Solution to False Beliefs in Marriage

This is a re-print of a series of two articles on false beliefs in marriage. They rank #8 on the most viewed articles on this blog.

Jenny dragged Lawrence into my office. They had been married for 14 months and I was dismayed they were already having marriage problems. Granted, Jenny had been married twice before and Lawrence once, but they had changed a lot since their previous marriages; and I was sure all the premarital counseling we had done would preempt future crises. Of course, I was wrong.

Jenny had grown up with a father who was physically violent and cruel. Twice, he broke her arm and once gave her a skull fracture. She left home at seventeen and never regretted it. She became quite successful as a flight attendant and married a pilot. After ten years of marriage, he also became violent and at one point hit her so hard he knocked her unconscious. She eventually divorced him and remained single for several years. When she did marry again, it was to a very gentle, kind man (her words). After five years of marriage, however, he also became abusive. She immediately filed for divorce and moved. She ended up in our fellowship of Christians where she met Lawrence. He was also a gentle man, something I could readily affirm. By his own account, he had never hit anyone in his life. He abhorred violence and he came across to Jenny as loving and stable.

But here is why she brought him into my office. She had begun noticing a change in attitude over the previous few months. She couldn’t quite identify what had changed, but she was frantically worried he would hurt her. I can imagine  you reading this thinking “I can see why she would think that. Every man in her life had done this”. But I suspected something deeper and more sinister was afoot. I asked Jenny to leave my office and asked Lawrence to stay. I looked him square in the eye and said, “Lawrence, do you ever feel like hitting Jenny?” He looked everywhere else but in my eyes. As he studied his feet, I asked the question again.

“Mike, I have never hit anyone in my life” he said.

“I know Lawrence. You’ve told me. Answer my question”

“Sometimes, I have this overwhelming urge to hit her. I don’t know where it’s coming from, but it worries me.”

I brought Jenny back in the room and immediately asked Lawrence to tell her what he had admitted to me. Reluctantly, he faced up to her and admitted the truth about his thoughts. She exploded and ran out of my office. What happened in the next hour was one of the greatest revelations I have ever received in 30 years of counseling. But before I get to the rest of her story, I want to build a framework for the solution we found.

In a previous blog post, I noted several beliefs that could ruin a marriage. All of our emotions and actions stem from things we believe. Therefore, when emotions and behavior are ruining a relationship, you can be sure that some kind of warped belief system is at the root. Root beliefs (also known as “core beliefs”) are not thrust upon us. We always choose what we will believe. There are some behavioral psychologists who teach the inevitability of some beliefs. For instance, they may claim that all abuse victims grow up with a belief that power has been taken away from them. That certainly is true of many people, but not even most abuse victims feel the loss of personal control. There are abuse victims who feel guilty; others feel fear; still others focus on shame. As we grow (especially between the ages of 5–10), we are presented with thousands of choices about what we will believe about life, other people and ourselves. Any number of these beliefs may doggedly hang on into adulthood, severely affecting our relationships and marriages.

What is the solution? There are four steps to any process of solving the problems caused by false beliefs. These steps may take anywhere from a few minutes to a few weeks to enact, but there is no way to bypass any of them.

1. Acknowledge that your emotional reactions and negative behavior are always the result of something you believe. Too often, we want to maintain our emotions are simple reactions to simple causes. But many times, our reactions do not line up with the force of our reality. We often react too strongly to minor causes, or, in some cases, react weakly to major causes. We then try to blame our behavior on our partner. What we do with this is take responsibility away from our own belief system. For instance, I know a woman who, when she learned of her husband’s affair, went out and had a one-night stand. Then she came home and told him about it. When we were in counseling, she steadfastly held to the position that her actions were justified. Months later, we came to the conclusion her actions were based on a belief that she needed to take revenge when people hurt her or they would continue to hurt her.

