marriage Archives - Laurell K. Hamilton

20 things I’ve learned about true love –

1. If you dread going home to the love of your life, they aren’t.

2. If you’d been happily married over ten years and people tell you, you’re lucky, it’s not luck – you’ve all worked your asses off to stay this happy.

3. Mind blowing sexual passions can last for decades, but you both have to want it, crave it, work at it.

4. Yes, I said you have to work at keeping passion alive in your long term relationships. Why does everyone think that they can work at their careers, their friendships, their family, their kids, their hobbies, but that great sex will just take care of itself? It doesn’t.

5. Find someone who is passionate about you in the bedroom and out of it.

6. Talk to each other, not just about the bills, or who’s driving the kids to soccer practice, or who picked up the dry cleaning, but about things that interest you. Bring your stories, your dreams, your goals, your fancies to each other always.

7. Get in shape together, or at least at the same time. Keep each other healthy. Or at least don’t sabotage each other.

8. Don’t go to bed angry.

9. Don’t be afraid to go to couple’s therapy.

10. Don’t be afraid to push each other outside your comfort zones, but remember to find enough comfort in your lives for you to all be happy.

11. If something is bothering you in the relationship talk about it early, before resentment builds up.

12. Remember that most big fights aren’t about the dirty clothes on the floor, the burnt dinner, the missed appointment, or whatever you think you’re fighting about. It’s about how it makes your partner, or you feel. The dirty sock on the floor can be the straw that broke the camel’s back, but it’s not the whole camel.

13. Schedule couple time regularly and make sure you both agree on what that time is used for, or take turns deciding.

14. Schedule alone time, remember each of you was a whole person before you found each other. Being in a relationship doesn’t change that.

15. Being in love should help you be more of who you are, a better, happier version of you. If you feel worse, sad, and miserable, then something has gone wrong.

16. There will be days when you’re sad, exhausted, overwhelmed, that’s normal. Being in love, even true love, doesn’t mean being happy every minute of every day. Only worry when the bad days out number the good for months. The good should out weigh the bad in a relationship, but it won’t get rid of all the bad stuff in your lives. This is true love, not a Disney Princess movie. (With apologies to both Frozen and Frozen 2.)

17. Remember to kiss and cuddle often. Both are proven mood boosters, and help keep our pair bond with our partners stronger. This is science people.

18. Try to find someone who’s level of skin hunger matches your own. Do not assume that the level of passion in the early days is normal for both of you. Discuss your expectations for passion and touching as the years go by. You’d be surprised at the number of people that assume passion will cool and that’s normal. If you both agree on that, great, but if only half of you agrees that’s a problem. I’m not just talking sex here, but literally the amount of touching, hand holding, kissing, physical affection in general.

19. You can grow together as a couple, or you can grow apart from each other. Choose wisely.

20. Remember that falling in love is the beginning of your story together, not the end.

Yes, Amanda, You Can be an Artist and a Mother

Motherhood does not define me. There, I’ve said it. I love my daughter dearly. She brought new worlds and concepts into my life that I would never have discovered without being a parent; but it was not a natural role for me. I never came to a point where I thought it was easy because every time I got the hang of it, she got bigger, older, changed, so that it was like learning the rules all over again. Parenting is like dating someone who changes every few months, but you’ve already married them, so you just have to figure it out as you go. You can buy all the parenting books you want, nothing prepares you for the reality of having a tiny human-being dependent on you twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty five days a year. It was, and is, the most overwhelming and challenging task I have ever attempted. My daughter is in college now, in the dorms. Other mothers I know bemoaned their empty nest but I was ready for less hands on parenting. She’s twenty, and I’m thrilled that she is starting her own adventures out in the larger world. I’m a little terrified at the thought of her being out there on her own, but mostly I’m just excited that we raised her to legal adulthood.

I know I would be a different person if I had not had a child, and since I like who I am, I’m happy with what I discovered of myself and learned along the way. But I’m here today to strike a blow against this ideal: that women are defined by motherhood and that not having a child makes any woman one bit less a woman. That’s bullshit. If a woman chooses not to have a child, that is her choice, let her make it, leave her alone about it. Stop asking women in their twenties, thirties, or Gods forbid, forties, when they are going to have children. First of all, unless that’s your uterus walking around in that woman’s body, it’s none of your business. Second, why should you care if this other woman has a child? Because it’s almost always women who do this type of bullying. Yes, I said it, bullying. I saw it as bullying when I was in my twenties and early thirties, married for years and had no children but was constantly being asked, when, why not, why don’t I have children yet? Strangers would ask me this – constantly.

I finally started answering, “I’m concentrating on my career.”

