Ever heard the story of Othello? I was required to watch a movie made from this story during English class at one point. Some guy named Shakespeare wrote a play about this guy who is considered a bit of a “noble savage”. A noble savage might be similar to a Tarzan who has gone through etiquette school, is wearing a suit, is honorable, but still displays a bit of his animal side. Othello is in love with his woman, but various 3rd parties plot and scheme to turn him against his lady. They feed him false information and lies that his wife is sleeping around on him. I remember from the movie version of this story that at one point, Othello’s wife was attempting to sooth him – the “noble savage”, but he wasn’t listening. He eventually became so convinced she was running around that he smothered her to death.

I considered this analogous to some of the struggles that my wife must have gone through with me. Many times I would “assume” that her intentions were malevolent and blow things out of proportion. Sometimes we would be in a heated debate and she would just stop everything and give me a little kiss. I can remember that little peck calming every nerve in my body and making whatever we were arguing about pointless in my mind. Sometimes she would simply say “I’m sorry” and it would have the same effect.

Somewhat related – I’ve got a “blood pressure” testing machine in our home. It cost about $60 – so nothing real fancy, but it lets me test my blood pressure. One thing fun to try – put on a movie like Rambo or another action flick and test your blood pressure before, during, and after. Try the same thing for some classical music. Interesting.

I remember being in the counselor’s office at one point and one of the counselors decided to turn on some music. I was anxious as crazy before she turned on the music. I found myself relaxing and a peace coming over me.

Where am I going with this? A couple of observations I’ve made from our situations and that of others. There are things that can sooth people and to avoid arguing over nothing. Perhaps you need to figure out what works for your spouse if things start to get heated.

• It takes one to defuse a hostile situation.
• Don’t believe everything you hear from 3rd parties about your spouse – though you should still expect the worst until she returns to her normal self.
• It takes one to get a marriage moving back in the right direction.
• Yes – music can sooth the savage beast or even your “noble savage”.

Popularity: 21%

Share This (No hits)

Okay fellas – this is one more tactic that could be used for “marriage maintenance mode” and if she is still living under the same roof as you, but trying to leave you. Don’t forget the rule about positive things being perceived negatively and that different people need different kinds (332 hits) of gifts. I don’t know any woman that would turn this one down though. Ladies feel free to comment if I’m wrong.

Recipe:

1 bottle of bubble bath / bath salts

1 bath tub

5 or 6 candles with solid bases (to avoid tipping over).

Add bubble bath or bath salts to running water shortly before your sweetheart arrives home, retires for the evening, etc. You have to be aware of how her schedule works – don’t try to force her schedule because that would be “insensitive”. Light the candles and turn out or dim the lights. Send her in there by herself to relax for about an hour. I’ve done this one about three times and it never turned out poorly – your mileage may vary. For a double bonus – if your wife stays home like mine and is coming in from errands or something – prepare dinner for once or bring it in before she arrives home.

Popularity: 37%

Share This (No hits)

My wife tells me that one of the reasons we made it through this was my persistence. I never gave up. In fact, each setback made me more resolute once I decided to save our marriage.

Once my wife was starting to give up hope (about 6 months prior to filing) she decided to get me into a counselor for US. She was very clever about how she did this – she told me it was for our “family” since we were having some trouble with one of our kiddos at the time.

We were into it about three counseling sessions before I realized we were there for us. I didn’t even know we had “problems”. Shows how clued into my wife’s feelings I was.

Then something happened. She gave up hope right as I was starting to get engaged into saving our marriage. I had lost her. She started going to the counselor by herself to work out her own “issues”.

I found another marriage coach referred by a friend. This coach seemed to have some sort of entrance requirements. I called him four times – persistent about it. I suppose he wanted to know if I was serious about it. Almost like I was being prepared to become a Jedi Knight or something.
Finally – he calls me up and we talk. We arrange to meet and I used every persuasive bone in my body to get my wife to go. She said “It’s not going to change anything”. I told “That’s fine – but I already told him we were both going”. Ironically, not wanting to break a commitment she decided to go.

