MARITAL MULTIPLE OFFENDERS

It is very natural to want a relationship, someone to cherish and comfort you. Someone who loves you and is committed to being with you. Most human beings want just this.

Relationships, though, are challenging, frustrating and maddening. They are the hardest thing we do in this world. Even the most highly intelligent individuals with great and wonderful I.Q.s and very expensive educations struggle with how to have a happy, fulfilling relationship.

But even though marriage is hard, we keep trying. Some marriages fail. As legal and societal restrictions have fallen, divorce is now common. Close to half of all marriages end in divorce and individuals who have multiple marriages, have an even higher incidence of divorce. Folks don’t usually give up after just one or two, either. They keep trying. Few things are more attractive than a one-on-one commitment. Given the human desire to form connections, it is understandable that lots of people are racking up lots of marriages.

The real challenge is not to carry bad, dysfunctional habits and expectations from one marriage to another. Naturally, you have grievances with your spouse and you have a right to these. After all, your former mates were far from perfect. They had issues (as does your current spouse).
The hardest part of a hard challenge is looking at yourself. Your issues. Your stumbling blocks. You are, if you look at it, the common denominator in all your marriages. This doesn’t mean you’re a bad person or that you should just accept that you’ll be alone for the rest of your life. The important thing to remember is that every relationship—and it’s failure—has lessons for you. Things you can learn about yourself.

It may be painful—and hard not to beat yourself up—but seeing your own bad habits can help you make different choices on the next go-around.

From personal habits to communication issues, you need to look at yourself and what you’ve contributed to your failed relationships. This is hard, but vital. Understanding your own challenges and addressing these improves your life and your future interactions with others. Whether you marry twice or a dozen times, you need to see what you’ve offered in the mix.

Remember, success in marriage isn’t based on just finding the right person. You have to be the right person, too.

THE HOMEWORK POWER STRUGGLE

If you care about theirhomework more than the kids do, there’s a problem. This is the kids’ issue, not yours. It’s not about whether you’re a good or a bad parent. It’s about the kid. Even really great parents have sometimes have kids who do poorly in school.

Trying to wrestle your kids into doing homework is exhausting. Unless you’ve got the kind of child who eagerly completes the assignments given, you’ve probably struggled with this. Striking a balance between being an indifferent parent and an over-involved helicopter parent is the challenge.

Homework is the kid’s business, not yours.

It is appropriate for parents to set up a firm home structure, which allows for time to complete homework and it is appropriate to limit access to electronics during this time. Parents can also stress that, while the assignments are the kids’ responsibility, there can be longterm, life consequences to not doing these. This is the parental role in stressing the importance of homework. You don’t need to blow off the importance of this in kids lives, but you don’t need to make getting it done your business, either.

Parents can be helpful in many ways and can certainly be involved, but children have to decide if they care about their grades. They get confused when their school work seems to be more about you than them. Power struggles—you know the threatening, yelling, grounding part—leads to this confusion.

Homework is their business.

You can be around to be supportive, if they need help. You can arrange tutors in areas where they’re weak. You can certainly find help if the child has a significant learning issue. You can’t, however, make your child care about doing well in school. If you punish them for unfinished assignments, you’re missing the point. School success can only be the result of children deciding to succeed.

You need to let them fail. You can talk--without a great deal of emotion--about the difficulty in trying to find a good job without an education. But you need to let them decide. This is a massively important life lesson.

It may sound horrible, but failure provides a life lesson that everyone needs to learn. Failure and the fear of failing can motivate a change in the way your children deal with their school work. They have to decide if school success is important to them. Your job is to point out the value of graduating high school and college and then get out of the way. Do this early in the child’s academic life, rather than waiting until high school, when the consequences are more life-altering.

Remember, kids need to make their own experiences. This is massively important in life overall and really pivotal in academic achievement. Applying parental pressure to the homework dilemma doesn’t solve the problem. The biggest lesson kids need to learn is to assume responsibility for their own school achievements.

GOODBYE HURTS, BUT CHEATING HURTS WORSE

Blocked relationships are like clogged plumbing—the emotional stuff has to go somewhere. If you’re in a relationship with issues that have been unresolved for a long time, you’re vulnerable to falling into something with someone else. The longer your primary relationship goes unresolved, the more likely this is to happen.

Leaving an unhappy relationship can seem too jarring and too absolute, though. You probably swing back and forth between hope and frustration. One week everything is better and you hope that the two of you have gotten over your conflicts; the next week you’ll be having the same conflicts and running through the same arguments. But leaving seems very final.

After all, you love this person, even if you’re not in love anymore. You have history with her or him. You may share children and a legal tie of marriage. You shared some good times. And even if you get really, really mad at him now and get very tired of the arguments (or the chilly non-arguments), you don’t wish bad things on him. You don’t want him to die.
If the love is gone, though, you need to go.

If your emotional plumbing is blocked, you are more vulnerable to finding affection elsewhere. Developing feelings for a different someone is likely and this only makes your situation worse. You may think you can keep this all going and limp along till the children are older or your parents die(and won’t be upset at your divorce). You might think that what your mate doesn’t know won’t hurt her, but secrets have a way of leaking out. If you’re not in your relationship, you’re not in the relationship.

