Why yes, I am Happily Single

I have been mildly amused of late with the sidebar adds on my yahoo mail account.   We all know that there is no privacy and ads are tailored to your lifestyle and interests.  Trust me they track everything which is why I am always getting horse and fiber (not the stuff to you eat) Ads.  But these Ad people aren't all that accurate and often offer the darndest things.  Somewhere they picked up on the fact that I was divorced and therefore single, which is correct, but after that it was all down hill.  Apparently no one should be single, and they had Ads to help fix that.

For the longest time I got these sidebar ads for dating men.  These men were all various ages and a real cutie was some guy out of Las Vegas, but after a year this fellow apparently still didn't have a date which is why he kept showing up in a sidebar Ad trying to get my interest.  Frankly if this poor fellow couldn't get a date after spending everyday as a sidebar Ad on my computer and every other computer, well.....would I really want to date him - I don't think so.  Since I wasn't interested in Mr. Las Vegas the Ad people decided to try something different.  So then I was getting 50+ Christian men looking for real woman to take care of - No games.  All right, that is really sweet, but where did they get the idea I was looking for a Christian man to coddle me.  I'm not Christian and while I have a great deal of respect for many aspects of the Christian religion it just has never resonated with me and I wasn't raised in that faith. So...no clicky clicky on that sidebar ad for me.

The Ad people went back to the drawing board.  Drop the Christian theme and just see if we can tempt her with some 50+ hunky guys.  Yawn......Thanks guys, but I was married for some 25 years.  While I thinks it is great for many and there are certainly aspects of a good marriage I do miss - I really am happily single at this time in my life.   But apparently being single is something that needs to be fixed and since I wasn't clicking on pictures of sexy men maybe I would prefer to date a 50+ hot woman.  I was startled and mildly amused when my sidebar Ad suddenly changed to great looking 50+ women about a week and a half ago.  Well, I do admit it got my attention, but not because I was interested in dating a 50+ woman.  Yesterday, I actually got an Ad that said "date great men here or women".  Curiouser and curiouser,  what will they suggest next?

Yes, I have been mildly amused lately, but then perhaps I am easily amused.   I think it is very thoughtful that the Ad people want to alleviate my perceived loneliness, but I'm doing just fine thank you and should I decide to start dating again I'll let you know.

The Just World Theory

I once wrote that people would be a lot happier if they stopped worrying about what other people should do for them and thought about what they could do for others. 

The golden rule is: One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself. That's it; no subtext, except we always seem to hold an unconscious addition or expectation that others will treat us in like kind. When this doesn't happen we often feel resentment, used, and somewhat betrayed.   I used to see this in relationships all the time.

The Just World Theory is a rather technical and complex theory in Psychology, but on a simpler level I think it is a belief there is a certain karmic tit for tat in the game of life; meaning if I am nice, nice things will happen to me.  In reality, bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people.  Now there is a certain karmic kickback - if you are a complete jerk and need a helping hand your not likely to get it from all the people you have really, really irritated recently. On the other hand you are more likely to get help if you've been nice.   I know I have consciously gone out of my to avoid someone I find a complete PITA* and don't spend any more time with than absolutely necessary.  I'm just not available, polite - but not available.


This subject came up as I listened to an individual tell me about all the ways they go out of their way for their friends and how their friends don't reciprocate in equal fashion, how stressed, put upon and resentful they were feeling after doing all these nice things that no one was thanking them for.  I felt like saying set some boundaries or get new friends, but I didn't.   On some level I think this complaint is really arrogant  Friends may ask, but we have the right to say no.  A friend's world doesn't revolve around making sure we have the energy, time or money for what they ask.  On the other hand, once we commit to a request we should see it through and not try and bail because it suddenly got inconvenient, like house sitting a friend's animals. 

I think making things special for others is wonderful - but not if your expecting some kind of payoff down the road.  It's not a bank account.  There is a certain martyrdom in always saying yes and then resenting when your friends are always asking you for stuff. If you can't accommodate a friend's request, just say so you will get greater respect.  Just because someone asks doesn't mean we have to agree.  We teach people how to treat us.  Boundaries are hard to set sometimes, but they can be learned with practice.   Finding the balance is the tricky part, be kind and generous to others, but also to ourselves.

Some people are just jerks, some are bottomless pits of needs, some are professional victims who's lives are crisis driven and are always needing a helping hand, but there are a whole lot of people who are really very nice - not perfect, but a very nice balance of goodness and imperfection.  I'll take this last group thank you very much. 

To use a gardening metaphor - pull the weeds and keep the good stuff, there isn't room to have everything in the garden plot and someone beside the weeds should be making the decisions; and it seems really dumb to then complain that the weeds are...well.....acting like weeds.

