Save Your Marriage

Frankly, when someone tells me that they want to save their marriage, I can't help but cringe and wish them good luck. Must be something about my own beliefs that probably would be good to work on, but the idea of "working on" a relationship is to the end of that relationship and the getting a house in the suburbs with a golden retriever is to having kids in some circles.

Maybe this comes from my male perspective. I don't know. Much of the talking and listening approach to such endeavors is a decidedly feminine undertaking.

Still, ending a marriage is nothing to be taken lightly. I don't care how many divorce attorneys are divorced and how many divorce service ads imply that if you just get through this, things will be so much better.

Once you get "through this", you are both who you were before you started, but you have a lot less money and a whole new set of problems to cope with.

Anyway, there must be a more productive way to look at saving your marriage than the one I have carried in my head and heart like a virus where it seems like a long, hard, slog that is ultimately doomed anyway. There are lots of good reasons to believe that it need not be that way.

There have been some really excellent efforts to spell out in usable terms how to save your marriage which I have been studying. And, I am impressed.

The Infidelity Story Just Rolls On

When an infidelity story makes the front page, I can't help but wonder if it isn't there not just for the prurient interest factor, but also as another one of those little bells that ring every now and then to remind all of us that we are a lot closer to bad things ourselves than we'd like to think.

That old 'ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee' probably is a good thing to remember on all kinds of issues.

Oh, I know, those are bad people who do those things, not people like me. And, maybe they are. I really don't know. I'm not trying to get them off the hook.

I do suspect that like every story in the newspaper, there's a lot more to it than is written there and there are as many stories about what really happened as there are people who are close to it. I feel for everyone involved. What a mess.

Now, it is Elizabeth Edwards speaking to the Detroit Free Press who is having to find a way to acknowledge what is with as much dignity as she can find and move forward. She didn't really say what "forward" will be at a deep personal level, but she did tell us that she's going to focus on her children and health care legislation. Sounds sane to me.

As for how she is coping with the broken trust, she also did an admirable job, saying that that is just too sensitive to talk about.

Every time I hear about another of these stories I feel like another Greek tragedy is playing itself out. The characters will either be transformed in some way, learn some great lesson, or be destroyed. And once the curtain is pulled back an the story starts to unfold, no one can do anything but play their part with as much dignity and integrity as they can muster.

There are experienced, professional people telling us lots of useful things about affairs, cheating, infidelity, or whatever else you call it. It's good stuff. It's helpful because this is one of those things in life that we don't want or need to know a lot about. Hopefully we'll never have to deal with it and if we do, we pray it is a one time aberration.

I discuss what some of them say and provide links to articles on my website, www.Better-Relationships-Over-50.com

Conscious Relationship

Conscious relationship is a term that has been used for some time, but what does it mean and how can us older folks who aren't even sure what it means get value out of it?


For me, relating consciously means that

• I am aware that there are two separate individuals each with their own strengths, weaknesses, needs, and history in the relationship
• I view the relationship not only as a way to meet my own needs, but also to learn more about myself and to move closer to my ideals of how I would like to behave towards myself and others
• I value relating as something that I experience in and of itself

• I see the other person as a potential mirror for my own foibles and challenges and I for theirs.

Hopefully, the result of all of this is that by being conscious of myself in the relationship I can put more into it, get more out of it, and be more the kind of person that I aspire to be.

Tall order? Well, yes, I guess so, but what else are we to do? The conventional wisdom seems to only go so far. Some people do just fine with it, but lots of us don't.

Here's a chance to put it all into a perspective with lots of hope.

You can find a more complete (and hopefully clearer) discussion of conscious relationships at my website, www.better-relationships-over-50.com

More Sex Improves Marriages

More sex more of the time is a great thing for a marriage. At least it was for two couples who had been married for a number of years, who did it as an experiment, and wrote books about it.

Sounds like something that those of us in the over-50 set might give some though to. It is simply too easy as the years pass to add habit upon habit, assumption upon assumption, until we look in the mirror and wonder how we became who we appear to be now. When you think about the stages of relationships, you can see that while most of us find some comfortable level at which to settle, it is always possible to set the movement back in motion with some change.

Often this is one that happens to us. We have no choice. It is exciting to see someone who has made a choice and reaped rewards.

Their books are: Just Do It: How One Couple Turned Off the TV and Turned On Their Sex Lives for 101 Days (No Excuses!) by Doug Brown and 365 Nights: A Memoir of Intimacy by Charla Muller with Betsy Thorpe.

In an excellent recent article, WEB MD looks into just how more sex improves marriages.

Well, they quoted the authors of the books about how it had affected their lives and they talked to some experts about what might have been going on. Which is cool.

Just because it isn't the outcome of a study including 10,000 couples doesn't make it any less potentially valuable for you and me. I mean, what if 98% of couples got nothing out of it and I and you and I are in the 2%? Do we care?

I do wonder about how the general tendencies of male psychology and female psychology relative to sex.

As usual for me, I just don't know. On the surface of it I find myself thinking "great! let's go." When I stop for about 10 seconds I realize that there are a lot of things that I would have to do to really make that happen and I wonder how I would really deal with them. It is very unlikely that life just goes on as ever and you add in more sex.