Category Archive for Lifestyle Design

Yesterday a friend asked me if my book has anything in it about relationships with men of different cultures. She has been divorced for a few years and has recently begun dating a Congolese.

Wow. That’s a cultural difference. What an interesting experience it must be!
The question of the week: What are the secrets to dating someone from an entirely different culture?

The question expands to all relationships:

• What do you do when you are attracted and at first it’s good, but then strange expectations and misunderstandings pop up?
• What do you do if you think that you might not be compatible but you hate to break up because there’s something special between you?
• What if you are married but just not compatible any more?

My first thought: Forget compatibility. Give up expecting to agree, expecting to see things the same way, and expecting to be in sync all the time with anyone. Here’s why:

1. We’re all different. We each live in separate realities. My best friend’s world is very different from mine and the way we look at the world is very different, but we are still best friends.
2. Men and women are different, with completely different orientations to the world. The longer you live with someone, the more you see it.
3. We all come from different families and backgrounds with different experiences.
4. Even when you are married, over time you are each hit with different responsibilities and different experiences and grow at different rates and in different ways at different times.

The secret: Get curious, not angry, when the unexpected pops up.

If together you can get beyond your cultural, family, and personal backgrounds and beyond your expectations and assumptions about way things should be, then you are on the right track. If you can deeply appreciate each other and enjoy figuring out your lives together, then maybe you’re a match.
If you’re married and once had all that, chances are pretty good that you can get back to that closeness again.

If you’re dating and you can’t seem to get to that level, whether he’s Congolese or the guy next door, learn from the experience and move on.

Does that make sense?
You can read more about compatibility and lifestyle design in Chapter 8, “Don’t Work at It” in Men Are Easy.

In his recent blog post Shawn has a new theory: You should marry the right divorce partner. He also said:

“The important thing to consider is that love is an ideal thing and marriage is a real thing, and that the confusion of the real and the ideal, never goes unpunished.”

Shawn’s right, but I’m going to take this last sentence apart to make his theory stronger.

1. Marriage is real, but it’s not a “thing,” it’s something you DO. I’m “marrying” in any given moment. I’m not “in a bad marriage,” I’m “marrying” poorly. I may be in a mess, but I’m creating it. So, I have a choice: I can either struggle in the mess, or I can open up and play around with different ways of doing things.
2. Love is real too: it is the feeling connected to the free flow of energy/information/matter between people. Want more? Open up!
3. It’s the space between the “real” (everyday marriage, life) and the “ideal” (love, the feeling) that can get scary for people. But, again, you have a choice: You can see it as a stressful thing–that ebb and flow of love. Or, you can see it as a design space, where change can–and does–happen. A space where you can learn to bring love back.

Confusion about love and marriage is rampant, and Shawn is right again: It never goes unpunished. The good news is that you can sort it out pretty simply:

confusion → stress → junk thinking → poor communication (or good communication of junk thinking) + fear of loss of love → marriage problems

The secret is to step back from confusion and stress. Get curious. Not angry. Not confused.

When you get fearless, creative, and ask with real openness, “What is going on?” you become the right divorce partner.

But then… What fool would want to divorce you?!

This Week: Focus on that design space. The space between the real (where you are), and the ideal (where you want to be). Play in it. Get curious about it.

Want more love? Want more fun? Want more time? Get curious. Just wondering how will make a world of difference.

Check out Chapter 8, “Don’t Work at It”, for tips on designing a great life — on purpose.

Maui News Columnist (retired last week!) Liz Jaynes-Brown, Mayor Charmaine Tavares, and I are on a panel for a symposium this evening at 7 p.m. at Seabury Hall in Makawao here on Maui.

When I was asked to be part of a panel to discuss “Where Is Feminism?” my first thought was, “I love this question.”

These are the five questions that we will be responding to at the beginning of the symposium:

1)   From your perspective, what is feminism?
2)   Do women have an unequal position in society or is it just that they operate in a different social, political, and economic spheres?
3)   To what extent should feminist issues be involved in policy decisions?
4)   Do you feel that feminism has constructed or deconstructed, America’s family values?
5)   Should abortion rulings be based on equal rights for all?

I’m preparing my responses this afternoon.

What are your thoughts?

Parenting magazine’s 20th anniversary survey was covered by the Today Show and commented on by bloggers.

The statistic that struck me: 96% of women believe that they are more stressed than moms were 20 years ago.

As a new mom 20 years ago, I was stressed. Tradition disappeared in the 80s. How to eat, exercise, parent, partner, work, on and on. I was running to keep up. At one point my husband and I almost divorced because of it. But by the time the kids were 5 and 7, I had it reasonably together.

My mom had different stresses—dentures at 40 and heart disease meant death, drunk driving deaths were “accidents,” and abuse was a private character fault. But she knew what to do in her life. She knew her role and she followed the rules.

Now it’s all happening faster. Schools and work are less stable. Standards of perfection are much higher.

Under it all is a lack of support for and understanding of the chaotic inner experience of being hit with mommihood. The work of it all. The massive demands. The normal but not well understood or described breakdown of sense of self and connection with others that happens periodically throughout life but is particularly distressing at this time, when responsibility for others is so great.

It’s life as a design space. We’re all winging it. In Men Are Easy, after 20+ years of research, I spell out the basics for life in this new world.

As I watch my 26-year-old daughter and as I read the blogs, I’m encouraged. Smart women everywhere are getting it right!

A recent NY Times article, Mommy Books: More Buzz than Buyers, discusses how books on working vs. stay-at-home mothers aren’t selling as well as their blog attention and media publicity would lead everyone to believe they would.

Why I don’t buy mommy books:
* I don’t buy one concept books any more. For this post, I read a blog post and a Huffington Post article (”Stay at Home Mom: A Sucker?” and “Women Who Stay at Home May Be Making a Big Mistake”) about the book and got the gist.
* Stay at home vs work is old news. It is a matter of circumstance, necessity, creativity, choice, one’s own nature, economics, on and on, and it’s all changing all the time. What we need are better design skills so that we can consciously create our own lives in our own unique ways in response to our own natures and circumstances.
* Buy a book that just describes my life? I know my life. It’s not that interesting. I share enough with my friends both in person and virtually to know I’m not alone. Unless the author’s as funny as Irma Bombeck (my mother’s generation’s wise comic relief–where’s our Irma Bombeck?!), no thanks.

But the real reason I won’t buy the book: It doesn’t get to the essence of the problem.

Working or not working, child or childless, single or married, life is a design space. I hope that instead of just discussing issues like working/staying home, women begin to talk about the process of and skills for creating a life where tradition is gone.

Our chaotic transitional society requires skills and ways of thinking that we can’t get from our parents or our expensive universities. As Robert Kegan says in In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life, “The curriculum is under development and the qualifications for expertise are questionable.”

The Great Turning has begun. A shiff from using up the world to sustaining the world is required. Work and life that’s not focused at least in part on those values is beginning to feel very wrong.

Discussions about working vs. staying at home seem off the mark. The discussion really is: Am I driven by need or driven by my highest values? How can I make sure, in my life, that the answer is the second?