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.
-
Attraction
-
Three poisons for love: Manipulation, Intimidation, and Domination
21 Jun 2011 by Rod Smith / No Comments
Think of chess! When relationships are “played” with moves designed to checkmate your mate, something is wrong in the camp.
-
Take my test, get my feedback……
19 Jun 2011 by Rod Smith / 1 Comment
I will assess your committed relationship and give it a grade: A+ through to a B-.
A “C” is for cut and run if it is at all possible.
You will receive a GRADE, my written response (NOTHING AUTOMATED), a list of challenges, and a list of suggestions (again, nothing automated).
All you need:
(1) To be is in a committed relationship that is in some turmoil
(2) Have an hour to spend WRITING about it in response to a set of questions I will send you
(3) Be willing to receive a GRADE with an assessment of strengths / weaknesses.
BE WARNED — the questions lead to much soul searching. You may be anonymous (of course) but you must be willing to write quite a lot in order to get the best out of the experience. I will not use anything you write in any column.
Privacy insured. Send me a message and we’ll take it from there.
There is a cost of $29.95 (USD) for this service. You will have my complete and undivided attention for 1 hour as I read and respond to all you have written. You will be billed via PAYPLAY via your email address.
I am you offering my opinion regarding the sustainability of your primary and committed relationship based on the information you send to me.
I’d suggest you consult with a face-to-face professional before you take any radical action based on the advice or guidance I give you in response to your submission.
I look forward to hearing from you.
-
Take my test, get my feedback……
17 Jun 2011 by Rod Smith / 5 Comments
I will assess your committed relationship and give it a grade: A+ through to a B-.
A “C” is for cut and run if it is at all possible.
You will receive a GRADE, my written response (NOTHING AUTOMATED), a list of challenges, and a list of suggestions (again, nothing automated).
All you need:
(1) To be is in a committed relationship that is in some turmoil
(2) Have an hour to spend WRITING about it in response to a set of questions I will send you
(3) Be willing to receive a GRADE with an assessment of strengths / weaknesses.
BE WARNED — the questions lead to much soul searching. You may be anonymous (of course) but you must be willing to write quite a lot in order to get the best out of the experience. I will not use anything you write in any column.
Privacy insured. Send me a message and we’ll take it from there.
There is a cost of $49.95 (USD) for this service. You will have my complete and undivided attention for 1 hour as I read and respond to all you have written. You will be billed via PAYPLAY and via your email address.
I am you offering my opinion regarding the sustainability of your primary and committed relationship based on the information you send to me.
I’d suggest you consult with a face-to-face professional before you take any radical action based on the advice or guidance I give you in response to your submission.
I look forward to hearing from you.
-
To the married woman in the affiar with a married man (yesterday’s letter)…..
25 May 2011 by Rod Smith / 2 Comments
Your thoughts about “your” married man (he’s no more yours than is the man in the moon) and your husband, expressed in yesterday’s column, are a fine illustration of three things:
Affairs seduce you away from REAL love
1. Love, and the illusion of it, often makes a person blind. You appear unaware that every time you are together he, whom you claim has never lied to you or led you on, is lying to you. That he is lying to his wife (with whom he has a covenant and legally recorded relationship) means he can as readily lie to you (with whom he has no legal relationship at all). You are duping each other no matter how well you dress it up in your head.
2. It’s next to impossible to convince the already convinced. It is unlikely you will take any guidance very seriously while you believe this “love” has come “knocking” to teach you something worth learning. Improving your skills at ducking, diving, hiding, and lying never led anyone to deeper intimacy, more openness, greater warmth, and appropriate vulnerability.
3. The human mind is capable of gigantic twists to rationalize its dilemmas. It is a crock to think this “love” is teaching you to better love others while you are at the same time deceiving these very same people.
-
Jealousy is quick-sand….
22 May 2011 by Rod Smith / No Comments
Jealousy in an intimate relationship is quicksand. Don’t mess with it. Accommodate it and it will suck you both in. Try to reason with it, or teach, change, or appease it, and it will constantly outsmart you.
This must be faced.....
To the non-jealous partner…
Conduct an inventory. Is your “flirting” within the realm of how sane, kind people conduct themselves? If your actions are designed to test the metal of your relationship then you are being manipulative. Stop. If not, continue. If you are not, yourself, being manipulative (this is for you and not your partner to answer) then continue. This is time for your to stay out of control.
To the jealous partner…
Jealousy is your problem. In a more sane moment you will probably agree that it is your issue. Jealous people read volumes into the innocent actions of others and attribute motives to others that are so far from original intent.
To both of you…Smiling is not flirting. Kindness is not flirting. The flirt knows when he or she is flirting – but the jealous person will read everything as flirting.
Once you engage it, give it a voice, try to prove it has no place or need to exist, try to reason with it, it will duck under your “let’s be reasonable” discussions and emerge later to drain you and your relationship of all vitality.
Given and audience, jealousy will remove all joy and spontaneity from your relationship and then, once its done its nasty work of destroying a good relationship, it will leave you burnt out, feeling guilty, and even looking haggard.
-
-
-
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
-