The Shalom Bayit or Marital Happiness blog

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Starting to post new things

I'll be putting up new post every so often.

Thursday, May 15, 2014

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Sunday, February 9, 2014

Five Illusions about Love by Emuna Braverman

Five Illusions about Love

With Valentine’s Day coming up, here’s a good excuse to discuss five illusions aboutlove that hamper our ability to create a healthy, thriving (and yes, loving) marriage.

1) If you’re in love, it will all be easy.

This is a destructive trap that many an unwitting spouse falls into. He or she looks around and it appears that all his friends have better marriages that require so much less work. They are relaxed around each other and it seems effortless. Obviously there is something wrong with their marriage since they have to work so hard to communicate effectively and to understand each other.

They need to understand that what they are seeing is not the full picture. They have no idea what goes on behind the scenes. They don’t know if it’s really a bad marriage and they are putting on a show for company. Or perhaps they didn’t see this couple at the beginning of their marriage when they had so many struggles. They don’t know if they are still working hard to creating that easy banter. When we watch a talented athlete, a dancer or figure skater, they also make it seem effortless. We shouldn’t be fooled by the surface.

No one has a good marriage without putting in a lot of hard work, constantly. If anyone tells you otherwise, don’t believe them. It’s just not possible. In the sheva brachos read under the chuppah, we say that the Almighty created joy and happiness, the bride and the groom. The possibility for a man and a woman who are so different to live together in joy is a creation of the Almighty. He created the possibility; we need to actualize it. Not only are we different genders, we are different personality types; we have different strengths and different weaknesses. We need to learn to work together.

2) If you’re in love, you will never fight.

As any successfully married person knows, this is also a myth. Due to the many differences cited above, a couple will inevitably have disagreements. They will fight. That is not necessarily bad. The key is how you fight. Do you do it with respect? Do you listen to the other side? Is about winning/ego or about working together? Is it about being right or compromise? Are you prepared to try to understand and validate your spouse’s opinion and perspective? Can you have the discussion in a soft and gentle tone?

The answers to these questions make all the difference in the world. They are determinative of whether the quarrel is productive or un, whether it brings you closer or pushes you apart.

The famous researcher, John Gottman, supports the view that it is not fighting per se that is the problem. According to his studies, the key is that there are 5 positive interactions for every 1 negative one. Yes, you will have fights but they should be far outweighed by the pleasure in each other’s company, by the compliments, by the enjoyment of your marriage.

3) If you’re in love, you know what each other is thinking.

Even though some partners in long-term marriages may actually finish each other’s sentences, no one really knows what the other one is thinking. And for the most part this is a good thing! We don’t want our spouse to read our thoughts, especially during one of the abovementioned fights. The problem arises when we have expectations that our spouse has some extra-sensory abilities.

We are shocked that he didn’t know exactly what he was supposed to bring home for dinner, the perfect birthday present and that I wanted those pictures sitting on the dining room table hung on the wall today (that last part was for my husband; I hope he’s reading this!).

The expectation that our spouse can and should read our minds leads to frustration and argument. Once we accept the impossibility of it, we can make our requests clearly and eloquently and not set our spouse or ourselves up for disappointment.

4) If you’re in love, you will always want to be intimate.

This is definitely a Hollywood and Harlequin-driven myth. Most married couples today lead very busy lives with lots of demands. Their careers are exhausting and life with the children is equally so. Most people are challenged to find time to be together (and this is a whole other topic). But dissatisfaction in this intimate area of marriage may be heightened by the belief that it’s different in other people’s homes or that it’s not normal that we aren’t always together.

This is an unrealistic expectation fostered by bad sit-coms and romantic comedies. Real life is so much more complex. Yes, you need to be together. Yes, you want to work on wanting to be together (if necessary). But don’t add unrealistic expectations based on the lives of fictional couples to the mix. Work it out with your spouse based on your situation and don’t be fooled by locker room chat and magazine titles. Everyone is struggling with this issue and trying to find their way. Don’t add unnecessarily to the pressure.

5) If you’re in love, you’ll live happily ever after.

I had to put this one in. Even though we may intellectually know the fallacy of this statement, we can’t underestimate the effect of fairy tales and Disney movies on our emotional lives and our expectations. There is a part inside everyone that thinks that love is magical, that love solves all problems, that “all you need is love”….

We know this isn’t true but we have to make sure that our emotional lives are in sync with our intellectual ones. And we so badly want to live happily ever after.

I think two issues need to be briefly addressed here. One is what it means to live “happily” and two is how to achieve this “ever after” goal.

If we think that “happily” means a life of no problems and no pain, then we will never be happy (this is true married or single) but if we define “happily” as maintaining a positive attitude and taking pleasure in each other despite your challenges, then it is certainly achievable.

Can you have a consistently happy marriage, an “ever after”? You can – the irony is that the only way to achieve it is through hard work. That’s the piece that the fairy tales always neglect to mention. But if you put your all into your marriage and your partner does as well (as with all situations, this presupposes two emotionally healthy human beings), then you can get your happily ever after. You need to begin by getting rid of Illusion #1.