*PITA - pain in the ass

A Rose By Any Other Name

I was gently taken to task several weeks ago by a friend who had been avoiding my blog because of the title.  She was afraid that it would be all anger and sarcasm which was something she didn't really want invited into her life.  She gently suggested that maybe it was time in my journey to perhaps change the name of my blog, because she found my title and content so energetically counter-intuitive.  Basically she felt I was a nice person with a not very nice name for my musings and it gave the wrong impression.  On one level she is correct, the current blog title might be better served by being changed to Dilettante At Large or something similar.

Her comments sent me to the dictionary to look up the meaning of "nice".  Agreeable, pleasing, accommodating (ok, this last one is a personal definition).  The title of the blog came during a difficult time of divorce, breast cancer and death of the father of my children and a bunch of other nasty things that caused a couple of friends to offer to do a black cloud exorcism for me.  I had moved through life trying to be agreeable, pleasing and accommodating, it just wasn't working.  I was tired of being nice and doing what others wanted or trying to live to someone else's desires.  Call it boundaries or setting limits (as a retired therapist I hate terms like boundaries and issues but that is a different story), but I think it is about having the confidence and the courage to say "no" or "no thank you".  I seemed to be really good about helping others define themselves and establish a life they wanted but no so good at helping myself do the same thing.  I'm not looking to pick a fight, but I am tired of colluding with others in my personal life regarding fictions of behavior, responsibility, and actions.  I think too often women have been taught to keep quiet, go along, be nice, accommodate.  We are rewarded for these appeasement behaviors and called nasty names when we say "no thank you or I don't think I agree with that",  bitch and ball breaker come to mind. 

I'm reminded of the Emperor has no clothes tale.  This idjit is parading down the street starkers and everyone is admiring his clothes except for the little boy that says "Look, the Emperor has no clothes."  Now I'm sure every woman in the crowd knew he didn't have any clothes on because woman are genetically designed with a clothes/shopping gene which notices these kinds of things, but they were to nice to say anything or didn't want to be called bad names for speaking up.  But the little boy, being a man in training, doesn't have to watch his mouth and probably grew up to be a gay male fashion designer since he actually noticed the emperor wasn't wearing anything.

 I am a huge fan of civility and wonder where its gone these days and I don't like the cult of rudeness that has grown up in social media and conversations, however, this doesn't mean I don't have voice and a backbone, and sometimes I'm tired of being nice - "Dude your naked!"

It's Official, I Am Retiring My License

This is the month that I have to renew my license with the Board of Behavioral Sciences if I intend to continue practicing as a Marriage and Family Therapist.  Actually, I haven't actively practiced in a couple of years.  I have all the continuing education required to renew - but it is time to face the fact that I'm just not going to practice as a MFT.  So I have sent in the application to retire my license and officially close that chapter of my life. 

I find that I have just gotten cranky about the whole formal process of therapy.  I think it has been regulated to the point of meaningless.  I think people can change, but it is a lot of hard work and it isn't done in a vacuum which is sort of what the therapeutic hour is.  Real change happens in the real world, the rough and tumble struggle of having a person hold our feet to the fire and having to really look in the mirror of life and see what we are doing to contribute to our own problems. I could probably hold forth on this for hours of boring reading and I certainly know that therapy is a complex process.  I think in some ways the practice of therapy has created a false sense of "getting better" or "the pretense of changing".  The excuse of  "I'm in therapy" is used as a rationale to inflict special needs and accommodations from others for our PITA behavior or the PITA behavior of our kids.  Now, this is not in reference to the heartbreaking and very real mental illnesses of Schizophrenia, etc.  This is the general everyday play nice with others type of stuff. We all have something that we bring to the table that is problematic in our lives, personality wise.  I deal with anxiety - I get it.

Having said this, I really value the training I received and the work that I did with others.  I learned a lot,  I love the work of Martin Seligman, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and the positive psychology movement.  But what I have also learned through my work and being a professional observer of human behavior some of the following:

Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should
Yes it is important to learn to say please and thank you
If people worried less about how others were treating them and more about how they were treating others everyone would be happier
We need Miss Manners (see learning to say please and thank you)
It isn't all about us
"No" is a very important word
Self  Discipline is not a dirty phrase
Delayed gratification is a good thing if practiced in moderation
Integrity counts
Character counts (yes, if no one is looking it still counts)
Don't lie, truth is slippery enough
Take responsibility
We need to get off the couch
We need to have a hobby
We need to do something for others on a regular basis (visit a housebound friend, volunteer, etc)
We need to tell others that we love them, that they did a good thing, etc.
Create something of beauty for yourself and others (an apple pie will do, a picture, a hand knitted item)

Okay,  this list is just getting longer - life can sometimes be hard, very hard which is why we need to be kind, gentle and generous with each other.  In the meantime - I am going to go back to my knitting a life of meaning and joy.