They said, “What if you wait too long and then you can’t have children?”

I said, “Then I won’t have children.”

They never seemed to like that answer.

My first husband and I were married for ten years before we had the house with a room for a nursery. I felt that I had had enough therapy so that I had dealt with the worst of my childhood demons and wouldn’t share them with our daughter. I stopped using birth control and within three months of trying we were pregnant. Let me add that I had a terrible pregnancy, like my mother before me, and was very ill. I was in and out of the hospital trying to keep our baby inside long enough to be born and survive. I did not glow. I did not enjoy the process of producing an entire human being inside my body. There were very few Hallmark moments during my pregnancy. If you decide to get pregnant, please do not go into it thinking that it will all be cute booties and wonderful moments of ever growing closeness with your spouse or domestic partner. Check out how well your own mother handled pregnancy and that may give you an idea if it’s going to be “normal” or exciting like mine was, trust me, an exciting pregnancy is not what you want.

Was it worth it to get our daughter? Yes, hell yes. Do I regret having her? Not for a minute. But I did not make being a mother the end all, be all, of my life. Her father helped make her, so I made sure he helped me take care of her. At one point in my pregnancy when he’d done something that made me doubt he was understanding that I saw parenting as a shared event, I told him this, “If you make me raise this baby as if I’m a single parent, I will be.” Never argue with the pregnant woman who is puking her guts up trying to bring your child into the world. I stood my ground and made him help me as much as possible. One, because that seemed fair to me, and two, because I had books to write, stories to tell. I’d wanted to be a writer since I was fourteen-years-old. I’d only wanted to be a mother since my early twenties. I was never one of those people who defined myself by marriage and children. I’d never planned on marrying. I was a writer. By the time our daughter was born I had six novels and numerous short stories published. She’ll turn twenty-one this year and I am planning the tour for my thirty-eighth novel.

My editor at that time worried when she found out I was pregnant. She thought it would make me soft, lose me my edge. My first novel written after her birth had the highest kill count of anything I’d ever written. Motherhood didn’t make me soft, it made me fierce. It made me more committed, determined to succeed. It made me cranky when our daughter was very small, because lack of sleep will do that to you. Even with my now ex-husband dividing up the newborn caregiving it was beyond exhausting. My hat is off to all new parents because it was the hardest stage of parenting for me. It just gets better after that.

Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman are expecting their first child together. Amanda is a wonderful musician, singer, bard, and recently, writer of her very own book. Neil is an amazing writer of novels, children’s books, comics, screen plays, pretty much if it can be written he’s done it and done it well. They posted a lovely photo of Amanda and a female fan promptly commented to Amanda that she had ruined her career as an artist.

First, the fan hit Amanda in the fears of many female artists when they decide to have a family. Will children take all my creativity and time? Will my art die? Will I change so much that I can’t write, or sing, or paint? I said publicly on Twitter that all that is bullshit. I’ve written short stories and thirty-one novels since my daughter was born. Having a child didn’t make me less of who I am anymore than marriage did. You remain yourself no matter who you bring into your life, even if it’s a whole new human-being. I understand the fears though, but I do not understand the other woman telling Amanda such hurtful lies, because I’m proof that they are lies. You don’t have to give up your life to be a mother, and before someone says it, no I did not have a nanny for my child. When she was born I couldn’t have afforded it and I also decided that I wanted to be the main input on our child, not a stranger that I paid, but that was my choice later on, when she was born it was just my ex and me to do it all. I would take her to childcare first for a couple of hours a day, and then gradually longer, but I learned to write in McDonald’s play lands while she explored the kiddie hamster trail. I wrote anytime she slept. Her naps were my chance to do a few pages. I handed our baby to my husband at the door when he came home from work and then vanished into my office. (This may have contributed to our eventual divorce.) I wrote on the kitchen table with the baby in a pumpkin seat beside my portable computer. If you are not determined and driven you can combine parenting and a career as an artist.

I believe that Amanda Palmer is driven and determined. She also has Neil Gaiman, her husband, in her corner to help. I had some help from my ex-husband, but when I married a second time I found even more help in Jonathon. He took care of her when she was sick more than I did so I could make my deadlines. He picked her up from school more often and he brought his wonderful mother and step-father into our lives so that by the time our daughter was seven, or eight, they were grandma and grandpa. One of the best things I ever did was offer his mother a chance to be a full-time grandma. I had more help as our daughter headed into double digits than I ever had before. It’s only now as Jonathon has more empty nest syndrome than I do, that I realize how much I pushed my new husband into the deep end of the parenting pool. He was twenty-five and had never been married and I just excepted him to step up. He did, but it’s only now that I realize how hard it must have been on him as an only child to suddenly be a dad. I have faith that Neil and Amanda will step up for each other as artists and parents and as a couple. It can be done, and done well, it just does take effort, planning, compromise, and a determination to make it all work. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t mix art and babies because that’s just not true.