She cried and I cried – it was beautiful. It was poetry. He accomplished more in one hour than our previous counselor / coach had in months. Guys – you have GOT to find the right coach – if you find one that isn’t working then get another one.

Then he asked her if she would go again next Tuesday if I could be a good boy for 4 days. She agreed, but then conveniently forgot about this agreement over the weekend.

I had to figure out a way to get her back in.

Her tire was low the morning we were scheduled to go. I told her to just ride with me and we would go get some “Fix a Flat” in a can.

Instead of going to get a can of fix a flat – I took her to the marriage coach. At which point he negotiated 30 more days of time for me to shape up. She later told me the only reason she agreed to that was because he was so persistent.
He would state his case – that divorce was wrong and that there was better way, acknowledge how she had been hurt, and then restate his case. I guess he just wore her down till she agreed!

Now you may notice a couple of things. I’m not advocating being deceitful to get your spouse into a marriage coach, but I am advocating being persistent (not persistently annoying) and being creative.
If she won’t go – then you go until she starts to go.

Also ladies – I can tell you that from at least my perspective it will be tough to get your fella into a marriage coach, but you’ve got to be persistent and you’ve got to be creative. To me it felt like we were so far gone that there was no rescuing us if we went to a counselor. It was giving up. Had it been explained to me that it would be cheaper and better and that this has helped a ton of people then I would have been more open to it back when my eyes were still closed to everything wrong that I was doing.

Popularity: 47%

Share This (No hits)

My wife and I have never really fought big-time over money – we’ve been fortunate in that regard; however, it has certainly been a part of several heated debates that went nowhere.

My wife likes to manage our money the old fashioned way – she uses a check book and one of those check register thingies that I know how to use, but have never been disciplined enough to mess with. I always just have a rough idea of how much money is in our account – I don’t need it down to the last cent to understand whether or not a check is going to clear. I just do a quick review of the statement to look for anything that looks funny – “Hey why is there a check to a lawyer in here?”.

We still have disagreements on how we should spend the money at times, but I did learn a little secret about women, trust, and money.

She wanted a new van. One of those new fangled Fords with fold up seats and what not. I did the math before hand and knew that economically – it wasn’t a viable option for us. Even with the improved fuel economy it wouldn’t make sense. Even if fuel were $5 a gallon – it wouldn’t make sense. We were still “upside down” on the note with our existent van.

Instead of telling her this though (or defeating her little dream) – I trusted her to make the right decision. We went down to the dealership and she talked to the saleman, went on a test drive, and fell in love with a new van – until she saw the price tag after they calculated the payments.

Wow – I trusted her to make the right decision and she did. Weird. That doesn’t mean she will always get it my way, but at what cost is having it “my way”. The little trip to the dealership cost us about $20 in fuel, but paid back huge dividends in demonstrating that I trusted her.

Now – it doesn’t always work out that easily for some couples right? My grandfather has maintained that one should always look out after one’s own money even while married. He and my grandmother have had separate checking accounts for well over 50 years. They have been married for well over 50 years. The beauty of this arrangement is that it helps that spouse who just can’t control themselves with the “our” money concept. By having to manage their own money – it becomes more real and allows them the freedom that they may be looking for. This is just one solution – there may be others.
My wife and I do this partially, but only so that we won’t know what the other bought for Christmas We still use one main account to pay bills.

• Guys – women like to “eyeball” stuff sometimes, but that doesn’t mean they want to buy it. Sometimes they are just dreaming a bit. There may be guys like that too, but I’ve only met one.
• Ladies – just remember when you say that you want something – it triggers an almost immediate problem solving mode in us guys – at least it does for me! Once we realize the problem can’t be solved – we may just get upset unless we are in the know about the previous rule.

and We now try to make financial decisions “our way”, it is sometimes a challenge – but well worth it. She now trusts me to perform the pure Return On Investment (ROI) analysis, and I trust her on the “family benefit” things not always captured by ROI!

