Today on Twitter I watched several women I know discuss their love/hate relationship with Christmas. The bottom line was they are run over by too much to do. This is especially true for these women because they are mothers. If you have kids, especially kids under high-school age, the chances are very good your bride has mixed feelings about the holidays, with a bit of dread in the mix. May I suggest it should not be this way?
What you can do about this will depend on your family, on how much you are willing and able to do, and how much you and your bride are willing for your family to not do this year. Have a long talk with your wife, and start by saying you don’t want her to feel stressed or overwhelmed for the next several weeks. Then, rather than starting with all that you normally do and cutting things, start with nothing and add till you hit “enough”. Start with what is most important, and question if each thing really is important, and why.
Yes, I know I’ve hit this idea several times this year. The reason for that is that I am seeing more and more holiday burn out, and I’m seeing it earlier and earlier. Jesus came to give us life and set us free, not to make us slaves to traditions and the desires of others. Over the last half-dozen years, our family has significantly simplified our holidays, and the result is we enjoy it more. Please consider my words, and please assume until proven wrong that the holidays are more difficult for your bride than they are for you.
Perfectionism – a mixed blessing to the one who has it, and a curse to their spouse and children! I can say this both as a (more-or-less) recovered perfectionist, and the husband of woman on the same journey. For me, perfectionism has been extreme in some areas, and non-existent in others, which probably makes it even more annoying to others.
The thing that made me aware of the problems with perfectionism was the failure of our first entrepreneurial business. My bride and I had a fine woodworking business a couple of decades ago. We did high quality work, and everyone was thrilled with the work we did. The problem was a local economic downturn started about the time we started the business – meaning very few people wanted, or were willing to pay for, the quality we were doing. We would bid a competitive price, get a job, and then do far better work than the customer was expecting. This resulted in happy customers, but also meant we were not making enough money for our time. We had plenty of work, but could not make much money!
I took this lesson with me to our landscape and irrigation business. I learned to give folks as much quality as they were willing to pay for (actually slightly more than they expected for the money). I always enjoyed doing jobs for folks willing to pay for the best, but I did other jobs well enough to make good money for my time. I also learned to explain why something I bid was more than what others had bid – why, for example, my irrigation design would save them money in the long run.
What does this have to do with marriage?
Are you putting too much time and effort into some areas of your marriage, going way beyond what she wants or cares about? That is not bad, unless it takes time and energy that should be applied to other areas of the marriage.
Some tasks are utilitarian, and extra effort won’t be noticed, much less appreciated. If you do it for you, and don’t expect praise from her, fine. If you get upset that she does not appreciate your above and beyond the call of duty work, that is a problem, and it’s your fault, not hers.
Perfectionism brings stress. Are you allowing such stress to hurt your family?
And, the big one: do you expect your wife and kids to live up to your perfectionist standards? This is a sure way to hurt people and strain relationships.
If you worry you have ever done any of these things, forward this to your bride and ask her if you are guilty of any of what I’ve said.
The short answer to the question in the title is YES! In a study of 1,700 couples, it was found that those who were the least materialistic enjoyed their marriages the most, and those who were the most materialistic enjoyed their marriages the least. There were also some insights as to why this is true. For example, those who scored high on materialism also tended to score high for marriage killers like blaming, complaining, and criticising.
Another interesting finding of the study was that rich, poor, and those in-between have the same rates of materialism. So being materialistic does not make you rich and being less than well off is not a (valid) excuse for materialism.
Bottom Line: If you are materialistic, it’s hurting your marriage. If your bride is materialistic, it’s hurting your marriage. If you’re both are materialistic, your marriage may be deep trouble.
The Fix: Is being materialistic something you can change? I am of the opinion that we can change just about anything we believe or feel if we choose to do so and work at it hard. Maybe knowing it could cost you your marriage, or at least make your marriage horrible, will be enough motivation to work at changing it.
Speaking of money (this is a horrible segue!) the year end donation challenge I issued 13 days ago is doing very well – we’ve hit 70%. THANKS to all who have helped with that. If you think what my bride and I do is worthwhile, would you consider helping us get to 100%?
