I'll forbear if you don't check this out....

I couldn't have said this better myself


http://www.prageruniversity.com/Life-Studies/Forgiveness.html

It's not about the nail....

This is a well made video that reflects one of the key aspects of Imago Relationship Theory... don't try and fix your partner even when the problem is so incredibly obvious to you... the only person who can fix you is you, and the one person your partner does not want to be fixed by is... you. Read my earlier post on being your wife's therapist...

anyway... the guy does the guy thing initially, even getting a bit steamed and even offended when his good advice is ignored, but finally gets around to simply listening and validating... and thus he begins to get a handle on the skills that are going to lead him to a better relationship.....

enjoy.

http://vimeo.com/66753575

How come nobody marries an asshole but always divorces one?

How come nobody every dates an asshole, never goes steady with a (son of a) bitch, but when it comes time to break up, guess what? Our soon to be ex is a professional full time asshole, (son of a) bitch and probably eats his or her buggers, is addicted to pornography, and lies all the time.

How is it that we choose wonderful, fun, exciting, charming, witty and warm people to invite into our heart and then they either a) change into or b) were always evil troglodytes, albeit carefully disguised evil troglodytes because they did seem pretty damn cuddly when we first fell in love.

Let’s consider the first premise: they changed. They were cuddly love muffins and they evolved into evil troglodytes. I guess it’s possible that the person has a degenerative neurological disease that has rendered them incapable of controlling their behavior, or it’s possible that they were seduced by a cult of narcissists who brainwashed them, yet if either of these were the case I don’t think you’d be sitting there wondering how this happened, you’d have them get a brain scan, or you would have noticed them going out to the cult meetings.

Now it can be that you married a sociopath, someone who lies with the ease of Martin Burney… we’ve all seen “Sleeping With The Enemy” and there’s no doubt that these people exist and they suck people into their poisoned lives and the only thing you can do is get the fuck out of the house and while you’re recuperating in a small Midwest town start making notes about what things, in retrospect, should have warned you off that freak so you’ll never go there again. In all honesty, the Martin Burney’s (of both sexes) are the exception and not the rule but if you contend that you are living with a crazy person then you best go take a look in the mirror and remember this: water seeks it’s own level. Healthy people get the fuck out of unhealthy relationships. Crazy people live with crazy people. Decide which you want to be and act accordingly.

But generally, if your partner truly has changed it’s because someone helped them change. Nothing happens in a vacuum. A five year old will act like a five year old until someone expects the five year old to act differently. By the same token, a normally healthy child will start acting out in all sorts of alarming ways if that child has been abused by an adult. So if there was a change, my point is simply this: you, as their most significant other, their attachment figure, probably helped.

Maybe you helped by being distant, maybe you helped by being passive-aggressive, maybe you helped by ignoring the problems, maybe you helped by creating problems, but in some way, some how, you helped.

But finally, here’s the thought that’s going to blow your mind: your partner has not changed, the way you see your partner, the way you experience your partner and the way you treat your partner has changed. And as sure as god made little green apples, your partner thinks you’re the one who has changed and doesn’t realize that you are still the same wonderful, cuddly little love muffin you were when you married, and that what’s changed is the way s/he sees you, experiences you, and treats you.

This is how it happens… imagine your relationship is a nice new pair of rose colored glasses. You meet someone and as you look through those glasses everything about your new honey seems wonderful. A great smile, a fantastic sense of humor. A good work ethic, inteligent… and anything that you don’t like about your new favorite person, you tend to overlook. Smoking… well, they’ll probably quit. Politics, well everyone is entitled to an opinion… and that laugh? Well, it is a little loud but it’s sincere and kind of cute.