2. Identify the belief at the source of the action or emotion. How do you do that? If you recall the incidents leading up to your behavior, ask yourself what you were feeling. As you focus on the feeling, note what thoughts go through your mind. In those thoughts you will identify some beliefs. Those beliefs, in their basic form, are what you need to focus on next. The woman who had the one-night stand had anger. But with the anger was a sense of fear. As she followed the fear in her mind, she had a thought that if she let her husband get away with his behavior, he would keep doing things to her like that. Her belief was that only revenge will stop the pain.

3. Follow the Belief to its Source. We do not usually come to false beliefs as adults. Generally, they have lodged themselves somewhere in our childhood memories. As you focus on the belief and the emotions surrounding that belief,recall a time when you felt and thought the same way as a child. It shouldn’t take too long if you’re being honest. When a memory comes (even if it isn’t all that clear how it connects with the present) walk through it again. Note the things you were feeling and believing in that memory.

4. Ask God to come and show you the truth in the memory. When we allow a false belief to take root in our souls, we cannot destroy it by outthinking it. We must get external input to help us make a decision. Our one-night-stand woman followed her belief back to a time when her brother bullied her constantly. After one time, he pulled her hair so hard she fell down and chipped a tooth. That night, she got a tennis racket and went into his room while he was sleeping and started to beat on him. All she remembers is that he never bullied her again. From that day on, she vowed she would never allow another person to hurt her without paying them back. As she walked through this memory, she invited God to speak truth. God showed her that revenge is not going to work. He showed her that her brother and her were never really close after that. God pointed out that she traded revenge for reconciliation and she was doing that in her marriage also. She chose to let go of the revenge belief and it helped to put her relationship back together with her husband.

As I worked in counseling with Jenny, I also explained that our inner beliefs do have an effect on our deepest relationships. Her personal belief was all men will hurt her. She lived this out in such a way that it affected the men around her. Don’t get me wrong; the men in her life who had hurt her were completely to blame for their actions. But she also had to come to grips with the reality that her belief made their actions easier. She and I walked through the four steps mentioned above and she heard from God that not all men will hurt her –  and she forgave her dad and the other men for what they had done. Since that time, Lawrence has reported absolutely no recurrence of the inner prompting to hit her. And from that day, her fear of being hurt has vanished.

This can apply to any false belief. Though it won’t change your partner all the time, it will change you; and if you are changed, then that will change the core nature of the relationship.

False Beliefs that Can Destroy a Marriage

This week, we are featuring the top ten most viewed articles on this blog. Today’s reprint is #8 on that list with over 4,000 hits. It is a two-parter. First part I will post this morning and the second part this evening.

Cathy’s husband wiped his oil-stained hands on the rag beside his workbench. As he came into the house, he realized the rag was getting so dirty there wasn’t enough ‘clean’ on it to sustain another wiping. He saw Cathy reading the newspaper and casually remarked “Remind me to wash all the rags in the garage before Monday.” Cathy dropped the newspaper, narrowed her eyes and stared at him. Then she said, with an acidic tone: “I will have you know I worked hard today. I didn’t get around to the garage after cleaning both cars, wiping little kiddie butts and straightening out the mess with the IRS.”

Within 2 hours, Cathy was in the car headed for her parents house, leaving behind a bewildered husband and two preschoolers. Within two years, they were divorced. Her husband had no idea what hit him.

My wife used to work on a hospital ward devoted to people with emotional challenges. One of her regular patients was a young man who used to have code words to identify “unsafe” people. The problem was, no one knew what the code word of the day was until you said it. He would randomly collect the first word that went through his head. If anyone said that word throughout the day, he would refuse to talk to them for the rest of that day. Nurses and doctors were left to wonder what part of their speech had produced the silence. It might be a simple word like “talk” or something more complicated such as “remember”.

Cathy and this young man in the hospital had exactly the same problem. They exhibited this problem to different degrees, but essentially it is the same problem. Cathy and the patient were both operating on a false premise. The young man’s false belief was that a spoken word could identify a dangerous person. We will discuss Cathy’s false belief at the end of this article –  suffice to say, it is just as real as the young schizophrenic.

