Hope keeps me going.  How much hope I have determines how much energy I have for the day ahead. 

Dennis and I went and saw "Hope Springs" last night for our Friday Night Movie date.  Tommy Lee Jones and Meryl Streep are just going through the motions of being married.  When you watch their daily routine, you realize that they are more like roommates than a couple.  Meryl Streep's character still has hope that their marriage could change, so she signs them up for a week-long $4000 marriage counseling session in Maine with a marriage therapist played by Steve Carrell.  Watching these characters work out their marital problems was a roller coaster ride of hope as each character got out of their comfort zone to try and create an intimate relationship again.  www.youtube.com/watch

Hope is my shovel that helps me dig deep to get rid of my troubles.  Without it, without possible solutions, I know what the outcome will be...I will be in the same situation or in an even worse one.  With hope, I can see possibilities and create a new outcome for myself. 

This movie reminds me why it is so important to be best friends with my spouse.  The quality of their lives changed drastically when they started liking one another again.  Once the friendship rekindled, so did their love.  They started being customers of each other.  When they renewed their vows, we saw how much they had learned about one another and how anxious they were to have the marriage of their dreams.

Go see the movie and bring home some hope!

As a teacher, I have always been fascinated with learning about how we learn.  We all have different learning styles and learning rates.   There is a concept called "wait time" that measures how long we wait for an answer once we have asked a question.  I think we can improve the communication in our marriage by applying this idea when we interact with our partner and our children.

The concept of "wait time" was developed by Mary Budd Rowe, a Professor of Science Education at the University of Florida in 1974.  Wait time measures the amount of time a teacher gives a student to respond after asking a question or the amount of time given before the teacher repeats the question.   The theory is that the longer a teacher waits for an answer, the better the quality of the response will be.  Her research showed that generally teachers only give a student less than one second to answer before repeating or moving on to another student.  I experimented when I was teaching, and I found that I was guilty of not giving students adequate time to formulate a response, and I started practicing wait time.  I was pleased to see that the quality of the students' responses improved when I was willing to wait just a few seconds more. 

When I think of the numerous interactions I have with Dennis every day, I realize how important wait time can be in marriage.  How much time do I give him to respond?  Do I assume that he should give me an excellent response in record time just because we have been married for 33 years?

Here are 3 steps to try to improve your wait time in communication:

1.  Look first to be sure your partner is in the room and you have his/her attention before speaking, so your partner has a chance to focus attention on you.  It's not fair to talk to your partner's back and then feel frustrated when there is no response.

2.  Practice wait time.  Ask a question that requires more thought than a simple "yes" or "no" answer and wait at least three seconds for your spouse to reply. (Try saying "I love you" silently three times to help you keep from talking.)  Keep an encouraging, thoughtful look on your face and avoid rolling your eyes or sighing while waiting for an answer.  See what kind of response you get.  (Try it with your children, too.)

3.  If you are thinking about your answer, say "I'm thinking about it." or "Give me a minute." so your partner knows you heard the question, and you need time to consider your answer.  If you find you are rushing your partner to respond, ask him/her to let you know they heard you and are thinking, so you know that your communication link is established.  Then go back to #2 and wait.

                                               Don't wait to try it---start now!

After reading my book, The Marriage Story, people have asked me whether it takes a crisis for a person to change, as the character in my story changed.  I believe that we are most motivated to change when we have no choice.  But we can also change by coming to a realization that what we are doing isn't working for us.  It may not be working for our spouse either, but we only change when our behavior no longer feels right to us.

People don't stop drinking, or abusing, because it bothers the abused, or the neglected.  The husband in The Marriage Story didn't stop feeling sorry for himself because it worried his wife.  He had an epiphany, an insight, into the meaning of his life.  For him it was his friend's crisis that awakened him.  For someone else it might be their own crisis, such as a partner walking out on them because they drink too much.  Or it might take a doctor telling them that they are going to die if they don't change. 

My mother smoked cigarettes from the time she was sixteen until she was sixty-seven.  All of the kids in the family tried to persuade her to quit, but when a doctor told her she was soon going to die if she didn't stop smoking, she stopped that very day and lived to be eighty-four. 

Often we have to discover something about our own behavior that is as dangerous, or as repulsive to us as it is to the people that care about us, before we are willing to change.  Hopefully we can change the little things that stand in our way of a loving relationship without needing a crisis to motivate us.  When we truly care about our partner's needs we are more apt to want to change the behaviors that are hurting us---and the relationship.

The list of reasons people give for why their marriages failed include the usual suspects: financial problems, infidelity, in-laws, disagreements about how to raise the kids, and so on. But none of these are the true reasons why marriages don’t stick. We believe that these problems are merely the symptoms of something more fundamental. Marriages fail for the same reason that businesses fail. They stop showing their customers that they care.

If that sounds simplistic, think back to when you started shopping at a new store or eating at a new restaurant. At the grand opening you were treated like a rich relative. Now recall when you started dating. You treated each other like royalty. You didn’t argue then about little things that bothered you. You were too busy showing each other how much you cared for each other’s pleasure and happiness. Even big problems didn’t seem insurmountable because you believed that your love could get you through anything.

The store or the restaurant that continues their royal treatment is likely to still be in business and doing well. How about the ones that took their customers for granted? It sounds like a chicken or egg problem. Do we stop caring because of problems, or do problems overwhelm us because we stop caring? We believe the latter, that problems engulf us because we have already stopped caring about each other. That isolates us and makes us feel alone. Together we could endure anything. Alone, the smallest troubles can feel too much to bear. The bumps that we were able to glide over in the beginning can loom like mountains ahead when we have no one to share the load.

The “Customer Metaphor” is a tool to remind us that caring doesn’t stop after marriage.

Imagine a sign on the front door of your favorite coffee shop or restaurant that announced, “Today we don’t care about you.” A business can’t succeed by taking a day off from treating its customers well. Neither can we stay in love by telling our partners that some days they don’t matter. Marriages fail because caring fails. By demonstrating “care” everyday we build a powerfully sticky bond, that embraces us, binds us together to face whatever problems come our way.