I think it would be safe to sum up the research on more choices leading to less happiness (The paradox of choice) as “less is more”. When we have too many choices, or too many things, we are not actually happier – despite what we think/believe. Please know that I say this even though I do not want it to be true! I want to defend my “right” to have many choices and more things if I so chose. For some odd reason, I want “more can make us happier” to be truth even though research and my own life say otherwise. Then of course, there is the Bible – it’s almost as if God knew these things before some clever researchers figured them out!
To me this all sounds a lot like minimalism. Not just minimalism as in having very few things, but as in having a simpler life. Maybe it’s sacrificing stuff, and choices, for mental and emotional health and balance. Maybe our marriages would be far better if we had less, and did less. Maybe we need more of each other and of simple times with other people. I’ve said maybe here a number of times because this is outside both my experience and my comfort zone. Pray about it, discuss it with your bride, and see how it goes.
Also, please kick this idea around in the comments – I’d like to hear what others think, and especially from those who are living it.
Have you ever felt you could have “done better”? Maybe you don’t think it exactly like that, but you see another woman who does something your bride does not do, or does not do as well, or you remember how someone you dated did something, and for a moment you feel a bit of doubt or regret. I suppose to some extent that is the old “grass is greener on the other side of the fence” thing, but it’s made far worse by the huge variety of choice we have in who to marry.
For most of human history, the vast majority of people married someone they had known most of their life. The choices were limited; a couple dozen to a hundred individuals of the right age who were not close relatives. Of those, only a couple would feel like they might be a good fit. The result was people married someone feeling they had made an excellent choice given the options, and that limited second thoughts.
Today, most of us have met many hundreds, if not thousands, of potential spouse choices by the time we married. If that’s not enough, there are dating/matchmaking services that will match you with the best of their tens or hundreds of thousands of possible mates. How then can you feel you made the “best” possible choice? She is certainly in the top 10%, maybe even in the top 1%, but is she the very best possible? In the TED video I suggested yesterday (The paradox of choice) Barry Schwartz explained that more choices leads to less satisfaction with the choice one makes. We get fixated on making the perfect choice, and then have “buyer’s remorse” when we wonder if we got it right.
The other part of this is that we now feel we can try another. Regardless of how you feel about divorce, most of us live in a society that makes divorce easy and relatively free of stigma. Your family, close friends, and church might not approve, but if worse came to worst you could divorce, move, and start over: a second chance to get it right! I’m in no way advocating that, but it is the reality of our lives, and I suspect those struggling in their marriages think such things from time to time.
There are several ways of looking at this issue:
God’s sovereign will: Some say God puts us with someone and that makes it the best possible match. This means that regardless of how you feel, you have the best spouse for you.
Free will: Other say we have free will, and we can make a mess of things. This means it’s unlikely we have chosen the very best possible wife.
Seeking His will: Still others, me included, say we have the free will to make a mess of things, but we also have the free will to seek His will for our lives. If we heard and followed well, we might have the best spouse – but there will always be some doubt.
If you believe the first, then it’s settled – you have the best, and you just need to walk it out. For the rest, the scary reality is you might not have the one woman who would have been the very best wife we could have. However, that was then, and both you and this mystery woman have changed so that you are no longer the perfect match – so let that go. Beyond that, we know from the Bible that it is God’s will for us to remain married if possible. Yes I think there are a very few situations where divorce is allowed (allowed, not required – there is a difference), but even when it is allowed it should be the last ditch, nothing works and I just can’t live this way choice. The vast majority of folks who divorce today are not even close to that!
I think the horrible divorce rate is due in large part to the huge number of choices we see, the vast number of other people to whom we could be married. People start looking at what could have been, or what could be, and that results in growing dissatisfaction with what they have. It starts to seem that starting over would be easier. It feels like the problems are mostly on her part, so if you could start with another woman you would have it so much better.
Please know that all of these are lies! The rate of divorce for second marriages is even worse than for first marriages. Statistically, the more times you try, the less likely you are to get it right. Statistically, you have a better chance of a good marriage with the woman who is now your wife than with any other woman in the world.