The false beliefs we gather to ourselves over the years become like tendrils of kudzu that wind their way around every healthy thought, seeking to choke the life out of them. Nowhere does this show its effects more than marriage. Allow me to quickly summarize several of the most common false beliefs and how they affect husbands and wives. At the end, I will use Cathy to show how the false belief infiltrates a person who would otherwise function quite well in society.

Here then are the most common false beliefs that can ruin a marriage:

1. Independence: This is the belief that we really don’t need anyone else in life. It has a 100 variations, but they all focus on the self-sufficiency of the individual. This belief prevents a spouse from allowing the other person to get close, to interact on a deep level or to partner in marital goals. Those with Independence beliefs often have separate bank accounts, enjoy much different life pursuits than their partners, stop short of really expressing their needs, are constantly making new friends and discarding older ones and run away when they are asked to make deep commitments to their partner.
2. Abandonment: A person with abandonment beliefs sees many situations as the springboard for their spouse leaving them. These beliefs are often accompanied by fear and result in both over-accommodating behavior and flashes of rage. The person with abandonment premises will constantly ask their spouse to account for their whereabouts. They will express how insecure they feel about the future. When their spouse criticizes them even moderately, they will say things like “well why don’t you just leave. I know you want to”.
3. Love based on Performance: This belief says “I will not be loved unless I perform adequately”. Those who hold to this foundation often are overly critical of their spouses, seeking to bring down the performance of another person to elevate themselves. They can become workaholics, alcoholics, clean freaks, clingy, anorexic, bulemic, suicidal, or obsessive-compulsive. Their core idea is that must constantly be doing something to earn or deserve the love they receive from their spouse. It doesn’t help to tell them they are loved –  they won’t really believe it.
4. Love Will Not Be There: There is an equally large group of people who just assume they will not be loved no matter how hard they try. Many of them just give up without really trying. These people will often test their partner by failing in really obvious ways in order to see how the other person will react. This belief can even push them into relationships with people they don’t really care about, just to prove they don’t care if they’re not loved. In addition, people with this belief may question their spouses to death, showing a total lack of trust.
5. Alone: There is a common belief with many people that they are going to be alone. This is similar to the abandonment belief, but it has a nasty twist. They don’t really think a person is going to leave; they are more fatalistic than that. They often fear their spouse will die, or will be swept away in an unavoidable situation. They therefore go through life with few boundaries, allowing their partners to do anything they want to them, fearing the relationship is simply on borrowed time.
6. Shame: This is a simple belief, but deadly. It is the core understanding a person carries that there is something wrong with them. When they were children, it came out as “I am stupid”, “I am going to be beat up”, “I can’t ever get this right”. In adulthood, this person often allows their spouse to find many things wrong with them, accepting blame when they have done little wrong. Shame beliefs foster such behavior as closet drinking, sexual deviancy, serial adultery, lying, self-mutilation, depression, anxiety disorders and even violence.
7. Helplessness: These beliefs (and there are many) come from situations in childhood where a person was treated unfairly and given no recourse to bring closure to the issue. This unfair treatment leads a person to conclude they will never get a fair shake, and therefore they need to protect themselves. Helpless beliefs can result in adultery, pornography obsession, eating disorders, obsessive drug use, phobias, prostitution, violence, angry speech, etc. These beliefs often result in the worst of behaviors, since the behaviors are often ways of bringing a sense of “control” back into their lives.
8. Escape: These beliefs focus on the only way to deal with reality –  run away from it. Every time life gets hard, this inner belief is triggered and the person finds some way to get away from it all. This often cuts the other spouse out of the picture and hurts them deeply. Most people with this belief abuse substances or use sex as an escape. Compulsive masturbation, compulsive gambling and spending are often seen.

There are other beliefs than these, but I have found this list to be the most common. But every person brings their peculiar beliefs into a marriage. When two people come into a marriage relationship with false beliefs, this mixes up a soup of disaster. Let me show you how it worked with Cathy.

