By Philip Alan Belove, Ed.D.  All rights reserved
You need to know this, you really do. I see couples all the time who love each other, and yet they do things to each other that hurt each other and tear their relationship apart. And yet, all the while, every step along the way, they feel that they are doing the right thing, and the only sensible thing. The road to hell really is paved with good intentions.

Somehow, if you can step back from what you are doing and see how it works, why your actions are so tempting and justified and why they are also destructive, you can send things in a different direction. This is useful knowledge.

It’s about how people try to make their relationship better and end up only making it worse. It’s about what you can do instead, how you can protect yourself, your partner, and the relationship, as well as protect your honor and your heart. Useful knowledge I think. I’ve explained to so many people that I finally decided to write it out.

It’s my upgrade of an extremely useful tool originally developed by Dr. Rudolph Dreikurs.

Feelings are Information.

“How do you feel about that?” is the same as saying, “What is your emotional relationship to that?”

Not everyone can put that stuff into words. Baby’s establish very complex relationships with the people around them long before they can talk. Dogs establish very complex emotional relationships and never can name them.

You don’t have to be able to name your feelings to get along. However, when a relationship is complex and you have a lot of different feelings and among those feelings are some unpleasant ones, then you want to be able to name your feelings.

Why? If you can name a feeling, then you can make decisions about how you want to handle it. You can be constructive. Or at least no more destructive than you want to be.

This ability to name feelings is something that we develop as we mature. It isn’t something we are born with. We are wired to be far more aware of what’s going with the other person because to a baby, and also to a child, what to expect from an adult is very important information. But if all we can think about is what the other person is doing, then we are only reacting, and that has to change if we want to be able to shape the relationships that matter to us in a healthy way.

What follows is a map, a system, that will help you recognize the early warning signals of how relationships can go from good to bad to worse and, finally, to hell.

General Perspective

A relationship has two sides. If you are emotionally connected to someone in a reasonable healthy way, they are also emotionally connected to you. Being emotionally connected and in sync makes people feel good, at peace, happy, and capable.

The road downward happens in predictable, regular stages. If you know how to identify the characteristic feelings for each stage, then you can tell how bad things are getting to be, and what you can do about it.

Each stage is marked by a more and more extreme form of protest. A protest is a weird statement. It is usually a statement about what you do not want. However, it is also simultaneously a message about what you want instead. It’s a request for change. “Less of this; more of that.”

Protest mount in intensity. Each level of protest is best handled in it’s own special way. You want to be able to recognize the more and more extreme levels of protest.

Here are the levels.

One: Irritation and Annoyance
Two: Anger and Confrontation
Three: Pain, Punishment, and Payback
Four: Contempt and Avoidance

Now, in detail.

First Zone: The Bug Zone
Irritation and Annoyance

Some folks call these irritating moments, “red flags,” because the feeling of irritation is an emotional message that says, “pay attention.” Right or wrong, legit or not legit, a “red flag” is a sign that you are starting to have serious misgivings about how things are unfolding. These things will make you stop and think and question this relationship. You have to respect your instincts and intuitions here. They are forcing you to take a closer look at what’s going on.

Most of the time we accommodate each other. Give a little here, get a little there. But sometimes the balance starts to feel out of whack. Then, what happens, usually, is one person gets irritated. This is usually the one who is doing the accommodating, and the other one gets irritated that the first is irritated. “What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you just enjoy what we’re doing?”

This is simple grumpiness. He wants this, she wants that and “this” and “that” don’t fit into the same moment. Toilet seat up or down? Dinner dishes done before dessert or after? Go out with friends or stay home alone? Look for a parking spot here or there? Shall we buy a new freezer or keep the money in savings?

We are not infinitely flexible. We all have our limits. Put me (or anyone) close to the edge of our range of flexibility and we get irritated. It’s that inner experience of feeling near our limits. “I can tolerate only so much of this and then no more.”

There is a struggle here. Even if one side wants to pay attention to the irritant and the other wants things to go smoothly without the complaints, it’s the relationship that is out of sync and it’s out of sync on both sides.

If this struggle continues, however, the protest will escalate to the next level. People get angry and the are angry about being so damned irritated.

Zone Two: The Hot Zone
Confrontation and Anger.

Confrontation is the right word. “Con” (both of you) + “Front” (look at it!). The two of you put the issue squarely in front of you and face it, usually with some hard feelings of anger between the two of you. It’s a good thing to do.

