That area is called "roots."

Aquanet cloud on aisle #18

Uh, if I dare (minefield alert):

In rizos post, she knew it would set him off and did it anyway. Now why do you think that is, was, I guess, the subject before it got to the, uh, roots.

Mark posted a well thought out and lengthy response to the serious question, which is WHY!?

Anyone have a short response ElCamino could use that works?

Shut up Larry

Firearms, matches, and barbeque supplies are stored far, far away from the flammables in aisle #18?

You would think it is, sometimes, from the impression people have. I don't understand how anyone can fix their marriage with just His Needs, Her Needs. It feels like one half of a program. Really less than that, actually, since in addition to Love Busters you also need more basic concepts that I think are better covered here.

I'm supposed to be rereading HNHN and LB soon, so I may reevaluate that impression, but that's how I remember it. I was thinking HNHN for Parents actually presented more of the basic concepts in what I thought was a better way.

And Mark seems to swear by FILSIL, so maybe that's really the best place to start.

Anyway, sorry for the thread hijack.

Third time: nobody is suggesting that El Camino DEMAND his wife follow the POJA. Second time to request: please go back and reread my post above.

I have read your posts, and I respectfully disagree. Dr. Harley describes requests that include punishments:


He may have requested it, but the punishment has turned it into a SD. Dr. Harley goes on to describe


I understand your point, markos. I just interpret it differently. Or perhaps we are just arguing about semantics. But I think we can agree on one thing: instead of a win-win outcome, they both lost.

Nobody is advocating a request that includes a punishment.


You are exactly correct. What he did was WRONG. He made a demand, not a request.

What we are telling him to do is to make requests instead of demands.

Thoughtfully, respectfully, politely say "Honey, please don't wear your hair that way." Or "Honey, please don't wear your hair that way, because..."

Do you disagree with me when I say that those two example sentences are requests, not demands?

Yes, they are requests. I understand your point. But if you don't get your way and create some sort of punishment whenever you don't get your way, it really doesn't matter that it was worded as a request.

IM, if you go back and look at my original post to you, and the quoted material within it at the beginning:

http://forum.marriagebuilders.com/u...flat&Number=2335921&#Post2335921


I don't understand why when I say "You respectfully say what you need done or not done" you think this is a selfish demand. This is why I am disagreeing with you.

And I specifically said:


Everybody agrees with you that what he did was wrong and was a demand/love buster.

But your original point seemed to be that no matter what, asking a woman to style her hair a particular way or not style her hair a particular way was a selfish demand. That there's no way to make this a request. I say there IS a way this request can be made, without making a selfish demand.

Going back to your point before that, you encouraged dishonesty and saying that if she asked if he liked her hair straight or curly he should lie and say he liked it both ways. There is simply no way this can be justified on Marriage Builders principles. The Policy of Radical Honesty involves radical honesty. Radical honesty without selfish demands or angry outbursts or disrespectful judgments, of course, which is a pretty fine line to walk. But radical honesty, nonetheless.

You don't encourage anyone to lie to their spouse.

Of course, that is correct. Nobody is saying to do that.

All we are saying is that he should not lie to his spouse; he should be honest about how he feels about her hair. And he should do it WITHOUT angry outbursts, disrespectful judgments, and selfish demands.

But, there is an unintended punishment if I don't comply with my spouse's complaint. And that is that I make lovebank withdrawals. If he loves me less and I WITHDRAW love units because I am thoughtless of his feelings then there is a negative consequence.

The concept of "don't get your way" is not applicable here because we are assuming here that each spouse does not WANT to make the other miserable. We each define what our emotional needs and our lovebusters are; the willingness of the other spouse is assumed. There is no battle of wills as implied in "get your way." Every spouse SHOULD get his own way if the goal is romantic love.

I am sure he could have filled her admiration by not lying. I agree that this would be against MB.

Imstaying, this article might make it a little more clear:

Complaining in Marriage

That is the goal! But in this case they both lost. They both were focused on what the other person is not doing rather than focusing their energy on doing something to fill each other's needs.

Further TJ I'm afraid, but germane to the discussion, I think...

I have a question for ImStaying.