She had a belief that no matter how hard she tried, everyone who mattered to her would eventually leave. You would think this sprung from a traumatic childhood experience, but the roots were very simple. Her two older sisters were both hippies and moved out of the house quite young. They had been best buddies to Cathy and now she was the only child left at home. Her mother reacted to her oldest daughters leaving by drinking gin every night until she passed out. Dad dealt with his wife’s inebriation by working 60 hour weeks. Cathy spent most of her days quite alone with her thoughts.

In high school, she made up for this sense of being abandoned by trying to over-compensate. She became hyper-flirtatious and joined every club at school. But because she feared being dumped, she often got clingy with both boy and girls. The result of this clinginess was that people didn’t want to have anything to do with her. Thus, they fulfilled her fear and abandoned her. This just served to reinforce her fear. In order to overcome this, she tried even harder to get people to stay with her. With her girlfriends, she was known as the one who would help out in every way. She spent her own money and bought gifts, helped with homework, staying up half the night sewing cheerleader outfits for her friends. With boys, she basically allowed them to take any sexual liberties they wanted. Yet, despite this extra effort, people still got tired of how hard she was trying and rejected her.

When she married her husband Ben, she really wanted to overcome this. She knew she tried too hard, so she sought to back off and give him breathing space. But her fears kept growing. So often she would get angry and say “Why don’t you just leave? I know you’re going to leave”. Her fear led her to get violent at times, hitting Ben in the head. She sometimes even took out her anger on the little girls.

The day she left, her fear of abandonment had been acute for weeks before. She determined she was going to solve this fear by praying every morning and then serving her husband in love. She had been reading a few books on Christian marriage and she read that if you serve in love it will cast out fear. Now, that is a good principle, but it was no match for her false belief. For a week or more, she tried to anticipate Ben’s every need. But it was exhausting. By the end of the work week, she was an emotional wreck.

When Ben came in and innocently mentioned the grease rag, it echoed against her deeply-ingrained fear. He had one more demand she couldn’t meet. Something inside her snapped and she realized her fear had only been submerged in her cleaning and service. Now, it came rushing out with a fury. Even though Ben had not been criticizing her at all, that is what she heard. False beliefs often affect our hearing, causing us to interpret all communication according to the matrix of the belief. Cathy left and never returned. Her example is repeated millions of times a year, by both men and women.

Examine your own life. Can you see evidence of these sort of beliefs?

There is an answer, and it’s quite straight-forward. More about that in the next article.

Wedding Shows Are Another Ploy

I once officiated at a wedding where the Bride and Groom spent over $18,000 on the wedding ceremony. There were real swans on the lawn as she drove up, ten musicians playing coronet trumpets as she ascended the stairs, a 20 foot train on her wedding dress and the church was a 200-year old landmark that her father pressured politicians to allow her to use. Result: Their marriage lasted 5 years and they split up. That’s about $3500/year.

It used to be that people found this story amusing. It used to be that people found it to be quirky, unique and out of the ordinary. Now, it doesn’t really cause anyone to bat an eye. Why? They see this all the time on the half dozen “Wedding” reality shows. And I believe the effect this is having on couples is much more insidious than people realize.

Most people who read this blog regularly are followers of Jesus Christ. I realize a number of you are not. So, let me be clear on a few things that the Bible teaches us. I am not asking you to agree with what the Bible teaches, just to acknowledge that it does.

First, there is nothing wrong with being single. There is nothing that makes a married person more important than a single person. In fact, the Apostle Paul almost seems to endorse the idea that if you’re single you can serve God with a greater fervor than a married person. Let me say it this way: If you want to be single, good for you. God has no problem with that.

Second, God also tells single people that having sexual relationships with other people is unhealthy. Sex does more than bind two people physically together. It creates emotional, psychological, relational, spiritual, social, financial and memory bonds that cannot be broken completely. The reason for sex within the marriage covenant is that sex creates ties that are best expressed when there is a lifelong commitment attached.

Third, the Bible teaches that if you’re single and the need for sex is getting too strong, there is nothing wrong with getting married soon. And the goal is to stay married.