You can’t agree on what will happen next and you aren’t willing to let the other make that choice. The anger usually stops everything. It is a power struggle. Anger is its signature emotion. It means you have to focus on the disagreement.

This may, in fact, be a good thing. Certainly it’s better than the alternative, which is to take the protests up another level and get destructive.

In and around all this anger is a bit of healthy fear. Anger can be dangerous. It can get out of control. Getting angry is expensive and risky. You don’t do it lightly. Usually you’ll do it because you feel you have to.

You will use anger to force a resolution because you fear that if you don’t draw the line and force a change something awful will happen. Usually, but not always, women are afraid they will lose love and be alone and abandoned, and men are afraid they will lose their effectiveness and be shamed and humiliated. Either threat can get folks pretty angry.

Zone Three: War
Pain, Punishment, and Payback.

Here is how the thinking goes:

If you can’t get your way, then at least you can make sure the other person isn’t going to enjoy winning the power struggle.
Or.
If the other person won’t concede the power struggle, you can just make it more and more expensive for them.
Never mind what it does to your friendship.
Never mind what it costs you.
It’s a matter of principle.
This is the face of hatred.
This is what you need to win a war, whether it’s a hot war or a cold one.
You have to make it expensive for your opponents, regardless of what it costs you.
Some people can carry on like this for generations.
It’s addictive. You feel like God is on your side. Like you are doing right and doing good.
This is very emotionally intense.
It’s so hard because it’s like killing, but at the same time, people doing it feel very alive.

Most of this stuff is justified in the name of “Justice” and “what’s only fair.” War is hell. Hell is all fire and heat and filled with punishment.

Zone Four: The Dead Zone.
Contempt and Avoidance

Hell may be the realm of the damned but all that fire means there is still caring, still giving a damn. There is yet a place which is beyond caring. This is where relationships go when they die.

When you say, “We don’t have a relationship anymore,” this is what you are talking about, a relationship which is shadowy and dead-but-not-really. When the person you “don’t have a relationship with anymore” walks into the room, if you still have an emotional reaction, like, say, contempt, it’s because you still have an emotional relationship.

Disgust is also a good word for it. Yuk. Eeouuuu! Spit it out! Ptui. Make it go away. Those would be the early and more primitive forms of it. In a more mature form it’s simply cold cordiality. “Oh, Hi. Nice to see you. Ummm. Excuse me. I see someone over there I need to speak to. Nice running into you. Bye.” It’s all very smooth. I’ve even seen it accompanied by a handshake that held the person at a distance and then moved them away. Deadsville. Silent and lifeless as a Grave.

So, Now That You can Name the Zones, What do you do?

First of all, just recognize it.

You will have feelings. They are the way you connect with the world of other people. The difference between you and a dog is that a dog just has feelings and reacts. That’s why we like dogs. You always get a totally honest and authentic emotional reaction from a dog. They don’t lie about how they feel. They don’t hide how they feel. That’s also why dogs are sometimes muzzled and often put on a leash.

In a sense, you are your own dog and you are also the leash holder. The name you put on the feelings helps you hold onto the leash better.

Second. Each Zone has its own rules. Know the rules and take action.

First rule: One step at a time.

You can’t skip over a zone to get to a different one.

Leaving the Dead Zone.

Hatred locks you in. You have to acknowledge the depth of your hatred. Then, if you want to take that relationship out of the dead zone, you and your partner have to find a way to forgive.

That means you both have to say “I’m sorry for the harm I inflicted on you. It was not justified. You didn’t deserve it.”

This doesn’t eliminate the reason why you had the war. That’s a different step. It just means that you acknowledge the harm done.

Leaving the War Zone.

You will still have to face the disagreement and the anger and the power struggle. But you will have to agree to face the disagreement. In essence you have to say, “This hurting each other isn’t working for either of us. Can we just talk?”

Leaving the Hot Zone.

You have to learn to keep your cool in the hot zone. Feel the anger. Understand that you are angry, that you really, really, really, don’t like something. And at the same time, keep your ability to think and plan. The problem most people have in the hot zone is that they are shocked that the other person can’t see their side of things.

The advice? Get used to this. Stop being shocked. Accept the reality of significant, meaningful differences.

The second rule is simple. You can confront anyone as long as you are also supporting them. If they feel that you are still basically on their side, you can oppose them on a specific point. So you have to convince them that you are genuinely willing to hear their side of the disagreement. You can disagree with anyone as long as they are convinced that you see and respect their side of the issue, too.

Leaving the Bug Zone.

