Excerpt from Part 1 of
The Happy Couple: How to be Married Successfully

The Happy Wife :
A Woman's Guide to Marital Success

Introduction

MOST WOMEN EXPECT TO BE married at some point in their lifetime. They hope to meet a man, fall in love, and feel loved in return. They like the idea of a companion and a lover, and someone with whom they can plan a life together. Most women meet their someone special and get married. In the beginning, marriage is fun and fulfilling. However, because all marriages hit rough spots, problems between a wife and husband inevitably emerge. Sometimes marital problems get solved and sometimes they don’t. When problems go on and on, marriage can become a hurtful and confusing experience. Despite the distress that can persist day after day, most women want to remain married, they want their marriage to work; they want some of their hopes and dreams back; they do not want a divorce. They want a successful marital experience. They wonder what to do. They ask themselves: “What can I do about my marriage? How can I make it better? What can I do so that being married feels good again?” They think, “I hate feeling this way. I need some answers.”

For many women marital problems become a marital way of life. When this happens, marriage feels like a place of great despair where hopes and desires crash daily against rigid marital walls. Some of the difficult challenges that married women face may be familiar to you:

My husband has been withdrawn from me for months. I’m so frustrated and hurt. I’ve even moved into the spare bedroom. Still, I don’t want a divorce.

My husband abuses alcohol. He stays out and drinks, comes home and is either belligerent or falls asleep. I’ve pleaded and pleaded for him to stop, and even threatened to leave. Nothing is working.

After five years of marriage, I have discovered that my husband engages in a behavior that I consider morally wrong and sick. He doesn’t agree with me. I don’t know what to do.

My old high school sweetheart wants to have an affair with me. I’m feeling vulnerable.

I don’t feel like having sex with my husband right now. He has done too many things lately that have hurt my feelings.

I feel frustrated about household tasks. I think I do more than my share. He disagrees.

My husband wants to do something that I have a difficult time supporting.
I feel crazy in this marriage. Is it me? Do I suffer from a clinical disorder?

Whether your marriage is in trouble, or you just want to make it better, knowing how to be married successfully can help. Marriage can be a heartbreaking experience or a fulfilling one. If you are going to be married, why not find out how to make it the best it can be? One of the most incredible relationships in life can occur between a wife and husband.

The Happy Wife: A Guide to Marital Success will be helpful to you if:

• You want to be successfully married.
• You want to resolve marital problems
• You want to feel good about yourself as a married woman.

If you are tired of feeling discouraged, confused, or angry and hurt, The Happy Wife can help you make being married feel good again. If you are planning to get married, The Happy Wife can help you learn what it takes to make marriage a positive life experience. As a prospective spouse, you can learn from The Happy Wife what kind of problems may emerge in a marriage and what to do about them. Knowing in real-life-ways how to solve problems can save you from marital heartbreak. Knowing how to be married successfully can bring about feelings of desire, closeness, fun and fulfillment.

There are many ways to view a marital relationship and a married woman’s participation in it. My philosophy is very “here and now” and pragmatic. I am interested in what works. I have seen married women overcome nearly every imaginable obstacle to be married successfully. They have not had to go back and rework their family of origin, they have not had to resolve unconscious motives for choosing their partner, they have not had to analyze and journal their dreams, they have not had to sort out female and male energy and which planet they come from, they have not had to analyze their parent’s marriage, and they have not had to become a self-trained communication expert or marital therapist to feel good about themselves as a married woman.

A woman needs to know how to guide herself as a successful participant in her marriage, and how to manage being married well in all marital situations. When women know how to guide themselves successfully in marriage, they are remarkably successful at achieving it. As one woman put it, “Just tell me what to do when it feels so hurtful and hopeless in my marriage, and I’ll do it. I feel so lost.”

Marital solutions are in the future. What you do today and tomorrow will shape your marital satisfaction, not what happened yesterday. If you don’t have the wisdom and skills to be married successfully, then marriage can be a disheartening experience. On the other hand, if you know how to be married successfully you will find marriage satisfying and fulfilling, even though you may encounter difficult marital problems along the way. Marriage in the 21st century is about choice, responsibility, equality, and fulfillment. If you want to be a happily married woman and embody these essential qualities, then follow the steps in this book and learn how to be married successfully.