Give a few years and those rose colored glasses that you’ve been wearing have lost a little of their tint, worse they’ve become scratched. Each one of those scratches is a hurt that you experienced at the hands of your beloved. Hurts that you held in and did not resolve, hurts that you allowed to accumulate and fester. Whether it was a bona fide mean spirited hurt, or an unvoiced and unmet expectation, or an accidental slight, or a joke you didn’t think was funny, it doesn’t really matter because now the way you view your beloved is a lot less rose colored (i.e. less accepting) and it’s as obscured as granny’s cataract clouded eyes.

And now as you look at your beloved you don’t notice the great smile you notice s/he hasn’t brushed their teeth, the humor seems bitter or juvenile. What used to be a good work ethic is now seen as never being home, and that intelligence seems more like intellectual bullying … and those things you don’t like about your beloved now seem insurmountable obstacles. S/he is committed to suicide by tobacco and is stinking up the house and poisoning the kids with second hand smoke. Politics have morphed from a considered disagreement to fanaticism… and that laugh? God, it’s obnoxious and embarrassing.

And thus we stay in a bad relationship and blame our partners for changing, because we know… I mean it’s as plain as day… that it’s not our fault: s/he changed.

And as long as you keep thinking it’s not your fault, as long as you don’t accept 100% responsibility for your relationship, as long as you keep demanding that your partner get better you are going to either stay in a bad relationship or move on to a bad divorce which will become a prelude to another bad relationship because perfect people are doomed to being surrounded by losers.

Now, if you’ll accept for the moment that you are not perfect, and if you’ll accept just for a second that your partner probably has as many hurts, doubts, and fears as you do, and if you will accept that in order for your relationship to improve you will both have to change… for the better, then the question becomes simply this… why are you waiting for your partner to change?

 If you aren’t perfect, if you need to grow, if you can find some small area where you can do better why aren’t you doing something about it?

And that is not a rhetorical question.

The Imputed Please

Tell me about the last time you had Sunday supper with the whole family and your grandmother said, “Pass the mustard greens.” and you yelled at her “Can’t you fucking say ‘Please’ you old bitch? Would it kill you? You are always (see below) telling me what to do and I’m not taking your controlling shit any longer, you want the mustard greens you got a walker by your chair and the rest of the fucking day to waddle your sad ass to the other end of the table and get them.”

I’m guessing you wouldn’t expect a Benjamin in your Christmas card that year, and you can pretty much expect her first call on Monday morning would be to the lawyer that wrote her Will.

Without going into your relationship with your grandmother (she may be worse than JR Ewing for all I know) we do not, as a rule, require that every request be preceded by a “please” or followed by a “thank you.” We give the person making the request the benefit of the doubt, we allow them an imputed please. If someone at work says “You got the stapler?” we don’t respond “What? Are you saying I stole the stapler?”

Nope, we usually say, “Sure.” We hand it over and don’t think about it again. Same with the mustard greens.

But in a personal relationship, in our relationships with our wives, maybe our parents and our siblings, for some reason, we may not be so kind.

In personal relationships (and here I’m talking about troubled relationships) every request, every communication is fed through a check list of resentments, past bad acts, suspicion and fear. Every word is parsed for meaning, every tone is analyzed, every body position is noted and we rank them all from one to ten, with one being the worst possible interpretation and ten being the a lesser offensive interpretation and maybe number ninety-eight is the one we attribute to the guy asking for the stapler and then we promptly disregard two through ten and go with number one which is “this is more of the same shit that shows she doesn’t love, respect or care for me.”

“Get some peanut butter” becomes not just a simple request for tasty legume paste but an interpolated attack “don’t even come back without the PB. You always forget it you insensitive bastard, and your kids suffer every day because you never do what you’re supposed to do.” Skippy’s becomes a proxy for every hurt your wife has inflicted upon you and the legion of those slights you imagine she intended. It’s not just the peanut butter, it’s the rest of your fucking life and nothing is going to change.

It can be a bit overwhelming. Maybe you don’t explode. Maybe you don’t give tit for tat with some sort of passive aggressive behavior, maybe you just note it and add it to your list of resentments, but even that is adding a bale of hay to your already overburdened relationship camel’s back.

