Is Heterosexuality AnUnsolvable Relationship Problem?

I received to following piece by e-mail today. It was intended to be funny and it is until you think about it for more than about 10 seconds.



Diary for Two


HER DIARY:

Tonight: I thought my husband was acting weird. We had made plans to meet at a bar to have a drink.

I was shopping with my friends all day long, so I thought he was upset at the fact that I was a bit late, but he made no comment on it.

Conversation was not flowing, so I suggested that we go somewhere quiet so we could talk. He agreed, but he did not say much.

I asked him what was wrong; he said, "Nothing."

I asked him if it was my fault that he was upset. He said he was not upset, that it had nothing to do with me, and not to worry about it.

On the way home, told him that I loved him. He smiled slightly, and kept driving. I cannot explain his behavior. I do not know why he did not say, "I love you, too."

When we got home, I felt as if I had lost him completely, as if he wanted nothing to do with me anymore. He just sat there quietly, and watched TV He continued to seem distant and absent.

Finally, with silence all around us, I decided to go to bed. About 15 minutes later, he came to bed. To my surprise, he responded to my caress, and we made love.

However, I still felt that he was distracted, and his thoughts were somewhere else. He fell asleep - I cried. I do not know what to do.

I am almost sure that his thoughts are with someone else. My life is a disaster.

HIS DIARY:

Missed a big deer today, but at least I got laid.

Is Working On Relationship Problems the Wrong Way to Go?

Relationship problems are real attention grabbers.

It's hard not to figure that if I could just work this or that thing out, get her to stop do this, start doing that, maybe even do some starting or stopping of a few things myself (or maybe not), then life would be good. Wouldn't it?

Well, maybe, maybe not, but probably not. In fact, I am convinced that hashing out problems the way most of us go at it is a dead end. A miserable dead end at that.

Why? There are different ideas on that that you can check out here.

But the general idea is that relationship problems, like ideas of compatibility, are a good indication that something is wrong. It's just that trying to solve them rarely works (never? nothing never happens, but almost never).

Relationships and Compatibility

In places where you need a reason to file for divorce, incompatibility is often one of the reasons you can use.

Makes sense. "We just don't like the same things, value the same things, act the same way."

The logic breaks down at the same place that the logic about gender differences being a cause of relationship failure. Same sex couples don't all stay together forever in perfect harmony and opposite sex couples don't all fall apart. Likewise, couples who are compatible in many ways still don't all stay together and ones who appear wildly incompatible can have very strong, rewarding, lasting relationships.

So what gives with the idea of compatibility?

Watch yourself and people around you for the times when one or both people in the relationship are saying "We just aren't compatible." Notice how often this conclusion shows up when things aren't going well in the relationship and the person saying it is discouraged and not sure what to do about it.

For myself and those I can observe, this appears to usually be the case. The place where we go off track, I think, is forgetting how distorted our abilities of thought, analysis, and problemsolving are when we are feeling down.

I know that if I can "cool my jets" until my general mood is more positive, that incompatibility usually returns to refreshing difference. Right where it ought to be in a healthy, loving relationship.

For more on this you can look, here.