But one thing that is strangely absent in the whole online furor about whether Amanda can be her artistic self and a mother is that no one has raised the same doubts about Neil. Yes, the woman carries the baby in her body, and the man can’t do that, but why is it assumed that the woman will sacrifice her career for parenthood but the man doesn’t have to?

I am the main breadwinner for my family, but I have had people ask me already if I’m going to be a full time grandmother and help my daughter raise her kids when the time comes. I say, no, and they look at me strangely. They have never asked the same question of my husband. I plan to do what most successful writers do: die when I’m old and gray, still typing away at my keyboard trying to tell that one last story. I expect Neil Gaiman will do the same, but I’m willing to bet that no one has asked him if he’s going to quit writing and become a full time grandpa and help raise his grandchildren, just as no one thinks a new baby will end his career.

If you want to stay home and be the primary parent for your children, then do it. If it makes you happy and you can afford it, then do that, whether you’re a man, or a woman, but please stop assuming that because we are women that it’s automatically our job to sacrifice everything for diaper duty.

New Blog – Happily Ever After is the Beginning

Twenty, our daughter Trinity is twenty today. There’s something about this birthday that seems momentous to both her and me. She’s no longer a teenager. Yes, she’s been a legal adult for two years, but somehow neither she, nor I, thought childhood had been completely left behind, but twenty is the end of the teens and the beginning of a decade that is absolutely, positively an adult number. But that’s not all of it, Trinity also attended her cousin, Kay’s, wedding earlier this month. Kay is already a mother of a baby girl of her own, and only a few weeks older than Trinity. I remember when I and both of my sisters-in-law were pregnant at the same time. All the girls were born within weeks of each other. Now one is a mother and married, another has decided on her career and is off pursuing that, and Trinity is in college; Trinity also caught the bouquet at Kay’s wedding.

People told Trinity that she would be next, and she loved that so romantic idea. She’s always been of a more romantic turn of mind than me. I double checked that she wasn’t dating anyone seriously, so a wedding was unlikely anytime soon. I remained calm, though what I wanted to say, was over my dead body would she be getting married anytime soon. Then, my daughter, who I thought of as fairly logical, proactive, and level-headed in most situations, just beginning to explore all the possibilities of her life, talked about her wedding day. She’s talked about her wedding day after every wedding she’s seen since she was about six. I guess it’s normal for most little girls, but when she was six I didn’t worry about it. Now she’s twenty and suddenly it’s not cute anymore, its a little frightening to me. I’m the mom, I’m supposed to worry.

I had grown up never planning to marry, so I had never dreamed of my wedding day. I was too busy writing my stories and collecting my first rejection slips, because I was going to be a writer. I didn’t have time to plan weddings, or moon over boys. Trinity had never done much mooning either, so I never worried about her falling into the trap that marriage and romance are the biggest things in a woman’s life. I’d shown her that men and weddings were not the be all, end all, for her life. She understands that, but suddenly the whole wedding thing seemed a little too real for me, and for the first time I thought of how differently she had seen marriage than I did growing up.

I had fallen in love for the first time in college and married at twenty-one to her father. It had certainly surprised the hell out of me. I’d planned on being a happy writer without any of those complications from “relationships.” They just distracted an artist from their goals. I actually didn’t let marriage distract me from my goals and was a successful novelist by the time we divorced sixteen years later. I vowed never to marry again, and then promptly fell in love with Jonathon. We are now blissfully happy at thirteen years and counting. Was it the fact that I had married twice and was actually happy that had made Trinity feel more positive towards marriage and romance? Trinity had been one of the flower girls at our wedding, so this more romantic attitude might be my fault. Was it letting the flower girls ride in the horse-drawn carriage with us? Don’t blame fairytales, because I was raised on those, too, and the romantic bug didn’t get me. But then, I had only my mother’s unhappiness in the brief marriage to my father, and was raised on tales of my grandfather beating my grandmother, who she had divorced after twenty years. Marriage didn’t seem that great to me, and men seemed like extras I didn’t need in my life. My grandmother and I got along fine without one. I did the heavy lifting around the house, what the heck were men needed for? Then I fell in love, and married, twice, and Trinity grew up seeing that the right man with the right woman could be pretty awesome, so in a way it was totally my fault. My happiness had actually fed into the social message that romance and marriage are important; damn it.

I took a few days to think about why I’d had such an issue with her innocent, and perfectly normal, remarks about weddings. I finally realized what I wanted to say not just to Trinity, but to all the young women everywhere.

