Subscription
Enter your e-mail address to receive this newspaper column each weekday.
My strict privacy policy will keep your email address 100% safe and secure.
-
Affairs
-
Reactive people tend to damage relationships….
31 Mar 2006 by Rod Smith / 3 Comments
Are you a reactive person or a responsive person?
Get out of the middle!
Reactive behavior is characterized by:
1. Rash, knee-jerk decisions; being anger-driven, living with a “short fuse.”
2. Getting other people rallying for a cause, stampeding to get your way.
3. Being highly subjective and self-protective.
4. Running in the other direction.
5. Being easily hurt, insulted, or damaged.
6. Being humorless or seeing humor as a waste of time.
7. Developing a conspiratorial tone with others.
8. Saying, “People are saying…… about you.”
9. Over-functioning (doing things beyond your responsibilities).
10. Under-functioning (avoiding your responsibilities).
11. Giving unsought advice and expecting it to be followed.
12. Doing things for others that they can do for themselves.
13. Remaining surprised and innocent after causing much disruption.
14. Being vindictive.
15. Trying to get people to take sides.
16. Being unable to see beyond survival, feeling threatened at every turn.
17. Feeling overly responsible for others.
18. Feeling no other person, except you, knows what is right or good. -
Husband denied then admitted affair….
19 Mar 2006 by Rod Smith / 6 Comments
I read your “Jack and Jill” column last week and was pleased to see that I am not alone. I found out that my husband of 14 years had been having an affair for months. He denied the affair and through pure digging he admitted it. When I bring the affair up he gets angry and tells me to get over it otherwise our marriage is never going to work. He says I have to control my emotions and I must believe him when he says it is over. He says I have to stop going through his personal slips, his cell phone bill and that he feels like he has no privacy. He has turned that situation around after begging me to please forgive him and promising to do anything to make our marriage work and believe in him again. (Letter edited)
It is not your lack of control but his that landed you both in this unfortunate place. It is his lies, not your discovery of them that eroded your capacity to trust. A regretful man would invite you to talk about it as much as you want and to “dig” anywhere you please. Don’t permit further abuse – it was not you who broke the marriage bond.
-
Jack was unfaithful and Jill can’t get over it…….
13 Mar 2006 by Rod Smith / No Comments
“Jack” and “Jill” have been married for twelve years. “Coincidences” lead Jill to stumble on Jack’s affair. She is “mortified.” He confesses. He wants to “get on with my life and marriage.” Jack is angry because Jill can’t “get over” the affair. She wants to talk about it “all the time.” He cannot understand why she doesn’t trust him or want intimacy. He says she can’t forgive. (Theme from several letters)
Dear Jack: Thank God your wife talks with you at all. Be surprised if she is ever willingly intimate again. Your betrayal challenges the foundation of your lives. Forgiving you, and desiring you, have very little in common. Marriage without fidelity is not a marriage. You are lucky to still have one.
Dear Jill: Trusting Jack is up to you, it is not up to him! I’d suggest “guarded trust” for about two years. Request, if you are up to it, that Jack arrange for you to meet the “other woman” so that, in your presence, he can tell her he really wants his marriage and that he was at fault for deceiving and hurting you. Decide how long you need to refrain from physical intimacy. Challenge yourself not to let it linger indefinitely. Marriage without sexual intimacy is not a marriage – and he is lucky he still has one.
-
Sometimes a person you once loved (or still love) can be unnecessarily cruel
08 Mar 2006 by Rod Smith / No Comments
I am getting divorced after twenty years of marriage. While discussing financial matters, my soon-to-be ex-husband told me that in his “new life” he has found love that he has never before experienced with me. After all the feelings of betrayal and the on-going tension with the three children, when he said this it still hit me very hard. Was there nothing in 24 years he thought was real love? He has no clue about how hurtful it was to hear such a thing? Should I be angry or sad?
Be both! Each is appropriate. Knowing it is very difficult, I encourage you to shift your focus off him. Divorce is often a cruel form of warfare and he deployed a weapon to inflict unnecessary pain. His words have no benefit to anyone but to underscore that the man you once loved has resorted to unnecessary cruelty. Perhaps he is looking affirmation, some way of telling himself that he has done the right thing; that his move was worth it. Leaving children carries a great price. Somehow blaming you (for not really giving him “real” love) puts some of that payment at your feet. Don’t believe a word of it!
-
I am “talking” to a man in the Internet and my husband doesn’t know…
22 Feb 2006 by Rod Smith / No Comments
My husband doesn’t know I am talking to a man on the Internet. We have never met face-to-face but he lives about 100K away and so it is not impossible for us to meet. He wants to phone me but I am hesitant to give him my cell phone number because my husband also uses my phone sometimes. This person “listens” and I can “talk” about anything. I want to meet him. He knows I am married. What should I do? (Letter radically condensed)
The Internet offers an illusion of intimacy. You are being suckered in, conned, and trapped. Do not fool yourself into believing he is “listening” or “loving” you. This anonymous no-good is aiding you to be sidetracked from your marriage and offers nothing worth having.
I?d suggest you cut off all contact with this prowler immediately without explanation. Perhaps he is in the distribution area of this newspaper and might read this column and get the message about your wise decision to move on from this stupidity. Loving, caring men do not operate in the manner you have described.
Focus on your marriage. It is the arena you already have in which to establish something authentic and enduring than will ever become of the deception and duplicity you have recently chosen.
-
-
-
Get Rod on FaceBook and/or Twitter
-
Verbal log-jam
When I was a boy I’d endlessly practice the fluent delivery of my name but it seldom flowed easily from my lips. As if it was new news to me, adults pointed out my stutter. Perhaps they thought I was beginning, at that precise moment, for the first time in my life to spit from the mouth, twist at the neck, jig my head back and forth trying to expel some inane statement log-jammed between my gut and my throat.
-
Life in our beloved 122
If the inside of a house (outside, too, I suppose) is a metaphor of the lives of the people who live in it – which is something I once read somewhere – gosh, are we in trouble. Our house is a mess.
I consistently clean it room by room, thinking often of the legend that the Golden Gate Bridge that says there’s some guy constantly painting it. I feel for him. While I am sure the view is wonderful I must believe that the poor guy whose doing it daily from one end to the other must find the wind and the weather quite a challenge.
-
Being a white South African can come with complications
Being a white South African reared under Apartheid is no simple matter. It permeated everything for me. While I do not pretend to have been a political activist, I was always cognizant that my privileges, simply a result of being born white, were unmerited, and most unfair especially when enjoyed at the expense of others who were not. I think this unsettling truth (for I took advantage of my station in life) was somewhat of a companion to me from the age of about six or seven.
-
Location, location – remembering winter in August
We live very close to our school and church, so close we can hear the school bell from our kitchen and the church bells in my bedroom.
Sometimes we walk to both and we don’t see the car for days.
I like it. I like not having to get in and out of the car. I like not having to negotiate traffic, something as synonymous with life in the USA as Disney, Fast Food, and the Fourth of July.
-
Ready to adopt?
If you wait until you are ready to adopt a child you never will because you will never be ready. The baby, and only the baby, will make you ready. Reading the right books will be helpful, but “ready” magically comes upon you when a real baby is sleeping in your arms or crying in the middle of the night. If you are not ready to change diapers – and I always am amused at the big deal about this non-issue – being unprepared will last only as long as a clean diaper.
Life inside the Smith household
-