Popularity: 30%

Share This (No hits)

One of the key things that you may be able to tell your spouse is just how much a divorce will hurt the both of you. Removing the emotion – it will be a mess for both of you. You can present the information, but remember to let her make her own decisions right now. You can’t make her do anything.
I started searching Google using “prevent divorce”. Most of the stuff that is out there is a bit theoretical with limited practical application. However, I did find a site (349 hits) that seems to be somewhat similar to the objectives of this site.

It also had some interesting facts and shocking stats about the subject.

The site didn’t have the source for the data, but interesting none the less. There were also some interesting articles here (242 hits) as well.

Popularity: 65%

Share This (No hits)

In a previous post (125 hits), I spoke about making more effective use of your time (212 hits) to help prevent your work from grossly affecting your marriage.
There is another thing to talk about. Timing of message delivery to your wife. Sometimes there may be an issue in the marriage that you guys need to work through. This does not matter whether it is the “she’s about to leave” stage or “she’s back in the same bed” stage.

I know that I used to get a bug up my sleeve and would want to talk about something important with our marriage. The only problem is that it would be at 4 AM as she was sleeping. Do you find yourself trying to talk about sensitive issues at 4AM? It is probably a good idea to better time the delivery of any issues to discuss.

In addition, this same concept goes for your nocturnal activities if they have resumed. She can not be open to such activities unless the timing is right. You must learn when she is open to such activities and what times are blocked off.
Let’s talk about about timing and personality types. Some folks are worried about being on time, schedules, etc and others could care less. I fall into the latter category, but have been trained by my work to pretend to be in the first category.

An overly defined schedule makes me feel crowded. I don’t know how else to describe it.

However, missing something as scheduled makes my wife feel anxious. We have now learned this about each other and have figured out how to better communicate the timing of events.

Here is what I did.

I setup a calendar on Google calendars that syncs to my work calendar. She can schedule personal events on my work calendar and since my day is often driven by my work calendar – I can see what is coming up in our personal life and have time to react. My wife now calls me up and reminds me about an hour before any personal events (e.g., kids recitals, school plays, etc.) as well.
We are also working on a shared “todo” list on another website. This gives us projects and dreams that we can work towards together.
I’ll put links to how this can be done shortly, I just wanted to make sure the information was available.

One last thing. As far as restoring your marriage, you must remember that you will be on God’s time. You can’t expect this to happen overnight. Remember, God has probably set this up so that you can learn an important virtue – Patience.

Time to move on from this post. I suppose I need to write about personality types next.

Popularity: 45%

Share This (No hits)

One of the things I learned about repairing my marriage has to do with communications. If your wife is getting ready to leave you may not realize that some of your communications can be taken completely the wrong way.

For example, I used to call my wife about two-three times a day to let her know that I loved her. After she reached the “I’m probably leaving you” state of mind – I didn’t realize that she was actually interpreting this as “Are you doing anything useful?” I was also crowding her. I was honestly just trying to let her know I loved her. Wow.

I learned a little trick about this from my Christian marriage coach (216 hits). Try a text message next time! Text messages are one way. It is a good way of communicating without violating her space requirements and not letting her perceive that you are just trying to spy on her. It tends to imply that you trust her enough and are going to be respectful of her space.

Remember, you must love her one way until she starts to come back around, but don’t be creepy. One way communications is one way to avoid being creepy! Please don’t abuse this and send 400 text messages in one day if you get desperate – you won’t be seeing her again if you do that!

Popularity: 8%

Share This (No hits)

As I was on the brink of repairing my marriage my wife and I quit seeing our mutual secular counselor at the same time. She wanted to go by herself. I then started going by myself to improve my anger management and to gather intelligence. Our counselor was in effect acting as an intelligence agent on “our” behalf by providing me with a status update on my wife’s progress towards recovery or lack thereof.

What I learned was interesting. My wife was fairly certain that there was no way I would be able to revise my errant ways on a permanent basis; however, she did indicate that I had been performing better recently. Her mind was still made up to go for the big D word because there was no way in her mind that I would be able to actually make some changes and maintain them for any meaningful length of time.

