Throw-Away Relationships

When you start seeing someone new does it ever cross your mind that if things get complicated, you’ll just break-up? Most individuals want to be in a relationship. It seems easier than being alone, but building a solid, rewarding relationship is a really hard thing to do. Maybe one of the hardest on this earth. The divorce rate reflects this.

Many adults grew up with divorced parents or had friends whose parents were divorced. Dissolving a marriage isn’t fun, but sometimes it’s the best option. So, maybe you’re single again, what then?

Being alone doesn’t usually feel good and isn’t good for your emotional or physical health. So, you get into another relationship and, typically, you get in fast. If the old relationship broke, get a new one. If a lover decides to leave, we go out the next weekend looking for another hook-up. We deal with loss and grief through an exchange mentality. If a pet dies, we’ll be at the pet store or breeders within a week.

Too-quick relationships often become disposable. In our culture, we cycle through relationships—mating up and breaking up with a speed that can rack up the marriages for a person fairly quickly. But we still want to marry, still want to believe in forever. Some say that we should work harder at marriage and that may be true, but part of the problem is how bad we are at choosing mates. Many of us put more thought into buying a car than whether or not to start up a thing with the guy from yoga class.

Divorce is ugly and painful, but the breaking-up isn’t the only problem. Some individuals fail to consider basic issues of compatibility when deciding to begin a relationship. Do your lifestyles mesh? This is where looking at values comes into play. Does one of you choose to indulge in recreational drugs on the weekend or excessive recreational drinking while the other is a teetotaler? Do you want the same kind of lives? Kids? No kids? Religion? Agnostic? Are you determined to make your first million before the age of 35, but he just wants a simple life?

Lifestyle compatibility is major when we’re talking creating a successful relationship. But that doesn’t mean you are the same people. Having different perspectives lends both a spice to life and helps to create a more balanced outlook. What you need is similar values; different personalities.

Getting into a relationship without either knowing the person (and I’m not talking Biblical knowing) or considering whether you share values is like using paper plates. If you eat regularly, you have to know you’re going to run through a number of plates.

Throw-a-way relationships can corrode your outlook and sap your energy. Before you jump into the next one, ask yourself how well you know this person. Do you know how she voted in the last election? Or whether she voted at all? How maxed are her credit cards and what’s her shoe size.

Before you jump into the next one, consider hedging your bets. Get to know the person you’re considering spending a part of your life with. It’ll result in fewer turnovers and less spinning of your wheels.

Stop Beating a Dead Horse

It’s true that we discard relationships more rapidly than previously, but maybe we’re just confused about relationships…. Jumping in and out of couplehood like living in a revolving door isn’t good. But staying in a going-nowhere relationship is pointless and, ultimately, bad for both of you.

The question is how you decide whether to invest or get out. This is tough when trying to make financial decisions and even harder when we’re talking about your heart. You need to ask yourself the difficult questions. Do you and the guy you’re with want similar lifestyles? (Both want kids, both have similar financial goals, both want to live in the city or the country. The same coast or somewhere in-between.)

Do you share similar ideas about using alcohol and chemicals recreationally? If you don’t see yourself in a life where alcohol is always present, don’t marry someone who wouldn’t consider celebrating without a drink. Individuals make assumptions about this aspect of life that can lead to significant relationship conflict. If you smoked pot when you were in high school or college, but think it’s irresponsible to continue doing this when you have kids, you need to make sure your partner agrees.

Do you have the same life beliefs? (Similar ideas about religion, family and how you spend your money.) How do you differentiate this from having dissimilar personalities, which is a good thing? What if you know you want very different lives and, yet, you find yourself holding on to the relationship, hoping the other person will change or that you’ll learn to deal with the conflict?

This is a tough question. If you’ve been with this person a while, you’ve come to care for her. While this affection is important to take into consideration, it probably won’t be enough to overcome major issues. So, what are the deal-breakers for you? This is what you need to ask yourself and you need to be brutally honest. Too often, we drift into relationships because of convenience or hormones. Sometimes, the biggest factor in who you date is that you don’t want to be alone.

I’m not suggesting you embrace singlehood forever. But if the relationship you’re in has no future, maybe it’s time to move on. Typically, the longer you stay, the worse the break-up will be and the harder the feelings. It’s too easy to get comfortable being unhappy or trying to get your partner to see the light. The light the way you see it, of course.

This can be massively more complicated if you share a child, but children don’t do well with unhappy parents. If there are children involved, see a competent therapist and figure out if the relationship can find a good ground. If you don’t have kids and your relationship isn’t working, don’t stay until one accidentally appears.