In describing the woman’s role in marriage, I use two terms, “married woman,” and “wife.” My distinction is this: When I refer to you as a married woman, I mean that you are no longer a single woman, but have chosen to be a married woman. Being a married woman is a generic role in your life. When I refer to you as wife, I mean the person you are as a married woman and the characteristics you take on as a participant in your marriage.

It's About You, Not Your Husband

There are two roles in marriage, the married woman role, and the married man role. You are not in charge of the married man part of marriage. You are in charge of the married woman part. My aim is to help you, the married woman, experience the success and fulfillment that comes from doing your part well. Trying to change your husband will not result in success as a married woman; it will only generate frustration and despair. Your success resides in managing your role, not his.

This guidebook is not about husbands, or about how to change him into a perfect mate. I am not going to tell you how to “make a new man out of him.” I am not going to tell you that you can continue with business as usual and your marriage will be all right. And, I am certainly not going to tell you that the dissatisfaction in your marriage is all his fault. I am not going to tell you that the marital problems are all your fault, either. I am going to explain in a practical and respectful way what you can do as a married woman to be successful at marriage. If you get better at being married, will your changes help your husband? Sure, and that’s okay. But, the point is not to try to change him.

Many women (and men) attempt to change their partner in the mistaken belief that everything will be all right if he simply “_________.” You fill in the blank:

• stops drinking
• is nicer to me
• goes places with me
• tells me how he feels
• makes me as important as his job
• helps with housework
• loses weight
• is gentler during sex
• watches less television
• spends less time on the computer

There are many changes a married woman would like her husband to make, and they can be legitimate concerns. The problem with focusing on what your husband does, or does not do, is that you can’t directly do anything about it. By focusing on those things under your husband’s control and not yours, you’ll probably only produce dismay and frustration on your part (as well as his). You probably already know this: You can’t fix your marriage by trying to change your husband. The only person you are in charge of is you. There will be no bad mouthing husbands here. There is no need for it. The Happy Wife is about you.

Chapter 1:
Learning the Secrets of the Marital Paintbox

IF YOU ARE GOING TO IMPROVE marital life, where do you begin? You know you can’t change your husband, so no sense starting there. Moreover, you can’t change the whole marriage because you are only a participant in it. If you want to bring about effective change, you must start with yourself and what can be done from your own place in the marriage.

The position a married woman occupies in a marriage is called “wife.” A married woman must operate from this space, because no other role exists for her. In order to understand what can, and cannot, be accomplished from your base as a wife, let’s look briefly at how your married role came about.

Your Role, Your Husband's Role and the Marital Middle

Remember your wedding ceremony? Appreciating what it means to be a married woman begins with an understanding of the ceremony that created your wife role. The ceremony that you participated in was a transformational ritual—a ceremony that added “wife” to your life. Before the ceremony you were a single woman. On the day of the wedding, you became a “bride.” When you said “I do,” you became a married woman and made the role of “wife” part of your life.

Let’s be direct and talk about marriage in a way that makes sense. On your wedding day, you decided to become a married woman. You alone are responsible for having made this choice and for making it successful. No one forced you to get married. According to an old Chinese saying: “Others can open the door, but only you can walk through it.” You chose to participate in the wedding ceremony, expressed your vows, said “I do,” and signed the required papers. By enacting these choices, you became a married woman. By marrying yourselves to each other, by placing rings on one another’s fingers, kissing and signing legal papers, you individually became wife and husband, and you mutually created a marriage. By becoming a wife and husband, you both created a marital middle—an interpersonal place where your marriage exists. Knowing about this “marital middle” is extremely important if you are to guide yourself well as a wife.

Your marital middle is made up of what you put into it through your actions as a wife, and what your husband puts into it through his actions as a husband. Combining your actions and his actions creates a marital middle where your marriage resides and is sustained. The marriage is a product of both of you.

