If both people are doing this it goes a long way to working through most problems. They need to be thinking about their spouse a lot and trying to put them first. Learning how to be in a relationship takes time and both people have to be committed to the venture.

Marriage is work, even in the best circumstances. It involves people and most people have issues of one sort of another. A marriage is rarely, if ever, a fairy tale. We focus way too much attention on the Wedding and hardly any on how to be married to someone. I can’t put my finger on when it happened, but we stopped teaching our young people how to be married. When did we stop valuing marriage in this country? This is not about Lara, but about everyone who treats marriage like something disposable. It relates to a fundamental problem with our society. I don’t know her, and I don’t mean to pick on her, but she put it out there for all to see. It’s not a new phenomenon, but it’s become way too common. Her quote, “When was the last time my spouse and I had thought the other was a badass?” She began to see her life as unexciting and apparently came to realize she didn’t see her spouse the same way anymore. She talks about not wanting to return to her “mundane” life after meeting the exciting new guy and falling in love all over again. That’s not to say that some people aren’t justifiably unhappy beforehand and then cheat, but in this instance she hadn’t really come to grips with being unhappy beforehand. So they start coming up with reasons why they aren’t happy. The thinking goes something like, if I cheated on my spouse I must have been unhappy or I wouldn’t have cheated. I can’t speak from firsthand experience but it seems to me that most people that cheat on their spouse will concoct a reality to justify their actions. It’s not really clear, but the way she describes the events leads one to believe that in her mind she knew she was already unhappy but just hadn’t faced it. But while I was reading it I began to wonder which came first, her attraction to the new guy or the fact that she was unhappy in her marriage. She found attraction to another man while alone on her trip chasing storms in Oklahoma. It ended up inspiring the story behind her book The Waiting Sky, which I’m sure is lovely, but her revelation is about how she realized her marriage was not what she expected it to be. Her post was about a personal event that happened while she was on a storm chasing trip. I just read a post on Scalzi’s Whatever page written by Lara Zielin. Okay this post has very little to do with writing, but I ran across an item that struck a chord with me about something fundamentally wrong with our society these days.

The Waiting Sky by Lara Zielin