Save Your Marriage by Becoming a Better Man, I talk a bit about decision making paradigms, and I focused there on how important it is to make decisions that take you somewhere rather than decisions that protect you or are fear based, but Mr. Cherry’s program affords an excellent platform for expanding that analysis.
Consider this scenario: you’ve about halfway through the deck, and you play a red seven off the deck onto a black eight, revealing the prior discard, a red three. You move your black six off the five pile to your newly played red seven and uncover the other red three, and as fate would have it, you have a black four showing on the two pile. What do you do? Play the three from the discard pile or from the five-pile?
Or worse, you move the last card in a pile over to another, but you have two kings already in play, one on the six pile and one on the four. Which one do you move to the vacant spot?
And like life, you can ponder and dither and worry over these decisions for minutes or even hours and come no closer to a rational plan of action.
Perhaps a card counter and master mathematician could make an informed decision in either case based upon the cards already discarded and the order they were in when taken in conjunction with the cards then showing and the number of concealed cards remaining in each pile. Likewise in life a trained psychologist who is as wise as the Dalai Lama and as logical as Star Trek’s Spock might be able, under the proper circumstances, to make the right choice in a relationship: Should I move on? Have I done all I can do? Should I be angry? Should she apologize?
All of these are, at times, as unknowable as “Should I move the red king from pile two or the black king from pile six?”
Thus in Mr. Cherry’s solitaire I made some policy decisions, I established some protocols for how I would deal with unknowing choices. For example, if I have a choice of moving either of two cards from piles to a new pile, all things being equal, I move the one furthest away. I have two exceptions to that rule, the first being to work the “mine that’s producing”: if I turn up a double choice as I am running through a pile, I’ll move that card. The second caveat to the rule is if moving one of the two cards will create an open spot and I have a king to play.
Now here’s the thing you need to remember: my rules are pretty arbitrary. Sure, I did a little thinking about how to bring as many cards into play before I decided to add the exceptions, but the rule about the moving the furthest card is purely arbitrary. I have to move one of them and in order to avoid the unpleasant dithering, second guessing and worry, not to mention moving the game along, I have simply chosen to move the furthest card.
There always remains the possibility that had I moved the other card I might win, or I might not, but as I have no way of knowing it’s truly immaterial. As the saying goes, “You pays your money and you takes your chances.”
So too in life, you have to set some arbitrary guidelines for how you are going to make your decisions. In my experience most people kind of go on an ad hoc gut feeling approach about things which leads often to widely varied responses to similar circumstances.
Take the situation where perhaps you suspect your beloved may not have been truthful about some little thing. Early in your relationship you’ll probably let it slide and forget about it, but later in the relationship, when perhaps you are not as trusting, it becomes an issue and a question that worries and nags at you. Further on, when your impression of your beloved is tainted by your growing resentment it becomes not only of tantamount importance but yet another example of betrayal, demonstrative evidence that you should either pack your bags or kick her out.
In all three instances you come to different conclusions about how to react based upon no discernable facts, but rather about how you feel about your partner at the moment. It is the functional equivalent of moving one king over the other because you “feel lucky” or “it seems right.”
Thus, one rule I have made about my relationships is that I construe everything in the light most favorable to my beloved. If she says while doing something else “Will you take out the garbage” I could construe it to mean “why haven’t you taken out the garbage” “didn’t I tell you to take out the garbage” “you never take out the garbage” “stop that unimportant shit and do what I want” “the least you can do is take out the garbage” “I hate you and the horse you rode in on” and with each of those constructions I will generate an antipathy towards her that is, in all likely hood, completely spurious and unfounded. Alternatively, I can take it as meaning “please take out the garbage” which is a reasonable enough request for me to make of her should the situation be reversed.
But what about the lie? What about the exceptions and caveats to the decision making process?
In law we have different standards of proof. For a criminal conviction the jury must find beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant committed the crime. That comes out to about ninety-five percent sure. In a civil case the jury has to find by a preponderance of the evidence that the defendant committed the tortuous act or breached the contract. That means it is more likely than not that it happened, or say fifty-one percent. In some instances it has to be clear and convincing evidence, figure seventy-five percent, but in no case does a jury have to find absolutely, one-hundred percent sure that something happened.