I hope my daughter’s wedding day isn’t the biggest and most important day of her life. I hope that she has so many days that make that one day, pale in comparison. I hope she finds someone so wonderful that their days together will be full of such happiness that the wedding is what it’s supposed to be, the beginning of an amazing adventure and a real life love story that will rise in action from that day forward. I hope for her a person at her side that brings joy to her life, everyday. I know they will fight, I know she’s not perfect, nor will her spouse be perfect. The trick is to get enough good stuff from the relationship to offset the irritating stuff, because that’s all it should be, just irritating stuff. If it’s truly bad stuff; addiction, abuse, I trust my beautiful, strong daughter to understand that you can’t love them enough to change certain things and not to ever marry someone who is cruel when they say they love you. True love is not cruel, or controlling in a way that hurts you.

When you fight, and you will fight, remember that list of things you know would hurt them the most, don’t say them. Don’t say the unforgivable list, because once uttered it can’t be taken back, and though you say, I forgive you, you never forget and it damages your pair bond.

I hope my daughter understands that it is the every day joys that make life worth living, not the big moments. The big stuff fades and cannot last, but the joy of waking up beside someone you love and renewing that love every day in a dozen small gestures that say, better than any fancy dress, or church full of flowers, I love you.

I hope she understands what that means, love, to her may not be the same as her spouse, and that part of the challenge is to find out what their language of love is both individually and together. To some men, playing their favorite video game with them means you love them enough to try. To others dressing in their favorite outfit is love. To some women helping with housework means love, and to others sexy naked time is love. For Trinity, I hope she finds another video game and anime Geek and that she never falls in love with someone that rolls their eyes and belittles what she finds such fierce joy in, and the same for her future spouse. Let them honor what each finds joy in, and understand that it doesn’t always have to make sense to you, you just have to understand that the love of your life adores fall mornings, or bird watching, or sleeping in late, hitting the gym, scuba diving, or watching cheesy horror movies. Whatever fills their face with light and joy, honor that, and honor the things that fill your own heart with the same light. Do not give up your hobbies, the pieces of yourself that bring you happiness, because your spouse fell in love with the girl, or boy, that thought Pokemon was cool; don’t lose that. Don’t let the idea of love and being a grownup steal yourself away. Love, true love, honors who you really are and never makes fun of it. Honor each other, care for each other, be kind to each other, have fun together, and above all know that there will be moments when you fall out of love, or are so irritated by that small thing they always do that you just want to scream. Remember in those moments how much you love that thing they do that always makes you smile. Remember how they held you when you were sad, or how they cry at Christmas commercials, or how hard they work at their dreams, and how they help you work at yours.

I hope that my daughter’s wedding, when it comes, if it comes, because if she never marries that’s okay with me, as long as she’s happy, but if she chooses to marry, I hope she looks back and thinks it was a beautiful beginning to an even more beautiful life in partnership with someone she loves, and who loves her as much as I do. It’s not about a certain ceremony, or a certain goal, or milestone, those will come and go, it’s about the day in, day out, are you there for me – do you have each other’s backs? That’s what it’s about, I hope my daughter and all the young women out there understand that is more important than a thousand designer dresses, or the perfect flowers, or how many bridesmaids you have – your wedding day will pass, but if you all work at it, and are lucky, then it just gets better from there.

New Blog – When I grow up I want . . .

From the time I was twelve-years-old I never planned to marry. I would live on an island with lots of animals and write my stories, because writers could live anywhere; right? At twenty-one I left my grandmother’s house to marry my first husband. I never owned my own apartment, never lived alone, and then suddenly I was part of a couple. It had been just my grandmother and me, and now it was just my husband and me. It seemed not that different, and yet entirely different. I think if I’d come from a bigger family that I might have had more trouble transitioning to this two person system, this couple, but two seemed familiar, seemed right. By the time we celebrated our first anniversary we had one Yellow-naped Amazon parrot, a hand fed luntino Cockatiel, and a canary that would come out of its cage and play on the parrot playground. I was writing and trying to sell my stories when I wasn’t working in corporate America. We’d moved to California, so I was at least by the ocean, I was part way to my island.