Shared values and lifestyles do not equal a good relationship, though. You might have the same values as your brother, but that doesn't mean you should date him. In a healthy, functional, fulfilling relationship, you have to like each other, balance each others’ personalities and both be willing to work on developing yourselves. But having conflicted core values is like building a house in a flood zone. It’s just a matter of time.

If you’re in a relationship where you’re going different places and want different things, cut your losses.

Sometimes They Won't Like You

Rejection feels bad, so much that some individuals live their entire lives avoiding others’ disapproval. Some people are very good at this though most individuals only have modest success—triumph in this area usually comes at the expense of their own needs and desires. Still, if you’ve spent your life as the “Golden Child”, the good employee, the best friend, then you may find yourself going to extremes to stay in others’ good graces.

The cost can be high.

Still, rejection hurts. You can really struggle when you’ve put a lot of effort into keep others happy and this doesn’t work. There are plenty who’ll tell you to give up on being concerned about how other people see you, but this is a hard habit to break.

What if rejection is completely unearned? If you date someone and they treat you badly or act disinterested, their negative response may very well be their issue. Or it may fall under the just not that into you category. Still, if you’re someone who works hard at being liked, this can be unsettling.

Aren’t we supposed to make others happy? Isn’t that part of love? Part of being a good person? And being liked feels so much better than not being liked. No question about it. The issue is one of balance. If you sacrifice too much for others’ approval, you’ll end up angry with yourself and with them. Sometimes, getting approval comes at a significant cost. You might need to tolerate some rejection. If a relationship requires you to consistently sacrifice your own desires and wishes, it becomes a job. One you don’t need.

Being aware of others is a good thing, but you need to live your life according to your own values. Others have their own agendas…they want what they want. Sometimes, even good people tick others off.

You need to live your life according to your own beliefs. This means you have to actually know what you believe. Spend some time thinking about what’s important to you, what you think makes a good person. Processing this enables you to have an internal compass. You bring yourself to each situation and it’s both exciting and scary to realize you’re deciding who you are. You get to—are responsible to—construct yourself. You grew up in a certain value-set and this has a lot of influence, but the bottom line is your decisions on how to live your life.

Rejection is a crappy part of life. But it’s somewhat non-negotiable. You can’t do away with it all together, no matter how much you want to. Others are not always going to understand your positions or actions…and even if they understand, they may disagree.

Living a good life means living by your own internal integrity. You need to know what you need. What you believe.

Relationship Power Differentials

Challenges abound when one partner in a relationship has more power than the other. This can be earning-power, celebrity-power, ethnicity-power or citizenship-power. Whatever gives one the upper hand. It may sound good to say that healthy relationships require equality, but our worst characteristics come out in the conflicts closest to our hearts. We fight the dirtiest when we’re fighting with the ones we love. We tend to go for the jugular when it feels like everything we have is on the line. This may not seem right, but it's the case more often than not.

Being a couple is complicated. In a time when there are more possibilities for you both, you have to negotiate how you interact. Relationship conflict is a given. If you have a relationship, you will sometimes have disagreements. Big differences in power just complicate these.

This only recently became an issue in relationships. Before this, power differentials have been built in and some people still mourn their loss. Men always made more money than women until the last few decades. In the past, only when women inherited money, or had some very unusual situation, did they have access to more money than their mates. The financial power differential was often cited as a reason for women to handle home and family responsibilities themselves—men had to make the living. This is no longer the case.

Let’s be honest--having less power than someone else feels bad. There may be a sense of security in being with a mate who has more options/more money/more skills, but that security comes with a price. When more-powerful partners are unhappy or angry with their mates, less-powerful partners can feel at-risk. There is a likelihood of thinking the one has to keep the other “happy”, no matter what. You want your mate to be happy. It’s the no matter what part that makes things sticky. Jumping through hoops to “make” someone feel whatever, isn’t good. This isn’t healthy thinking in a relationship. When one half of a couple is better-paid or better-educated or just “better” in some way, the other can feel like he’s always giving in. This will consequently lead to the less-powerful mate feeling reactive and defensive.

It’s hard from the other side, too. The partner with more power can feel apologetic for this power-differential, even when he’s done nothing to put his partner down or subjugate her. Then, too, it’s hard not to use power when you feel threatened somehow. Even partners who, in their calmer, saner moments, would never want their mate to feel less-than, can tend to use their power when in a really challenging relationship conflicts. Sometimes, it even seems like you’re trying to end the conflict by mentioning your power strength, like a mate who has a big-money job mentioning that she has to work all the time, so he should take care of all the chores. That seems reasonable, doesn’t it?

