Detour Around Reno : Part 3

The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book: Twelve Steps to a Happy Marriage
by Various

(Page 11 of 16)

One may cooperate creatively. This means that one will still grapple courageously, but not as a lone wolf. One will seek to understand the other people who are involved: one's husband or wife, one's children, one's relatives, one's rivals, and all the other people who have any part or interest in the family problem. To understand means to be able to see the situation sympathetically through their eyes, but without losing perspective. Cooperating creatively means teamwork. It means discovering what is the best solution for everybody involved, and then working wholeheartedly toward that solution. The rest of this article is devoted to outlining some practical steps toward cooperating creatively when o

5. One may cooperate creatively. This means that one will still grapple courageously, but not as a lone wolf. One will seek to understand the other people who are involved: one's husband or wife, one's children, one's relatives, one's rivals, and all the other people who have any part or interest in the family problem. To understand means to be able to see the situation sympathetically through their eyes, but without losing perspective. Cooperating creatively means teamwork. It means discovering what is the best solution for everybody involved, and then working wholeheartedly toward that solution. The rest of this article is devoted to outlining some practical steps toward cooperating creatively when one has fallen out with one's marriage partner.

If you yourself are confronting difficulties in your marriage, you may find it helpful to note down each of the following steps on a sheet of paper and then write in after each step the applications that fit your own case. See whether you can transpose these suggestions into the terms of your problem. If you start thinking about what you face, in the light of these steps, you will probably find new ideas and fresh possibilities coming into your mind as you write. Those solutions which spring up in your own thinking may prove to be just the aids which you need to get a new grip and to start transforming your marriage into a thing of new beauty, joy, and power.

Ten Steps To Marital Adjustment

1. Abandon all feelings of resentment. Emotional antagonism toward one's mate, or toward other personalities in the problem, acts as an effective barrier against finding the creative solution and against putting it into effect. What you hate you cannot understand, because you are ready to believe all evil of it, and unprepared to perceive its good. Therefore surrender all grudges, jealousies, and feelings of contempt. Emotions of enmity distort one's vision and impel one toward actions and words that are not wise. When one person feels resentment against another, the other is likely to feel resentment in return. This intensifies the first resentment, and so the hatred grows. Someone has to break the vicious cycle. Don't wait for your marriage mate to take the first step if this joy-destroying process has started in your home. Forgive and forget. Let good will take the place of antagonism in your own consciousness, even though your mate continues to carry on the old grudge for a while.

2. Eliminate needless irritants and antagonizers. Make a careful and thorough study of the things that are hurting, distressing, or thwarting your mate. Here is a check list which includes some of the most frequent annoyers in married life.

Stop criticizing your mate - above all in the presence of other people, but also in private.

Carefully avoid every action or situation which makes your mate feel inferior, or which brings him unnecessary failures, even in small things. Don't insist on playing bridge if he a poor player; don't cultivate witty conversations with brilliant people if he feels like a dub in such company; don't throw him into contrast with people who are stronger, more successful, or better educated than he; avoid those situations in which you demonstrate your own superiority over him.

Study to eliminate the topics of conversation which are annoying to him: stop bringing up the subject of his shiftless relatives, the time he went bankrupt, the occasion on which he made a fool of himself, or that political or religious question on which you always quarrel.

Replace those items of household equipment which keep causing unnecessary pain, labor, and irritation: that leaky faucet, that worn-out washing machine, that broken light switch, that asthmatic vacuum sweeper, that torn rug, that decrepit snow shovel, that ready-to-be-junked lawn mower.

Avoid inflicting unnecessarily on your mate people or pastimes which bore him. Don't drag him to teas or to concerts or to prize fights if these events pain and torture him.

Form the habit of keeping all appointments with your mate on the punctual minute. But (unjust as this may seem) do not demand that your mate do likewise.

Never read at the table unless your mate also has something interesting to read and agrees to the arrangement.

Bring your mate into contact with your relatives so infrequently and under such favorable circumstances that their liking for each other will flourish rather than perish.

Do not try that dangerous experiment of flirting with someone else in order to keep your mate interested in you.

Never repulse your mate's sexual advances in a way which will seem unloving, contemptuous, or irritated. If you cannot respond fully at the moment, be sure that you express unmistakably your respect, your affection, and your comradeship, and make it clear that the necessary sexual denial is a mere postponement.

Watch to see whether you are needlessly violating your mate's ideals of courtesy, decency, good sportmanship, generosity, or honor.

See whether you can discover any other way in which you have been unnecessarily irritating or hurting your mate, and make a clean break with that joy-destroying habit.

3. Find ways to do new joyful things together, even in seemingly trivial ways. The long check list under item 2 is largely negative. Add the positive side. Buy your mate little presents - from the ten-cent store and occasionally from more expensive places. Make a private list of the small things that please him most (yellow jonquils, Olivia de Havilland, dipped caramels, picnics, chicken pie, Bill Smith, ice-box snacks, Beethoven records, best-seller novels, theatre parties, grape juice with ginger ale, odd china, or whatever they are) and make a habit of springing small but delightful surprises. Cultivate the friendly little family jokes that grow up wherever people enjoy each other intimately.

Garden City Publishing Co. reprint edition, 1949, by special arrangement with Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Copyright, 1938, by PRENTICE-HALL, INC.