Predictors of Relationships

Recently, our daughter and son-in-law were over for dinner, and my husband told a slightly embarrassing tale from our early marriage. The story was exemplary of me....and my "managing-others" automatic behavior. Fortunately we all had a good laugh.

It goes like this--After we'd been married a couple of years, Claud and I took a six week trip around the U. S. It was 1972, and we traveled from Houston, Texas through the southwest, up the California and Oregon coasts, over to Montana, where we had met in 1969 while working at the Many Glacier Hotel in Glacier National Park, and then to Michigan to visit friends before making a bee line home. Our mode of transportation, a white utility van we had revamped, was complete with curtains, a bed and all the camping equipment necessary for living on the road. We didn't have a lot of extra money so, magnanimously, I put myself in charge of trip finances.

Outside of Las Vegas, while stopped by road construction on a steamy hot day in our un-airconditioned vehicle, I deemed as the perfect time to offer Claud breakfast. I poured him a cooking pan worth of corn flakes, topped it off with some luke warm milk and suggested if he ate it, we would save the expense of eating out in Las Vegas.

John Gottman (www.gottman.com) has been doing research about couples, and he says that in the first three minutes of interviewing a couple, he can tell whether or not the relationship will work. A friend also told me that when a couple marries, research indicates that if either the bride or groom smash the wedding cake on the other's face, that marriage is likely to end in divorce. Makes sense to me, considering the inherent disrespectfulness of that one act.

In the small things, we can notice how we are in the grander scheme. However I am in this moment and this moment and this moment paints the larger picture of my life, and the story Claud recently told was one that predicted a problem I would have in both my marriage and in my parenting--my tendency to manage others.

My commitment of late is to get it that I'm only responsible for my life and live each moment from that perspective. It's not my job to fix, to manage, to not see hurt, pain, discomfort. It is my want to be present and hold the possibility for transformation. And that is enough.