In her mind it was “He has said he was going to change so many times before – what makes it different this time?”. It had to be different this time. I utilized mental images of being without her or her being with someone else to make sure I didn’t regress. This drove me towards becoming consistently better. This was not changing who I am, but rather was making myself better. We can all stand to improve ourselves. In addition, I did tell her that though I was trying to improve, I am still human and would likely make mistakes. I set her expectations, but let her know I really was trying.

As you start to show signs of improvement you’ve got to make sure that you don’t regress. Figure out a way to monitor your progress and to keep you progressing. If the communications lines are open – one way to do this is to just ask her or find out from other sources how she thinks you are doing. In my case, the other source was our counselor. If you must, tell her why you are doing this i.e., so you can get better to improve the hopes of saving the marriage, but you better not break the law of not being creepy. It is a fine balance. If you must – write down how many “violations (162 hits)” you’ve had per day and per week. Keep track. Your log book (196 hits) is a good place for this.

Ironically, all of this is not too far from what I’ve learned in the corporate world – organizations tend to make “sawtooth” improvements in their processes. Stated another way – two steps forward one step back. This seems to be no different from people like you and me (gee whiz since people seem to form most corporate processes).

Popularity: 44%

Share This (No hits)

Okay – I’m a fan of Star Trek. Yeah I said it. That’s not to say that I go around wearing Vulcan ears and attending “trekie” conferences, but I do enjoy the movies. In a weird way, they seem to much more in tune with some of our own internal struggles than do many of the other outer space genres (e.g., Star Wars) and the premise just seems much more plausible to me. I believe George Lucas has actually stated that the target audience for his Star Wars movies are kids so go figure.

My favorite Star Trek character has always been Spock. This guy struggles with his own humanity. In retrospect, maybe the reason I like this character is that I could relate to his struggle. Some of you guys may be very much in touch with your inner woman or whatever, but I certainly wasn’t and it lead me to a very dangerous place with our marriage.

Logic vs. Emotion

Women seem to possess some sort of instinctive knowledge of relationships that us poor fellows have to learn over time or through very traumatic experience like having divorce papers filed. I’m sure there are exceptions to this, but I think as general rule most of us guys struggle with this. The bad news is that though women may have these built in skills with emotions / relationships they may not always have the analytical skills to go with it. I guess guys do have a purpose after all. Now there are some very analytical women out there and I have certainly met many of them in the corporate world; however, most that I have met are more intuitive than logical until they reach a certain age. This is based on just my personal experiences so please don’t accuse me of being some kind of chauvinist or woman hater because I’m not.

The point to all of this is how do you reason with someone whose analytical skills aren’t as strong as your own, and furthermore how do you reason with someone who wants a divorce? It doesn’t work that way my friend. You have to show her by your own example, not talk her to death.

Many guys think that once their woman has decided to leave that they can “talk her out of it”. It didn’t work that way for me and I’ve heard plenty of other folks agree with me. There are some interesting points about logic that I noticed during the war to save my marriage.