Even if you squeak by with something on the side, you’ll eventually be found out and, then things get really ugly.

Infidelity makes everything even more difficult for your current mate. Breaking up is always hard to do; it’s even harder when the one who has been committed to you, falls in love with someone else. Being cheated on sucks.

Not everyone with a dysfunctional relationship cheats, but too often this is the case. Even if you don’t get involved with a new person, staying in an unhappy relationship isn’t good for anyone.
Get help or get gone. You might possibly do both, but one way or the other, don’t just live in limbo. Don’t think you can deal with it until your children get older (unhappy relationships still effect kids) or try to get your jollies through work or friendships.

Bad relationships need to get better or they need to be put to rest. If you can’t resolve the issues on your own, get help. You deserve a happy life and so does your mate.

Doing Your Half

You’ve probably heard that relationships sometimes require you to give 110%. It is true that you sometimes give more when your mate is struggling, but you need to also know that you don’t get to tell your significant other what to do. The most challenging part of love is that, while you are impacted by the loved one’s choices, you don’t get to direct these.

Yes, I know that doesn’t seem fair, but it is what it is.

If your partner makes choices that are detrimental to the relationship—cheats, adopts dangerous habits or ignores your existence—you always have the option to leave the relationship. You may owe this to yourself, in fact. But you still don’t get to tell him how to live or the choices he should and shouldn’t make. You may want to argue about this and you might insist that if you adjust your behavior because he doesn’t like it, he should have to do the same for you.

He doesn’t. But then, you don’t have to stay.

Actions in relationship will effect the relationship. This is a given. Love may be unconditional, but relationships are not. The choices both you and your partner make will either foster or destroy the relationship. There are consequences to ignoring or disregarding your partner’s opinions and feelings and vice versa. But you still don’t get to make him or her behave a certain way to make sure you feel safe and loved.

It just doesn’t work this way. Your partner must decide her own behavior based on the results she desires, as you must behave to encourage what you want in the relationship.

Not getting to tell him what to do doesn’t mean you don’t have any say-so in the relationship, though. You have a lot. You get to make your own choices and you decide if you’re remaining in the relationship, or getting out. You need to know that your power lies in what you do and how you act, not in yelling at him if he doesn’t return your calls(or whatever). Your power is in how you conduct your half of the relationship. Look carefully at the actions your taking. These are what empower you.

You might want to argue that you’re playing fair, but she isn’t. Well, then, you need to tell her the impact her choices are making on you. You get to say "When you do this____, I feel ____." You get to communicate your feelings. Be aware that you get to end the relationship, if you’re not getting as much from it as it is costing you emotionally. You get to leave, if you need to.

But loss feels sucky. You love your partner or you wouldn’t be here. You might even have kids together or share a mortgage. You’ve probably got history. You don’t want to leave, you just want things to be better. You want him to be better. Possibly you’ve found yourself longing for things to be like they "used to be."

That doesn’t make it so, though. All your yelling, withholding sex and threatening to leave isn’t as powerful as you doing your half. Leave if you need to leave. It’s like voting with your feet. But don’t forget to look at your own actions and don’t justify these by saying she did it first.
Don’t threaten, though. That has the same result as the boy crying wolf. Say what the impact the behavior has on you; listen hard to your partner’s feelings(even when these seem accusatory) and remember to do your half.

Then, if you need to leave, leave.

Good Parent / Bad Parent?

Don’t think you can judge whether or not you’ve been a good parent by the choices your children make. It may seem like your parenting success should have a clear outcome, but that’s not the case. The children of really terrific parents sometimes make really bad choices.

The goal is simple: happy, healthy, well-behaved children who grow up with high self-esteem and lots of friends, go to college and then embark on successful careers. But you can put a lot of energy and effort into this and still not get the outcome for which you were hoping. Parenting is one of the hardest jobs on earth. You’re probably really trying to do it right.

You may often feel like a total failure.

While some people don’t seem to care about making good parenting decisions(you know the ones), most parents worry a lot about how they’re doing in this area. Parenting books populate store shelves and television news program frequently feature stories about how-to and how-not-to raise your children. Parenting is such a huge job and so many people struggle with it that a popular television reality television show features frustrated parents and their out-of-control brats both being chastised by a super-nanny.

There are few demanding jobs at which it seems so easy to fail as parenting. The question you need to ask yourself is: Are you measuring your success with the right yardstick?

You may feel judged as a bad parent when your child throws a tantrum in a grocery store or kicks the back of another patron’s seat at the movies or gets bad grades in school. You might think you look like a parenting failure. It might, in fact, feel like other people always have opinions about what you should be doing with your kids (of course, you’re never doing whatever this is).

But even when you’re trying your hardest, your kids may struggle. So, how does this work?

It is a little recognized fact that children, to a certain degree, get to choose their own paths. Parenting has a major impact, but it’s not like steering a car--you turn the wheel to the left and the kid goes left. You can be a loving parent and give your children your attention and love and your kids still may make bad choices.