Fifteen years later we were living in St. Louis, Missouri, the middle of the country, and I’d almost forgotten that island dream. I was a best-selling novelist and I was separating from my soon-to-be ex-husband. I got my first apartment that was just mine. I was able to pick out a kitchen table and chairs without consulting anyone’s opinion but my own. It was GREAT! I reveled in the freedom of just me. Well, not just me, because one room of the apartment was for our daughter, Trinity. I let her pick the color and the decor. She was five-years-old and wanted a totally pink room. At her age, so had I, and she wanted a pink canopy bed, and so had I, so who was I to argue with her? Besides, I’d already told her she could pick everything, this would be a promise that I would never make to a child this young again. The pink paint was called Candy Pink, or something equally innocuous, but we, the painters, the people who delivered the furniture, all of us, dubbed the color Eye-Bleed Pink, because it was so bright it made us nauseous to be in the room too long. One of the men who delivered her pink and white canopy bed declared the color made him dizzy. But Trinity loved her room! The rest of the apartment was mine to decorate as I saw fit, and I loved being on my own. I was never going to marry again, it hadn’t worked for me, monogamy with the wrong person is a trap I never wanted to fall into again. My ex-husband got to keep our remaining parrot and I got the two dogs; we shared Trinity.

Six months later I would be engaged to a friend I’d known for eight years, Jonathon, and we’d be planning our wedding. My first husband swept me off my feet in a gentle, geeky kind of way. Jonathon and I snuck up on each other, just friends until the moment we realized we weren’t. I’d done the big wedding once, but he hadn’t, and what my sweetie wanted, I wanted to give him, so we did it up big. Trinity and her best friend were our flower girls and they got to ride in the horse drawn carriage at the end after we were pronounced husband and wife, because if you have a little girl and you have a horse drawn carriage they get to ride in it too, that’s just a rule somewhere, or should be.

Jonathon and I celebrate our thirteenth anniversary next Monday. We are happier now, more in love now, than when we started. Having been through a marriage where ten years in, that was not the case, I value this love and our life, all the more. Trinity is happy, healthy, and off to college. We have three dogs and about twenty koi in the pond. We still live in the middle of the country, so no closer to that island I wanted at age twelve, but I am now a #1 New York Times Bestselling novelist (my agent always insists I write it that way *waves at agent*) so part of my childhood dream is on track.

Four years ago, Jonathon and I were in love with another man. He was our third, and I’d hoped he might be a live-in third someday, but the situation was too complicated. No one’s fault, just not enough honest communication and grownup straight forwardness, I think. But our ex-third introduced us to a woman and her partner. The woman was Genevieve, and her partner doesn’t matter much to this story, because two years later he would be an ex for both of us. But Genevieve would be my first girlfriend ever, and she dated both Jonathon and me. Even more than our ex-third she loved us both, equally, and I hadn’t realized how much I, we, needed that until we had it. She was states away, and we settled into a long distance relationship, LDR, most of our polyamorous relationships have been LDR. She met another man. We knew all about Spike from the beginning, because poly has only one hard rule: that everyone is honest. Spike would talk to us for hours as he planned her engagement ring. Who knew her better than we did, after all we’d been dating her a year longer than he had. We were part of the party where he planned to surprise her with the proposal. I got to help distract Genevieve so that when I turned her around he was just down on one knee with the ring held up to her. It was wonderful and we’d worked as unit to pull it off.

Next week, just after Jon and I celebrate thirteen years of wedded bliss, Genevieve and Spike are moving in with us. They are bringing their two dogs, and yes we have introduced our packs with the help of a local “Dog Whisperer”. Genevieve will also be bringing her fifty-five gallon aquarium of fish. She and I have already talked about a possible lizard, and more fish. Both Spike and I are terribly allergic to cats, and that is a blow to her, but she loves us both, even enough to risk never owning a cat again. I am getting shots, and hope to find a way, someday, for her to have her beloved felines again. She has also asked about parrots, but I am allergic to feathers, which was one reason I had to give up the parrot to my ex-husband. I miss having birds, very much, and hope to find one type I am not allergic to. I’m the writer I dreamed about being, and we will soon have as many dogs as I envisioned as a child, and I hope, nearly pray, that we may add more animals as time goes on, now all we need is that island. Some place tropical, Genevieve?

How do I do it all?

I’ve gone through every picture that was in the boxes in the guest room. Decades of pictures. Some made me sad like ones from my first marriage where it’s obvious I’m head over heels for my first husband, because I know how it ended, and I looked so happy. I also prove again and again that I had not yet discovered the right hair care products for my curls. *laughs* But I found one picture that I thought I’d lost, or rather didn’t know I had, at all.

People are always asking me, how do you do it? Write books, have a career, how did I write 35 novels and one short story collection, and have both my book series be best selling series, and hit #1 on a regular basis? How do I have a husband who loves me, and who I’m crazy about, and successful poly relationships, plus a daughter, and a writing career? How do I do it all? Well, I found a picture that sort of answers the question.