• I thought I always “won” any kind of reason / logic based debate with my wife, but in reality I was winning the battle at the expense of the war. You know this has happened to you if you get a sarcastic variation of “of course honey, you are always right” in response to winning a debate. I later learned that this was one of my wife’s biggest issues with our marriage. She could never win! Don’t be like I was. Throw her a bone, man!
• I learned to respect her wishes even though it made me personally vulnerable. I agreed to some of her wishes that were illogical. I had to really trust in God on this part, because my brain was telling me that many things I was agreeing to would hurt me. There was one point where she requested that I sign the papers. I had planned on stalling her out on the divorce, but finally said “Yes Ma’am – if this is what you want show me where to sign.” I respected her wishes even though her wishes would hurt me. I did tell her that I did not want this, but was reluctantly agreeing to her wishes if that is what she wanted. In essence – being selfless. You can’t do this just to “Call her bluff”. Now let me caution you on this part, my wife was a Christian who was fast heading towards agnostic so I was able to trust in God on this one. If she started out as a non-believer I’m not so sure I would have done this.
• I realized that once she was in the “divorce is the only option” state of mind that I could no longer reason with her. I needed to call in backup and that’s what I did. A friend referred me to an awesome Christian marriage coach (216 hits). This coach had been doing this for 30 years and really understood that divorce was not the right path for my family. He also had enough reasoning tools and prior experiences under his belt to reason with my wife on “our” behalf.
• My “backup” asked my wife to remove all the emotion to her decisions and confirm that a divorce would actually be harder than her life at the moment. She agreed that it would be. He then turns to me and says “Shohn – she knows that divorce will be harder on her, but she’d rather have that than you.” Wow. Deep revelation for me.
• My “backup” used the following argument. He said – “A divorce will affect you (my wife) for the rest of your life. Give me 30 days to work with Shohn and see if I can turn him around. 30 days is a small amount of time compared to the rest of your lives. I can’t turn him around in a day – I need at least 30.” He then promised her that he could show us the best marriage we had ever had and could ever have if she would just let him work with me for 30 days. Powerful stuff. He then turned to me and said Shohn most of this will rest on your shoulders since she is the one who wants to leave. This person had no reason to help either of us so it made it twice as powerful in her eyes.

• Note: I later asked my wife why she agreed to give me 30 more days and she said it was because our marriage coach was so persistent. Haha!

Good stuff from a very wise man. Now that we’ve covered this I hope you have learned some lessons from this. You’ll need help, but it needs to be the right kind of help. Perhaps there are some pre-screening questions you can ask your counselor or marriage coach.

“Do you believe in divorce?” for starters.

Now since we are on the subject of Star Trek and Spock and all I thought I would help relate the feelings I had as I was going through this rough time.

There is a scene from Star Trek V where our beloved Captain Kirk and Spock are being lead into the very scary “Great Barrier” by Spock’s zealous brother, Cybock. The Great Barrier was a wall of star dust and stellar stuff that separated the center of our galaxy from the rest of the galaxy. There comes a point where everyone is freaking out – “Oh nooo.. not the Great Barrier” to which Cybok replies “It is an illusion – full speed ahead”. Turns out it was just a bunch of dust. This is kind of like the way I felt once I placed my trust in God with regard to my marriage. It felt illogical to place that much trust in someone I couldn’t see, but man did it work! Get out of the driver’s seat buddy – let Him drive.

Go get the movie if you haven’t ever seen it or if it has been awhile so you’ll feel what I’m talking about.

Popularity: 36%

Share This (No hits)

My grandfather shared with me a simple truth about marriage that I’d like to share with you. My grand parents have been married for well over 50 years so the man must know at least a thing or two about the subject.

If you don’t go to your job or place of employment what happens? You’d get fired right? The same applies to your marriage. It is a job and if you don’t work at it you will get fired i.e., divorced.

Simple.

I think this also has another lesson that my grandfather may not have seen. At my job we like to say work smarter not harder. I believe this also applies to a marriage. You can give her chocolates every single day of your life, but if chocolates are meaningless to her what good are your efforts doing? Food for thought!

In addition, I have learned not to compare her to my grandmother. This applies to other “model” marriages from those bygone times. This is not the 1950s so don’t expect your family to be like the Beavers. I have noticed that as a general trend women’s tolerance for the “bohemian” male has gone down tremendously with each generation. The bohemian male is that guy who props down in front of the TV in his underwear and asks his wife for a beer and then refuses to help her out some. If you don’t believe me – just ask your mom about some of the stuff she put up with, and then ask your grand mother. You may be surprised.

Unfortunately, depending on which generation you grew up in – you will have to live up to a different standard of behavior from what you may have grown up with and the reality is that the ideal standard of behavior has become lost.

The standard is simple though – love her more than you love yourself. If you follow this principle to the tee, she has no choice but to follow, but it may take time. Love is patient.

Popularity: 48%

Share This (No hits)