What if you simply imputed a “Please”. What if, the next time you see a note or hear a request that could be interpreted as controlling or dictatorial you simply added a mental “please” to it. “Please get some peanut butter” is an entirely different experience.

“Why should I? She’s telling me what to do and I have every right to resent it.”

Can’t argue with you there, but you have a right to a divorce too, and that defensiveness is leading right towards one. You’re reading this because you want to improve your relationship with your wife, you want to be a better man, and the bottom line is that a better man is going to impute a “Please” because anything you would do for your granny or the guy needing the stapler you should be willing to do for your wife.

OOPS

I don't get many questions on this blog, but I get a few over the occasional glass of wine and I thought this answer merited sharing... my friend was facing a hard decision and afraid that he would make the wrong choice. Enough preamble, this is the email I sent him the next day (parenthetical added.)

Last night I parted with the observation that you cannot make mistakes… and upon reflection that seems a bit ambiguous.

What I mean is I don’t much like the concept of mistake…. Assigning blame and recrimination for past actions.

If you listen to your heart, are honest with yourself and make the best decision you can at the time you have done your work. The decision you make may or may not bring the results you desire, but even if it causes WWIII it is not a “mistake”, and especially less so if you take the opportunity to review your decision making process, challenge the assumptions that underlay it and look to find your blindsides that lead to your decision…. In other words, you make it a learning experience.. or an afgo. (Another Fucking Growth Opportunity.... read the book)

So let go of the concept that you can make a mistake here. It places too much stress and front ends too much culpability for a circumstance which is not entirely in your control. In short, the fear of making a mistake will cloud your judgment. You have to make a decision, and the better man understands that he will live with the consequences of that decision, good or bad, because the decision was his to make and he made it freely.

Use the tools you have, make the decision, let go of your expectations and see what happens.

ALLWAYS and NEVER

The issue I wanted to put on the table for your consideration are the words “never” and “always.” This came up at one of my weekly meetings with men and I want to give a hat tip to John C. who is always perceptive.

 Always and never are interesting words because they don’t describe the real world. As Asimov so famously observed “the only constant is change” and nothing in the physical world is “always” or “never.” Reality is like a statistical distribution curve, there are always the fee tails, the outliers, the exceptions that prove the rule. So when someone says “Blank is always soandso” you know they are speaking from an emotional rather than rational point of view because it is an impossible statement. It is like dividing by zero, or saying “a cubed equals b cubed plus c cubed” it is a seemingly rational mathematical formulae, but it is an impossibility. Likewise, so is “Blank is always soandso.”

So let’s bring this down out of the theoretical and into the nitty gritty of relationships.

When your beloved comes home and says, in an angry voice “You always leave the door open.” Your first response, if you are novitiate in the ways of being a better man, is to see that blatant falsehood as an attack, as blaming you for something you don’t do, wouldn’t do, or at least if you did do there was a damn good reason for it.

 Admittedly, the door might have been open when your beloved came home, but clearly it is not “always” open and more to the point since your last argument about heating the neighborhood you have been conscientious about closing the door for which you’ve gotten absolutely no credit and a quick survey of the house would show to a certitude that all the doors and windows are closed, were closed, and have only been opened as necessary for egress and ingress, so you might say “don’t start with that” or “That’s the first time the door’s been open in six weeks, stop bitching.”  And we know how these theoretical conversations are going to end: badly

 Note this, even if you are absolutely correct. Even if you had been closing and locking the door with the assiduity of the vault keeper at Gringotts, even if you had locked the door not just three minutes ago but a burglar  had slipped the bolts in anticipation of stealing you baseball collection only to be scared away by the headlights of your beloved’s car, understand this: it doesn’t matter.

Your honey telegraphed where she was coming from when she said “always.” When we say “always” or “never” we (yes, WE. This bit of irrationality isn’t limited to women) are announcing that we are in an irrational state and if there is one other fundamental truth to this universe it is that you cannot reason with an irrational person.