In relationships, we generally don’t bother placing any kind of standard on our decisions. If we are angry were generally one hundred percent sure of whatever fact serves our interest best, and if we are worried we wonder if we shouldn’t be one hundred percent sure before we do anything about the thing that scares us most. Some people simply believe what they want without regard as to whether there is a ten or a ninety percent chance they are right. If you were to take this approach playing solitaire you would never play the game consistently and you would spend a lot of time blaming yourself afterwards for your poor choices. “See? I should have moved the red king!” you might say, but you would be saying it because you had no foundation for the decision in the first place. When everything is hit or miss, there is no responsibility.
So, long story short, decide what your standard of proof will be: fifty percent, sixty percent, seventy… it is your call, you just need to define it and apply it consistently. If you have set a boundary and you suspect it has been crossed and your burden of proof is met then you say, “Honey, we gotta talk” and you act upon your convictions, accepting the consequence of being wrong with the same grace as if you’d been right. You don’t get do overs or mulligans… but you do get to move on with your life.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Manning Up: How the rise of women has turned men into boys by Kay Hymowitz presumes that the meme of adult male as perpetual child, the lad generation, the male incarnate as any juvenile Adam Sandler character, which she describes as the “preadult”, is the result of the socioeconomic rise of women in modern culture.
The jacket design is the best thing about the book. It’s a great graphic, and it is what will sell the book, but after that, like Neil Young said in his intro to “Don’t let it bring you down” the book “sort of starts off slow and then fizzles out all together.” It is the literary equivalent of news channel infotainment, nothing more than a sensational premise supported by opinion and convoluted presumptions designed only to generate controversy, and more importantly, sales.
I’m going to take specific exception to the title, because it presumes the one thing that is possibly the most toxic concept in any relationship and that is that someone else, or some set of circumstances that are beyond your control, are responsible for how you behave and think.
No one can make you mad, belittle you or denigrate you: we do that on our own. I have a wise friend who’s said time and again, “It doesn’t matter what I’m called, it matters what I answer to.” And in our relationships, in our lives, we are responsible for the choices we make and the consequences they bring.
It may be that as the title suggests that men are living lives of extended “preadult”-hood, or as Ms. Hymowitz tries to caveat with a “some men” in an interview with Dr. Helen Smith, (at approx 4:20) but if men are, in fact, choosing computer games over relationships, if men are choosing to be Chester Riley rather than Ward Cleaver, then understand this one thing: it is a choice. The rise of women, the conflict of who gets the check, the distinction of alpha or beta or even theta male has nothing to do with it. It is a choice. To say that men make this choice, if in fact they are making it, because of women’s relative success is simplistic at best and it does disservice to both sexes.
While the book is copiously footnoted, most of the references are anecdotal and tautological, and many of the core premises of her argument go unsubstantiated: three spring to mind easily.
On page 3 she states that “preadults are a different matter: they are a major demographic event.”
Notwithstanding that she has self-admittedly created the new concept of “preadult” without bothering to define “adult”, demographics are by definition documented numbers. A city is 23% black, 54% high school graduates, 10% LGBT: these numbers come from the census, from statistical analysis, from any number of sources public and private but they are at their core demonstrable and factual: to state that “preadults” are a “demographic event”, major or otherwise, is meaningless and pure sophistry without citation to authority.
And on page 15 she states “By the 2000s, young men were tuning in to such cable channels as Comedy Central, the Cartoon Network, and Spike, whose shows reflected the adolescent male preferences of its targeted male audiences.” It might be a commonsensical claim, notwithstanding that the Cartoon Network is the home of “The Powerpuff Girls” yet I have no doubt that Ms. Hymowitz could have contacted someone at Nielson or Tivo to document the exact demographic of these channels, but she doesn’t, and like the dog that didn’t bark in Doyle’s Silver Blaze the fact that she doesn’t is telling: like the Sandleresque slackers she derides, she gives at best a “preadult” effort at documenting her claims.
