Lunch is Not a Date

Before I get started with today’s entry, a few announcements. First, one of my articles appeared as a guest article on The Breakup Chronicles today. Check it out; Lisa Steadman runs the site and is a fellow author and relationship expert. She has good tips that swim upstream against much of the traditional chick lit. advice. She is definitely good to check out.

Also, I had a weird experience this past week. I emailed several sites and organizations against violence against women; I thought they would find my last post relevant and of interest. They did. A few emailed me back, though, that they couldn’t let their readers and subscribers know about the entry because they were feminist groups and I was a man. They are strongly against sexual violence against women. They want to stop the violence. To stop the violence, they need men to stop that violence and they need to show that men are concerned about the violence, too; however, they believe they can do it all with strong women only and are bent on painting a bad picture of all men. (I’m not referring to all feminist groups, just the few that replied they thought my piece was insightful and important, but couldn’t refer women to it because it was by a guy.) What, then, is the real point of these groups? To stop violence against women? Or to bash men? If you aren’t willing to involve men in your quest, you can’t possibly stop violence against women or even get men to listen to you. You must remember to never lose sight of your cause and that you have to work with those against your cause to achieve the goals of the cause. All right, on with this week’s column about marriage:

PhD’s and other purported experts are always warning couples that marriage is a 50/50 compromise. Odd, since everyone I know who’s married or who’s been married, whether successfully or not, assure me that marriage is a 100/100 compromise. Those who can’t accept or understand the other person and expect them to change 50% of them self to compromise are in trouble. Instead, each needs to be willing to accept the other 100% without expecting changes. Yet, each must be willing to give 100%. This is why I get irritated with all those stupid women self-help dating books with titles like “How to Change Your Man” or “How to Make Him the Man to Marry” or… The message is “get him to marry you, then change him after you’re married.” My message? Marry the guy you want to begin with. Dah! Or don’t get married. You don’t have to be married.

Let me illustrate with my younger sister. (She stopped buying me birthday gifts last year, so I’m no longer at risk of losing good birthday gifts from her and can speak openly…)

My younger sister is married to a guy she dated for years. They have two kids, too. They do lots together. They go to Disney World all the time (live in Orlando). They are both outgoing and have friends or sitters watch their kids so they can hit the town or parties at friends. It’s 100/100. A few weeks ago, my brother-in-law could see my sister was burnt out with the kids. They had been behaving rambunctious all week and she is a stay at home mom. He had plans to go golfing on Saturday but he could see she was spent. She didn’t get on his case about it; she knew he had been planning the golf outing for weeks. It would be her and the kids for the whole day. That’s her giving 100.

Well, he cancelled his golf outing, declaring to her that he wanted to spend some time with the kids. He wanted to just have some daddy-kid time without mom. He took the kids to Disney World for the day, then to dinner. My sister got to spend the day alone, relax and re-energize. That’s him giving 100.

See? It’s 100/100. Don’t go into a marriage expecting anything else and being willing to give anything less.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 11:43 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.