So, what to do? Bring differences in power out into the open. You have to talk about it, not just once, but frequently. In the beginning, when relationship skills are being honed, the two of you need to put the power thing on the table. If one makes more money or is from an ethnicity which has more societal value, this needs to be openly acknowledged. If the differences have a play in what’s going on between you, they need to be addressed.

The more powerful person doesn’t need to apologize all the time for the discrepancy, but she must be aware of not playing on the differences to her benefit.

Being aware of these conflicts helps you to deal with them in a healthy manner. If you can talk openly about these aspects of your experience, you have a better shot at building a fulfilling, nurturing relationship.

Marriage and Holiday Gifts

The holidays are gift time and this can be really tricky for couples. From the newspaper that comes heavy with sale circulars to television commercials that show beautiful people responding with beautiful emotions to very pricey items, the holidays can be a time we try to buy love. This doesn’t mean that you don’t really love your spouse or she doesn’t love you, but the whole gift thing can be massively complicated. It’s just about as challenging as Valentine’s Day.

There are several different ways to look at gift-giving between lovers. Some feel that “hinting” or outright telling their spouses what they want is the way to go. This group wants what they want and they don’t see any reason their mates shouldn’t give them something they’ll like. Others are of the “receive with an open heart” group and they feel strongly that people should happily receive whatever a loved one gives them.

The largest and most challenging group, however, feels that, if their loved ones actually know them, they should know what they want or, at the very least, what they would enjoy. Guess what I’d like! For these individuals, gifts represent how much their mates know them and how much thought goes into getting the right item.

Clearly, gift-giving can be very difficult.

Partners don’t always know which group their spouses fall into. If couples don’t get around to discussing their philosophies about handling money, their feelings about child-rearing or their hopes for how couplehood will actually work, they certainly won’t talk about what gifts mean to them. Too often, the holiday season becomes a time of misplaced efforts and disappointed hopes.

Your own philosophy about gifts may conflict with his. What if you enjoy going out and wandering the malls and just seeing what strikes you? You may enjoy the festive spirit of the season and feel that buying just the items on a list takes the fun out of giving gifts. If you’re with a man who thinks it only make sense to tell you exactly what he wants you to get him, you may feel all the fun is being taken out of the season. The spontaneous gift buyer hates buying off a list. The list-giver, however, may feel this is the only way to get something he’ll really like

Sadly, this sort of disconnect can lead to resentment and hard feelings between mates.

The trickiest gift style is the one that feels like a test. When individuals want their significant others to guess their deepest desires, disappointment is frequent. Shouldn’t soul mates know each other that well? If you’ve spent many years in a relationship and have worked toward really knowing one another, you’ve probably gained an understanding of your mate. Most likely, you can get a gift that satisfies your mate. But the idea of an instantaneous complete understanding of one another—soul mates—early in a relationship, doesn’t fit well into day-to-day reality.

If you can’t read your mate’s mind, the gift season can be a nightmare. Particularly, if she expects you to value what she values.

The healthiest way to deal with these kind of differences is to accept that both styles of finding gifts are fine. Some people resent having to compromise—viewing this as giving up something. Understanding each other’s differences, however, isn’t a giving up. Truly understanding each other takes some of the sacrifice out of finding the middle ground. If you know your partner’s gift style, you might want to work with both her style and your own.

There’s no harm in including both of your ways of celebrating with gifts. If your mate likes you to buy off a list, do that...and then add some small surprise of your own. If you’re supposed to guess which gift he’d most like, pay attention to his preferences. Most people aren’t secretive about what they enjoy. Valuing one another's gift style isn't reached instantaneously, but neither is a good relationship.

The solution to managing murky relationship waters has to do with understanding and appreciating each other’s differences. After all, you loved her for the ways she’s unique. Embrace that now.

Giving Gifts We Want to Get

Everyone moans about the rush of the season and about having too much to do at this time of year, but buying gifts can be fun. Credit card bills in January can be staggering, and you know this. After all, you’ve lived through a few Januarys by this time. But buying—especially for your kids—can be sooooo much fun.

You don’t want your kids to suffer the disappointments you had. You want more for them, and you’re probably too aware of the moments when you’ve not been the greatest parent. Parent-guilt is almost as universal as Catholic-guilt. Guiding a helpless infant into becoming a well-adjusted adult is a huge job, complicated by our own struggles and short-comings. Parenting is one of the hardest things we do in this life.