Writing of the latter part of the nineteenth century she further opines “Still, with the limited number of respectable women hanging around in billiard halls and, in any case, fairly strict rules against sex unless you put a ring on a finger, the vast majority of men - 90 percent – would soon enough become husbands” pg 129
I’d like a little authority for the presumption that social rules against premarital sex were any more effective in 1890 than they were in 1960 or 2010, and some explanation of why charities supported “lying in” hospitals where generally poor and unmarried women, seduced, no doubt by the functional equivalent of “preadult” man-boys of their time, could both safely birth their unexpected child and find moral salvation if the youth of the time were deferring sexual activity until marriage.
The truth is we are sexual creatures and the hormones that propel that drive are at their most rampant in our fertile years. Young men and women fuck around. Always have, always will, and sadly my only authority for that is my personal experience, yet even that limited authority is more than Ms. Hymowitz can muster for her claim that somehow social prescriptions against premarital sex once forced men into marriage and the absence of those social prescriptions allows today’s man-boy to live in an extended adolescence.
I will grant you if there is a phenomenon of “preadult”-hood among some men and further assuming arguendo that it has evolved over the last thirty years that there is a correlation between “preadult”-hood and the advances women have made in their economic and educational participation in society, but there is also the same correlation to be made with the decline in interest rates in the same period. Correlation is not causation.
But one of the major problems with Ms. Hymowitz’s theory is that she posits this behavior is some how new, as if Henry Fieldings Tom Jones wasn’t the eighteenth century iteration of a paradigm that has been around for all time.
As I understand one of her arguments, women’s lib, the pill, and greater education has allowed beautiful intelligent girls to “play the field” and to put off their child rearing years so that they can pursue alpha males to the detriment of poor beta males, who then slide inexorably into the perpetual childhood that is “preadult”.
This is passed off as new and interesting despite the fact that we all were in junior high school at one time or another and learned there that beautiful intelligent girls play the field and seek out alpha males. As Charlie Sheen, the paragon of extended adolescence would say, “duh… winning.”
Distilled to its core, the sum and substance of Ms. Hymowitz’s monograph is simply that some people make bad choices and choose immaturity over growth, self-gratification over introspection and behave childishly even after their personal chronology suggests they are “adults”, and she takes almost 190 pages to put lipstick on that particular pig.
The hope is that somehow, as a species, we evolve past junior high school. It seems iffy, but it could happen. Ms. Hymowitz doesn’t address how her “preadults”can grow to be more than a cruel society has forced them to be, but I can.
It requires some work, and the assiduous application of the principles in How To Save Your Marriage, but we can all, men, women, “preadults”, adolescents, senior citizens and baby boomers alike, let go of the bad behaviors that destroy our relationships and our lives.
The jacket design is the best thing about the book. It’s a great graphic, and it is what will sell the book, but after that, like Neil Young said in his intro to “Don’t let it bring you down” the book “sort of starts off slow and then fizzles out all together.” It is the literary equivalent of news channel infotainment, nothing more than a sensational premise supported by opinion and convoluted presumptions designed only to generate controversy, and more importantly, sales.
I’m going to take specific exception to the title, because it presumes the one thing that is possibly the most toxic concept in any relationship and that is that someone else, or some set of circumstances that are beyond your control, are responsible for how you behave and think.
No one can make you mad, belittle you or denigrate you: we do that on our own. I have a wise friend who’s said time and again, “It doesn’t matter what I’m called, it matters what I answer to.” And in our relationships, in our lives, we are responsible for the choices we make and the consequences they bring.
It may be that as the title suggests that men are living lives of extended “preadult”-hood, or as Ms. Hymowitz tries to caveat with a “some men” in an interview with Dr. Helen Smith, (at approx 4:20) but if men are, in fact, choosing computer games over relationships, if men are choosing to be Chester Riley rather than Ward Cleaver, then understand this one thing: it is a choice. The rise of women, the conflict of who gets the check, the distinction of alpha or beta or even theta male has nothing to do with it. It is a choice. To say that men make this choice, if in fact they are making it, because of women’s relative success is simplistic at best and it does disservice to both sexes.