The Value of Dependency in Relationships

The continuing letter and the vlaue of dependency. I think dependency got a bad rap with the plethora of books on co-dependency. Any one attribute is neither all bad or all good. When it becomes overdone a character strength tips into a weakness. So....on towards the value of dependency in relationships as I characterized it in a letter 20 years ago.

There must be a dependency that allows the partners to know they are important to the wellbeing of the other. Not the kind of dependency characterized by clinging. But the kind of dependency that allows the one to go to the other because it is the safest place to be when there is hurt. This is also a sense of safety, of coming home in the other. It is not that one could not function wthout the other, but the going is made easier by the presence of the other.

Tomorrow, the value of imagination or romance in a relationship.

Spelunking the Past

I have had some time on my hands of late, and have been going through boxes from storage. I have always been a journal keeper. But I have also been a keeper of correspondence, which I sometimes think is the more interesting memory walk. Apparently, I also am a great keeper of copies of letters I have written to others. I ran across a letter I typed to a friend regarding the nature of marriage and relationships. I wrote it almost 20 years ago. I find what I wrote then to be just as true today in my opinion. It is too long to quote in it's entirety here so I will break it up over the next couple of days.



A letter to a friend:



...There are always three entities not two in a relationship, the man, the woman, AND the relationship (This letter was a response to a discussion of an article about heterosexual dating).



...Security, dependency, imagination, compassion and a commitment to not only each other but to the relationship. There are acts that might benefit the other but would be unhealthy for the long term survival of the relationship......



There must be an underlying sense of security that the other is there for you. An underlying TRUSTWORTHINESS. Lies and deceptions will destroy the base on which everything else depends. The partners need to KNOW they are secure in the love of the other and that they won't be betrayed. Each must hold the well being of the other and the relationship in the forefront of their actions and behaviors. Oh yes, there will be unintentional hurts and misunderstandings, but if the foundation of trust is there than the hurts will heal. It is when trust is eroded that the hurts stay open and raw.



Tomorrow - the value of dependency.

A Woman is just a Ride

I read recently an article in Glamour from the new “Jake” on the block, and it suddenly occurred to me as I read him describe going out with a new woman wondering if he slept with her, how she would feel, sound, look, etc. that he could just as well as been describing a car. And then a cacophony of images, articles, comments from male friends began roaring around me. Men see women as tools, as something to own, ride, show off, use and trade in when a new model is made available. Look at the example pulled off the net:

…that the way a man treats the people who service him out in public, whether it's a waitress or a cab driver, can indicate how he may later treat the woman he marries.

No kidding!! Because he just married his own personal wait staff. How many times have you heard from a woman in regard to her spouse, he only has one job around the house and I make sure he does it (yes, I heard this comment just this week). Of course, they both have full time jobs, but I don’t hear men saying my wife only has one job around the house and I make sure she does it. How many articles have you seen about “How to tell if your man is cheating”, “How to keep your man from cheating”, “The 10 signs of a man that may cheat”. I don’t ever remember seeing articles with “How to keep your woman from cheating”. Generally speaking if a man hasn’t cheated it is because he is too lazy, the opportunity hasn’t presented itself, or he has done the math and decided that his regular ride is going to find out and his personal convenience store is going to close. The Greeks wrote a whole play about the women getting sick of the men throwing big sticks at each other and said: “Throw another freaking stick dude and no nookie for you” Bam! War ended, no more big sticks being chucked during the day, just little sticks in the night.

Men think they are in a deep relationship if they have a full stomach, have gotten a little in the last 12-24 hours and they have a remote, game stick, or console in hand. I floated that idea to a male friend that laughed and said it was actually pretty true. I asked another male friend, “So Pat, let me see if I understand this correctly. Men just want the most amount of bang in a relationship for the least amount of actual involvement”. Yep, that pretty well covers it was his reply. Oh my….and I like men, but I am definitely learning that you cannot expect them to be what they aren’t.

We are things for them, it isn’t personal and we women keep thinking it is. A recent article decoded this phrase for women: “When he says “I love you” after sex, it really means “I loved having sex”. My guess that “I love you” coming from any man translates as: “You do enough things for me that I would be an idiot to not let you keep on taking care of me.” This is not to say we can’t enjoy what they do have to offer, just don’t assume that you actually mean anything to them – you are their own personal wait staff and convenience store and they are happy to shop somewhere new at a moment’s notice. Dogs generally have more loyalty.


I used to be such a romantic – oh well…..