My advice is to accept that for better or worse this is the marriage you have. Rather than imaging how it would be better with another, focus on what you can do to make this marriage better. Rather than hedging your bets or holding back, go all in; give your marriage everything you have, work at it like your very life depends on it! It’s amazing what happens when a husband decides to give his marriage all his time and attention – try it and see.
A final note: If you are thinking of divorcing with someone in mind to be your next wife, you are very certainly in the wrong place. THAT IS NOT GOD! If you are thinking of divorce, you need to be open to the possibility of never remarrying. You most certainly need to be free of any thoughts of dating. Divorce hurts people, and there is a necessary grieving process to go through. Rebound relationships are almost always ugly. Moreover, divorce changes people in various ways. If you divorce, you will not be the same person after the divorce that you are now, and that means the “best” possible spouse for you is not the same as it was before.
Rainy Days and Ugly Days Always Get Me Down: Two reasons to click this one: 1) to better understand your wife’s body image struggles, and 2) to see a really ugly little dog.
My posts for today and Sunday will be better understood if you take twenty minutes to watch the TED video Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice. I did not actually build these posts on that video; I went looking for a good clear explanation of something I have read about a number of times in the last year which I wanted to address here.
In short, having more choices does not benefit us. The more choices we have, the less happy we are.
The studies on this are clear – past some fairly small number of choices, more choices mean we fret more about making the choice, question ourselves after the choice, keep looking back wondering if we made the wrong choice, and are far less happy with our choice. Alternatively, the choices may be so numerous that we become overwhelmed and we put off making the choice.
So let us apply that to married sex. I often hear guys complain about the lack of variety in their sex lives, and the common belief is that more variety – more choice – would result in enjoying sex more. While this seems right to us, the growing body of research on variety and choice suggests the very opposite; more sexual variety will result in less sexual satisfaction. I suppose there would be an initial thrill, but then there would be a drop in pleasure and very possibly in frequency.
Sounds wrong, doesn’t it? However, what the studies suggest should happen is what my bride and I have found to be true based on talking with numerous couples over the years. There are couples out there who have exciting sex lives “despite” the fact they use only one or two positions, or have all of three forms of foreplay, always turn the lights out, or have never done it other than between 10PM and 11PM. There are couples out there who have had sex the very same way a couple thousand times, and they are both eager to do that very same thing again tonight, and tomorrow night, and two nights after that. While my anecdotal “sample data” is not even close to being representative of the population as a whole, a lack of significant variety is common amoung those we have talked to who have a lot of sex, and enjoy that sex a great deal. A lack of significant variety is also common among couples who have no struggles with sexual frequency. There are exceptions to this, but they are few, especially over a number or years.
Aside from the paradox of choice, I wonder if part of the problem is being so focused on variety that a couple (or at least one of the couple) is not getting out of sex what they should. Sex should be deeply intimate and connecting, and while the physical pleasure is great and important, too much focus on that (for yourself or your bride) means not having the ability to focus on other vital aspects of the sex act. Maybe we would all enjoy sex more, and maybe even have more of it, if we stuck to a narrow menu, with something extra thrown in only rarely.
Another way to look at this: If you are into fancy coffee (St. Arbucks or the like) – how many different ways do you order your coffee? Starbucks® claims there are at least 87,000 combinations of drinks possible at their stores! Despite that variety, most people order only a very few drinks, and many order the same thing day in and day out for years. They find something they like, and they stick to it. The coffee break becomes more than a drink, it is a ritual. The coffee shop experience is about relaxing, connecting with friends, or people watching. Changing your drink choice every time would not make the experience better it would make it worse.
Today on Twitter I watched several women I know discuss their love/hate relationship with Christmas. The bottom line was they are run over by too much to do. This is especially true for these women because they are mothers. If you have kids, especially kids under high-school age, the chances are very good your bride has mixed feelings about the holidays, with a bit of dread in the mix. May I suggest it should not be this way?