There are lots of little things — squeezing the toothpaste from the middle of the tube, not putting the toilet seat down, making noises when eating, mentioning an old lover at a stupid time – that might or might not be changeable. You can try.

Remember, most of these irritating habits are unconscious habits. You might have to remind, bring them to your partner’s mind, more than once. Keep it light. Be generous.

If you’re a perfectionist, you will always find something not quite right, unless you learn to find all the little flaws charming. That does happen.

As Fred Astaire told Ginger Rogers, when she had a head covered with shampoo,

“And that smile that wrinkles your nose
touches my foolish heart.
You’re lovely.
Never ever change.
Keep that breathless charm.
Won’t you please arrange it
‘cause I love you,
just the way you look tonight.”

She had an “emotional affair” that lasted many years. They were never lovers. They talked constantly and told each other their stories. They said they would leave their marriages. He left his. She didn’t leave hers. She went into therapy instead.
The chances that an affair which ends a marriage can become a happy marriage are very, very slim.  We’ll look at why that is, at what happens in an affair, and at how to make the best of the mess that’s left afterwards.   The woman who had the “emotional  affair,”  had it with a man she’s met in a pottery class. There was a part of her that longed to be creative and artistic.  She and her husband had joined together to work hard, build a family, build a family business. By her late thirties, children off in college, she felt utterly suffocated by the very success she’d worked so hard to build. Her husband wanted them to double the size of their business and all she could see was another fifteen years of being a slave to that business. Yet she felt she couldn’t refuse her husband because, she felt she’d committed to a certain kind of life with him. So she began her affair.
Now I’ll give you a male version of that story. The man was a doctor and an excellent one. He’d come from a family where the adults and older children were pretty selfish and self involved.  He basically raised himself and cared for the older people.  Since he had a good heart and was smart, he was good at it. He knew how to care for others. What he had suppressed was his ability to allow others to care for him. You can see where this story is going and why, at 45, he began an affair with a very sweet young woman who was a nurse in his practice. You can see what their time alone was like, and why he said to her so often, “When I am with you and our clothes are off, one of greatest happy feelings for me  is that, finally, I’m not being a doctor.”
What’s going on?
Most of us, except those of us who really are very superficial, have a suppressed, or hidden side.  There is almost always a part of our potential that, for a number of good reasons, we refuse to develop.  The mark of the young adult is his or her focus on becoming a certain kind of adult.  Often the first marriage is an expression of that healthy intention.
But often, unless you were graced by exceptionally loving, generous and supportive parents, your vision of what you can be is too narrow.  At midlife you discover in many ways that you are both a better and more complex person than you thought you were, and a worse one.
There is a suppressed part of you that wants its time on the stage of your life.  And if you don’t trust your marriage partner to allow that part of you to appear, you will find someone who will nurture it. You will fall in love with that person. It’s a very old joke. The man says to his secret love, “My wife doesn’t understand me.”
People in these relationships, when they get into them, are often pleased, surprised, relieved, or thrilled to find that, in this affair, they show up as a very different person than the person they seem to be  in their marriage. They are funnier, sexier, smarter, more compassionate, wiser, kinder, something more wonderful, fulfilling and pleasing to themselves than they ever thought they were, or always wished they were.
But there is no integrity to the relationship  when it’s a secret and there is another party being excluded. How can there be? The relationship which is an affair,  is no more stable than the one that isn’t.  In both relationships, the one who is having the affair is showing up with only part of her or his true self.
So the affair starts out as being a way to become more real, more whole, as a way of trying to live with more integrity, and ends because, in the context of the affair, it’s impossible to become more real and more whole while having an affair, impossible to love with integrity. And this is the lesson everyone learns over and over and over again.
Here is how things sometimes resolve. The woman who wanted to do pottery had to learn to say, in a generous way, “no” to her husband. Instead of helping him open an additional store, she set up a studio in a loft building where there were several other artists.  She replaced her “emotional affair” with a community of friends.
The Doctor went into therapy and ended the affair.  Of course he had to ask the nurse to find a new position because he couldn’t have her in the office anymore. They managed that with some grace and a heavy severance package.  If the pottery woman had to learn to start saying “no,” the doctor had to learn to stop saying “no.” He had to learn to allow his wife to care for him and that wasn’t easy for either of them, but in the end, it was a transition they were both grateful for.
Sometimes the affair that ends the marriage survives the divorce, but usually it doesn’t. In one situation, as soon as the man left his wife, all the unpleasant ways he’d been as a husband started showing up in his new relationship. His new love stopped being the good woman in contrast to the “bad” woman at home and became, to him, a woman of ordinary complexity. He couldn’t handle it and in some respects, neither could she. As their relationship got weird, she became convinced that he was cheating on her with another woman just as he had cheated on his wife with her. And she was right. At some level she intuited the dual personality aspect of men who have affairs. The poet, Stanley Kunitz, said, “We have to invent and reinvent who we are until we arrive at a self we can bear to live with and die with.”  People who are drawn to affairs are often in a chaotic research project to discover what parts of their inner self they need to invite into their daily lives.  There are ways to create this integrity without doing something that also violates integrity.  But life is filled with such lessons.

