The problem, though, is you have yet to overcome your insecurities so they are still present in your unconscious. And you bring those insecurities into your next marriage where you project them onto this spouse as well.

But one of the most important elements of life for each of us is as we get older we mature. Hopefully you are older in your second marriage and realize that the same thing is happening in this marriage that happened in the first, so this time you take a proper inventory of yourself to maybe look differently at the situation this time. After all, you already went through divorce once, one of the most gut-wrenching experiences any of us goes through as an adult.

The reality is it takes courage for you to face your demons and slay them and this is truly only possible when you have the motivation to look within yourself. Obviously the insecurities that lead to the first divorce where not overcome but with the choice of divorce or maturity, maybe the understanding of that pain will motivate you to approach the situation differently the second time around.

guest post from Tim Kellis

The basic premise in a successful marriage is you have to be happy with yourself if you are going to build a marriage with your spouse. And the caveat here is your happiness as an individual has nothing to do with how much money you make or how good looking you are, but is achieved by understanding and appreciating your internal character traits, which are nothing but systems of beliefs that reside in the unconscious. The reality is your character traits are what cause your behavior.

So what eventually leads to a spouse cheating are problems in the marriage. I call intimacy the icing on the cake, but in negative relationships this is one of the first activities to go. After all, how are you supposed to come together and open yourself up to intimacy with your partner when you are fighting in the other elements of your marriage?

I was at a marriage conference about a year ago and attended one presentation where the topic was sex. The speaker summed up sex in a marriage when she said that “no” always wins.

The other element of marriages which eventually leads to cheating is jealousy. The funny aspect of the minds of people with insecurities is the notion that if you fear something happening it eventually does. If you fear your spouse cheating on you and get jealous in situations where you believe your spouse is thinking about doing that and the subject becomes a major cause of anger, then eventually your intimacy breaks down and either you cheat or your spouse cheats.

guest post from Tim Kellis

They repealed a law limiting marriage to man/woman partnerships only. effectively legalizing gay marriage.

And how did they do it? They stated that to limit it was violating people’s constitutional right to “pursuit of happiness”.

In a nation where even hippies and Hollywood starlets can’t keep marriage for everyone, I was completely convinced Iowa wouldn’t be able to pull it off? For real, we make fun of our neighbors to the east, saving the best of our barbs for the city directly to the east of us (Council Bluffs, i love you so!). Now, however? I kind of want to pack up and move ten minutes away to a state that regularly shows up blue on the map, and recognizes all people are in fact created equal.

GO IOWA!!!

I keep running into some of my favorite blogs discussing marriage, and it seems The Simple Dollar is no exception.

The blog has been featuring a five-part series on the blessed event of marriage, covering such topics as courtship, engagement, the wedding itself, honeymoons, and having a reasonable marriage.

The final topic, on reasonable marriage, just went live last week, and after reading it I feel like I’ve learned a few things.

Remember to both talk and listen. Not only is it important to talk to each other often, but it’s also important to listen to what your partner is saying. I tend to like to be right, so this is a good reminder for me!

Plan big purchases together. We’re not in a place where we’re making big purchases yet, but when we do, I’ll keep the tips on this topic at the forefront of my mind.

Talk about long-term goals together. Not only making sure you’re both still on the same page with these goals, but also talking about how you can get closer to these long term goals today and tomorrow is such a good suggestion. We definitely need to be more intentional about this!

And my favorite? Reaffirm your love every single day. I try to look my husband in the eyes every day and tell him I love him, and I hope that as our marriage continues this will be a practice I keep up with. It’s so fun to see him light up when I tell him how much he means to me!

And the reason for this is quite obvious too. One of the most significant characteristics of successful relationships is trust, the trust that you can depend on your partner for life. This trust will get you through anything. But once that trust is destroyed then it becomes extremely difficult to get back. There is nothing worse than realizing that your partner for life is actually working against your relationship instead of for it.
Can you imagine the bombshell that goes off when one discovers that the other has actually let someone else invade that most personal element of a relationship? Your heart immediately falls through your feet, straight to hell, where it begins descending. The unimaginable truth about infidelity is you get to view hell from below.