The Three Greatest Mistakes People Make About Love RAbbi Benjamin Blech

The Three Greatest Mistakes People Make About Love

Love is in the air, so allow me to offer a Jewish perspective on what I believe are the three greatest mistakes people make about love. And in case you’re wondering what gives me the right to believe that I know some of the secrets of love, perhaps I’ve earned it as someone happily observing 56 years of marriage.

1. Love isn’t a noun, it’s a verb.

“I’m in love” is passive. “I love you” is active. The Hebrew word for love, ahavah, has as its two-letter root the word hav (give), preceded by the letter aleph, which means “I will give.”

True love is far more than an emotion. Loving is doing. It’s acting out of concern for another’s well-being. It is an affirmation of our willingness to give.

When people ask me how they can know if they are truly in love I tell them to ask themselves a simple question: Do they feel more joy in giving to the other person than in receiving from them?

The more we give, the more we love.

Rabbi Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler, a famous rabbi, Talmudic scholar, and Jewish philosopher of the 20th century noted the striking truth that love increases by giving – the more we give, the more we love. That explains the striking anomaly that parents normally love their children more deeply than their offspring love them - not in spite of the fact that parents have done more for their children than the reverse but precisely because of it.

The world has it backwards when it comes to gift- giving. It measures love by how much we receive. Far better would be to determine the depth of love by what we are willing to give to one another.

Love is a verb defined by our readiness to sacrifice for it. Eric Fromm said, “Immature love says I love you because I need you. Mature love says I need you because I love you.” For the immature everything begins with fulfilling a personal need; for the mature, love is what creates the need to give which, by echoing God’s love of the world, fills us with nothing less than a taste of divine bliss.

2. The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference.

Elie Wiesel captured a profound truth:

“The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference. The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.”

Antonyms help us better understand the real meaning of words. We’ve established that love is a verb, an idea that needs to turn feelings into actions.

Let’s take that a step further and identify love’s greatest enemy. Marriages aren’t most often destroyed by “acts of war” between partners. Like plants that need constant watering, marriages wither from lack of the basic attention human beings require to combat the fearful state of solitude.

We need to remember why God originally created a partner for Adam. After every act of creation, the Torah tells us he proclaimed it good. But then for the first time God used the words “not good”: “It is not good for the man to dwell alone” (Genesis, 2:18). Commentators clarify that God was noting retroactively that everything which He had previously called “good” would not warrant that appellation if experienced alone. Love was meant to allow us to view the world through the eyes of others as well as our own. Love was intended to allow us to share the kind of friendship that turns two people into one, not only physically but emotionally and spiritually. Love permits us to care and to be cared for, to live and to share our lives, to dream and to know that our innermost thoughts and secrets are important to another.

We don’t fall out of love. We fall out of caring and sharing, out of communicating and connecting.

That’s why we don’t fall out of love. We fall out of caring and sharing, out of communicating and connecting, out of recognizing the importance of taking the time to appreciate moments we have together - and then we wonder whatever happened to love!

Love begins with passion and thrives with perseverance. Like any important project, it can’t be taken for granted. It requires constant work and effort. And its greatest enemy is indifference.

Lovers don’t usually go from love to hate. But they do very often go from love to boredom, from love to silence, from love to neglect and to lack of attention. One of the most profound secrets for maintaining love was encapsulated by the famous words from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman: “Attention must be paid.”

3. Make your love unconditional.

The Sages offer a profound insight into the difference between temporary and permanent love: “A love that is dependent on something – when the thing ceases, the love also ceases. But a love that is not dependent on anything never ceases (Ethics of the Fathers, 5:16).

Temporary love is love that is based on a particular feature of the beloved. He is rich. In time he may lose his wealth. He is virile. In time he may lose his strength. She is beautiful beyond words. In time she may lose her good looks. True love needs to build a foundation of permanence on the entire person. To love someone is to be aware of their failings as well as their most favorable characteristics. It is not to love because of one thing but to love because of everything – the totality of another human being to whom you have decided to commit yourself because you recognize in that person the values and the ideals that mean the most to you.

The wisdom of the Talmudic teaching is to remind us that no person can ever be summarized by one trait nor romantically idealized by one attribute. We are, all of us, purposely designed to be unique and a remarkable combination of many different parts to our being. Even our faults may serve, from a divine perspective, to attract another whose different personality and abilities may be just what we need for self-improvement. As the Bible tells us, God created woman to be “a helpmate oppositehim.” Not identical, but opposite – which is probably why opposites in some sense attract. Each party in a love relationship has the ability and the opportunity to improve the other.

Love that is meant to last accepts the whole of the other. It forgives flaws and does not expect the impossible. It finds fulfillment in knowing that togetherness makes each one of them better even as neither one alone deserves to be loved merely for one particular reason.

The goal of true love is eternity. It is validated by the passage of time. It is confirmed by the words “I love you” that continue to be offered one to another in spite of the wrinkled faces, the stooped posture, the diminished hearing and the physical ravages of old-age.