That’s me writing in my office, in the first house I ever owned. Yes, that’s a very tiny, Trinity laying across my arms, as I type. Why was I holding her like that? Because she cried if I put her down, and I needed to write. The rhythm of my arms and hands moving soothed her. That was how I wrote a lot of the the fourth Anita Blake novel, Lunatic Cafe, with my newborn balanced across my arms, lulled to sleep as I typed. At three months she went across the street for two hours and I wrote furiously while she was at daycare.

Something about writing the latest Merry Gentry book, A Shiver of Light, made me ready to go through all those old memories. I think it was Merry having her own babies, that made me want to go through all my own photos. There’s something about mile stones, even fictional ones apparently, that make you look back, as well as forward. You get to meet Merry’s newborns on June 4, 2014 when A Shiver of Light is published. You can see my only newborn in this picture. I’m so glad that Trinity wasn’t a multiple, one was hard enough. *laughs* Of course, Merry has many more fathers to help her than I did. One mother and one father seemed outnumbered by one newborn. 🙂

How have I succeeded at so many things? I think this picture says, how I’ve done it, better than almost any other I’ve found. How do you accomplish great things? Be driven, be as determined as the woman in this picture, because I was committed, dedicated to succeed. I was obsessed! Writing isn’t my job, it’s my calling.

Ten things I’ve learned from Two Marriages and a Decade of being Polyamorous

1 Do not date drama llamas. Do not date people that are prone to drama, just don’t. No one is that pretty, no sex is that good – no drama queens, or kings.

2 Remember that you aren’t perfect either. No one is perfect, don’t expect it, don’t look for it, because if you do, you are doomed to be continually disappointed.

3 Love means different things to different people. Do not assume that because your last girlfriend loved getting flowers, that your current girlfriend doesn’t see them as funeral flowers, and is trying to figure out a way to tell you, “Please, stop buying me dead plant matter.”

4 People have different hierarchies in love: I put great sex near the top of my list, if that’s not present, then I will not even date you, let alone get into a serious relationship, but I know a surprising number of women that put sex fourth, or lower on their “love list”. Some of the things they put higher on their list ; financial security (whatever that means to them), someone who wants to be the breadwinner, wanting children, good father. Not all men put sex at the top of their list either. I’ve run into several that put emotional security, companionship, good mother, wants to stay at home with kids, or doesn’t want to stay at home with kids, higher on their “love list’. Make sure the love of your life has the same priorities in this area, as you do, otherwise it will eventually destroy your happiness together.

5 No one wants to think they are wanted just for sex. I’ve found that even if the relationship begins with sex, even if the man and I negotiate that it’s going to be about hot, monkey sex, eventually he will feel bad if he doesn’t feel appreciated for other fine qualities. Even your friends with benefits, if it’s to continue as a relationship, needs to know that you like them, even if your friendship is mostly about the booty call. Make people feel appreciated, and make sure they know what you need to feel appreciated to.

6 Men are not mind readers – let me repeat that – men are not mind readers. That’s right my fellow women, the men that want to date you, are dating you, are in a relationship with you, married to you, cannot read your minds. So, it’s up to you to tell them what you want, how you want it; what makes you happy, what makes you sad; you must communicate with them. If any of you have ever said, “If you loved me, you’d known why I was mad at you.” You are setting your lover, boyfriend, husband, up to fail, or get so frustrated there’s going to be a serious fight. Talk to the man, or woman, in your life, ladies, please.

7 Men, most women need you to talk to them and tell them what you need, want, and what makes you happy, or sad. Yes men, I’m talking mostly to you, though any women who date women you get #6 and #7. The strong silent type is fine, but not if it leaves your girlfriend, lover, wife, in the dark as to your emotional wants and needs. We can’t make the shared relationship wonderful, if half the couple is a mystery that never talks to us about anything important.

8 Ladies, don’t push too hard on the communication if the man has never been taught, or encouraged to talk about his emotional needs and wants, it’s going to be weird and uncomfortable for him. The men need to try, but we need to encourage their efforts in this area, but not too hard, or too constantly. Baby steps if they’re one of those men that isn’t an emotional sharing sort of person. If you think 7 & 8 contradict each other, not really, it’s a dance between the two of you, to figure out what’s comfortable for both of you, and how much you both need from each other in this area.

9 If a woman asks a man, “What are you thinking?” and the man says, “Nothing.” Just believe him, men have this wonderful ability to actually still their minds and think nothing for minutes at a time. I know, as a woman, it’s hard to believe that everyone’s mind isn’t going a thousand miles a minute, but it’s true of most men, and even some women. If you insist they had to be thinking something, they will be pressed to make something up, or get angry that you didn’t believe the truth.

