Quiet Despiration

"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation," Thoreau once wrote - and here is one. Veteran's Day I was making my coffee and saw the police coming down the street with blue lights on - and turning up the next street over. Right behind him were fire engines - way too many for that hour of the day. That's when I saw the smoke. It was already too late though.

Not for the house, though that was totalled, they were too late for the man inside. As the story unfolded, it turns out the couple had been having domestic problems, and I guess financial problems because the house was scheduled for foreclosure as well. I have to confess I don't even know their names - they always kept to themselves and the kids could not stop there on Halloween because they kept the lights out. Quiet desperation.

She left; he was alone. So he set the house on fire and then took his life. The note said something about this being an appropriate day being that he was a vet himself. Fifty three years old and done. Very quiet desperation. And I didn't even know him. None of us did.

Hey men, if you know of a man out there who is alone, maybe someone you even know but he's been down stairs for some time now, take this as a reminder that there are about a million ways men cry out for help only one of which is, "Hey help me! Please" The other 999,999 don't sound anything like that. Most of them make the inaudible noise of quiet desperation. Make a call. Drop by. Sit down beside him. But do something.

I know that this is supposed to be the Married Man's Survival Guide blog, but this is why we wrote the book, and why we do this work, and even then one slips away right under our noses.

Don't Remove the Arrow!

Shakespeare called them the "slings and arrows" but whatever you call them, the pains of living the masculine life can certainly feel like a direct arrow in the chest. I was working with a man who had been divorced and is now contemplating marriage to a chart-topping, classy woman. All was going well until he called me recently in agony and depression saying the arrow he'd taken in the divorce was just too painful. It was actually stopping him from proposing to this magnificent woman he knew he wanted to marry.

He said, "You're my mentor - help me take out the arrow. I can't get it out by myself!" But (and I am certain he didn't like my response at first) I said no. That is masculine wisdom. Men learn through our pain and what we learn are our values and our terms. Because the pain speaks loudly, in a sense, saying, "NO - I will never ever feel this pain again. I will never let this happen again." And that is the first step in driving the stake in the ground that says what your commitment is.

There is no legitimate "no" that is not the result of a committed "yes" to some principle or value. So if your pain is saying a loud "NO!" then there is a value that has been challenged; a line that has been crossed. That man lost - massively - when he did not hold his ground and let his values be compromised, and it cost him his first marriage (for better or for worse). And now that pain is what he needs to ensure that his commitment in this next marriage will be stronger than any circumstance or hiccup that can (and will) arise. "NO, I will not quit!" "NO, I will not get lazy in the relationship, because I will never allow that thing to happen to me again!" I told him that the pain is not what should stop him from proposing - it is the watchdog that will ensure that this will be an unstoppable marriage.

So a good mentor (I will claim that in this case) will not take out the arrow. A true mentor will help a man embrace and cherish the pain as his teacher. We do not learn any other way (sorry, I wish it were easy)! Wisdom is the ability to look through your pain and scars and find the lessons learned. Then turn around and teach another man - pass it forward.

Happiness and Choice in Marriage

There is a professor at Harvard by the name of Dan Gilbert who has done a huge amount of research on happiness and whose findings might shed some light on the issues of happiness in marriage. It is something that every married man should know and it goes something like this.
Gilbert reports on two studies that have direct correlation to committed marriage. In one study people were asked to rank order six Monet prints from most liked (1) to least liked (6). They then were told that as participants they could have one of the prints as a gift but unfortunately the researcher only had the 3rd and 4th ranked prints. Of course the people almost invariably picked the third over the fourth. That is not the interesting part. Some time later those same people were again asked to rank the same six prints, and guess what? Their formerly third ranked print came in among the top averaging a little better than second overall. Ad the formerly fourth ranked print fell lower in the pick averaging about fifth. Being stuck with what we think is average changes our perception of our liking of that choice over time. Hmmm!

