The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

The Selfish Path to Romance. Download chapter one for free at DrKenner.com and Amazon.com.

I want to welcome Silke to the phones. Did I pronounce your name right?

Yes, absolutely.

Oh, thank you. And your question has to do with your husband. Is he good for you?

Yes, yeah. What's—go ahead.

Yeah, I've been listening to your program Psychological Self Defense, which I found very helpful. And you talk about a feeling that we sometimes have with people—that they are part friend, part foe—and I sometimes have that with my husband. He has good qualities, of course, and I've always tried to see the good in him, but I think I've neglected the fact that I've never really been happy in this marriage.

A few examples: I had a rather difficult childhood, and then after studying, I was lucky to find a job in another region of Germany, and I felt very happy and free there. Then I met my husband, and by coincidence, he worked in the area where I grew up. I told him, “I don't want to move back into that house.” In spite of that, he kept trying to persuade me to move back in there because it was cheap and convenient for him. Another point is he tried to make me do all the housework. I always have to ask for everything. “Could you please help me tidy up?” And he doesn't want to do anything. So I feel like a servant.

A third point, I think we can't really communicate very well, at least about important issues. Once I told him I feel rather exhausted in the evening, and he would say things like, “Well, pull yourself together,” or, “But the kids are so sweet.”

You don’t have a partnership. It sounds like it’s a 1950s relationship—a stereotypical relationship where the husband, as my father once told me, thinks the male’s ego is everything and the woman is there to serve it. Now, hopefully, he doesn’t believe that anymore, but that was the mindset back then, and that is not the mindset of a good relationship. Many women I see in therapy now, in couples therapy or individual therapy, say, “You know, I’ve spent my whole life living in the shadows of someone else, and I'm fed up. I've had it.”

So it's very good that you're asking the question in the way that you are: Is my husband good for me? Not, Am I a good enough wife? It is your life, through and through, and that is so hard for many of us to grasp. You’re doing very good introspective work. When I talk about asking, looking at your emotions, and turning them into thoughts, you're saying there are moments when you get that foe feeling—not a friend feeling, but a foe feeling. And when you get that foe feeling, it’s so important to tune into that and turn it into thoughts.

He was not respectful of you when you said it was very important not to move into the particular house where you grew up, even though it was less expensive. Now, assuming the option wasn’t being homeless—if you had other options—he needed to consider that. You needed to feel… and here is the key word in a romantic relationship: you needed to feel visible, emotionally connected, emotionally intimate. And you didn’t feel that.

If that were the only thing he did—if it were not a pattern, just a one-shot deal, or every so often he did that to you and you did that to him—nobody's going to be perfect. You need to learn how to correct those types of errors going forward. But if it’s a pattern, which is what I’m hearing, Silke—that you do all the work, and when you ask for help, it’s not that you're a housewife or that you're doing all the housework and putting a band-aid on your lips, refusing to ask for help—if you ask for help and he puts you down, that’s not good. He’s not listening to you. You’re not being heard; you’re not visible.

If he’s telling you to pull yourself together when you're really tired—well, I don’t think any of us would like to be told, “Hey, pull yourself together,” if what we need at that moment from a loving companion is, “Oh, man, it must be tough to feel very tired when the kids are crying and wanting your attention.” Then it would be up to you; you could pull yourself together. So, what are your thoughts?

What are your options?

Yeah, I don't think he's the loving companion that I need. I need somebody who's more supportive.

Okay, so the first thing I would say is that the gift you want to give yourself is to see what constitutes a very good romantic relationship, because that gives you a standard against which to evaluate your own relationship. That you could do with our book that Dr. Ed Locke and I wrote, The Selfish Path to Romance.

Got it. I’ve already read it.

Okay, so if you’ve read that, then you’ve gone through Part Three, which is Finding Your Soul Mate. Do you connect on sense of life and values and interests and tastes, and even your habits, daily habits? Do you stay up late and he doesn’t? Or your views towards fitness? You see what the important things are—the essence of a good relationship. And you also see deal breakers: anger issues, refusing to communicate, dishonesty, or faking niceness. If people are always faking niceness, guess what’s underneath that? Faking niceness hides bitterness. They’re not genuinely feeling happy.

When you have a standard, if he was willing to read the book and change, it doesn’t mean you’d still want him as a partner. Sometimes there's too much damage that's been done, and you just want to start fresh. But once you have a standard, then you can go to the appendix of our book. We have a way… we have a chapter—it’s not a chapter, it's in the appendix—How to Part Ways and Start Over if You Cease Being Soul Mates. It’s a nine-step plan. First, you identify the reasons you’re considering a divorce. Second, you identify what's keeping you in an unsatisfactory relationship. You identify the barriers, and then third, you make a decision. You tie all the information together, then you break the news to your partner, and you try to create an atmosphere of respect. Another step is you help your children through it. You develop an action plan.

So I'm not giving you all of them, because we don’t have the time. You have kids too, right?

Yes, three and six. They're young.

Okay, so you would need to look on my website for a book by Florence Bienenfeld, Helping Your Children Through the Divorce. But first, you can consider talking with him because, who knows, if he changes dramatically, then you’ve got a marriage made on earth—a wonderful marriage. So thank you so much for your call.

Thanks for your help.

Oh, you're welcome.

For more Dr. Kenner podcasts, go to DrKenner.com, and here’s an excerpt from The Selfish Path to Romance, the serious romance guidebook by clinical psychologist Dr. Ellen Kenner and co-author Dr. Edwin Locke.

There are aspects of your appearance you cannot change, such as your height, being covered in freckles, or some changes due to aging. You simply need to accept things that you cannot change and work to change things that are within your control. Certain aspects of one’s appearance are changeable with the help of technology, plastic surgery, cosmetic procedures, and even drugstore products, like at-home hair dye kits and teeth whiteners. These are available if you want to and can afford to use them. It's perfectly healthy to use technology to reasonably enhance your appearance.

You can download Chapter One for free by going to DrKenner.com, and you can buy The Selfish Path to Romance on Amazon.com.