Improve Your Marriage by Letting Go of Myths

Hi folks!  I would like to introduce you to a wonderful and vibrant organization called Chat, Chew, and Chocolate.  It is an award winning company that helps busy women lead a lifestyle that is filled with balance and fun. I was honored when CEO Dena Patton asked me to write a monthly column on marriage for their website.  Each month I will be presenting a new author who will share wisdom about different aspects of marriage.

Here’s a sneak preview!

Improve Your Marriage by Letting Go of Myths

Can we talk?  Can we sit down and pour a cup of coffee, rich and dark with an aroma that fills the kitchen, and agree to get real about marriage while we pass the creamer back and forth?  Any of us who have been married a while knows that these can be some of the most fruitful therapy sessions. Girlfriends sharing, brave and deep.  You tell me your joys and pains and I’ll match you, even one up you if I can.  We’ll test the waters of our trust by first sharing the moments that make love grand, and then we’ll venture through the awkward silence that will surely follow the first mention of pain, the first acknowledgment that marriage is sometimes lonely and unpredictable.

I am of the ilk that there are no real marriage experts. All of us are searching. Oh sure, there may be learned people out there that can help us become better communicators, help us understand ours and our mate’s personality types, help us move from inaction to action in unexpected circumstances that have caused us to stand still.  But no one is an expert in your marriage except for you and your spouse.  The two of you are unique in every way and the dynamics of your partnership, where one of you ends and the other begins, can only be known by you.

Though I am not unrealistic and understand that some unions must end for the health and well being of a couple, I do believe in marriage overall.  It is a sacred vow, even though this promise to honor and love a person through thick and thin is proclaimed when we have no concept of what “thin” is going to look like as the years unfold. Thin can get to a sheet of ice, translucent parchment.

There is plenty of literature out there to defend the life altering decision to end a marriage.  But sometimes, we don’t want it to end, not really.  We don’t want to split up our family, ask our children to shuttle between worlds.   Sometimes we are just lost and lonely, or wandering because life has dealt us a paralyzing sucker punch.  We want to return to love and just don’t know how.

Consider this column a safe haven where we can safely come to chat and chew on marriage.  The tough times.  What we have gone through, and why we have stayed.  The unexpected fruits of staying as shared by a variety of women who have stories to tell and wisdom to share.  Wisdom that may challenge you to think outside the box, to allow yourself a paradigm shift because that’s what it takes to weather tough times.

Our first topic introduces us to the inherent dangers of certain myths that our culture holds dear. Prince Charming, happily ever after, and the white picket fence are just a few of the phrases that come to mind. Transforming a marriage is, sometimes, about letting go of these images.  Recognizing the end of a chapter when it presents itself and finding a way to move on, together.

Though it was not easy, one of the myths that my husband and I let go of was the whole concept of the American Dream. As I discuss in Halfway to Each Other: How a Year in Italy Brought our Family Home, the glossy magazine ordained lifestyle we were working long hours to achieve was the very thing that was getting in the way of our ability to love each other effectively. By stepping completely outside of that lifestyle and moving our family to Italy, we were able to see, more clearly, the downfalls of abundance. Living simply enabled us to create the emotional space needed to reconnect and remember that taking care of each other was more important than taking care of all of the things we had accumulated along the way.

I am excited to present Laura Munson and thank her for being my first guest to the CCC community.  Her powerful memoir, This is Not the Story You Think it Is, recounts a painful time in her marriage and how she and her husband worked through it.

Laura delivers her story with courage and insight. This is what she had this to say about letting go.

“One of the things we fear most is being told we are unloved.  Especially twenty years into a marriage that for the most part, we feel proud of.  My husband and I had existed in the normal ebb and flow of married life:  we’d been happy and unhappy together.  It seemed important to know how to do both.  We’d never really signed up for the happily-ever-after myth.  Or had we?

When my husband announced that he no longer loved me and wanted to move out, I was stunned.  I knew that he was in deep despair over his failing job, I knew he was wildly frustrated that my books were not getting published with all my efforts and his years of support…but I never saw his woe turning against all that we’d created together.  Years of love, adventures, intimacy, laughs.  Two happy healthy kids.  Land in Montana.  Our dream house.  That’s what mattered, right?  We could survive failing careers, couldn’t we?  We’d be the ones to land on our feet, right?  The look in his eyes told me that his love came with a cap on it, and that cap had to do with success.  That was the piece in our wedding vows I’d missed.  His “worse” was much less worse than mine.  Had I been standing at that altar vowing to love a quadriplegic in a wheel chair, when he was vowing to be married to anything short of a New York Times bestselling author, but not too short thereof?  Was he vowing to a permanently twenty year old body when I was picturing us old and grey and wrinkly, on a front porch?  How much had myth run our relationship?  Because to me, love was about holding the space for our partner’s hard times.  Of course, I had my deal breakers.  But being married to a man in financial ruin was not one of them, especially because I knew how hard he worked.