Stack up all the facts, call in the witnesses, catch the burglar down the street and have him confess and she’s still going to be angry. No one who is out of control has ever calmed down when someone said “calm down” and if you try to reason with them you by citing facts and appealing to logic you are just going to make it worse and end up in a fight where your feelings get hurt and you start attacking back with some perceived fault of your partner (you spend too much money, you always expect me to to … whatever.)

“But it’s not fair!” you say and perhaps you’re right but life isn’t fair. I promise you everyone sailing through the air after being hit by a beer truck is thinking “this isn’t fair” but it doesn’t change a damn thing. Life isn’t fair.

“So what do I do? Suck it up, roll over and play dead, be pussy whipped?”  Nope. Wouldn’t suggest that for a minute. We all hate it when we roll over and play dead, we all hate the way it makes us feel impotent and useless when we seemingly cave to our partner’s  (and I hate to use the word) unfair behavior. We resent rolling over and after a while that resentment builds up into a general dislike and distrust for our spouses and bingo, the marriage has taken the exit ramp to the Twilight Zone.

“BUT she’s being irrational… you said so yourself… why should I have to put up with someone who’s being irrational?” Jeezopete, come on down off the cross. We all act irrational from time to time, and your typical response, to feel attacked and to become defensive is not only irrational, but it is ineffective. It is time to try something new, something that works.

You stand up for yourself by embracing the anger. If you haven’t the foggiest what I mean by that you haven’t read enough of the blog or the book, but it comes down to this: you don’t walk away, but you do realize that this isn’t about the door being left open.

Always and Never are invitations to dialogue. Always and Never are by themselves statements of a fear that life is not going to change. This is what I am going to live with the rest of my life. He is never going to change. I am always going to be miserable.

The key is to engage your beloved through dialogue and mirroring to understand what is going on in her life.

So your response might better be: “You’re right. I did leave the door open. Did I get that right?” and then let her explain if there is more. If there is, go there, but if there’s not you simply say “I can understand how finding the door would make you ….

And before you know it your relationship will grow deeper and more meaningful and there is a damn fine chance that you wife will stop saying “you always….”

Now if this makes no sense to you what so ever it’s because this is your first time here and you have neither read the book nor are you up to speed, but trust me on this and read on.

In the interim, it wouldn’t do yourself or your relationships with your spouse and kids if you took “never” and “always” out of your lexicon as well.

Try Not or Do

My friend Cassidy sent me a link to an article in The Atlantic that bemoans the lack of advice columns for men and writes in her own subtle way… “Stupid pukes.”  She tells me I should write an advice column and I responded “I do, it’s just that no one reads it.”  Whereupon she retorts “Pussy. You should read your own book.” (Cassidy is a Marine... enough said.) And I would have been well within my rights to tell her to STFU because she can't possibly understand anything about me and...

But she’s right. One of my growth edges is clearly self-promotion. The skill set that allows me to sit for hours, lost in my head and typing away is not functionally useful when it comes to marketing, in finding an agent, in arranging speaking dates, in reaching out. This stuff makes me uncomfortable and as I’ve had the temerity to write and advise others, if it makes you uncomfortable it’s probably something you should be doing.

So I am. I just spoke at a function at my high school alma mater and I am promoting my new book, based in part upon HTSYMbBABM and my work with Imago and divorce mediation, A Road Less Traveled, a reader’s companionto a good divorce. It's a good book. It's getting good reviews, and in all honesty you should buy it from me via e-mail and not Amazon because that way I make a decent profit and Amazon already has enough money.

So, rather than temporizing by saying “I’m going to try to market my work.” I am focusing on saying simply “I am self-promoting.”

Which is just as hard as shifting from saying “I’m trying not to be angry and violent around my family” to “I am not going to be that man anymore.” The former allows for and perhaps even invites failure, the latter is a powerful statement of intent. So remember that when you are speaking to your beloved.

Promising to try is not a promise at all.