But the reality, and something never before explained, is infidelity is not usually the cause of problems in the relationship, but the result of those problems. People do not cheat on their spouse to cause the problems in marriage but as a result of problems in the marriage, as a result of an unhappy marriage. Actually the worst thing married couples can do to each other is the power struggle, where one tries to control the relationship.

The bottom line behind the causes of troubles in relationships is the way couples handle conflicts. The positive way is through disagreements, where the two different perspectives are discussed logically, even the emotional issues. The negative way is through arguments, where the emotional perspective is used so that one gets to utilize a subjective perspective to decide the solution to a conflict.

And the reason for this is the basis behind the subjective perspective are our insecurities, which are prejudices we have developed in our past that we use to justify our current perspective. I call this the “Hierarchy of the Argument”. We develop our emotional perspectives when we are the youngest, when we are children. If that perspective is based on the imbalance of those who taught us then we develop an insecurity, which is defined as best by fear and anxiety. The result is we develop a prejudice, which is a preconceived judgment or opinion, and the result is we become judgmental, the source behind our anger.

And as adults we use this insecurity behind our power struggles to get our way with conflicts on subjective issues. This is best described as when a simple truth becomes the truth or a minor mistake is equated with a fatal error. Have you ever gotten in trouble for not replacing the toilet paper? This is an example of a minor mistake being equated with a fatal error. Or has your spouse ever tried to convince you that the sky is brown, even with your continued futile attempts at explaining that no, the sky is really blue, even to the point of soliciting friends to justify the perspective that the sky is brown.

This prejudicial perspective is best summed up in one of the most poignant sections of the book, where I use the prejudice of Hitler to demonstrate how couples engaged in the power struggle do so by using their prejudices to slowly take away the individuality of their spouses. This is the story of a man and his wife who survived the horrors of Germany, and whose memoir gives us a fascinating glimpse into their lives. At the end I recite a joke they had heard. “A man in Berlin takes his wife to the hospital so that she can give birth. A picture of Christ hangs over the bed. The man: ‘Nurse, that picture must go, I don’t want the Jewboy to be the first thing my child sees.’ The nurse: She herself could not do anything about it, she will report it. In the evening he gets a telegram from the doctor. ‘You have a son. The picture did not need to be removed, the child is blind.’”

guest post from Tim Kellis

Renowned Wall Street analyst Tim Kellis takes on what could be considered society’s biggest problem today: divorce. The journey that led to him tackling such a significant issue was both personal and professional. After a successful career that eventually landed him on Wall Street, Tim met what he thought was the girl of his dreams, only to see that relationship end with bitterness and anger. The journey included work with a marital therapist, and after he discovered the therapist wasn’t really helping decided to tackle the issue himself.

The objective of this book is to provide real, logical help to couples so that they can learn how to stay out of the divorce trap. The bottom line is to learn how to set up your relationship so that you can maintain a happy, healthy, harmonious, loving, affectionate, intimate marriage.

Because I’m about to be a newlywed, and want to relish in the wedded bliss for as long as possible, I’ve set a goal to have a date-night once a month to “keep the romance alive”. Or whatever.

So I’m trying to collect great (and cheap!) ideas for some unique date nights (or days).

This is what I’ve come up with so far – I’d love some comments to help me come up with other ideas.

Dinner and a movie – yes, it’s classic, timeless, and probably pretty boring. But we do this at home, with take-out pizza and a good (or terrible, depending on Netflix) action flick to keep us entertained. We’re actually doing this a few days after our wedding, and I’m considering it our first official married persons date.

Morning at the farmer’s market – okay, so not technically a date “night”, but I’m pretty excited to bust this one out once the Farmer’s Market hits it’s stride. We’ll be able to pick up some locally-grown foods, and enjoy the people watching and the sunshine. All that’s missing is a dog on a leash and some cutesy kissing.