In my heart, I knew what I was up against.  He was transferring his pain onto me.  Rather than being responsible for his own emotions, he’d decided to blame me and run.  I knew this man.  This was not his style.  He was in deep crisis and I knew that my reacting to his drama would only make things worse.  So I said, “I don’t buy it.  What can we do to give you the distance you need so you can heal through this season of your life without taking down the family?”  Love could survive finances, couldn’t it?  Shouldn’t it?  The word should:  not a good one in the field of myth-busting.

Click here to read the rest of the article!

Endings as Beginnings

If you don’t already know Laura Munson, it is my extreme pleasure to introduce her to you.  In April of 2010, Laura published a memoir recounting a tough time in her marriage called This Is Not the Story You Think It Is. Her inspiring story is an international bestseller, landing on the New York Times bestseller list in its first week of publication. The short version was published in The New York Times “Modern Love”  section, the responses to which crashed the New York Times website.

Laura continues to inspire through her countless magazine articles, a great blog, These Here Hills, and a monthly newsletter called HAVEN.  (Click here to sign up for her newsletter!)

I was honored when Laura asked me to partner with her for this month’s HAVEN to explore the throught provoking theme: With every ending, there is a beginning.  Please enjoy these two essays and feel free to comment and explore this inspiring topic further on our blogs.  Let’s get the conversation going!  We would both love to hear from you~

Here are the essays from this month’s Haven:

Windows

by Laura Munson

Part of the beauty of having a published book is meeting other writers who have long been hard at work at your shared craft, swapping stories from what otherwise is a very insular, quiet life– except of course, during book promo. My new friend Susan Pohlman knows all about both. But more than that, she knows what it is to write a memoir about a rough time in her marriage. To have taken the very deliberate journey not only to move her family to Italy for a year in hopes of saving her marriage, but to have written through her pain and discovery in her wonderful memoir: Halfway to Each Other.

We spoke on the phone yesterday for almost two hours, and one of the things which sparked a host of sharing and collective understanding had to do with the notion of endings being beginnings. People ask me all the time how I could possibly not take my husband’s words, “I don’t love you anymore” personally. How I could keep from engaging the drama around those words, and how I could practice empathy and even forgiveness with him. I’ve thought long and hard about it, and I’ve learned a lot about myself in this year of interviews and subsequent reflection. Yes, I loved this man. No, I did not believe he truly had run dry of love for me. Yes, I saw this as a crisis of his own soul brought on by years of career failure, fear, and desperation. But there’s another component of this that I have left out of most of my interviews, and which perhaps I’ve only just now landed upon.

In that moment when he made that heartbreaking proclamation, I felt a deep sense of relief.  And even of gratitude.  He had come to the end of something.  And when we come to the end of something, that’s when things happen.  For good or bad.  That’s when there is a window in which change and healing can take place.  Susan and Tim had come to the end of their marriage as they knew it and they took a stand for it by changing their lives– selling their house, surrendering their belongings– going on an epic journey together with their children.  There are people who talk about that sort of drastic move.  And people who actually do it.  They did it, and it provided that window and that healing.

I didn’t want to be with a man who was telling himself inwardly that he didn’t love me anymore. When he spoke it, it gave us that window.  We healed through that time right here in our own home, but it was still a deliberate act he performed in speaking those words.  And a deliberate act on my part to give him the space he needed to work through his crisis.  It might seem cowardly or cruel of him to utter those words, but I never viewed it like that.  He was putting the end to a stage of our marriage that no longer fed him.  And in that act, he found a renewed love.  When I told him that I didn’t buy it—that I really felt this was about his relationship with himself and that he was transferring his own feelings toward himself onto me, he could have said, “Nope.  I don’t care what you think. I’m out of here.”  But he didn’t.  He saw the window.

 

Letting Go

by Susan Pohlman

Writers need other writers. We are called to the same tribe on this lovely planet, scribes who have been given the exquisite burden of capturing the human condition in all of its glories and shames on paper. We can’t help ourselves. Sometimes our stories are thrust into the general consciousness of society, and sometimes they sit quietly in drawers and upon shelves waiting to be summoned.

Our genres connect us. It is a thrill for me to meet another writer who is inspired by similar truths. Like hikers who have traversed an unexplored canyon from opposite sides, we have arrived at the same meadow. Sitting down to talk of our journeys is one of the experiences that makes the long hours of pecking away at the computer well worth it.