Suppose that your top EN or at least one of the top 5 was Physical Attractiveness and your spouse wore the sweat suits that seem to be all the rage in Texas right now (at least at Walmart among the Aquanet set ). Would it be a Love Buster to for your spouse to show up at a dinner party in a sweat suit? Or even more to the point, would it be a Love Buster for you to ask your spouse to not wear a sweatsuit to the dinner party?

Now imagine that your spouse began wearing sweatsuits and took up jogging as a form of recreational activity at a time that an affair was beginning and the sweatsuits were really more to do with attracting the affair partner than with the jogging that was taking place. NOW what would you think if your spouse showed up at a dinner party wearing a sweatsuit AFTER you had expressed your displeasure with the way they looked in sweatsuits?

"But I really like sweatsuits."
"I should be able to wear something that I feel comfortable in."
"It's just a sweatsuit, for God's sake."
"You should love me for who I am and not what I wear."

NONE of these are valid reasons to wear a sweatsuit though any one of them could be used as justification to wear what is known to be something that makes our spouse unhappy.

The real issue then becomes a case of doing something that makes our spouse unhappy knowing that it will make him or her unhappy and claiming that he or she has no right to be unhappy since we want to be happy ourselves and we can only be happy by doing what makes them unhappy.



But we also have a situation here where not only is the sweatsuit something in and of itself a problem for the spouse who hates sweatsuits or even the fact that wearing a sweatsuit in spite of knowing that it will trigger the memory of the affair in our spouse's mind because our spouse has already told us that is part of the reason they don't want us to wear a sweatsuit. So now when I wear the sweatsuit I am not just accidentally hurting my spouse by not meeting one of the top ENs or even just committing a Love Buster through IB, but I am in fact telling my spouse that I am going to continue exactly the type of self-justified independent behavior that resulted in the affair. It isn't a matter of me being happy any more. It is a case of me telling my spouse that I am not willing that he or she be happy. This where a bit of the honesty problem shows up, IMO.

The real issue comes down to what it means to be married. If I want to do something, no matter what it is and even if it is something that might be viewed by anyone or everyone else as no big deal, or even as something GOOD, and doing that thing would destroy the feeling of love that my spouse has for me, why on Earth would I want to just go ahead and do it? Is the way I wear my hair, or the sweatsuit that I think is comfortable, or the job that I have or the sport that I play more important than my spouse being in love with me?

Rizos didn't fall in love with EC because he let her wear her hair any way she wanted to. She fell in love with him because he met certain ENs until it triggered a directed response in her and he became the stimulus that made her happy. But consider that maybe one of the things that made EC fall in love with Rizos was actually to way she wore her hair at the time they met because it met one of HIS ENs in a way that trigger her to become the stimulus that created the directed response in him.

And I would bet the farm on her not having had an affair because OM didn't care about her hair. He met some EN for her and she let him do it because it made her feel good and happy and triggered a response in her brain.

I'll tell a couple of "hair" stories later if I get to it...

Mark

In addition to filling her need for ADMIRATION, he has to make sure he is being radically honest. This is especially KEY to a person whose top need is admiration. FALSE admiration won't suffice and since they DO want to be admired, it is important the spouse keep them informed of things that DO erode their admiration.

Make sense? It is BECAUSE I love to be admired, that I count on my H to tell me when I do something that is unadmirable to him.

Not at all. Even though he handled it badly, she now clearly understands that he HATES her hair like this. So, they did not lose.

They would have lost if he had said nothing and left her with the FALSE IMPRESSION that he liked her hair while he suffered in silence. Keep in mind that "Unspoken issues in a marital relationship lead to a superficiality that ruins romance."

POJA is NOT about getting your way or not getting your way. POJA is about you BOTH getting what makes you BOTH happy and so makes LB$ deposits into BOTH LB$s and avoids making withdrawals from EITHER LB$.

When enthusiastic agreement is reached you BOTH get your way.

THAT is the point of POJA.

It lets you get YOUR way at the same time your spouse gets his or her way and so love is built instead of being destroyed.

We each see conflict as my way or your way in a romantic relationship because we are each emotionally invested in the relationship. But choices made entirely based on emotions are almost always bad choices.

POJA requires that we find some third way of doing it that does not allow either to gain at the emotional expense of the other. It goes further yet by requiring that whatever we do BOTH parties gain.

To find this type of solution requires that we make choices based on logic, data and reasonable expectations rather than how we feel at the moment.

Mark