While the book is copiously footnoted, most of the references are anecdotal and tautological, and many of the core premises of her argument go unsubstantiated: three spring to mind easily.
On page 3 she states that “preadults are a different matter: they are a major demographic event.”
Notwithstanding that she has self-admittedly created the new concept of “preadult” without bothering to define “adult”, demographics are by definition documented numbers. A city is 23% black, 54% high school graduates, 10% LGBT: these numbers come from the census, from statistical analysis, from any number of sources public and private but they are at their core demonstrable and factual: to state that “preadults” are a “demographic event”, major or otherwise, is meaningless and pure sophistry without citation to authority.
And on page 15 she states “By the 2000s, young men were tuning in to such cable channels as Comedy Central, the Cartoon Network, and Spike, whose shows reflected the adolescent male preferences of its targeted male audiences.” It might be a commonsensical claim, notwithstanding that the Cartoon Network is the home of “The Powerpuff Girls” yet I have no doubt that Ms. Hymowitz could have contacted someone at Nielson or Tivo to document the exact demographic of these channels, but she doesn’t, and like the dog that didn’t bark in Doyle’s Silver Blaze the fact that she doesn’t is telling: like the Sandleresque slackers she derides, she gives at best a “preadult” effort at documenting her claims.
Writing of the latter part of the nineteenth century she further opines “Still, with the limited number of respectable women hanging around in billiard halls and, in any case, fairly strict rules against sex unless you put a ring on a finger, the vast majority of men - 90 percent – would soon enough become husbands” pg 129
I’d like a little authority for the presumption that social rules against premarital sex were any more effective in 1890 than they were in 1960 or 2010, and some explanation of why charities supported “lying in” hospitals where generally poor and unmarried women, seduced, no doubt by the functional equivalent of “preadult” man-boys of their time, could both safely birth their unexpected child and find moral salvation if the youth of the time were deferring sexual activity until marriage.
The truth is we are sexual creatures and the hormones that propel that drive are at their most rampant in our fertile years. Young men and women fuck around. Always have, always will, and sadly my only authority for that is my personal experience, yet even that limited authority is more than Ms. Hymowitz can muster for her claim that somehow social prescriptions against premarital sex once forced men into marriage and the absence of those social prescriptions allows today’s man-boy to live in an extended adolescence.
I will grant you if there is a phenomenon of “preadult”-hood among some men and further assuming arguendo that it has evolved over the last thirty years that there is a correlation between “preadult”-hood and the advances women have made in their economic and educational participation in society, but there is also the same correlation to be made with the decline in interest rates in the same period. Correlation is not causation.
But one of the major problems with Ms. Hymowitz’s theory is that she posits this behavior is some how new, as if Henry Fieldings Tom Jones wasn’t the eighteenth century iteration of a paradigm that has been around for all time.
As I understand one of her arguments, women’s lib, the pill, and greater education has allowed beautiful intelligent girls to “play the field” and to put off their child rearing years so that they can pursue alpha males to the detriment of poor beta males, who then slide inexorably into the perpetual childhood that is “preadult”.
This is passed off as new and interesting despite the fact that we all were in junior high school at one time or another and learned there that beautiful intelligent girls play the field and seek out alpha males. As Charlie Sheen, the paragon of extended adolescence would say, “duh… winning.”
Distilled to its core, the sum and substance of Ms. Hymowitz’s monograph is simply that some people make bad choices and choose immaturity over growth, self-gratification over introspection and behave childishly even after their personal chronology suggests they are “adults”, and she takes almost 190 pages to put lipstick on that particular pig.
The hope is that somehow, as a species, we evolve past junior high school. It seems iffy, but it could happen. Ms. Hymowitz doesn’t address how her “preadults”can grow to be more than a cruel society has forced them to be, but I can.