Now, what do wedding shows have to do with this? They make weddings so altogether more important and EXPENSIVE than they need to be. In some misguided ideal promoted by wedding dress manufacturers, cake designers, rental hall companies etc. we are led to believe that you cannot have a great marriage without a correspondingly great wedding ceremony. There could be nothing further from the truth.

The sole purpose for a wedding ceremony is to drive home the permanent nature of the vows to the bride and groom. All the rest is fun and games; and I don’t have anything against the rest of the hoopla except this. If the cost and complications of a wedding ceremony are keeping you from getting married any time soon, you need to do one of three things:

1. Get married now in a simple ceremony and have the big ceremony later.

2. Ditch the big ceremony altogether.

3. Break up and find someone who hasn’t been sucked in to wedding shows.

I’m not trying to be funny either. People have always struggled with sex outside of marriage. I am not here to pound that pulpit or say that everyone is evil. Sex is as natural a need as we have. But there isn’t a person on this planet that doesn’t think that sex complicates great friendships. And I don’t know a lot of people who can be in a deep committed relationship who can abstain from sex forever.

So, my advice for all of us who have a biblical mindset is to stop watching these unrealistic and distracting wedding shows and just go back to being smart again. Have a small wedding and enjoy your guests. Put away the swans…put away the huge meals…and have a wonderful marriage. That’s a thousand times more important.

Or stay single and celibate. It doesn’t matter.

The Solution to False Beliefs in Marriage

Jenny dragged Lawrence into my office. They had been married for 14 months and I was dismayed they were already having marriage problems. Granted, Jenny had been married twice before and Lawrence once, but they had changed a lot since their previous marriages; and I was sure all the premarital counseling we had done would preempt future crises. Of course, I was wrong.

Jenny had grown up with a father who was physically violent and cruel. Twice, he broke her arm and once gave her a skull fracture. She left home at seventeen and never regretted it. She became quite successful as a flight attendant and married a pilot. After ten years of marriage, he also became violent and at one point hit her so hard he knocked her unconscious. She eventually divorced him and remained single for several years. When she did marry again, it was to a very gentle, kind man (her words). After five years of marriage, however, he also became abusive. She immediately filed for divorce and moved. She ended up in our fellowship of Christians where she met Lawrence. He was also a gentle man, something I could readily affirm. By his own account, he had never hit anyone in his life. He abhorred violence and he came across to Jenny as loving and stable.

But here is why she brought him into my office. She had begun noticing a change in attitude over the previous few months. She couldn’t quite identify what had changed, but she was frantically worried he would hurt her. I can imagine  you reading this thinking “I can see why she would think that. Every man in her life had done this”. But I suspected something deeper and more sinister was afoot. I asked Jenny to leave my office and asked Lawrence to stay. I looked him square in the eye and said, “Lawrence, do you ever feel like hitting Jenny?” He looked everywhere else but in my eyes. As he studied his feet, I asked the question again.

“Mike, I have never hit anyone in my life” he said.

“I know Lawrence. You’ve told me. Answer my question”

“Sometimes, I have this overwhelming urge to hit her. I don’t know where it’s coming from, but it worries me.”

I brought Jenny back in the room and immediately asked Lawrence to tell her what he had admitted to me. Reluctantly, he faced up to her and admitted the truth about his thoughts. She exploded and ran out of my office. What happened in the next hour was one of the greatest revelations I have ever received in 30 years of counseling. But before I get to the rest of her story, I want to build a framework for the solution we found.

In a previous blog post, I noted several beliefs that could ruin a marriage. All of our emotions and actions stem from things we believe. Therefore, when emotions and behavior are ruining a relationship, you can be sure that some kind of warped belief system is at the root. Root beliefs (also known as “core beliefs”) are not thrust upon us. We always choose what we will believe. There are some behavioral psychologists who teach the inevitability of some beliefs. For instance, they may claim that all abuse victims grow up with a belief that power has been taken away from them. That certainly is true of many people, but not even most abuse victims feel the loss of personal control. There are abuse victims who feel guilty; others feel fear; still others focus on shame. As we grow (especially between the ages of 5–10), we are presented with thousands of choices about what we will believe about life, other people and ourselves. Any number of these beliefs may doggedly hang on into adulthood, severely affecting our relationships and marriages.

