The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

The Selfish path to romance. Download chapter one for free at DrKenner.com.

Hello, Dr. Kenner. I'm in a three-year relationship with Carl and have recently received emails on MySpace.com from Shauna, a person claiming that my boyfriend Carl gave her herpes. Okay, so that means bodily contact. I got tested, and I am clean of every STD, including HIV, and so is Carl. He got tested. This has been going on for a month. This person, Shauna, is still emailing people I know, telling them about her sexual escapades with Carl. I can only believe my Carl's "I don’t know who she is" so many times. My trust is going away, since the person knows too much about Carl, including his body parts and his bedroom. Doreen, so she wants some help.

Okay, Carl doesn’t have herpes, but Shauna got it from Carl. Carl doesn’t know her, but she knows him intimately. You're faced with a huge contradiction. This situation is impossible. Notice, contradictions don’t exist in reality; you can hold contradictory ideas. Most people do, and it drives them buggy. They don’t have any peace of mind because they don’t do the detective work to resolve their contradictions. But contradictions cannot exist. In fact, either Carl slept with her, or he didn’t. If we had a video camera and we could roll it back in the past, we would see the truth. So you need to do the detective work to make sense of this. Either Shauna is lying or Carl is lying, or both.

I would like to say Carl is innocent until proven guilty, but you also don’t want to feel like a sucker, so you need to actively think. You don’t want to just put your head in the sand like an ostrich. So look at the range—the worst. I call this the range. You draw a line across a piece of paper. On the left-hand side is the worst-case scenario. On the right-hand side is the best-case scenario, and in the middle is something that's not great, but it’s mendable.

Worst case scenario: Shauna is telling the truth. Carl is a bold-faced liar. Shauna wants justice, and she may not have gotten herpes from Carl, but she does know his body parts too intimately and too recently. It could be a woman at work. It could be that he met her at tennis or at the bar or at a sex club. It’s very good that you got tested. Kudos to you.

Now, the best-case scenario is that Carl has never met Shauna. You've been in a three-year relationship. He loves you dearly, and he has never cheated on you, and she happens to be one of Carl’s former male friends, male… you got an email. Remember, you didn’t get to see her. Male friends who wants to harm the relationship or who thinks this is a great practical joke. So, at football practice, he’s happened to see Carl naked—not at football practice, but in the locker room afterwards, he saw Carl naked, or he saw him naked when they were taking showers at the gym. So he knows what his body parts look like. He’s been to Carl’s home, and he’s seen his bedroom because, you know, his mother invited them over to eat. Carl has shared some of his sexual escapades with him that are with you, or the former friend is now an enemy, evil enemy, and he concocts stories. So this is low-down and rotten, but in this case, this would be the best-case scenario because Carl is innocent, and that’s possible. People do these sorts of things.

In the moderate range: Carl did have a former girlfriend who’s lonely and envious and she wants to start trouble. She’s hoping to get Carl back, and so she’s been emailing Carl, and he doesn’t want to tell you about it because he doesn’t want to start trouble, but he hasn’t had an affair with her. So you need more data.

What I recommend is…

Hey, I gotta interrupt this because we’ve got to pay some bills. 30 seconds, that’s it. A very quick ad, and then Alan will be back.

Romance… I wish I knew more about what girls want from a relationship. Well, I wish I knew more about what I want. Where’s that ad I saw? Here it is: The Selfish Path to Romance, a serious romance guidebook. Download chapter one for free at selfishromance.com and buy it at amazon.com, huh? The Selfish Path to Romance, that is interesting.

So… you need more data. What I recommend is to observe Carl closely. I know if somebody accused me of having an affair, if they said, “Ellen, you’ve cheated on your husband,” or if my husband accused me, my first response would be to laugh. It would be, “You’ve got to be kidding me. You know you’ve got the wrong person here.” Now, people fake well, but if he accused me, an honest person would just blow it off: “You know, this is not true.” But if he persisted, “No, you have cheated,” I would say, “Well, where’s your evidence? Help me understand this. This is not making sense. Let me work with you to get to the bottom of this.”

Notice how Carl responds, and you want to try to figure out if he’s telling the truth or not. You know him well enough after three years to be able to differentiate, to see those little, small signs that he may or may not be telling the truth. So I wish you a lot of luck with that. If he has had an affair, get the book After the Affair at my website, DrKenner.com.

And here’s a little more from Dr. Kenner.

Here’s another question: Dear Dr. Kenner, I have a problem with my girlfriend, Jessie. I love her, but there are so many fights between us. I hit her, but she pushes me to the limit, and sometimes I can’t control myself. If she only knew how much I love her, how many times she’s been there for me, and I would be there for her at any time. But there is no reasoning with her. I don’t drink. I’m not on drugs, nor do I stay out all night with other ladies. I work and come home after all my shifts. I don’t want to hit my girlfriend no more. I hate that.

