On the Book Tour in San Diego
By Lynn Rasmussen in Book Marketing Tips, Relationships & Marriage | Comments (2)
I wrote this entry earlier this week:
I woke up this morning thinking about what I said yesterday on KUSI’s Inside San Diego and San Diego’s Fox 6 Morning News. Charming Bill Griffith made Tuesday morning’s interview on KGTV-10 News easy, but did I say what I really want to say in the way I want to say it?
I took a walk on Mission Bay with my cousin, Pat Holmes, a lifelong San Diegoan (if that’s a word) and then went out for Mexican food. She and her husband Alan said that I looked great–calm and professional. That’s fine. But I want to be fun, interesting, and light.
I’m still asking the same question: What, besides the title, really makes Men Are Easy different? We’ve been crafting the message now for months and still I’m not satisfied.
Sometimes I say that it is based on systems thinking, on thinking from the new science of complexity. But that doesn’t really spell out the difference.
Sometimes I say that it doesn’t just look at relationships, psychology, and emotions. It’s grounded in physiology and it’s in sync with what’s happening culturally.
It’s life as a design space. He’s spending all the money? You’ll take action. He’s not doing his share around the house? You’ll do something about it. Instead of getting angry and upset about “the relationship,” you get clear and straight about what you want, ideally. Then you get creative.
I said it at a Rotary meeting: Rotarians don’t dwell on problems. The world is loaded with problems. Rotarians focus on solutions. Progress comes easily when we work collectively and creatively toward creating a better life and world.
But even this isn’t quite it. What is it?
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You seem to be facing a challenge with trying to get a larger idea across — one based in systems theory — so that your messages don’t come across as pablum. There’s depth there, but you don’t want the audience to get lost.
I won’t solve that problem for you, but can describe one ah-ha that people sometimes get with systems. Synergy isn’t more of something in the parts, it’s something different in the whole. No matter how much you study hydrogen and oxygen, you won’t make a dent in understanding the property of wetness in water.
When you speak of life as a design space, it’s a bit bounded by our conceptions of physical space. In a social or conceptual space, design is different. Think about degrees of intimacy. It’s possible to get close to someone, but if you had to grade your relationship, there’s a big difference between like and love. That’s a qualitative difference, which in the systems literature (i.e. T.F.H. Allen) would be a change in type, not scale.
I think that what you’re trying to describe in relationships is something that is qualitatively different, not just something quantitatively better within the same type. If a husband gradually learns to pick up his clothese off the floor more often, that’s a quantitative improvement, but it doesn’t necessary lead to the wife loving him more.
I am just now getting to this because it is too important and too fun to just blow by.
re: synergy. Thanks for the reminder about the hydrogen/oxygen and water example. I’ll have to revisit and use it.
re:design space. If he learns to pick up his clothes, he has paid attention to me, he cares, he is on my side and helping us, and maybe I will open up and experience that old love feeling again. I will more likely experience it if I am taking care of myself, if I’m able to sort out what is going on with me and my life and still have the energy to open up to him.
The tricky part is that maybe I was attracted to him while on birth control pills and now I’m off of them. My subconscious response to the pheromones he throws out becomes negative.I don’t even know why I don’t love him any more. I just don’t.
Yes, like and love involve different physiological responses/pathways.
Okay, it’s all more complex than my simple model suggests, but really it comes down, in any given moment, to, am I open or closed? When I open up, then I will get the feedback I need to adjust and adapt in response to whatever hits me.
Gosh, I didn’t touch on the type/scale issue.