Decisions that turn out badly are not necessarily mistakes, but if you actually did something wrong, remember that your goal isn’t to self-flagellate, but to do better. Once you’ve learned what you can and apologized if necessary, begin living with the luck you have. Success is not measured by how well you maintain or restore family wealth, but by how well, despite humiliation and loss, you stand by your values, continue to work hard, and do your job as a partner and parent.
Many of those who grow up with wealth, spared from the conflicts and challenges of life’s regular tasks, can feel bored and insignificant, obliging them to find a creative calling to make their lives meaningful. In marrying such a person, you think you’ve lucked out by acquiring both financial security for your family and a special kind of companionship that is more interesting and available than that offered by someone forced to make a regular living.
The danger is that if your spouse takes the ordinary responsibilities of partnership and parenting for granted and overvalues creativity, he can focus too much on his dreams and not on the day to day. Marrying a dreamer may seem romantic, but nothing about being bound to an unreliable, self-centered asshole is romantic, even if the bills are always paid. He’s not necessarily malicious, but in his own genial, princely way he feels entitled to flee boredom and pursue whatever and whoever is new and interesting, regardless of prior commitments or responsibilities. If that’s the kind of guy you married, you’re in trouble.
If you complain or urge him to stand by his family commitments, he is likely to withdraw while acting as if you’re trying to push him into depression and banal captivity. He’ll tell his shrink, if he sees one, that you’ve turned into precisely the needy, demanding, conventional partner he was determined to avoid and you promised not to be. Even if the therapist seems sympathetic to your point of view, the therapist won’t get any further than you since your spouse just won’t show up again.
Instead of complaining, remind your husband how much you respect whatever he contributes as companion and parent, even when the job is irritating and boring. Discuss his unhappiness as something that may be inevitable, particularly if he is prone to depression, and that his unhappiness doesn’t signify to you that he hasn’t found his calling in life or that he’s an unsuccessful human being. Urge him to relieve symptoms of depression with treatment, if that’s what his lethargy and uneasiness truly are, and to learn to tolerate unhappiness without necessarily questioning the meaning of his life goals.
Hopefully, he can respond to your good advice. If not, you’ve done your best to help him settle down, and now it’s time to stop taking responsibility for his unhappiness, build up your independence, and carefully evaluate whether this marriage is worth holding together for you and your kids. If it is, respect the extra work required to manage a family as an unequally partnered parent, and if it isn’t, respect yourself for making a difficult choice.
Despite what films, country songs, and human-interest stories on the news about happily married centenarians say, many people marry without ever feeling madly in love. Having suffered breakups and breakdowns with previous, well-loved partners who couldn’t do their share, manage money, or stay faithful, lots of people are just happy to find someone they can trust, respect, and work with reliably and without drama. In most cases, love grows, even if it’s never mad or doesn’t stay deeply passionate for longer than the life span of a parrot.
If you’re unlucky, however, and find yourself increasingly irritated with a perfectly nice husband, it’s hard not to feel guilty when there’s everything to like and you just can’t get yourself to feel the way you should. That guilt makes you more irritated, and irritation makes you feel guilty, and on it goes. You wish you could work out your issues and feel comfortable and happy with a guy who’s a good match, but what you learn is that no one controls his or her feelings, with or without therapy, so making yourself feel more love or just less guilt isn’t in the cards.
So don’t dwell on your failure to feel the way you should. Instead, review the advantages of staying married such as your finances, the kids’ security, and having a good working relationship with your husband. If the advantages outweigh your unhappiness, respect yourself for tolerating the painful chemistry of your marriage for a worthwhile cause, and work hard to find distracting hobbies, such as running or volunteering, to keep your mind on something besides your irritating spouse.
If it’s no longer worth staying, don’t overapologize for feelings you could never help, but do express regret for a good partnership that ran into bad luck. Take credit for the good family you built together, then reclaim your single life and commence a search that’s still pragmatic but with more of an emphasis on finding a partner who provides more support than irritation. You can’t assume that your mistake was to overrate money or underrate love, rather than to overrate your ability to control your emotions.
Having wealth in a marriage opens the door for many worthwhile life goals and can reduce certain sources of marital conflict, but it can also foster overdependence on and overvaluation of lifestyle goals that are not important and become a false measure of success. Remember, wealth is the gas, which means it can take you far even if your marriage-mobile is otherwise in need of repair and at risk of exploding at any minute. So don’t measure your marriage based on the destination, but on how you manage, or survive, the journey.
Did You Know . . . Truth, or Bullshit?
We examine widely accepted beliefs about relationships to determine whether they’re true (or not so much). The phrase in question:
“You’ll find someone the minute you stop looking.”
Usually, if you’re trying to achieve a difficult personal goal, be it getting a new job, quitting cigarettes, or finding a vintage PJ Harvey T-shirt on eBay for under $200, being driven is a good thing. When you’re looking for a partner, however, being driven can sometimes read as being needy, and if you seem too desperate, you’ll end up scaring potential partners away or accepting unworthy ones out of sheer determination to reach that relationship target. You’re especially at risk if your desperation pushes you to compromise your standards and give any willing biped a chance. In these instances, this saying is true: if you’re not actively looking, your choices won’t be warped by neediness, and you may actually find someone you wouldn’t if you were actively on the hunt.
