Family Matters

Soon, Gal and I are going to celebrate our 28 years of our life together. Every year that passes, we get more and more requests for our relationship program from people who are considering divorce. The good news is that they look for solutions before they “turn off the light and send the actors home”. The bad news is they are in an emotional turmoil and are very very unhappy.

If you have seen the movie Mrs Doubtfire or Kramer vs. Kramer, you have probably had a glimpse of what it means to divorce, although a movie cannot describe even a small portion of the emotional stress people go through when they think about separating.

The real problem is that the reasons people divorce do not just disappear after the divorce. In fact, there is a big chance they will give birth to more problems. If you are not happy with your marriage and think divorce will make you happier, think again. Chances are you have attributed the failure of the marriage to your spouse, but if it were only one person’s failure, life would be much easier.

Blaming someone else and trying to change the partner instead of working on yourself sounds like a convenient way to handle stress, but in fact becomes long term pain. Walking away only seems easy.

“Marriage is the foundation of the family and the family is the foundation of society: if we strengthen marriage, we strengthen the family, we strengthen the children and we strengthen the community. If your goal is to help improve the world, marriage is as good a place as any to start” – Diane Sollee, Grand Rapids Family Summit, 1998.

In part 1 of Save Your Marriage, I gave you 3 simple steps to stop your divorce and save your marriage. This week, I thought some statistics regarding marriage and divorce would give you all an insight into what is happening in the reality of relationships.

Eye-opening marriage and divorce statistics:

As a daughter to parents who are still married and a long-time partner to my beloved boyfriend, I was very surprised to read some of the statistics about marriage and divorce. Yes, I have many clients thinking of divorce, but when they come for coaching, they are in “solution mode”, which makes it easier for them to find their love again.

I believe the marriage situation has reached a level of social disaster.

Happily married couples say that marriage has taught them to accept each other’s strengths and possibilities. They argue that by doing that, they transform themselves from the ordinary to the extraordinary.

Therefore, marriage is an “enabling” situation, providing the freedom for each person to be who they really are, to reach for the stars and discover what they are meant to be without ridicule or rejection.

“I got gaps; you got gaps; we fill each other’s gaps” – Rocky

After all, it is a question of attitude. When you are happy, you are able to grow and evolve. With the right attitude, every honeymoon excitement can last longer.

Many of us have read reports, which drive home the message that married people are healthier and happier, and therefore live longer than single or celibate individuals do.

For one, there is the emotional support they receive when the going gets tough, and the fact that married life provides the opportunities to sustain communication between two people, even if one of the spouses just wants to vent. In fact, one of the reasons people say they like being married is the assurance there is someone they can come home to at the end of a hard day.

Then there is the comfort of having stability and certainty in life from sharing a journey together. Some say that having someone who knows them best, understand their needs, fears and is there for them is the best friendship there is.

Individuals make couples, couples make families and families make communities. It is people’s natural instinct to get together. According to Dr. Mary Pipher, a therapist and anthropologist, the family is still an essential unit of the community. When people get married, their hopes are linked to building a home and a family.

I remember the day my daughter was born. Gal and I moved from being a couple taking care of ourselves, concentrating on our needs and aspirations, into being a family. It was a big feeling of responsibility mixed with joy. It was the beginning of a different journey.

While marriage is a later invention in human development, family is an ancient institution. Now, many people have kids but having kids and having a family are totally different things. Bringing kids into the world is a much simpler task than creating a family. To have a baby, all we need is a sperm and an egg, but to have a family we need parents who stick together. The reason families were part of the ancient world was because keeping together was an important survival skill.

For a family to function, it needs a strong support structure and having to support a family as a single parent is a hard task. A solid family is like riding a cycle. A unicycle requires lots of balance, while a bicycle is much easier. If you are one of the millions of parents who are working very hard to keep their family together, bravo to you for making an effort to support the most ancient important institute of humanity.

Happily married people understand this very basic concept. Working together makes life easier for everyone. This road was not meant to be traveled alone.

Getting married is entering into a contract – but it is probably the one contract that is the easiest to break. This is because divorce has made it easy for husbands and wives to walk out when they go through unhappy periods in their lives.

John Crouch, Executive Director of Americans for Divorce Reform, says that the most important economic contract of our lives – marriage – is no longer legally protected.

Just think – lawyers will fight tooth and nail to protect corporations in their contractual relations between you and your landlord, your mechanic and your doctor, but they cannot prevent you from breaking up with your spouse. In fact, they would even counsel you to break up your marriage and then discuss division of property as the next logical step.

Marriage is the only contract that anyone can break, at any time. It is also the most painful to break.

One typical topic appearing in each couples’ counseling or coaching session is the lack of communication between them. It is not that they do not talk. They do, but they talk to themselves in a never-ending self-talk that happens to be negative.

One theory about the reason for marriage breakdown is that one or two of the married couple seem to be trapped in a conversation, in which they talk and they answer on behalf of their partner. In this conversation, their partner is critical and demanding, which makes them treat them with anger later on. When I ask them about their communication, they are very surprised to discover they never actually had these conversations with the other person.