What is the solution? There are four steps to any process of solving the problems caused by false beliefs. These steps may take anywhere from a few minutes to a few weeks to enact, but there is no way to bypass any of them.

1. Acknowledge that your emotional reactions and negative behavior are always the result of something you believe. Too often, we want to maintain our emotions are simple reactions to simple causes. But many times, our reactions do not line up with the force of our reality. We often react too strongly to minor causes, or, in some cases, react weakly to major causes. We then try to blame our behavior on our partner. What we do with this is take responsibility away from our own belief system. For instance, I know a woman who, when she learned of her husband’s affair, went out and had a one-night stand. Then she came home and told him about it. When we were in counseling, she steadfastly held to the position that her actions were justified. Months later, we came to the conclusion her actions were based on a belief that she needed to take revenge when people hurt her or they would continue to hurt her.

2. Identify the belief at the source of the action or emotion. How do you do that? If you recall the incidents leading up to your behavior, ask yourself what you were feeling. As you focus on the feeling, note what thoughts go through your mind. In those thoughts you will identify some beliefs. Those beliefs, in their basic form, are what you need to focus on next. The woman who had the one-night stand had anger. But with the anger was a sense of fear. As she followed the fear in her mind, she had a thought that if she let her husband get away with his behavior, he would keep doing things to her like that. Her belief was that only revenge will stop the pain.

3. Follow the Belief to its Source. We do not usually come to false beliefs as adults. Generally, they have lodged themselves somewhere in our childhood memories. As you focus on the belief and the emotions surrounding that belief, recall a time when you felt and thought the same way as a child. It shouldn’t take too long if you’re being honest. When a memory comes (even if it isn’t all that clear how it connects with the present) walk through it again. Note the things you were feeling and believing in that memory.

4. Ask God to come and show you the truth in the memory. When we allow a false belief to take root in our souls, we cannot destroy it by outthinking it. We must get external input to help us make a decision. Our one-night-stand woman followed her belief back to a time when her brother bullied her constantly. After one time, he pulled her hair so hard she fell down and chipped a tooth. That night, she got a tennis racket and went into his room while he was sleeping and started to beat on him. All she remembers is that he never bullied her again. From that day on, she vowed she would never allow another person to hurt her without paying them back. As she walked through this memory, she invited God to speak truth. God showed her that revenge is not going to work. He showed her that her brother and her were never really close after that. God pointed out that she traded revenge for reconciliation and she was doing that in her marriage also. She chose to let go of the revenge belief and it helped to put her relationship back together with her husband.

As I worked in counseling with Jenny, I also explained that our inner beliefs do have an effect on our deepest relationships. Her personal belief was all men will hurt her. She lived this out in such a way that it affected the men around her. Don’t get me wrong; the men in her life who had hurt her were completely to blame for their actions. But she also had to come to grips with the reality that her belief made their actions easier. She and I walked through the four steps mentioned above and she heard from God that not all men will hurt her –  and she forgave her dad and the other men for what they had done. Since that time, Lawrence has reported absolutely no recurrence of the inner prompting to hit her. And from that day, her fear of being hurt has vanished.

This can apply to any false belief. Though it won’t change your partner all the time, it will change you; and if you are changed, then that will change the core nature of the relationship.

