Roots and Branches

          "Marriage is a total commitment and a total sharing of the total person with another person"                                                                                                       --  Wayne Mark     Or, as Calvin Trillin put it: "Marriage is not merely sharing the fettuccini, but sharing the burden of finding the fettucini restaurant in the first place."     Whether you're a pasta lover, Wayne Mark, Calvin Trillin, or you and I, most of marriage boils down to just one word: sharing.      No other situation or circumstance will compel someone to share every mundane aspect of their life with anot...

      Creating a Cornerstone: pt 2          Last week I wrote a little about some modern twists on dating that have infiltrated our society, and how they can have lasting effects on the health and longevity of a marriage. Some key takeaways from that last blog post that I want to carry over to this weeks' are that: The level of intimacy, both physical and emotional, must never be more than our established  level of commitment. Dating should be intentional. Dating should be an opportunity to learn all you can about a person before  making a commitment to them, rather than a casual way to eat up some time.          These three points are directly linked to a concept called the R elationship A ttachment M odel, or RAM . This model visually represents what we have been talking about with being intentional, and building relationships in the healthiest way. The RAM consists of five "pillars" that lead to atta...

      If the family unit was a house, the relationship between the mother and father would be the cornerstone.       When looking at the subject of family relations, the topic of dating and courting habits doesn't immediately jump out as particularly important. However, if so much in the family is dependent on the strength of the relationship between its two figureheads, the way in which those figureheads meet and develop their connection is pretty darn important!      My family relations professor, also a full-time marriage and family therapist, has said that 80% of the time he can accurately predict a couple's inter-relational problems just by hearing how they dated before they got married.      The way we date and interact romantically with others plays a huge role in the strength and effectiveness of our future or current marriages. Dating has changed drastically over the last couple years, and the resulting effec...

         Today there are a million and one labels for things. It seems everyone is so focused on inclusion that, ironically, they have created even more boxes with which to sort people into. My thoughts this week have been centered on the damage that using labels to define something so fundamentally complex as a human can cause.          I'd like to start with this idea labeling in regards to gender and gender roles. Now please take a deep breath and let me say IT IS OKAY TO DISCUSS GENDER. Gender identity plays a fundamental role in society, and we are doing ourselves a disservice by making it taboo. I understand that not everyone agrees with what I define as gender.       That is fine.      However, it doesn't do anyone any good to dance around definitions in an effort to be politically correct. It is confusing and unhelpful.       For my purposes, I will be defining gender as some...