10 If you’re with a woman that changes her clothes a lot before going out, please, do not get angry about it. Do not grab a shirt, or shoes, and say, “This matches, let’s just go.” Or, “You look good enough, let’s go.” If your lady is the type to do this, then just budget enough time to let her try on a dozen outfits, before she’s ready to go out. You don’t have to understand why she does this, when you think she is beautiful in anything. Honestly, I’ll do it on occasion and it’s like a compulsion, even I don’t understand it. You will not break a woman from doing this, if she does it, so you can fight about it constantly, or just accept it, and deal.

True Love is Hard Work

It’s been very interesting reading the comments on my FaceBook page about love, and the flowers that Jon, my husband, gave me. There seems to be this idea that men are barbarians and women are the civilizing influences, so we train them up to be what we need, or want. Or that there are only a few perfect men out there, and I’ve lucked out and found one. Both those thoughts are based on incomplete logic, and in fact I haven’t found either to be true.
First, it’s insulting to men to cast them in the role of hapless, even stupid, until the right woman comes along and trains them up. A couple trains and teaches each other. You both learn and grow together if the relationship is to be a happy and fulfilling one.
Second, this idea that I found the perfect man and there is just a few of them out there, and if a woman could find the “right one”, then she’d be as happy as I am discounts all the time and effort that Jon and I have put into our relationship. There is no perfect man, or woman, out there. The idea that the right person will make everything in your life work effortlessly is just not true, but a lot of people believe it. I think that one of the reasons for the high divorce rate is this fallacy that if you fall in love with the right person that it will all be easy, and that if it isn’t easy then you’ve obviously chosen badly and you need to find someone else. Sometimes you do choose badly, and a divorce is the only cure. My first marriage ended in divorce after sixteen years. We were college sweethearts, and we went virgin to our honeymoon after a big church wedding. Nearly twenty years later I was a different person than the one he married, and we grew apart rather than together, until there were so many differences we could no longer thrive as a couple. I left when I realized I would rather be alone the rest of my life than be in a marriage that made me miserable. I planned to never marry again. Six months later I was engaged to Jon.
I did everything differently the second time. I insisted we live together first, because I had learned that you never really know someone until you wake up beside them, see them sick, after a hard day’s work, happy, sad, whatever. Anyone can pretend while they date, but sharing a home . . . you learn the real them, and the real you as a couple. Again, dating is all about the special, but marriage is all about the ordinary. A lot of men that are great on special occasions and will sweep you off your feet in that romantic way, suck at the every day. No, really, they do, just like some women that hit that same romantic note may totally suck at being a permanent partner. You can’t live on little black dresses and roses, because someday’s the toilet over flows and somebody has to wait for the plumber to show up. Was that unromantic? Good, because real life cannot be all flowers and pretty, real life is messy and you want someone who is willing to get down in the trenches with you, even if it means getting mud on their Gucci loafers.
Being married to my first husband didn’t help me be married to Jon, they were too different, and I was too different from the girl who married the first time. What I needed in a partner had changed almost completely. I was nearly twenty years older, so that made sense, but it was weird to realize that I had to throw away most of my preconceptions of marriage to make the second one work. I think a lot of people that marry over and over again, try to treat people like cookie cutters and fit different spouses into the same shape of marriage, and then they’re surprised why it doesn’t fit. They have a new shape of cookie, a new relationship and it needs to be treated like something brand new, and special in it’s own right.
One thing I did learn from my first marriage was that you had to make everyday special. You couldn’t wait for holidays, or anniversaries, because there weren’t enough of them, not for me. I’m the kind of person that needs anniversary sex daily, and flowers for no reason more often mean more to me than a big, expensive bouquet on my birthday. Now, I know I said earlier that dating is all about the special, and marriage is all about the every day, but successful marriage for me is about making every day special. Now, you can’t do it literally every single day, because there are days when the child is sick, the work deadline is crushing you, and by the end of the day you and your spouse are so tired you just want to fall into bed and sleep. It happens, the point is to make sure it doesn’t happen too often. That takes conscious effort on both your parts to understand that being married to the other person is a privilege, not a right. You earn privileges, rights are given to you like the Constitution gives rights. You must always remember that marriage is about earning the privilege to continue to be happily married, and it’s up to each person, each couple, each family, to figure out what that means for them.
Here’s the other thing I learned from my first marriage that helped me make a happier one the second time around. Love doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone. That means that how you show love isn’t the same, and what makes you feel loved isn’t the same. That sounds logical, right? You just have to find out what makes the other person feel loved and do those things, but what if they are mutually exclusive things?