In the last 20 years psychological research has systematically investigated the psychology of successful romantic relationships…and rediscovered what many folks simply knew all along. But still, there are a lot of opinions out there and it’s good to know what some folks have found out with rigorous thinking.

A good relationship contains three main elements – technically they are called “behavioral systems.” The term means that our brains are set up to create three different, somewhat independent kinds of relationship conditions. Relationships that live and flourish tend to contain all three.

There is the physical loving, the sexual connection.

There is how you take care of your partner.

There is how your partner takes care of you.

The emotional connection has two parts.

What Trust looks like in a romantic relationship.

1. Open communication of thoughts and feelings.

You can say difficult things to each other and be heard and understood. Partners are sensitive to each other’s vulnerabilities.

2. Partners listen to each other and are genuinely interested in each other’s concerns.

3. Partners don’t dismiss, brush aside or belittle each others’ problems.

4. Partners are steadily willing to provide instrumental assistance.

5. They are willing to take steps to provide protection or remove sources of danger and threats.

What “Support” looks like in a romantic relationship.

Here are some things that happen for a relationship to be a source of mutual support.

1. Partners believe in and encourage each other to accept personal challenges and try new things.

2. Partners have genuine interest and appreciate for each others’ personal goals.

3. Partners take pleasure in knowing about each others’ lives beyond the boundaries of their relationship

4. Partners provide instrumental assistance, like information, advice and assistance in removing obstacles.

5. Partners don’t interfere with, demean or intrude on each other’s explorations.

6. Partners celebrate each others’ successes and responding sensitively and supportively to each others’ failures.

I thought of those studies of pre-school kids where the dominant one in a group always had on particularly loyal and, in a sense, dominant follower and it was the axis between them that organized the rest of the group.

In the map of the good romantic relationship, we see partners do this for each other. This is one sense of secure base, the one who is present and actively following and appreciating and responding to what has been said and done.

I sat in on a play rehearsal. It was what they call a salon reading and the actors stand at a lectern and speak to the audience, telling their stories. The director and one of the actors didn’t like each other. No matter what the actor did, the director responded with reservation. I, in contrast, was very interested in what the actor had to say and how she told her story. And so she spoke her entire piece to me. I listened with all my heart and she calmed down and her reading came more alive and later thanked me.

I took a guitar lesson from a lovely man from Argentina who had performed in Montreal. I wanted to learn from him. He was some 30 years younger than me. Before the lesson I played for him and he attended to deeply to my playing that this alone improved it.

In a good relationship, this is a vital component. And it has to work both ways.

Attend is a very interesting word. It means to help, to assist. In French it means to wait.
The two meanings are collapsed in the sense I’m using it. Sometimes the best way to help is to wait and pay (that word again) attention.

I was also deeply affected earlier this week by a French documentary film called Zidane,
Un portrait du 21e siècle. It is half sports documentary have conceptual art installation. It is one soccer game filmed with 21 cameras all focusing on this man, Zinedine Zidane who is perhaps one of the greatest athletes in the world. He is to soccer what Michael Jordan was to basketball. The movie is about his focus, what it’s like for him in “the zone,” that area of complete relaxation and complete attention and readiness for anything. Occasionally he explodes into brilliant action, but most of the time he watches and is ready.

In a great intimate relationship, this is one essential gift we give to each other, and we can only give it well when we are solid and secure within ourselves.

Film director John Cassavettes said, “Life is a series of attempts to avoid being exposed as a fool. But in the effort to do this we make even bigger fools of ourselves.  Most of the arguments between men and women are based on someone’s inability to express what they really mean. “

Takes Two to Not Tango

Relationships Deteriorate in Predictable Stages

Being Annoyed and distracted

Getting Angry

When a Relationship Destroys Itself

Getting Resentful, Distrustful and Even Punitive

Primal Avoidance

“Can’t We Still Be Friends?”