Here is the second study: Students at Harvard were in a basic photography course where they were taught how to shoot good pictures and then after making a contact sheet of their best efforts were asked to pick their absolute best two. They were then taught all about developing and print-making to give their very best effort to creating two blow-ups of those pictures. Half were then told that they had to choose only one picture to keep and that the other was to be shipped off immediately to research headquarters in England never to be seen by them again. The other half were told that they had four days to reconsider their choice and could swap it out if they wished. The results were rather astounding. The unchangeable group, when surveyed in the short and over the long term, were extremely proud and happy with their picture, while those who had a choice when measured during the four days of consideration, shortly after their final choice point, and over the long haul showed increasing unhappiness and displeasure with their choice!

As an epilogue to his study Gilbert offered students a choice in photography courses in a recent semester; one course where they would have a reversible choice on the pictures they produced and the other where the choice would be final and irreversible. Not too surprisingly, over 66% of the students said that they would prefer to have a choice – or in Gilbert’s words, two thirds of us would prefer conditions in life that would make us miserable!

Translating these research studies to marriage we would contend that if and when you marry with a sense of finality and irreversibility, you actually are producing a greater possibility of happiness than if you hold that you could get divorced if it doesn’t work out. Furthermore, having made that choice, even in the face of the fact that there are other more attractive possibilities out there, the choosing increases the attractiveness of our life partner. How do you like them apples!

Love Her "For Free"

Years ago I read a short essay by Tom Robbins called something like "How to Make Love Stay" or something like that. Aside from some wild and crazy ideas of the sort we have included in the final section of our book (250 ways to keep your woman happy and make make her smile), his orientation to love and marriage relationships shows a similar orientation to ours. It is an ownership that places us (men) squarely in charge of ourselves - and no one else. In one quote I found from Robbins, he said, “We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.”

What can we do to create ourselves as "perfect love?" How would we become the man our wives would cheat on us for, as Wayne Levine, and Justin Sterling both call it? Well, first and foremost you need to build your strength (no, dude, not in the gym per se) in your guts and in your passion for how you serve the world. Know what your purpose is and live it daily. Then when you turn your attention to your wife, what she'll see is a man who gives (instead of taking, and needing and whining). Love can only thrive in a place where it has no demands made of it. And what you can do to ensure that is make sure you are complete and self-sustaining.

I love the way Robbins says it: “Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the question. The words "make" and "stay" become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free.”

Loving your wife for free is THE only way - and it is the ultimate way to keep love alive, well and succulent.

Study Your Woman

Patton studied Rommel. Fischer studied Spasky. You study Tae Kwon Do, or fantasy football league stats, or whatever. Anyone who ever wanted to be great in his craft studied it as a practice. And you must study your wife. It is the only way to be good at this and to have even half a chance at moving from surviving to thriving in marriage. But how?
You live with her, right? So wake up and pay attention. Notice her habits, how she goes about her day, what she chooses when nobody is watching. You need to become a student of this woman. Here is a short list of what you might consider as the required study areas for this new expertise you are going to build:

- Ask her women friends what she likes and dislikes. They know a part of her that you may never see, or that she may be too nice to discuss with you.
- Look through her memorabilia, you know, photo albums, scrap books and the like. Does she have a drawer with keepsakes in? If you don’t feel like it is a violation of “off-limits” territory, look through it and get a new look at your woman.
- Watch what she wears both when she dresses up for an occasion and when she dresses down to relax.
- What does she do to unwind? Where is her favorite place to go?
- We realize we repeat this ad nauseum but listen to what she talks about. But here is the thing you should do with it – look for the pattern. What do all these themes suggest when taken as a group?
What else could you study?