To one person doing the dishes makes them feel loved, but to the other person being made to do dishes feels like punishment, maybe it was a punishment as a child so to have their spouse complain about them not doing the dishes throws them back into unhappy childhood memories. But the dishes still have to be done, and the other half of the couple will not think it’s fair to do them all the time. It is the job of the couple to find out why dishes are such a hot button for them. Figure that out, and the half that was punished with dish washing can offer to cook more often, or vacuum more often, or take some task that their spouse hates more than dishes.
“You were punished by being made to mow the lawn, I’ll do that, if you’ll do the dishes, because it makes me feel punished to do them.” Is that fair? Only if both halves of the couple feel it’s fair. That’s just one small example of the kind of dynamics that go into a long term relationship.
Here’s another example of the confusion that can happen if love means different things to people. I sent flowers to my first husband’s work once. I loved him and wanted him to have a happy reminder of that at his job. He came home and told me, “Never do that it again.” It had embarrassed him for his wife to send him flowers, and the other guys had given him shit about it. I had meant it to be romantic and tender, to make him as happy to get the flowers as it had made me to pick them out and send them, but it had made him unhappy and far from making him feel special, or loved, it had made him feel just the opposite. I must admit that his reaction to my flowers made me feel very unloved, too, so lesson learned. I never sent him flowers again.
Go forward about twenty years and I’m seriously dating Jon now. I was out on one of the last big book tours I would do by myself without Jon. I was gone for weeks and it was the longest we had been apart since we got serious. I sent him roses to his job with the first stanza from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem, “How Do I love Thee, Let me count the ways . . . ”
Now I was taking a chance here since a similar gesture had blown up in my face with my first husband, but I had been dating Jon for nearly six months, living together most of that time, and we had been friends for eight years before that. I had sent him flowers to congratulate him for getting his first big job out of college and he had liked them. I’d done other romantic gestures for him, so I thought it was worth a try. But not only had I arranged for this bouquet, but I had arranged for a different color of rose and the next stanza of the poem on the card to be sent to his work every day for a week.
He got the same ribbing that my first husband had gotten from male coworkers for the first flowers, but Jon was able to proudly say, “She loves me, and she wants me to know that.” To him the flowers and the poem meant he was loved, just like it meant to me that I loved him. We matched up in our love expectations and actions. Yay!
The women at work thought it was very romantic, the first day. By day three the women were getting hostile to him, and the men at work were having two reactions. One, what sexual secret did Jon know to make a woman send him this many flowers!? Jon’s answer of, “She loves me, and I love her,” did not make the men stop trying to wheedle this bedroom secret from him. Two, that he was making them look bad in front of the women they were dating. He actually had one boyfriend who didn’t even work with him come over and talk to him, because the flowers were making the boyfriend’s girlfriend who worked with Jon complain to the boyfriend. Why didn’t she get flowers from him?”
The boyfriend said, “You’re making me look bad. Tell your girlfriend to stop sending you flowers to work.”
Jon’s reply, “I don’t make her do anything, and I like getting the flowers. You can get a five dollar bouquet of flowers from the grocery store across the street and give them to your girlfriend.”
I have dated other men besides Jon where the big gesture wasn’t as appreciated. It didn’t fall as flat as it did with my first husband, but it made the men uncomfortable. Part of the lack of comfort came from the fact that I was dating men ten years, or more younger than myself the second time round, and I had more money and resources to do the big gesture than men in their twenties. ( I did try dating men in my own decade, but I had many of the same issues with them that I’d had with my first husband. Ten years, or more younger and we got a long better. Jon is twelve years my junior.) I apparently made some men feel less manly, because I wanted to do the big romantic gesture and I did it better, or more expensively than they could. Again, go back to the whole idea of love means different things to different people, you have to respect that and figure it out. I knew I wanted to date a man that enjoyed getting flowers from me, so I did. I wanted to be rewarded for my romantic inclinations, my generous impulses, not feel punished for them. That goes back to the whole who washes the dishes question, well, who feels punished and more emotionally attached to the dishes? What do flowers at work mean to a man? Is it a good thing, or a bad thing? Find out, and respect their feelings. That’s really the key talk, communicate, and find ways to make you both feel happy and loved.
Strangely, Jon no longer likes getting flowers at work. This made me very sad, but the reason is that he works out of the house just like I do now. Flowers at work where he couldn’t see me and touch me were reminders that he was loved and got to go home to me. Flowers at home/work seem useless to him, because I can just find him and hug and love on him in person. Why send flowers when we’re together during the day anyway? Once we talked it out it made sense, but it still made me sad that he no longer enjoys getting flowers. On the the other hand I love when he gets me flowers, so he does, because for me as I write alone in my office they are a reminder that I am loved. This is just one example of how things that made us both feel loved when we were dating have changed. You have to honor the changes in each other, as well as the things that stay the same.