Many people need time.

By Philip Belove, Ed.D.

In a New Yorker cartoon by Leo Cullum, the elephant is on the psychoanalyst’s couch and saying with a pained expression, “I’m right there in the room, and no one even acknowledges me.”

The core of Relationship Hygiene is the Searching and Fearless Conversation.

Sometimes you have to talk about tough stuff.  Ask the dentist which teeth you have to floss and the dentist will say, “Only floss the ones you want to keep.” Relationship hygiene is like flossing.  Only do it in the relationships you want to keep.

Of course, this principle only applies to intimate relationships between equals.  The mark of equality between partners is that both care equally about the concerns of the other.

Rule One:  The Searching and Fearless Conversation is as intimate as sex; set aside a time and place for it.

Turn off the phone.  Don’t hurry. Appreciate every minute.  Give it your full attention.

(Hint: Once you get good at it, once you have a sense of how it works between you, you’ll find that you can have a “quicky” now and then and it’s pretty good, too.

Rule Two: Acknowledge and appreciate your partner’s willingness to do this on a regular basis

At the beginning and end of each session say something like this:  “I know this is hard. I believe we do it in order to the relationship good for both of us. I appreciate your effort and your caring.”  Say it and mean it.

Rule Three: After each statement, the other partner says back, in his, or her, own words what’s just been said. Until the speaker says, “Yes, you’ve understood me,” then the other person can’t respond.

This is not easy to do. It slows the conversation way down.  It makes incredible cognitive demands on you. Here is why:  It’s very difficult to appreciate and follow a line of thought when it runs so opposed to your own line of thinking.

I’m a pretty good listener and when someone is saying something I disagree with, and it’s about something that’s important to me, almost every cell in my body is screaming, “No. That’s not it. That’s not it at all.”  The urge to explain my side constantly threatens to drown out what they are saying.  I don’t particularly want to hear their side. I want to explain and justify my side.  I want to persuade. I do not want to be persuaded. All of this must be resisted.  Your own position has to be set aside. You have to commit to listening.

How do you know if you are a good listener?

People talk more. People who only imagine they are good listeners, but really aren’t, don’t know this. They complain and say that they’d like to communicate but their partner won’t talk. Often it’s because their partner does not expect to be listened to.

Rule Three-and-a-Half: Spoon Feed.

You have to deliver your position in small doses.  You can’t harangue.  You can’t rant. You have to say what you have to say without overwhelming or steam rolling your partner.  If you are telling someone something they don’t want to hear or agree with, and they are committed to staying open anyway, make it easy on them.

Rule Four:  No PABAS

PABAS is an acronym. (Thanks to the late Jack Tannenbaum for this.)  It stands for

Put downs, Attacks, Blaming, Accusations, Sarcasm

Here’s the deal. You’re doing this instead of having a fight.  But the temptation you are resisting is to have a fight. Therefore what ever your favorite weapons are – and usually one partner will have one set and the other will have a different set – you will itch to use them.  It’s so easy to blame (well, if you hadn’t…) or counter with sarcasm (Well, thank God you would never….) or … well, you know how it goes.

All the other rules tell what to do. Rule Four is more challenging. It tells you what to not do.  Simple to say: Don’t do it. But in the moment…very difficult to follow.

Rule Four-and-a-half: Don’t forget the difference between Intention and Impact.

You may intend one thing but the impact on your partner may be entirely different.  What you want to care about is how it was experienced by your partner.

Rule Five:  Remember why you are doing this. It is to develop a feeling for the relationship (FFR).

This is, for most people a very unusual concept. It is the key to effectiveness in a relationship.  A feeling for the relationship is a sense of how the relationship works. It means you take your sense of your partner and how she (or he) tends to handle things and you combine it with your sense of yourself (and you have to be honest here) and how you tend to handle things, and then you see how they fit together.

You end up with rules of thumb for the relationship:  “If I tend to (whatever), then there’s a good chance that my partner with (whatever) in return. If my partner starts to (whatever) then almost always I’ll (whatever) in return. This is our dance.”

For example, Bill has come to understand that if he makes a decision for Ginette without talking to her, her first response will be to go along and then a day later she’ll get really angry and back out of the plan, and then she’ll be stubborn about almost everything for several days.  In a Searching and Fearless Conversation he learned that is  wasn’t that she didn’t want to have dinner with his friends, it was that she didn’t want him to make commitments for her.  Neither one of them knew this until they’d cycled through this dance many times and finally had an SFC about it.

