Master CraftsMon

Sunday, February 05, 2006

Master CraftsMon - Aired Monday, January 2, 2006 at about 11pm CST - Segment 6

Master CraftsMon - Aired Monday, January 2, 2006 at about 11pm CST - Segment 6

Let's move on. Here's an idea about having a good marriage.

That was Instructions by Stan Swiniarski.

In this song, you see something I found fascinating. A couple love each other, but they cannot communicate. The question then becomes how do you communicate with your spouse if you were never trained in that task. Come on. With so many single parent families, there is no way that kids can learn how a married couple should talk out their differences of perception. Ummm... you did know that women and men do view the world differently? What's that? According to your understanding, gender differences are societal constructs. Nope. Sorry. Stupid idea. Women have a different body than men and have, they have a different hormone system than men. What that means I do not know. I only know that couples have to come to some understanding about how to resolve conflicts. Inside a marriage there is a reasonable expectation that a fight does not mean the end of the relationship, so there is an incentive to work out your differences. If you are not willing to re-visit a topic one thousand times, then you should never be married. As time passes, old contracts and understandings about what the relationship must be have to change, because your perception of the past changes.

The thing that gets me about the song is that the woman expects the guy to intuitively understand what is going on, because it is obvious to the woman what SHOULD be going on. If she asked the guy, "Dear, why didn't you ask me about my day?" I guarantee you she would have gotten an answer that would have surprised her. What did she do instead? She got angry, which put the male on the defensive. Communication had just shut down. If you refuse to ask your spouse why they are acting so stupidly, then how do you expect him or her to know what you consider a reasonable response to a given situation? People learn from their failures. If you fail to please your spouse and your spouse explains why you failed, then sooner or later you get to the point that you kind of guess what your spouse is going to do in most situations. You don't ask, "Why are you doing that?", then try to understand what the answer means, then you cannot reach a place where you share the same reality. Good God, you didn't know that men and women perceive reality differently? It's true. The way around that is to keep asking, "Why" until you understand what is going on. If you cannot get a consistent response, it means that you are unaware of some factor that is not obvious to you, but is obvious to your spouse. You have to visit the same damned screwup a gazillion times to finally reach an understanding of what is actually going on instead of what appears to be going on.

If you expect perfection without failure, then you are an idiot. The only way to get a master craftsman in any field is to accept that failure is an acceptable outcome to a given situation, as long as you are willing to LEARN from the failure, really learn, not just paper over the failure. Because you are married to someone, you have a reasonable expectation that your spouse will accept that you are not perfect and work to reach some compromise in behavior. Most people believe that sex is best outside of marriage. That's crazy. Inside a marriage it is possible to practice and communicate with your spouse as to what worked and what did not work for you. If you are not willing to talk frankly to your spouse about sex, then give it up. Too much of our culture makes the case that one night stands are the greatest, but in actuality that is the rare case instead of the rule. You have to practice to be the best at anything, particularly sex. Experience is the only way to get anything to work. If you will not accept that failure is a possibility and learn from the failure, then you are doomed to have failure forever.

I keep telling you that to be the best, you have to fail. If failure makes you angry and unwilling to explore why you failed, then you can never be the best at anything AND your children will be unable to do that either. If you have that stability in your life, so that you can fail without it hurting you too badly, then that spills over onto your children and they are not frightened to try new things and learn from THEIR failures. Sudden change is what causes trauma for kids, because kids are in the learning stage in their lives. Constant changes makes it impossible for a child to learn from their mistakes, because they get to a point where they do not know what to expect when they fail.

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