The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

The Selfish Path to Romance. Download chapter one for free at DrKenner.com and Amazon.com.

Hello, Dr. Kenner. I've been engaged for two years, and we are having more and more problems every month. I've been thinking about this and trying many different approaches to reach my fiancé, but at the end of the day, one big and heavy question lies on my shoulders. Are these just hard times that everyone goes through? Or should I get out of this before it starts to blur my vision? What types of tips or markers can you suggest that would help me decide if I should stay or leave? Thank you!

Alina, now Alina, I would recommend our book, The Selfish Path to Romance, but let me give you a few tips from that book. One is that you want to really know how to cherish your partner. It is true that early on in a relationship, many couples are clueless. They get married on the euphoria of just having dated and discovering each other and feeling valued, cherished, loved, and cared for. Then they move under one roof, they marry, or they start living together, or start dating for a long period, and they start to get in each other's hair. "I can't believe you do this," "Why do you do this?" "You never listen to me." You get all of those problems because you can't just go on automatic. You can't just let those initial loving feelings carry the relationship over an entire lifetime or the lifetime of the relationship.

So it is true that you do want to learn skills. I think reading the book that Dr. Edlock and I wrote, The Selfish Path to Romance: How to Love with Passion and Reason, which you can get at Amazon.com, will help you set good standards. For example, what makes for a good relationship? One is psychological visibility: feeling really valued, cared for, cherished, adored, like you're the most important person in your partner's life, and he is the most important person in your life. If that's withering away, if you find your attention and his attention going to friends or buddies or anything else but one another, there's a problem.

Now that doesn't mean you don't have friends in your life. It just means that a romantic relationship means just that: you want the connection to be between the partners. You want to feel at home with him. You want to feel that he listens to you, that he knows what's important to you, your top values, and that if there are differences, you have good communication skills to talk about discrepancies—that he doesn't put you down for what you value. For example, I enjoy the theater. My husband doesn't. My husband doesn't put me down for enjoying the theater. I can go to the theater on my own. I can't force him to love it. Similarly, there are activities that he enjoys. He likes action movies. I'm not big on action movies, but I don't try to take them away from him. There are many things that we enjoy together, for example, dance. So building interests together is important. Too many couples don't do that.

Also, habits. You know, if you're always late, that can become an irritant for any couple. If you're always dropping dirty clothes around, even though it's not something that's like lying, it's still a reason to increase your communication and hopefully to improve your relationship, to figure out a solution to that that works for both of you. So you want to feel also sexually visible, intellectually visible. Both of those, you want to feel like your partner values your mind and that he will focus on the fact that you also want some joy in sex, that it isn't a one-way street.

So there are a lot of things that make for a good relationship, and you want to figure out what's going on in your particular relationship. Also, the biggest thing is, does he make himself lovable, or does he lie or tell little white lies? Is there something about his moral character that you don't like? Maybe he drinks too much, or he swears too much, or he just doesn't work the way you would admire. He just takes the easy way out. Those are reasons to leave.

So you're asking, Alina, are these just hard times everyone goes through? It's been going on for two years, Alina. Or should I get out before it starts to blur my vision? I would get more information first because, unless he's abusive, then you have every right to leave if he ends up being a narcissist or an abusive person. You want signs for that too.

So let me just read a couple of those for you so that if he fits this bill, I would leave right away. I wouldn't wait around. If he's always putting you down, if he's trying to control you, if he's trying to isolate you from friends and your family, if he becomes very jealous and possessive of you, or if he destroys or threatens to destroy things that you own—you know, "I'm going to break this." I don't know. Maybe you have a photograph that you love of your family. "I'm going to break this if you don't do this for me." Maybe he's always checking up on you. He has to know where you are. He's listening in on your phone calls. Maybe he physically harms you. Maybe he's always denying what you say, minimizing it. "Yeah, you don't count. What you're saying doesn't matter," because he comes in with the "yes, but."

If there's sexual violence or physical abuse, which can include hitting, slapping, choking, punching, or degrading acts in sex, or trying to guilt trip you or other forms of intimidation, you want to part ways immediately, and you want to do so safely. If you think you need some therapy to do that, just some supportive therapy for some help in getting out of a relationship, you could certainly seek that. So it is your happiness in your life, Alina, and you want to value it to the point of gaining more knowledge and then parting ways if you cease to be soulmates.

And here's a little more from Dr. Kenner: "Self-sacrifice we drool is the ultimate virtue. Can a man sacrifice his integrity, his rights, his freedom, his convictions, the honesty of his feelings, the independence of his thought? Self-sacrifice. But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed. A man's self is his spirit. It is the unsecured self that we must respect in man above all."

Think of that in your own life. Do you value yourself, or do you think that sacrificing yourself is good? The more you give up, the more you do for everyone else in your life—not necessarily because you love them and they're your value, but out of duty that you feel you have to do for a neighbor you don't like, you have to do for an in-law you don't like, you have to do for everybody else but you, and you get lost in the shuffle. That is not good.

And that movie clip was from The Fountainhead. What that book helped me grasp is that true happiness, genuine happiness, means making yourself lovable, and that doesn't mean being a people pleaser or someone that's just a yes man, but is somebody who truly is honest with others and truly is honest with themselves and pursues their dreams, their goals without ever violating anyone else's rights and without letting others walk all over them either. So that's having good, lovable character, integrity, honesty, being productive, and valuing yourself.

Surprisingly, my co-author and I wrote a book emphasizing that. It's very provocative to say this, but we titled our book The Selfish Path to Romance. We don't mean the mean, rotten way to romance. We mean the taking care of yourself, tending to yourself, valuing your character, making yourself lovable way to romance. What happens if both partners do that? If both partners do that, they're going to value themselves. They won't feel lost in the relationship in the shadow of their partner, and they also will learn to cherish each other too because those are relationship skills that keep any good romance alive for over the long term, and that doesn't happen very often.

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Here's an excerpt from The Selfish Path to Romance, the serious romance guidebook by Doctors Kenner and Locke:

How we communicate can sabotage our relationships. Here are a few examples of ineffective communication techniques:

Threats: "If you don't apologize now, I'm packing my bags and leaving." Or "If we don't have sex soon, I'm going to find someone else."
Global Language: "You never listen to me," or "You always manage to be late."
Predicting an unhappy future: "You'll never make anything of yourself."
Lecturing: "You should call your mother more often. I know she wasn't a good mother, but she needs you now, and it's wrong to ignore her needs."
"You should put your own issues aside and be more caring."
Catastrophizing: "I saw you smile at that sales clerk. You don't love me anymore."
You can download chapter one for free by going to DrKenner.com, and you can buy the book at Amazon.com.