College game day – we’ve got a pretty popular college football team within an hour’s drive of us, and we try to get to a game at least once a year. This fall, I’m definitely going to count it as a date, as we go just the two of us and have such a great, coupley time whenever we’re there.

Ice skating – once the weather gets cold, I want to go rent some skates and hit up one of our city park’s skating rinks. I haven’t been on skates in YEARS, and I think it would be a great way to get some good quality (butt) time in!

And that’s where my creativity runs dry. What are some other great date night suggestions?!

I’ve had my fair share of wedding freak outs in this whole planning phase. And now that we’re a mere three weeks away, I’d hoped that all the big planning and such being done, I’d be free of the major freak-outs for the duration.

So when this morning, as we were getting ready for work, an e-mail threw my for a loop and caused a major freak-out on my part, The Monkey did what he does best – he tried to get practical about it, and help me see how it wasn’t as big a deal as I thought it was, and that it would all work out.

And of course, because I was still in the throes of panic over it, I snapped at him. Bad. And for about twenty minutes.

So now that I’m free of the major portion of the freak-out (I’m still internally panicking, don’t get me wrong. I’ve just finally hit an external sense of calm.) I’m wondering how others deal with this sort of thing. Stress, blowups, dealing with panicking, all that.

I tend to be someone who needs to be allowed to panic, no matter what, until the panic has run it’s course. Then I’m all sorts of ready for practical solutions, and welcome the help. But until I’m there, until I’m ready to hear it? It’s best to just let me panic. And The Monkey has a very hard time with that, so this isn’t the first fight like this we’ve had. Any suggestions for curbing this sort of drama in the future?

When she’s not writing here, Robyn is contemplating the awesomeness that is Showtime.

Apparently, expensive weddings aren’t the only thing on the downswing. According to an article in The Arizona Republic, marriage itself is less and less popular.

Americans are waiting to get married until their late 20’s, according to recent studies, and the idea of getting married at all is taking a serious hit as more and more socially acceptable options are becoming available to young people (staying single, non-married monogamous couples, same-sex pairings, etc). More and more couples are choosing to date longer, have longer engagements, and live together indefinitely instead of taking the “big step” towards matrimony.

The National Healthy Marriage Resource Center, based out of Penn State, is aiming to change that. They’ve launched an ad campaign aimed at touting some of the benefits of marriage.

“The resource center, a federally funded virtual clearinghouse, works under an agreement with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families. The campaign is part of the Healthy Marriage Initiative, a Bush administration effort”

The research they’re touting for making marriage a happy alternative once again includes better health, better overall happiness, greater wealth for the couple, and improved well-being for their children.

This whole thing worries me. Not that I’m opposed to marriage – obviously I’m not, as I’m getting married in a month. But the program is federally funded, and I have issue with the governments incredibly vocal about what types of marriage are acceptable, and which are not. Will the ad campaign show marriages with multi-racial groupings? Will it show people that foster and/or adopt children? Will it show families that choose not to have children?

We already know it won’t show any GLBT families, as the government has already taken a decidedly anti-gay stance when it comes to federally regulating marriage.

So, am I all for promoting marriage? Definitely. But at the expense of other forms of happy couple-dom? Definitely not. What are your thoughts?

Source

Generally considered to be recession-proof, even the wedding industry is starting to feel the burn of the global economic crisis currently happening. Because weddings are generally considered a “once in a lifetime” experience, most people will go overboard on the spending. But recent reports are showing that people are spending less and less on this newly-labeled luxury.

I found an article from a Korean newspaper discussing this very phenomenon. In it, only the most luxurious wedding facilities still seem to be booked out. Most of the mid-range and more modest wedding venues are showing openings across the board, even on Saturday afternoons, a globally popular wedding time.

Interestingly, in Korea matchmaking industries are booming, as people look to marriage as a way to help stretch their finances. And 7 out of 10 women about to graduate from university have stated they’d consider a marriage over a job search in these times of economic crisis.

source