Drake, guilt is good. In your case, unearned guilt is not good, but you’ve earned the guilt. If you’ve crossed the line and you’ve initiated force, then you’ve got to bear the consequences. And I love that you want to change. Your email was longer; you asked me about counseling programs. I would call your state psychological association. If you’re in California, you’d call the California State Psychological Association. You can also go to a website, the Academy of ct.org, and look for a therapist in your area. That’s Academy of Cognitive Therapy, ct.org.

Now, your anger, it’s too intense, too frequent. You’re violating her rights; you’re initiating force. It’s got to stop. And you can’t get yourself off the hook by saying she pushes me to the limit because people can be pushed to the limit, and there is no limit. You just don’t hit; it’s like, you just don’t cross that line. You can leave a relationship, but you don’t cross that line.

I’m confused. You’re saying that she’s been there for you, but it sounds like you take advantage of her. You say you would be there for her at any time; you don’t say that you are there for her at any time. You say there’s no reasoning with her, but that’s assuming that your position is right and hers is wrong. So you need to learn how to do some active listening. I would suspect that she’s very afraid of you. She probably thinks, “Drake scares me. He gets this look on his face. He gets all tense. I see him raise his fist and start coming at me. I try to run. I scream at him. I see the strike coming. He tells me I caused it. I have to lie about my bruises. I don’t like to do this,” so get some help ASAP.

You’ve got to figure out where this comes from in your family background. How did your family members express anger? You’ve got to learn new skills, especially time out: “I’m beginning to feel angry, and I want to take some time out.” Then leave—walk, jog, clean the garage. There’s a book, Dr. Weisinger’s Anger Workout Book, that I recommend getting. You need to figure out a lot of specific methods so that you can stop yourself and practice those methods so that in the moment of a heated argument, it doesn’t get in your way.

And here’s a little more from Dr. Kenner.

Look, I hate to cut this short, but I told some guys I’d meet them down at Duke’s.

You’re leaving? Yeah, whenever you’re ready, I’ll walk you out.

Dad, I haven’t seen you in two years. I stopped by… you’re leaving in 10 minutes.

Oh, why don’t we stop kidding ourselves? You don’t really want to be here, and we don’t really have anything to talk about.

At least I’m making the effort. Oh yeah, it’s an effort to talk to me, huh? Well, I guess that’s why you only bother coming home once a year at Christmas. But what the hell, I didn’t go visit you in Boston either, did I? So why don’t we just drop this?

Now, that’s from Frasier, and that is a wonderful interchange because if you listen to the emotions in that, what you hear is Dad is unwilling… Frasier’s dad is unwilling to play the phony game of, “Oh Dad, so good to see you.” Yeah, so good to see you. Okay, are we done now? Can we go on, do our own things, and we return to our lives?

Dad is saying, “I never saw you in Boston. You only see me once on Christmas. I am feeling hurt. I don’t feel valued by you. I don’t feel important in your life. Here I am. I raised you, and I just feel tossed to the sidewalks here.” And you know, and then, “Oh my gosh, you know what? I treat you the same way. I don’t make an effort to see you.” And so it’s a moment of recognition where both father and son have disconnected, and that’s good. I mean, you can either take it in a sarcastic route, or you can say, “Hey, you know what? I felt really sad. I miss you. I miss the good times we had together. I remember when you were a little boy and used to run. I’d take you down to the beach, and you would just dash into that water, and you’d come running out with a shell, or you’d come running out with a little crab and say, ‘Daddy, Daddy, look what I found.’ And I miss those times when you were a teenager, and you were asking me about, ‘Daddy, how do I kiss a girl?’ I miss being with you now.” That would open things up, and then you have the chance of a decent relationship.

Of course, if there are unresolved hurts, those need to be talked about too, because the good stuff usually doesn’t come out until you get the bad stuff out of the way. And that’s true in all relationships.

For more Dr. Kenner podcasts, go to DrKenner.com, and please listen to this ad.

Here’s an excerpt from The Selfish Path to Romance, the serious romance guidebook by clinical psychologist Dr. Ellen Kenner and Dr. Edwin Locke.

Even though you may already understand a lot about your partner, knowing him or her is a continuous learning process that takes years. Here are some aspects of your partner you’ll want to find out about. What are your partner’s intellectual interests? What does your partner like to discuss, learn, read, and think about? What hobbies and sports does your partner enjoy, and why? What types of art or recreational pursuits does your partner like, and why? Asking why helps you and your partner to find some of your core values. What are your partner’s favorite and least favorite foods and drinks? What is your partner’s personal style? Do you know his or her favorite color, style of clothing, and decorating preferences?

You can download chapter one for free by going to DrKenner.com, and you can buy the book at amazon.com.