On the other hand, if you have no eligible partners in a situation—e.g., if most people your age have already paired off, or your tastes are a little unconventional, or you’re a single woman in New York City (but not Staten Island)—you won’t find someone unless you are determined, because you’ll need to look hard and with great care. If you aren’t looking at all, you won’t be avoiding losers, you’ll be avoiding the search and the possibility for partnership altogether.
Plus, people often invoke the “not looking is the best policy” dictum after too many bad dates and attempts at finding someone worthwhile have left them with a bad case of burnout (and nothing more if they’re lucky or used protection). Not looking becomes synonymous with giving up, ignoring the burnout, and pretending that you’re still looking when you’re really in a committed relationship with Netflix and your couch. The smarter option isn’t to stop looking, but to look for better guys by toughening up your criteria. That way you can stop wasting time on bad candidates and protect yourself from burning out and bingeing on Lady Dynamite in one sitting.
While it is true that you will find something meaningful with someone when you aren’t desperate enough to accept anything that’s moving, it’s not true that you’ll find someone if you entirely lose the will to search. So, no, you won’t necessarily find someone when you aren’t looking, but you will find someone good for you if you aren’t looking for any old moron with a pulse.
VERDICT: TRUE-ISH SOMETIMES, BUT FREQUENTLY BULLSHIT
The financial potential of a partnership is important for the security of anyone who wants kids, to be able to send those kids to college, or ju
st wants to keep themselves and/or their kids from a career redeeming bottles and cans. While extreme wealth doesn’t guarantee you can keep a marriage together—just ask the British royal family—few partnerships last if they make one or both parties substantially poorer. That’s why how one responds to the stress of gaining or losing wealth, not the problems money solves, is the best indicator of the potential strength of your union. Those moments tell you how strong a person is and what he can contribute when bad luck arrives, which it always does. Don’t feel guilty or superficial for caring about how much money you need a partner to have, but it’s more important to know whether a partner’s values are strong enough to stand up to the sooner-or-later stress of financial fluctuations. If he or she has that strength, then God save this possible king or queen.
What to Look For
What to Achieve/What Not to Be Fooled By
Mutual attraction
. . . based on each other’s ability to save and prioritize spending, not on having the ability to blow cash on fine wines, five-star hotels, and foolish, great expectations.
Mutual respect
. . . for what you accomplished when there wasn’t much money to go around, and not for what you spent it on when you got a lucky fistful of dollars or a family fortune.
Shared effort
. . . on working hard, deciding together what’s most worth saving for, and then finding ways to have fun together, rather than in finding new ways to feel better by spending more without worrying about tomorrow.
Common interests
. . . in what you like to save for, spend on, and donate to, rather than in climbing a social ladder to gain self-esteem.
Common goals
. . . to make enough money for survival, security, and building a family and a strong foundation for your kids in the future, not for buying yourself into the 1 percent and the good feelings that go with it.
Should My Partner and I Have a Baby?
Congratulations! Not because you’re having a baby, but because you’re smart enough to think twice about having a kid, which already shows great parenthood potential. Before deciding to become a parent, you have lots of important factors to consider, starting with how experienced you and your partner are with kids, and whether any experience indicates potential parenthood red flags. The timing also has to be considered, as well as you and your partner’s abilities to take on the many massive sacrifices and tough choices that parenthood entails. If you come through this evaluation feeling confident that you, your partner, and your relationship have what it takes to make a family, then congratulations for real. If you instead discover that you currently don’t have the experience, resources, and/or sturdy partnership that parenthood requires—and remember, babies don’t solve problems between couples, they open up an entire universe of new ones—then congratulations for making a smart but difficult choice, and for having learned what you’ll need to make parenthood a better option in the future.
Warning:
This chart assumes that you have cleared three of the biggest hurdles to making this decision and are thus:
1. Free of fertility issues;
2. At an age where you couldn’t have a baby in a pact with your homeroom besties or to get onto Teen Mom;
3. Not already being told by everyone in your life and/or time traveling rebels in the future war against Skynet that this is a really bad idea.
Otherwise, as they say in the world of grant writing, if you do not qualify, do not apply, which is to say, skip this quiz and get your egg or sperm count checked, or wait to finish high school, or listen to John Connor because otherwise, like raising a baby when you’re not equipped, your future is fucked.
Acknowledgments
Both Bennetts:
As always, we’re grateful to our agent, Anthony Mattero; our editor, Trish Todd; her right hand, Kaitlin Olson; and the entire FF Inc./Touchstone team: Susan Moldow, Tara Parsons, David Falk, Meredith Vilarello, Kelsey Manning, Shida Carr, Erich Hobbing, Cherlynne Li, and copyeditors Navorn Johnson and Steve Boldt (for teaching us that “fuckup” is one word). Thanks also to S&S press wizards Amanda Lang and Ebony LaDelle and radio guru Chuck Monroe. Thanks also to our online ambassador, Madison Cleo.