Here’s the bottom line: You cannot claim to love your wife if you do not know her well enough to look at her daily with compassion. You must learn enough about her to know that when she hurts it is her reaction to something, that when she is angry, you know what it is in her that she is trying to protect. The more you know about her the better you will be able to look with compassion and understanding at her. Having compassion is not feeling sorry for her – it is a deep understanding that carries with it an ability to alleviate her suffering itself. When you do this, her moods will not trigger your “equal and opposite” reaction, but instead will be fielded with compassion and understanding. When you know her that well, your ability to love her through whatever she is feeling will heal and nurture her. And that, brothers, is loving her!

Having Your Men

I was reminded tonight why I am on a men's team and why I leave my family to meet in a circle of men on a regular basis. It is not what I got from my men tonight, nor is it really what I gave to any one man. Rather it was the raw honesty and lack of any pretense or posturing.

Men's work is not pretty or neat or orderly. Organizationally speaking (I am an OD consultant by trade) it does not fit in any hierarchy or pattern. Men's work is men being men. Stupid. Smelly. Cussing. Men.

I am a man. Before I am anything else - father, husband, lover, consultant, writer, whatever. What defines my being is my chromosomes, my genetic structure, my endocrine system, my masculinity. And there is only one place where all of that is just allowed to be what it is - with other men.

There are no ahas tonight to share. I am just grateful to be a man among men. It gives me a centeredness to be able to come back to my wife and my son and be the husband and father they need. Yea, that.

The Marriage Ref

I retired from watching TV some 25 years ago when it became apparent that there was little or nothing that captured my attention save the chance to dream Olympian thoughts every two years or so. But I had to come out of tube-watching retirement this week to take a look at “The Marriage Ref.” And I have a few choice words to say about it for which I will not even ask forgiveness. This is a show that offers to referee domestic disputes between couples and declare a so-called winner – a priceless bit of semi-reality TV gone mad!

Okay I am not surprised that men are still being portrayed as buffoons – one of the men wanted to stuff and mount his pet dog in a shrine in the entry of their home and the other wanted to install a stripper pole presumably for his somewhat overfed wife to “exercise" with. You know what, maybe we men actually think stupid things like that but usually we laugh it off and come to our senses within minutes. I am certain that many of us think it would be cool to get all our ex-lovers in a room for one night (like Paul Simon’s Kodachrome) but we don’t actually take step one toward that. Whatever! So have fun with our buffoonery even if it only exists in our heretofore un-acted upon thoughts. It just tires me that Hollywood has not gone too many steps down the sidewalk from Art Carney and Jackie Gleason’s or the Lucy and Desi’s house of the 50’s.

No. That isn’t what bothers me. It is the simple thought that for even these trivial incidents, we think we need a referee. There are two problems here. First of all, there is an assumption inherent in all disagreements that there must be a right and a wrong – a winner. Sorry, folks, when there is a winner there is a loser. And in the case of a marriage relationship, when that happens the real loser is the relationship – not the husband or wife. Relationships cannot tolerate winner/loser tallies. Look we are as competitive as the next guy – it is partly what defines us as men. We love to compete. But your wife does not see the score the same as you. Think of a good batting average – what maybe a .300 – but if that were a wife keeping track, it would be converted to a .700 loss average. Marriage relationships cannot withstand a 70% hit! So our advice is to keep your competitive edge on the playing field.

Which brings me to the second problem, which is more about the process. Relationships are about relating – and relating is working on things. Without question, relationships have issues and problems and disagreements. It is just natural, unless you have married yourself, that your partner will see things differently than you. And what happens when you work on things as a team is that you build up a track record of successes. In a sense working to resolve little things (like stripper poles and stuffed, mounted dogs) builds up muscle to be able to handle real crises, like a pregnant teenage daughter, or huge financial setbacks and the like. Don’t worry, the Marriage Ref will never take on those things because they are too real and it will take real people with guts and commitment to work through that. And I don’t care where you mount the reality TV camera, you just can’t capture that kind of committed work on camera. The bottom line is that it is resolving these “problems” that makes a marriage strong. And having a ref, if it doesn’t kill it will only make it weak and atrophied.