Especially at Christmas or Hanukkah, parents tend to throw financial caution to the wind and buy! The real challenge is to keep the buying about the kids. Everywhere you turn, there’s advice on how to keep the budget under control this time of year, but that’s hard. Not only do relatives and friends expect gifts, but your kids are making lists of things they must have and can’t live without, things their friends already have.

You can feel pressured to measure up—to your kids’ expectations and to their friends’ parents’ generosity. You want your kids to feel loved. You want them not to feel like dorks, so you try to get them whatever all the other kids have. Or what seems really cool to you.

In general, we tend to buy emotionally. Feelings are all tied up with the whole gift-giving thing. Sometimes, our feelings about ourselves. Sadly, we often buy for others what we think they want or what we’d want if we were kids or what we actually want now, regardless of our ages. Parents buy their kids video games they want to play, cars they want to drive and clothes they’d want to wear, if they still had sixteen year-old bodies.

Few other times are as easy to project your unfinished business on to your kids than gift-time. You load up the back of your SUV and use your credit cards till they’re hot to the touch. We forget to be aware of what the kid needs. If children don’t grow up with an understanding of money, it’s probably because we parents are trying to be Santa Claus year round. It’s easy to want for your own kids what you wished you’d had yourself.

Whether this means getting a parent-loan for them to attend a expensive out-of-state college, buying them a new Mustang as their first car or getting them every toy known to man, parents can give their kids too much. You love them, but are you thinking about what’s good for them when you hit the malls?

We tend to forget that children can be overwhelmed by stuff. They lose any concept of appreciating what they have if they have so much they can’t find it in their rooms. The real challenge as a parent is giving your children what they need. Knowing what they need is hard. When it comes to the gift-giving season, we want to feel good. We want to see happy, excited faces as they rip open wrapping paper. Most of us, go for the convenience foods of emotion—we buy stuff.

When you give a gift to a child, try not to focus on the wrapping-paper-flying-through-the-air frenzy. It is a bitter moment a month later when you find the gift you chose, bought, wrapped and are still paying for, at the bottom of the closet with the hundred other toys that don’t get played with. January can be harsh for reasons other than the the weather and the bills that come.

Resist.

Love your kids by not overwhelming them. Love them by practicing good financial habits yourself. After all, they may go to college someday and it’d be nice if you could help with that without hocking the house or going massively into debt.

Make the gifts about the recipient. Get your kids moderate Christmas or Hanukkah gifts. Get your spouse and your friends thoughtful, reasonable gifts that won’t have you filing bankruptcy in six months. Make the gifts about the person receiving them, not about you.

Kids and Christmas -- Does Fair Mean Same?

If you have more than one kid, you’ve probably worried about being fair as a parent. Having a parent who plays favorites can color a child’s early life. Ask any adult you know who their parents’ favorite kid was. They usually know and it still bugs them.

Kids and equality of parental love can be complicated.

When you’re a parent, you might tell your kids you love them equally, but does that mean always doing exactly the same for them all. Christmas gives you lots of opportunity to worry about this. Most parents enjoy getting gifts for their kids, but the issue of equality can make this complicated. Some parents respond to this by rigidly adhering to a “everyone gets the same” policy. Same pajamas, similar toys. You don’t want to play favorites, especially if you’ve grown up with an adult who did this with you.

Sorting the equality issue through can be challenging as a parent. There are several things you need to consider. First off, there are times you prefer one kid over the other. (It’s just you and I here--You can admit it to yourself.) If you love movies and one of your children loves watching them with you—you’re probably going to feel closer to the kid who shares your hobby. If you vote Republican and you’ve got a kid who worships George Bush—you feel connected and think the kid has her head on straight. If you love sports and your child, either plays sports or avidly watches sports with the same passion you do, you’re gonna really like this child.

It’s not that you love one more than the other, but you might feel closer to one at a given point, and closer to another kid at a different time. Emotions shift. This is normal. It doesn’t mean you don’t love all your kids. But you won’t always feel the same towards them. Get used to it and don’t freak out.

When it comes to parental love, though, children can evaluate equality as being reflected in what you give them. So, gift-giving can be difficult. Parents tend to worry and to try and give their kids the same, or spend the same money on them, but that’s probably not the best answer. Are your kids just alike? Do they have the same interests? Engage in the same activities?

Probably not.

If they’re not the same people, don’t treat them just alike. While it may be scary to think about investing differently in your kids, you need to do the tough thing. Respond to the individual child. Give her gifts appropriate to her, give her what she needs and wants. If your kids feel acknowledged and validated in their uniqueness, they’re probably not going to get crazy about one of them having an extra gift.

Love the kid, give the kid what’s good for that kid.