Thank you to every press outlet—radio station, magazine, carrier pigeon—that helped promote our first book. This may seem like a craven plea for more attention, but really it’s an attempt to alleviate the guilt of forgetting grandma’s advice and not writing “thank you” notes in a timely manner.
Thanks again/always to legal consigliere Quinn Heraty, who begat working with Liz Gallagher, Candace Kreinbrink, and Anthony. Thank you all for believing in us and being so great.
We’re still grateful to daughter/sister Rebecca, son-/brother-in-law Aaron, and their litter of children. And really to all the family members (both official and otherwise) in Massachusetts, Vermont, New Jersey, New York, New Hampshire, Florida, Ontario, England, etc., whom we never get to see enough of but who don’t get annoyed when we do see them and tell the same four stories about Grandma all over again.
Special thanks to our old friend Dr. Nancy Cotton for her autism expertise and for donning a Teletubby costume in public. Thanks also to her children: Anna, for her keen interest in our work from the get-go; Mary, who also works with autistic kids and first introduced Sarah to the “social fake” concept (for which Sarah’s grateful whenever she has to be, ugh, social); and Billy, who is gifted with extraordinary social and design skills. Thanks also to father/husband Dr. Paul Cotton, as we fear his wrath if he’s left out.
Thank you, Eudora Prescod, who taught us that mockery can be a sincere form of affection.
We’ll thank Dr. Mona Bennett again, on top of the dedication. It’s the right thing to do, dammit.
We’re still not okay with thanking each other, though. It’s weird.
Michael:
Thanks to Mel Brooks, Don Rickles, and Louis Black, who taught me more about the therapeutic impact of curmudgeonly corrections than the entire collected works of Sigmund Freud.
This book also owes much to my failed relationships and partnerships. Often, what went wrong could only be helped by going back in time, recognizing what couldn’t work, and building acceptance into future choices.
The ideas in this book emerged during conversations with patients about their experiences with love, loss, and relationships, and are as much theirs as mine.
And thank you to my social-worker sister, Naomi, for still talking to me after we mocked her profession in our first book (that after an entire childhood of torment).
And a special thanks to my old boss, Dr. Jon Gudeman, who gave me the idea for an op-ed piece thirty years ago; I actually got to write it for the New York Times last year but only recently realized that the original idea was his. Please accept my gratitude, apologies, and an imaginary byline.
Sarah:
Thank to all my exes, unrequited crushes, and basically every guy whose name I bothered to learn but who was still a dick to me. Your collective shittiness netted me a book’s worth of jokes (and some rare LPs), so I guess it was worth it.
Thank you to the following people I don’t know, but whose work and contribution to the universe/my life filled my heart with love during the writing process: David Ortiz (David Ortiz! David Ortiz!), Don Orsillo, HRM HRC, Ronna & Beverly, Joss Whedon, Pamela Adlon, Maira Kalman, Jen Kirkman, Amy Sherman-Palladino, and, of course, Prince.
Thank you, Maria Bamford, who was so kind to me when we met that I still think it was all a hallucination.
Big thanks to Leah Tamburino, makeup artist, and Paul Ferraro, hairstylist, at CBS This Morning. These two wizards didn’t just make me look TV-pretty, they basically pulled a full-on Face/Off, and while I have since returned to my original, Nicolas Cage state, their miraculous efforts are not forgotten.
Extra thanks to Navorn Johnson and Erich Hobbing for their help with the flowcharts (and sorry for creating yet more work for you by adding this last-minute ac
knowledgment).
Since my beloved dog, Avon Barksdale, cannot read, thank you to Peace and Paws Dog Rescue (peaceandpaws.org) of Hillsborough, New Hampshire, for bringing him into my life and, in doing so, teaching me to love again. And thanks to petfinder.org, which led me to Peace and Paws, as well as to the dog jail in Meriden, Connecticut, where I found my first dog and first real love, King Buzzo (zt”l).
Thanks again to every single friend and family member I thanked in the first book, most of whom I do really, truly love in one way or another (most “like family,” a few “like Fresca”). Special thanks to old friends Kathleen Billus, who first taught me about the permaflirt (then known as Roboflirt) and is still my friend after all the years and all my recent work-related neglect (and even after all the unbelievable horseshit she’s had to deal with in general); Lizzy Castruccio Kim, who has suffered just as much neglect on top of the loss of Vin Scully; Bill and Eilene Russell, who only get my full attention during spring training and if there’s a Sonic Drive-In nearby; Dr. Rebecca Onion, who gave my father his first gig with published advice back at YM and was extra helpful when it came to putting together the pain-in-the-tuchus charts in this book; and Emma Forrest, who hustled so hard to get me blurbs for book #1 despite her already full, top-notch hustlin’ schedule. And of course, huge thanks to the only friend dedicated and loving enough to stand by my side always, especially and literally at a show that featured both Morrissey and Danzig, Maysan Haydar (and all Haydars everywhere).
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