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Patterns of Society Learned at Home

What are our children learning at home? What are they learning from your marriage as they watch you and your spouse interact? Are they learning about what real love is? Are they learning that love is caring about the other person and putting their needs above your own? Or are they learning that life is all about getting what you want no matter who gets hurt in the process? An article posted on the forums started me thinking about all this. The general attitude of society seems to be look after number one –yourself, and don’t worry about trying to … Continue reading →

The Interfering in-Law

Are you an interfering in-law or have you ever been on the receiving end of comments and the not so welcome actions or advice from interfering in-laws. It is something that can certainly be a problem. It can also be a fine line too between helping and interfering. Part of it may well come back to the relationship between the in-laws and the married couple in question. What can be seen as help sometimes from one person, may be viewed as interference by another. I recently heard of one grandparent who interfered in the upbringing of her grandchild by taking … Continue reading →

Pressuring Your Spouse

Are you ever guilty of pressuring your spouse? You know the sort of thing I mean. You want to do something while your spouse had other ideas, so you resort to tears and pouting and making your spouse feel guilty – all what I would call emotional blackmail to get your own way. Or it might work this way. You continually make your spouse feel guilty by being negative about what they want to do and listing all the reasons why it’s not a good idea and won’t work. Worse still is getting the children on side and using them, … Continue reading →

Making It Work

A friend recently in a conversation about marriage had something interesting to say. It was about arranged marriages. Strange as the idea may seem to many of us, arranged marriages still occur in some traditions. This man was talking about this arranged marriage and the difference between arranged marriages and those we might consider done the usual way of falling in love and choosing whom you will marry. According to him the difference is those who go into arranged marriages know they are going to have to work at the marriage to make it work. What’s more they are expected … Continue reading →

The Other Side of the Picture

I’m convinced that how successful and lasting a marriage is comes back to several things. One is choosing the right person and thinking it through logically and carefully before you embark on marriage. The other is, as Mary Ann suggested, each one’s attitude towards marriage and commitment to it. Now it’s time to spend time apart says reality TV star Heidi Montag. Since I never watch reality TV, I know nothing about this woman or Spencer Pratt, her husband, apart from the article. Mick’s comment when he suggested this was something I might use was, ‘it sounds like the reality … Continue reading →

The Value of Marriage

Someone asked me yesterday in an interview what I’m passionate about. One of the things I mentioned was I’m passionate about marriage and sharing what I have learned over my many years of marriage. Then last night, I was reading an article and it cited research showing married people live longer, suffer lower rates of depression, and victimization. Not only that but marriage contributes to greater wealth. I immediately thought about the old adage ‘two can live as cheaply as one.’ There appears to be some truth in it. Monash University in a study recently found family break ups rather … Continue reading →

Less Chance of Divorce

It’s official, men who help their wives with housework, shopping and caring for children are less likely to have their marriages end in divorce, according to a study in the United Kingdom. There could be several reasons for this. One is that when the wife is working outside the home she is under a lot of stress trying to combine work as wife, mother, lover and woman in the work force. Therefore she’s less likely to have time to pay attention to her husband’s needs and more likely to feel hard done by when he does not help out. This … Continue reading →

Dealing with the Worrier

Some of us by nature are worriers. It’s not something we do intentionally. It’s not something we plan. It just happens. It can be more a gender think at times, but often it’s just the way the person is wired. They worry as easily as they breathe. I know. I‘m a worrier, not as drastic as some people I’ve known over the years, but still a worrier. Sometimes these worries are valid, like worrying about the future, how I would cope without Mick if he died or if I got Alzheimer’s or some other dreaded disease. As you get older, … Continue reading →

Celebrities and Skin Cancer

Being a self-professed “tanaholic” (blame it on the fact that I was born and raised in Hawaii) I often worry that my days of basting (with baby oil) and baking as a teen might come back to haunt me. These days every time I notice an irregular mole or a raised freckle I speed dial my dermatologist. It doesn’t matter that now (years later) as a mother I am extremely vigilant about protecting my skin (and my family’s), the damage is done. All I can do now is hope and pray that I didn’t sustain irreparable damage. And I know … Continue reading →