It is a love which, when asked for its reason, responds with no single answer other than “because it is you.”

Marriage Counseling. Does it Work? Not Necessarily by rabbi Shlomo Slakin

http://www.themarriagerestorationproject.com/marriage-counseling-does-it-work-not-necessarily/

Humans are fallible and so are marriage counselors. There are a few reasons why some marriage counseling doesn’t work and may make things worse.

Some marriage counselors do not have specialized training in marital therapy and while they are allowed to see couples and practice marriage counseling ethically, they are not well equipped for safely counseling a couple together in the office. Couples often come in very angry and the therapist needs to be extremely well trained as a specialized marriage counselor if they are to handle the needs of the couple effectively. Marriage counseling requires highly sensitized and well trained therapists as it is a extremely delicate discipline.

Some therapists get “caught up” in the marriage problems and conflicts being brought up by the couple and they begin serving as “referee”, advising the couple to compromise and do one thing in exchange for something else. It ends up like a whack-a-mole exercise, because once one issue is solved, another one comes up! That’s if what is really going on in the relationship is not addressed. It’s essential that the marriage counselor helps provide the couple with an understanding of the deeper cause of the conflict. Getting distracted by the individual issues that continue to arise does nothing to enhance the connection between the partners.

Many therapists have their own bias about marriage and relationships and their bias can start to come out in the sessions-leaving you walking away from the sessions seriously doubting your partner and doubting your marriage. If the therapist does most of the talking and you find yourself walking away feeling worse about your partner than better, you need to trust your intuition that something is not right. It’s not you or your partner/marriage it’s them. We’ve seen even the worst of marriages heal with good marriage counseling. Sometimes if your marriage problems seem too difficult, the therapist will suggest a trial separation and to “take a break” from each other. We believe this is the worst advice possible.

If you are currently undergoing marriage counseling together with your spouse or you are going to therapy on your own, we suggest that you walk into the door prepared. You can read more about how sometimes counseling can make things worse or you can arm yourself with indispensable information that will make your marriage counseling experience 100% successful, with what we call The Marriage Restoration Project Bundle.

Don’t go into marriage counseling unprepared. You’ve got to be educated to make your marriage counseling experience work.

So, how can we help you?

Romantic Comedies May Save Your Marriage by Yvette Alt Miller

Romantic Comedies May Save Your Marriage

Can watching romantic comedies make your marriage better? A new study by the University of Rochester suggests it might – if couples then talk about the movies afterwards.

Marriage counselors have traditionally focused on helping couples who already are experiencing problems. “The prevailing wisdom was that the best way to keep relationships healthy and strong was to help couples manage difficulty” says Prof. Thomas Bradbury, Director of UCLA’s Relationship Institute.

He, along with University of Rochester Professor Ronald Rogge, wondered if there was another way to help couples safeguard their marriages. Instead of waiting for troubles to crop up, can husbands and wives start working on their already-healthy marriages, learning listening and communication skills that will head off arguments before they develop?

The researchers offered newlywed couples both types of therapy. One group received traditional guidance on conflict resolution, meeting with a therapist weekly to learn strategies to employ during arguments, making sure they slowed down to listen to what their spouse was saying, and taking time to understand why their spouse was upset.

A second group also had weekly meetings with a therapist, but these couples focused on the positive in their marriages, instead of their conflicts. They did exercises to help find common ground and stress their similarities: these couples were encouraged to think of themselves as a team, be more accepting of each other, and were prompted to do random acts of kindness for their spouses.

After three years, the researchers had some startling results. Both groups had lowered their risk of divorce dramatically: improving day to day interaction was just as important for marriages as learning to manage stress and conflicts.

Incredibly, though, the researchers found that a third group – assigned to watch five movies together and talk about them afterwards – experienced the same benefit as those assigned to weekly marriage counseling - and cut their divorce rate in half - compared to couples who did nothing at all to work on their marriages. These dramatic results lasted throughout the three years of the study.

The key, the researchers found, is to spend time – they suggested 45 minutes – talking about the characters critically after watching a film, and discussing how we feel about their choices. What problems did the characters experience? How did they tackle the problems they faced? Were they supportive of their romantic partner or not? Did they act together like a team? When they argued, was it in a constructive way? Were they kind or cruel? How did they make up following a fight? How do all of these choices relate to your own relationship with your spouse?

These questions remind us of what we already know – that being kind and supportive, that thinking of our spouse as a teammate rather than an opponent – strengthens marriages and brings us closer. Being reminded to think about these issues – and doing so in a fun context of watching movies together – helps make sure we learn and grow from the examples we see around us.

The Questions from the Survey

1. What was the main relationship portrayed in the movie? This is the relationship that you will focus on in the following questions.

2. What main problem(s) did this couple face? Are any of these similar to the problems that the two of you have faced or might face as a couple?

3. Did this couple strive to understand each other? Did they tend to accept one another, even if they were very different? Or did the couple tend to attack each other’s’ differences?