 

Or to put it on a level we can al identify with... there is no try

 

What the McGurk?

The McGurk effect. Speaking as a guy who is named after a color I truly appreciate intersting last names and this is a keeper You simply must click on this link: McGurk

 Watch the video then come back here.

Okay, if you didn't click on the link none of the rest of this is going to make any sense so please, click on the link.

Done? Great. didn't that just blow your mind? Go back and listen to the entire video with your eyes closed.

The incredable thing about the McGurk effect is that it is beyond your control. It is proof positive that what you think you hear and what you hear can be two different things. The McGurk effect works because you have eyes and you have spent your entire life watching people form words and you have come to the inescapable conclusion that when you see someone's teeth on their bottom lip the sound that they are making must be FA. It doesn't matter that the sound is somehting different, it matters only that you rely upon your experience and your belief to control what you experience. So think how that plays into your relationships with your wife.

Okay, I'll help. You and your wife aren't getting along so great. She says mean things and you think they are intended to hurt you and you are, in fact hurt and that hurt leads to anger, mistrust,and resentment. We've all been down that so much it's been paved.

But McGurk underscores one of the basic tenents of the whole better man better marriage philosopy: sure, there's the chance that your wife is possessed and evil, but there is a greater chance that over the years you have taken misunderstanings and interpreted them to be slights, you've taken attempts at humor to be insensitive attacks, and you have come to expect that when you're wife says something that could be interpreted as either benign, neutral or mean spirited you have trained yourself over the year to hear it only as mean spirited.

You've kept track of the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to and taught yourself not to trust your wife to be kind just as you have taught yourself to hear FA whenever teeth meet lips.

The good news is that while the McGurk effect is so ingrained it is irreversible the same is not true about your perceptions of your wife. You can change them, and if you do just imagine how that will change your relationship?

 What if, and I know this seems crazy, but what if she wasn't nagging, if she wasn't sarcastic, but you've just trained yourself to hear her that way?

Just sit with that for a little bit.

AN OPEN VALENTINES CARD TO MY BELOVED

Beloved,

Happy Valentines Day. I know this should be written out in longhand, but….. you’ve seen my writing, and I've already done the hand made card thing.

Jack Nicholson had a line in “As Good As It Gets.” As Melvin he said to Carol “You make me want to be a better man.” It was a pretty good compliment, but from a relationship point of view, he was teetering on the edge of making her responsible for his growth, and of course after he said it he followed up with a stupid line that drove her from the room. Mistakes are the price we pay for growth.

The thing is, I’ve been working on being a better man since before we met (in fact our first correspondence followed an Imago training session) so I can’t look at you and say anything quite so romantic. I was doing the work before we met, and I do it still not for you but for me, yet in truth one reason I am truly glad I did all the work it took to turn my life around is because I know the guy I once was wouldn’t have won your heart and I love being loved by you.

So I thought this Valentines Day I would share with you (and given this blog’s demographics, only you) a little of what it is like for me to be loved by you.

It is hard for me to imagine, much less believe, how long we have been together. It all seems of an instant and yet somehow we can make time stop when we are simply together.

I never thought I’d have a kitchen as cool and beautiful as the one you are rattling around in as I write this. Every time I enter the kitchen I feel stylish, wealthy, happening, way too cool for school, all of which I am not, and most importantly, blessed, which I am.

I am blessed to have you in my life. I kind of knew that from the start when I saw your picture. I knew that you were different in all the important ways and I suspected (and you confirmed) that we could indeed “hang out” together.

There are a lot of things I could wish for, from winning the lottery to a larger practice to more sales and fame: the one thing I do not wish for is anyone else.

There are lots of things I would change in my life, from not being a good tooth-brusher as a child to my desktop clutter, an investment or two: the one thing I would not change is you.

I used to think that a lot of bad things had happened in my life. Death, betrayal, abandonment, lonliness… and now I think that if just one of those events had turned out differently I wouldn’t be the man I am today, and I wouldn’t have you in my life… and then I think, “gee… I’ve been pretty lucky all along.”

