“Marriage
Seminar”
Kay and I agreed to be facilitators
at a marriage seminar that was sponsored by our church. The good thing about
being a facilitator is that you don’t need to be all that qualified.
My job was to tell each individual in
our group when it was his or her turn to answer a question from a booklet. It
was Kay’s job to tell speakers when their two minutes were up. There are some
women, uh, spouses who can talk the sheetrock off a wall. With five couples in
a group, there’s no time for that. The time-keepers husband would come unglued.
One major rule about each session
had to do with saying only positive things about your spouse. And, you could
only talk about “yourself” in relation to your spouse. If anyone said anything
negative about her husband or his girlfriend, it was my job to put a stop to
it. And when each person finished responding to a question, everyone in the
group had to say “Thank you,” to make the person feel good about what was said.
With these strict rules, you can
surmise that the seminar was not geared toward marriages that were on their
last leg. Facilitators are not qualified to handle stuff like that. Even if it’s
their marriage that’s in a nosedive. The goal of this program was to make
spouses more aware of their mates’ feelings. The way it was put to us is that
we were encouraging “acceptance” of one another.
Turns out, our speaker, Dr. Jon
Anderson, said that you can’t change your mate. – Did you know that? If you try
to change your spouse, the effort will result in both of you liking one another
less. Apparently, you can’t shame or nag a person into changing. With enough
firepower you can alter their behavior, but it will cost the both of you love
for one another.
Take Kay, for example. Before we
married I never noticed that she had a problem putting things away. Perhaps,
before marriage, she was trying to hide her aggravating behavior from me. Once
we married, I began noticing things about her that would register on my Peeve Meter. She could not put
away her cereal bowl. It would end up on a coffee table, kitchen counter, or
the hood of the car.
The girl could not reseal a loaf of
bread. It would end up opened on the counter. When I reminded her of it, she’d
say, “I’ll take care of it later.” That was a bit off-putting, because Kay’s
definition of “later” is “whenever.” My nagging didn’t help. It usually just
made her cry. Kay and I never argued. We couldn’t because it made her cry. I
can’t bear the thought that I made a sweet person cry. That’s why I would’ve
made a horrible Daddy.
Over the years, I accepted Kay’s
propensity for leaving stuff out. I didn’t like it, but I accepted it. Eventually,
I accepted it without feeling bad about it. It was just something Kay did, and
I loved her too much to let it bother me. That’s called “acceptance.” And, yes,
there is spousal behavior that a person should never accept. Leaving a cereal
bowl on the countertop is not one of ‘em… which is fortunate, because Kay has
continued to do stuff like that over a 46-year period. .
There may be things about me that
Kay has learned to tolerate. It’s unlikely, but possible. She didn’t mention
anything to the group, because we couldn’t say anything negative about one
another. It was an event where each spouse had to come up with things she could
do to improve the marriage. I mean, “he or she” could do.
The only way one’s marriage can grow
is through the “acceptance” each mate has for the other. The only way that can
happen is if, after every decision, they believe that the both of them were
winners. True, that happens only on the
planet Nirvana. However, here on Earth, we should each try to move in that
direction.
By the way, in the seminar we were
assigned homework on the first night. That was not mentioned when I signed-on
to facilitate. The assignment involved a list of 11 questions concerning your
mate that you had answer. For example:
Who is her favorite relative? What does she most like about me? What does she
fear most in life? – That kind of stuff. We each graded the other. The highest
score possible was 33. Kay scored 29 and I got a 26. Dr. Anderson later told us
that the spouse with the lower score was the winner, because he or she graded
the other more leniently. Boy, was that ever the truth. Kay cut me no slack.
What I learned from our experience is
that it’s best Kay and I not over-think our marriage. Right now we’re in a good
place, and if we start trying to come up with ideas to make things better,
we’ll get self-conscious about stuff and end up having to take the next course
titled “Nine Essentials of Lifelong Love.” If I have to try to concentrate on
nine of anything, I’ll end up in cuffs.
As is, there is nothing Kay does
that upsets me. And, she could say the same thing. -- There’s nothing she does
that upsets me.
end
Mark can be
contacted at hayter.mark@gmail.com.
An archive of Hayter’s articles can be found at http://markhayterscolumn.blogspot.com
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