How We Adjust in Marriage

Let me start with a quick explanation of personality typing. Essentially there are four things we measure when we talk about a person’s “type”:

1. How they gain their energy while they interact with the world around them (Extravert or Introvert)

2. How they collect data (with the senses or the intuition)

3. How they react to the reality around them (with their mind or their emotions)

4. How they accomplish their goals (with patterns or with principles)

So you can have a person who is extraverted (meaning they feel more energy when interacting with other people) married to an introvert (someone who regains their energy by spending some quality time by themselves). This is a common pairing in marriage and generally the adjustments are slight over time. Usually, the longer an extravert and an introvert are married to each other, they will tend to adapt by coming closer to the middle. For instance, in the ten point scale I use to measure personality, I am a nine point extravert (five being the middle). Kathy was a 2 point Introvert on that same scale. That is what we were when we first married. Now, I am a seven point and she is a three point. We are moving closer to the middle.

What is even more intriguing are those situations where two people with the same characteristic marry each other. Let’s take two introverts. Both of these people like to have alone time to rejuvenate. But, over time, they balance each other out. The least introverted will actually begin to seek out people more. The most introverted will actually spend more time alone. Though I would have to do a bazillion hours of research to verify this, my guess is that most couples will eventually add up to “11” after 20 years of marriage.

How have you seen that in your relationship?

Talking Points on Homosexual Marriage

After reading yet another debate on the newspaper website (with over 300 comments so far and no end in sight) I had the following reactions. First, I noticed how often proponents of Gay marriage think that Christians are hateful, spiteful and bigoted. They also call us narrow-minded, hide-bound and fanatics. Since none of those adjectives describes me or most Christians I know, I am intrigued at why the so-called “No on 8″ crowd has come to these conclusions about us. Second, I am annoyed at how poorly some Christians are debating this issue with those who are not believers in God or the Bible. We need to explain ourselves reasonably and with a good attitude.

Thus, I want to suggest some talking points that Christians can use which may help the “No on 8″ crowd at least listen to us instead of throwing epithets at our psyches.

Not About Rights: To us, this debate on homosexual marriage is not about rights. I personally do not object to permanent homosexual relationships having the same legal and inheritance rights as married couples. And this is what we need to emphasize. If it is just about equal rights and not about what we call a homosexual relationship, then everyone should be happy, no?

Boundary Violations – Part 2

Ken was hurt; again. His wife Vivian and her two friends had gone to the Mall and then out for a couple of hours of “girl time”. This was the third time this month they had spent the entire evening  together. For the second time, they had chosen Ken and Vivian’s “date night” to do it on. He was hurt and wanted to hurt in return.

Vivian finally came home about 11 p.m. Ken was waiting for her as he stewed in his frustration. He knew she would be exhausted the next morning when she had to get up at 5:30 for the morning commute into the city. That meant she would be tired the next few evenings. Any time he had hoped to spend snuggling and being affectionate together during the week was ruined.

But Vivian saw things very differently. For years, Ken had reserved three evenings a week for golf with his two high school pals. They did everything together and usually excluded their wives when they went out to the golf course. Afterwards, they would spend an hour or so in the clubhouse telling jokes and talking over the events of their lives. By the time Ken got home, he didn’t feel like talking and usually gave her leftovers. But as the men grew older, they slowly grew apart and Ken found himself at home more often. He didn’t really want to be there, so he just sat around and made Vivian be his entertainment. At first she soaked in the attention. But she realized that he would never be satisfied with the attention she gave him (he constantly complained about everything she did wrong). She decided that it would be better if she got away from him some evenings. Leslie and Joan were just the tonic she needed. They also loved to shop and drink tea. All Ken wanted to talk about was sports.

Ken and Vivian were ready that evening for a clash of major proportions. Ken had it planned in his mind. He would simply tell Vivian how he felt and allow her room to change her mind for him. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Later, when he was licking his wounds, he wondered why things had gone so wrong. He thought over the conversation they had when she came in the door:

Ken: “A little late for a mother of three to be coming in don’t you think?”

Viv: “Not really. I don’t have a staff meeting in the morning, so it’s not that late really.”

Ken: “Did you forget about our date night?”

Viv: “What date night are you referring to Ken?”

Ken: “The date night we said three years ago at the marriage retreat we would never violate. You violate me every time you go out when we’re supposed to spend the time together.”

Viv: “Oh, I see. Like last week’s date night. When we had to watch the World Series