I had the pleasure of chatting with one such writer, Laura Munson, author of This is Not The Story You Think It Is. What was supposed to be a quick phone call of introduction turned into a lengthy conversation that I will hold close. We shared our experiences of family life and why we chose to fight for our marriages rather than flee when bitter disillusionment came knocking on the door.

loved her book. I loved that she held firm to her own core. Like the strong mast of a sail boat in a raging storm at sea, she did not break. Though she would endure conversations that no wife wants to hear and rejections that pierced her heart, she understood that there are times when a spouse’s words reflect the pain in his own soul, not hers. She was willing to give her husband time and space and did not internalize that decision as weakness. Rather, such choices exhibit great emotional and spiritual strength and a willingness to surrender to outcomes unknown. The exact qualities that marriage takes sometimes. It is familiar territory.

In May of 2003, while hosting a business trip to Italy, my husband and I took a break from entertaining clients and walked along the Ligurian sea where Christopher Columbus had learned to sail as a boy. The elegant beauty of Santa Margherita lulled us into silence as we ambled along, lost in our own thoughts. We had been married eighteen years, had two beautiful children, and a cozy home on the outskirts of Los Angeles.

From the outside, our lives were idyllic, but on the inside we were painfully disconnected and confused. Neither one of us could figure out (and trust me, we tried every avenue known to man) why we had become so miserable and lonely together. I knew that our days were numbered since I had quietly, and with paralyzing despair, hired a lawyer prior to our trip. What I did not know was that a mere five minutes in the future my husband, Tim, would utter the phrase that would open a window for us, and change our lives forever. He stopped, asked me to move my empty gaze from the blue of the sea to the blue of his tear filled eyes and said, “I could live here.”

These four simple words began a gut wrenching, two day conversation that ended with our signatures on a year’s lease to an apartment in Genoa-Nervi. Tim would quit his job, we would sell our house, and move our family to Italy. We would choose to regard our past eighteen years together with reverence even though our emotions were roiling below the surface heated by years of accumulated hurts and disappointments. We would start over. Maintaining the sanctity of our family, we decided, was worth trying. It was irrational, ridiculous, reckless and the best decision of our lives.

Two months later we were living in Italy. Our children, Katie (14) and Matt (11) were doubtful and fearful at first, but as we slowly slipped out of the constraints of our fast-paced Los Angeles lifestyle, we found something far sweeter. We traded in the American Dream for a dream of our own as we slowly realized that our lifestyle in Los Angeles had started, at some unknown point, to work in opposition to the values we held dear. A fine line that we had failed to notice as we ran across it, to-do lists in clenched fists.

By drastically simplifying our lives, struggling to learn a foreign language and navigating our new Italian village lifestyle, we learned what it felt like to be a family again. The challenge put us all back on the same side of the fence. Teamwork and active problem solving in a new culture provided opportunities for intimacy and abundant humor. It was both therapeutic and exhilarating.

We realized that over planning our family’s life had stifled the excitement of discovery. Dawn to midnight schedules that had filled each day extinguished any possibility of happenstance. Letting go of shoulds and musts and adopting an attitude of “let’s see where this takes us” allowed for the rebirth of enchantment and delight, two important elements that feed one’s soul. Adventure became a surprisingly powerful and restorative way of life. It forced us to live in the moment and be present for each other.

The experience was beyond our wildest imaginings and taught me many things. Some are the same truths that Laura and I shared on our phone call. Besides the fact that we both found Italy to be the land of enchantment, we agreed that sometimes beginnings are disguised as endings. That relationships are not a destination but about transformation, and if we choose to see the closing of a chapter for what it is, it doesn’t have to destroy the family.

The ending may be the end of a dream, the end of a career, the end of a lifestyle, or the realization that reality doesn’t quite match what we always thought our lives would look like. And that ending might be messy. It might throw the family off its axis as it hurls tough words and inconvenient truths across the very room where your first child was conceived. But endings end, too. And that’s where the magic can happen if we open our hearts to possibility and unforeseen circumstance that may decide to just lay its beautiful self before us like a furnished apartment overlooking the Ligurian Sea.

Endings and beginnings are two sides of the same coin. Sometimes, especially when the stakes are great and we are deeply hurting, the only thing that keeps us from flipping the coin over is fear. It is important that, as couples, we cultivate courage and embrace the whole of marriage. Appreciating that the good times allow for celebration and the tough times offer unimaginable opportunity for growth.

Where are the endings and beginnings in your life?  Where are the windows and what would happen if you opened them and took in that first breath of transformation?  Please  feel free to share your own stories and questions. We will both be here to read and reply.

~Wishing new beginnings to all in 2011~