It requires some work, and the assiduous application of the principles in How To Save Your Marriage, but we can all, men, women, “preadults”, adolescents, senior citizens and baby boomers alike, let go of the bad behaviors that destroy our relationships and our lives.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Alphabet Soup
There are, by some lights , alpha males and beta males. Alpha males don’t take shit and beta males are alternatively pussy whipped or pussy deprived and subservient to women. Alpha good; beta bad. If it sounds sort of like a cave man mentality, “Me Tarzan, you Jane,” it’s because it is.
And it worked pretty good for tens of thousands of years. It made sure the strong and genetically stable males remained well fed and able to procreate with as many genetically stable females as possible and thus populated the world. Go team.
But the advent of the frontal cortex brought drastic change to our world, and thinking became more important than clubbing some pathetic delta or theta to death over a fertile woman. I promise you it was undoubtedly some beta who first strung a bow and from a safe distance flung an arrow into the heart of a club wielding alpha. Brain trumps brawn.
And despite the fact that over half the world still keeps women in subjugation, it soon became clear to even the most underutilized intellects that women could think too, and in some cases they could think better than their male counter parts and before you know it the whole alpha male paradigm began to fall apart, and a new relationship paradigm had to evolve that incorporated and respected our intellectual equality.
Intellectual equality doesn’t mean pretending that Jim is just as smart as Bob, it means accepting that we have as a species evolved to a point where we are all smart enough that if we respect each other and work at it we can communicate, cooperate and understand one another on a level far beyond the basics of Me Tarzan, you Jane.
Many attack the philosophy behind How To Save Your Marriage by Becoming a Better Man as one that emasculates men, that it asks them to be less manly, less alpha.
And to the extent that HTSYMbBABM encourages men to act like men and not cave men, they have a point.
But to the extent they suggest that being able to control your anger, to respect another’s reality, to listen effectively, to state your needs clearly, to know and enforce your legitimate boundaries, that this some how makes you less of a man… au contraire: it is the definition of a man.
It is the true man, the real alpha, who in times of stress and challenge does not regress to the atavistic traits of aggression and dominance. It is the true man who can think past the reactivity of the moment, who can set aside the immaturity of others, and who can lead a relationship past the brink of irreconcilable differences and into a new frontier of happiness.
I shit you not.
And it worked pretty good for tens of thousands of years. It made sure the strong and genetically stable males remained well fed and able to procreate with as many genetically stable females as possible and thus populated the world. Go team.
But the advent of the frontal cortex brought drastic change to our world, and thinking became more important than clubbing some pathetic delta or theta to death over a fertile woman. I promise you it was undoubtedly some beta who first strung a bow and from a safe distance flung an arrow into the heart of a club wielding alpha. Brain trumps brawn.
And despite the fact that over half the world still keeps women in subjugation, it soon became clear to even the most underutilized intellects that women could think too, and in some cases they could think better than their male counter parts and before you know it the whole alpha male paradigm began to fall apart, and a new relationship paradigm had to evolve that incorporated and respected our intellectual equality.
Intellectual equality doesn’t mean pretending that Jim is just as smart as Bob, it means accepting that we have as a species evolved to a point where we are all smart enough that if we respect each other and work at it we can communicate, cooperate and understand one another on a level far beyond the basics of Me Tarzan, you Jane.
Many attack the philosophy behind How To Save Your Marriage by Becoming a Better Man as one that emasculates men, that it asks them to be less manly, less alpha.
And to the extent that HTSYMbBABM encourages men to act like men and not cave men, they have a point.
But to the extent they suggest that being able to control your anger, to respect another’s reality, to listen effectively, to state your needs clearly, to know and enforce your legitimate boundaries, that this some how makes you less of a man… au contraire: it is the definition of a man.
It is the true man, the real alpha, who in times of stress and challenge does not regress to the atavistic traits of aggression and dominance. It is the true man who can think past the reactivity of the moment, who can set aside the immaturity of others, and who can lead a relationship past the brink of irreconcilable differences and into a new frontier of happiness.
I shit you not.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)