Holistic Relationships

Max Said

It occurred to me recently that what you and I are good at is the maintenance of a healthy relationship. Often when I am asked for advice on relationships it is because the relationship is in crisis and I am always a bit uncertain on what to say. I can offer some pretty sound advice on what to do in order to keep yourself and your woman happy in a functional long-term relationship, but when the dishes are flying and divorce is a topic of conversation, I am not so sure of my ability to offer anything helpful.

But this line of thinking started me making connections to other areas of our lives. We approach our health in a holistic way. And at core what this means to me is that we have a great deal of faith in our bodies’ natural healing powers. We take care of the whole body with good diet, plenty of sleep, happiness and exercise (well not so much exercise over the winter :) But in addition to this there is a basic underlying assumption of wellness being our natural state. If we contrast this approach to the typical allopathic one, I think the difference is pretty striking. Medical school teaches health practitioners to search for and treat pathologies. If one approaches the body from this perspective, one is almost certain find something wrong. The myopic focus of the highly-specialized medicine that is the rule I think also contributes to this find-something-to-fix brand of health care (or sickness care really.) If some indicator related to the heart is outside of normal parameters, then it needs to be fixed regardless of how the patient feels overall. Treating this one symptom perhaps means taking a drug that has a negative effect on the patient’s –they get headaches – so this then becomes another problem to fix, and so on…

Then there is our approach to learning. On our best days, we feel relaxed and confident about just letting our kids learn what they want how they want to learn it. Again, it is a “nothing is broken” approach to things. We trust that the human animal is imbued with a natural love of learning and we just do our best to facilitate this for our kids and stay out of their way. Taking as the obvious contrasting option to this approach, let’s look at public schools. Here testing, measurement and conformity rule the day. Students battle math problems, teachers call out behavior problems, kids are medicated because they have problems concentrating, etc… More of the find-something-to-fix mindset.

So, how does this all tie into relationships? Well, I guess what I am trying to say is that maybe what really needs to be shifted here is the way we look at things. Perhaps we are creating problems by looking for them? Maybe nothing is broken? There were certainly plenty of times in our relationship’s history when things did not seem overly rosy. We had bad fights; we did not see eye-to-eye on important things and probably each thought (at least briefly) about leaving. But we have always had that core of certainty to fall back on and over time that has developed into a nothing-is-broken philosophy in our relationship. This philosophy makes everything just flow. Sure we still hit bumps, lose our tempers, have moments of despair, but they just seem to roll off pretty easily.

But, as evidenced from the couple of examples listed above, much of our culture encourages us to look at things from a problem-oriented perspective. So then the bumps, anger and despair become symptoms of a relationship that is fundamentally flawed and on its death bed. So I guess what can say to those who are having problems in their relationship is to stop looking the problems and start looking at what is good and what is working. Use the salve of gratitude for the good things to heal the discontent. Realize that we are trained and influenced by our culture to focus on the negative and with that knowledge make a different choice.

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Denise Said

Once again I amazed at your insightful and well-written post. It’s very true Max. We are a problem-oriented society. We focus on what isn’t working instead of what is. I would add also: Why not work with what you’ve already worked on so many years in a marriage relationship? I think we make the same mistakes over and over, even with another partner, unless we shift our thinking to a healthier outlook and look within ourselves to see what needs adjusting and get the right help so that both husband and wife feel empowered in the marriage.

After I did my Sterling’s Women’s Weekend and when I was involved in the Family of Women in NYC during many of the meetings the leader would always say, “If you want a healthy relationship, find a woman in a healthy relationship and do everything she says to do. Don’t question her wisdom; just do it.” Many women approached me, (yikes!)one even took me out for a drink at 3am near Gramercy Park during one of our sleep-over events to pump me for information. I never knew what to say. I was just starting to heal our marriage relationship. I was unsure of myself and my advice. My advice seemed archaic and old-fashioned and honestly from the 50s. One group leader said to me when I told her I don’t have any special magic to offer women, “What you do Denise is just a part of you. It comes easily.”

But I had learned very specific things to do in my relationship at that point and was working to implement those changes, I just wasn’t so sure of myself and whether these specific things were really going to work. But I had/have a good man, and one willing to do the dance with me of being a happily married couple. We had the initial vision of being together and enough history to stay together. So what those women were seeing in those meetings was a very new Denise, one that was teetering on stepping stones in a stream. I couldn’t really verbalize then what I was doing.

I had my sister Karen and my good friend Cora, who I spoke with often, and who were both also working on their marriage relationships and their relationships in general. These two women were the people I went to, to work out aspects in my marriage relationship that I needed help with. They told me straight what I was doing wrong and how to shift things. And I did the same for them. I now know what I’d say to someone seeking my advice because I’ve been doing it for years. It is archaic and relatively simple, and not very sleek and glamorous. Max you’ve allowed me to heal our relationship and we’ve been honest through the process. I am lucky. I am lucky in that you chose to always be willing to forgive me when I fell off the wagon and made a big mistake, like telling you you fucked up something. (Rule #1 to women – Don’t ever tell your husband they fucked up!) There’s always a better way to communicate, but it takes practice and a knowing that relationships can be healthy and holistic. We don’t have to fall into the trap that it just gets worse after the honeymoon – as several people told me on my wedding day. No broken dishes here – not on purpose anyway. xo