Self-talk is a natural emotional outlet for people. Self-talk is the internal conversation a person has with himself or herself. It is the way to verbalize a person’s thoughts. Self-talk is a good way to handle stressful situations. When they are too overwhelming, people talk to themselves to find ways to handle the situation. They tell themselves the problem is not that big, they tell themselves they have solutions, they tell themselves things that will encourage them to “survive” the situation. Self-talk can be very helpful.

The problem in every relationship appears when the thoughts are negative and later on, the attitude towards the partner can be hostile and negative. People fearing a reaction may tell themselves things on behalf of their partner and react to them as if they have already happened.

Negative self-talk gives freedom to many feelings that do not support marriage like fear, jealousy, anger, frustration and even hate. Such feelings are fertile soil for divorce. It is impossible to find a divorcing couple having feelings of joy, happiness, love or satisfaction. In many cases after divorce, it takes years for people to awaken such feelings.

In “Save your marriage (part 6) – How to get things wrong”, I explained how negative self-talk becomes an obstacle in a marriage.

Although the story about the Jack was about a man, self-talk is typical for men and women alike. In this post, I give you two examples of such imaginary scenarios that can lead to relationship breakdown. I hope that you will be able to recognize yourself in them, learn to “catch yourself in the act”, and switch to positive self-talk and open communication with your partner.

Going Out for a Romantic Dinner

Allan called home from work and invited Sally to a restaurant for dinner. They had discussed this some time before and had both agreed they needed some time out, to refresh and renew the romance between them. Allan invited the babysitter, booked the restaurant and there was nothing Sally had to do but dress for the occasion.

Two weeks ago, in part 6 of “Save Your Marriage”, I explained the influence of negative self-talk on relationships. Last week, in part 7, I gave an example of Sally talking to herself about her frustrations regarding her weight. In every relationship, when people talk to themselves about their problem with others in a negative way, things can easily be blown out of proportion.

Self-talk is a natural way of dealing with what happens to us in life and it is typical for men and women alike. It is when the self-talk turns all dark that things start going wrong.

This week, I want to let you in on Allan’s self-talk when planning to hang out with the guys.

Hanging out with the guys

Sally packed her bag and rushed to pick up the kids from music school. The phone rang and Dave was on the other end of the line.

“Hi Sally, I can’t get hold of Allan. Is he home already?”

“No”, said Sally, “He has a meeting till 6″.

“Can you please let him know we are planning to hang out with the guys on Friday?”

“Sure”, said Sally and hurried to her car. The thought of not having to cook on Friday was pleasing. She could take the kids out for a pizza, she thought happily.

In “Save Your Marriage (part 6)”, I described a common communication problem couples have (the story about the jack). Today, I will outline 10 ways you can get things wrong in any relationship. I hope you will be able to recognize yourself in some of them and find ways to work on that miscommunication. Remember, it is just miscommunication and there is no need to give up something as special as your marriage because of something that can be fixed so easily.

Many arguments start from a simple misunderstanding of the meaning of what one or the other has said. Many times, one party will give a meaning to something the other one has said that was actually not the intended meaning at all. So if you think about it, if it is you who attaches the wrong meaning to your partner’s words or actions, then when you argue, in a sense, you argue with yourself.

A study of expert communicators has found that in any given interaction, we have a tendency to see what we want to see and hear what we want to hear. The study has found that in any communication, we:

1. Interpret
2. Distort
3. Delete

We change the information we receive subconsciously by the interplay of our beliefs, values and rules that we already have in our heads. Thus our emotions can alter the interpretation of any message sent our way. If we are afraid of something, we tend to think the messenger was aggressive. If we feel confused, we tend to think the messenger was unclear with his or her message. If some information is missing, the way we fill in the gaps can be very subtle but may have a very strong impact.

In previous parts of the “Save Your Marriage” series, I discussed some of the problems that arise in relationships. This week, I will cover another one of the disturbing conflicts in any relationship – being trapped by stereotypes about gender.

In married life, there will always be obstacles threatening the stability of the marriage. Working through personal perceptions and interpretations is the key to overcoming such challenges.

Shortcut to divorce

Men and women perceive emotions, communication, sex, fidelity, work and money differently. They think the way they do because of the way they have been socialized and because of the way they have been shaped by their parents’ perceptions. From a very early age, we are “programmed” to believe that there are such things as “typical male” and “typical female” behavior. If you want a demonstration of how early this starts, look at your kids playing “shop” and consider how you choose baby clothes. Is it true that all baby girls love pink and baby boys love blue? No. Yet, most parents, when buying clothes, do not want to risk going against the grain by swapping colors.

Endless messages such as these are received during childhood and turn into beliefs and values that couples take into their marriage later on in life. Each party to a couple has his or her own “programmed” definition of what is typical, what is acceptable, what is tolerable and what is intolerable in a marriage relationship. Each of them may think that there is a particular way to show love to men that is different from the way you show love to women or that all men love sports and all women love jewelry and, without knowing, such gender beliefs can become a shortcut to divorce.