I am happy that you are a part of my life.

Over at popsci.com there is an article exploring a study that shows (at least in the test groups) that approximately 35% of the time a man…. Or perhaps it was 35% of the men.. they didn’t make that clear… but in either event that the test group of men were able to identify whether or not a woman was menstruating simply by the sound of her voice.

Click on the link and read the article if you doubt me but before you go all Charlie Sheen on me and say “Duh… bitchy” understand that what’s going on here is not conflict based or relationship based, but simply men listening to a woman’s voice recorded over the course of her cycle and being able to (about a statistically signifcant third of the time) identify the recording made during her period. Nota Bene this test was done with voice recordings, so there were no pheromones involved and no body language, this was strictly monkey hear, monkey do.


From a better man perspective this brings up one big point: what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

In other words if one out of three times you can tell, simply by tone of voice, by timber, by tone, by inflection, by a countless number of unseen tells that something is going on in your wife’s life there is a fair chance that she can do the same, especially if she has other non-verbal clues such as your body language, you eye contact, your facial expression, your footsteps.

Lots of times in our relationship our beloveds come up with a statement like “is something bothering you?” or, in a less loving relationship “what’s wrong with you today” or in a even less satisfying scenario, “what is your fucking problem” and like most guys, given a choice between intimacy and plausable deniability, we go with the latter and say “no dear” “Nothing” or “Mind your own business.”

But what if rather than reverting to type you tried something different? What if rather than avoiding an awkward moment, you embraced it? What if rather than saying “I’m fine” you said “I am always amazed by your intuitiveness and I appreciate your invitation to dialogue,” and then tell her what’s on your mind.

WAIT A SECOND one of you is now thinking, what if something isn’t bothering me. What if I am as happy as a clam on a sandbar? And my response is, AS IF. What are you, a fucking saint? There hasn’t been something that’s been bugging you in your relationship? Do you seriously expect anyone to believe that you haven’t been nursing some viper to your breast, some unspoken anger, some unresolved angst, some slight or hurt which you wish she would recognize and own up to? Trust me, even if you are as happy as an alpiner in new lederhosen, there’s always something there, something that has gone unsaid and is lurking in the shadows waiting for an argument to burst forth and do its worst damage.

Just assume, for the sake of argument, that your wife is blind and deaf and there is no chance in hell that she has picked up on one of your tells, that she hasn’t intuited a sense of conflict or distress, why not take the opportunity? Why not accept the invitation? Why not honor her willingness to hear you by sharing? Why not get that lurking resentment out of the dark and into the open, resolve it and deepen your relationship?

Why not say “there is something that I’ve been struggling with and I appreciate your asking…..”

Now somebody is shaking their head and saying “Hunt, god bless you but you are an idiot, sometimes it is best to leave well enough alone and to simply not go there. If I answer her question honestly, all I will get is an argument.”

And that would be true if you weren’t trying to be the better man, if you still let your anticipation and projections control your actions, if you still made decisions based on fear and not on growth…. But assuming that some of you haven’t read the book, done the work and you haven’t gotten there quite yet let me point out the following.

Leaving well enough alone is just another way of saying stagnation, withdrawal and ultimately divorce. If you want to leave well enough alone then get out of the marriage. If you want to have a better marriage then the status quo will not do: the status quo is why you are miserable and you must act to make your relationship better and that means taking chances, that means honoring your wife’s invitation to dialogue.

Even if she says, “What the fuck is your problem?” you can answer: “I’d like to tell you if you’ll simply mirror me…” and then see what happens. My money says she’ll listen.

In fact, based upon the study cited above, my money says that when she asks you what is wrong there generally is something wrong and that you need to talk about it but you are afraid, even upon invitation, to go there and risk the bad scene you have convinced yourself will follow.

Be a better man: go there. Talk about it.

The Curious Case of the Barking Dog

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.