The Marital Paintbox

Imagine your marital middle in terms of colors. When you are being a really great wife (in your terms, not his) imagine the color yellow representing you, the great wife. Now imagine that when your partner is being a wonderful husband he is the color blue. If you combine your yellow color with your husband’s blue, the marital middle becomes green. Now, let’s say this green is a truly satisfying and fulfilling marriage color for both of you. You like this green marriage, you want to keep, maintain it, and make it happen over and over for years and years to come. How are you going to do this? What can you as a married woman do to sustain this “green” marriage. The answer: Put in your yellow! The most you can do to have the green marriage you desire is to put into the marital middle your brightest yellow color. If your husband continues to put in his blue, you will have green, the great marriage.

But, what if something negative comes up in the marriage and your husband gets frustrated, irritated, angry or hurt and changes his color to red? He starts putting red into the marital middle, instead of blue. In reaction to his red, you react and change your color to brown. Because he is putting red and you are putting brown into the marital middle, your marriage is now a brick color. Let’s say you feel pretty miserable in this brick colored marriage and you want your green one back. Your natural inclination to get the green back is to try to get your husband to go back to his blue color, to try to change him. You try everything—reasoning, pleading, pouting, lecturing, withdrawing, and criticizing. Despite all your efforts, you are unable to get him to become a husband who is putting blue into the marital middle. In fact, the more you try to change him, the browner you become and, in reaction, the redder he gets. Then it dawns on you, “Hey, I’m not in charge of my husband’s color, I’m only in charge of mine. He can make it difficult or easy, but he will never be in control of my wife color, I am! And, I will never be in control of his color as a husband, he is.”

With the power of this newly discovered paint box logic in hand, you get back on track as the wife you want to be by putting your yellow color into the marital middle. No matter what your husband does or what color he puts in, you are busy adding yellow. Soon you discover that your yellow creates the potential for green. As long as you put yellow into the marital middle, the marriage has the potential to be the great green marriage you want.

The most you can do as a wife to have a green and successful marriage is to put your yellow into the marital middle. No matter what color your husband puts into the marital middle, go ahead and beam your brightest yellow into the relationship space. You will find out that, at the very least, you feel better about yourself as a married woman because you are doing a good job of adding your color into the marriage. Of course, your husband liked the green marriage better than the brick colored one, so the longer you stick to putting in yellow, the more likely he will go back to his blue color from his own initiative. Nobody likes someone to try to change us. When you stop working on his color, and work on your own, this frees him to work on himself. So, let’s say he takes charge of his husband role and changes it to blue. Now, you are back to putting into the marital middle, yellow, and he is back to putting in blue. Guess what? You have the green marriage back. Having accomplished this, you live happily ever after, the best green marriage in town!

From this palette of colors, and deciding which color you add to the marital middle, you will discover that you are in charge of your actions—color—as a wife. What color you want to be, what color you are, what color makes you feel good about yourself, and what color you put into the marital middle, is what a successful marital experience is all about for you. If marriage is going to work for you, if you are going to pull yourself out of the “brick marriage” and get on with feeling good about yourself, become a happily married woman, and contribute to a successful marriage, you will want to learn how to get on track being the best wife—color—you can be.

Rules About Being A Wife

These rules govern your role as a wife:
• You are in charge of the choice you made to be a wife.
• Nobody can make you be a wife but you.
• You are in charge of your actions (“color”) as a wife.
• You can’t change your husband. He is charge of his
actions (“color”) as a husband, you are not.
• Your husband can make it hard or easy for you to be
the wife you want to be, but he will never be in
charge of what you are like as a wife.
• Putting the best of who you can be as a wife into
the marital middle is the most you can do to
contribute to a successful marriage.
• All the logic for being successfully married and becoming
a happily married woman, is based on these rules.

If you want to make these rules part of who you are as a wife, you can personally adopt them by initialing the following statement:

I take charge of my choice to be married and for my actions (“color”) as a wife___________(initials).
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