They get to do this. They get to fail miserably. They get to create their struggles by heading in really lousy directions.

Sometimes, this has nothing to do with you. The only way to measure how successful you are as a parent is to look at your own behavior. Good parenting doesn’t automatically lead to good outcomes. Kids have minds of their own and, while you want them to think for themselves, it also can make you crazy.

So, ask yourself if you’ve put your children’s needs at a high priority. Have you let them deal with their own lessons rather than stepping in to save them from the consequences of their actions? When they’re young, you keep them from running out in front of cars. When they’re in high school and cheat on a test, however, you don’t rescue them. Allowing them to experience consequences when they make bad choices is hard, but still important to children’s learning process.

Remember, you can’t take credit for their successes, only your own. And you certainly can’t blame yourself for their failures.

Individuals make choices. Therein, lies our power.

Everyone Needs to Win

This is Relationship 101. No one likes to lose. Losing sucks and if you feel like your mate wins every argument, you won’t stay there long. Some folks try to deal with this winning-losing issue by never fighting, but this just doesn’t work.

Like it or hate it, all relationships have conflict. Even if you search for a mate with whom you share all values and even if you try to share all thoughts/perspectives/opinions, you still won’t agree about everything. Disagreeing about issues is natural and won’t kill a relationship, believe it or not. Having differing views of life issues isn’t always a bad thing. You need someone of the other end of the teeter totter.

It is bad, though, when your arguments always end with one person as the victor or if one person just agrees. Not only does this set the winner up with an incomplete view of things, it leaves the silent, loser half of the relationship feeling, well, like a loser. This is a pretty crummy place to be, particularly if you feel like you're always the loser.

While relationships can function for a while with this dynamic, eventually the loser gets tired of being the loser. Even if the mad feelings don’t stack up and choke the relationship right away, loser-ness will eventually, quietly kill the love. It just dies.

Everyone needs to feel like their point of view is acknowledged and valued. Winning an argument can be as simple as having your mate own up to the fact that you have a point. Apologies are nice, too, but only when they’re sincere. You can’t just pull an apology out every time you’re fighting. This gets old.

Sometimes, the winner in a relationship will claim that he or she just naturally has more logic or common sense or whatever. Don’t be hooked in by this admittedly comfortable thought. Sometimes, you are wrong. That’s just reality. Not always, but every now and then.

It is important to see that both of you have valuable contributions to the relationship. Even when you disagree, you’re both usually partly right. This is typically easier to see when you assess what you both want—i.e. even if you argue about money, you both want to be out of debt, you both want your in-laws to get along, you both want both of you to be happy in your jobs, you both want your children to do well. Whatever.

The point is that you’re not so far apart on most issues. You may have different concerns and you certainly will have different things that you see as important. The truth is that these things are both important. Maybe to greater or lesser degrees, but still both concerns are, well, concerning.

Being right sometimes is massively important, though. Don’t just give in because you don’t like the messiness of fighting. Arguing isn’t usually fun, but talking about your different opinions, bringing different views to the table, that’s important.

Just make sure everyone is hearing and heard. Losing all the time really hurts the relationship. If you’re both sharing your take on things, you both have a say in the relationship. This will take effort, but it pays off. Don’t give up. Just remember teeter totter. It’s more fun when someone’s on the other end.

Feeling Inadequate

Don’t be too harsh with yourself. While you are aren’t perfect, you aren’t horrible, either. You’re actually a lot more capable than you think.

Self-image is a difficult area for most. You probably started of life with some glaring inaccuracies—things your parents said(whether they meant these to be taken to heart or not), things you heard from unkind classmates or those things you decided about yourself based on a small child’s limited reality.

You were a kid and you didn’t see yourself or the world fully.

Individuals frequently believe things about themselves that are just untrue. Finding objectivity when you’re looking at yourself can be very challenging. You may have very truthful, very honest people telling you good things about yourself and you will tell yourself they’re just being nice.

Raising self-esteem requires you to do your best to shake up and re-examine your beliefs about yourself. It also requires you to take action. You need to walk toward your conflicts and challenges and prove to yourself that you are adequate and capable by handling these. You can do this. Yes, you goof up sometimes. You won’t always handle things the way you later wish you had, but you won’t mess up every time. When you do make mistakes, these usually aren't as horrible as you’ve feared.

It’s hugely important to note your successes. Sometimes you are right, you do well, you make the right choice. Don’t miss the moments you make the best decision. Sometimes, you do the right thing, you see the potential mistakes in judgment before you jump. Every now and then, you make a home run.

Don’t miss it. Don’t dismiss it.

Yes, you’ll also make mistakes, too. Screwing up is part of the process of living. Everyone blows it sometimes. This is unavoidable and simply a part of moving through life. Don’t expect yourself to be perfect. Mistakes will be made; the real challenge is to learn from them. A poor choice or series of choices that lead you to learn isn’t a waste, at all.

Failure is in not risking, not believing in yourself enough to take the plunge. Believe in yourself, even when it’s hard. Even when you’ve messed up before. You aren’t nearly as inadequate as you think.