Relationship hygiene is not the fun part of a relationship, but it can be erotic.

There is something fascinating about it and couples who regularly practice it almost always talk about the incredible sexually excitement that comes up between them after a good, but difficult conversation.  Some people call it “make-up sex” and say it’s the best. That’s because the relationship hygiene conversation, the searching and fearless conversation, is incredibly intimate. In fact, it pushes the limits of intimacy.

Sometimes intimate relationships fail because the partners grow to hate each other’s company. “Hate.”  It’s a strong word.

Hatred is wild and strange.  I’ve counseled people who are dealing with an ex who is intoxicated by hatred.  Such people are willing to use children, the legal system, and vandalism to make a former partner’s life miserable. They do it in a gleeful frenzy. They are scary because they feed off their hatred and there’s no stopping them except by going to war against them and defeating them thoroughly.  Most of us don’t like going to war.

For most of us hatred is  uncomfortable.  For most of us, when we are angry we are angry about a principle, a value, something that seems bigger than the issue at hand.  But when anger shifts to hatred it’s because we’ve made the issue personal. Often people who like to hate are also proud of the fact that their values are so personally held.

Because hatred is a personal matter and because the pain associated with it is often so close to the surface, most folks shift from hatred to disgust.  Disgust is the way we put distance between our self and the thing we hate.  In disgust we don’t have to resolve the hatred. We can simply go past it and seek the more comfortable state of denial.  We resolve to simply never see, speak or think about the person we “used to” hate.  We do this for our protection, and sometimes for their protection. We cut them off.

There is an ancient story about someone, a midlife person, not a young adult, who is challenged to forgive in order to free himself of the hatred he carries.  But he can’t do it. He doesn’t want to leave the comfort of his disgust.  Instead he runs away from a chance at reconciliation.  This is the core of the story of the Book of Jonah, the Old Testament story about the man who was swallowed by a whale.

This ancient story is recited on Yom Kippur, the culmination of the Jewish New Year’s celebration, the Day of Atonement.  Yom Kippur is about forgiveness and reconciliation. The idea is to start the year with a clean slate.

There is a lesson in this tale for people who are single at midlife.  By midlife many of us have had at least one bitter relationship experience, usually more, and in order to start fresh in a new relationship, we need to address the challenge of forgiveness. However, as I’ve said, forgiving is difficult. It’s surprising how much easier it is to hold on to our resentments, grudges and even our hatreds.

If you start to forgive, or want to forgive, you have to think about what it is you hate and are going to forgive. Who wants to do that?

I have more to say about it but usually at this point people start to assemble their resistance to the idea. Therefore, let me put your mind at ease by telling you where we will end up several paragraphs from here:  There is all the difference in the world between forgiving and trusting.  If someone has been dangerous to you in the past, you can forgive them but you do not have to start trusting them again.

Now, back to the challenge of being forgiving.

When you cut someone off, you shut them out of your life, which is a drastic act.  At some level of your mind you have said, “What this person has done is unforgiveable.” In saying this, you have made a promise to yourself, an oath, an oath you will have to reconsider. Therefore, at the beginning of the Jewish observation of Yom Kippur, we listen to a prayer called Kol Nidre — the words mean, “all vows” — and  in it we ask to be released from the oaths we’ve taken.

Then we recite the many ways we ourselves might need forgiveness. It’s an exercise in humility, a very necessary part of the process and an easy one to resist. One year I was at a pre-Yom Kippur discussion group. Most of us were in our fifties.  Maybe we have to be at midlife before we can understand our real imperfections (as opposed to our imagined ones.)  One woman in the group said, “I never can relate to that section of the services because I never do anything wrong.” The conversation stopped momentarily.  No one knew what to say.  Someone, maybe the young rabbi, said, “That must be very nice for you,” and we went on.

Did I mention that we’re supposed to fast for 24 hours during Yom Kippur?  The fast starts at sundown and by mid afternoon people are cranky and irritable.  This irritability and impatience sets us up to hear the story of Jonah.

The book of Jonah is a story about a man who thought he was a nice guy.

Before going into the story, you have to know one reference. “Ninevah” is a town, and in the context of this story Ninevah is a place where anyone could find people easy to hate. So start by thinking of a group that’s easy to hate. Nazis? Terrorists?  Criminals?  A particularly sociopathic person you know?  A religious group that teaches hatred and persecutes others? A woman who stole someone’s mate? An ex-husband?  A best friend’s ex? You can do this.

At the beginning of the story, Jonah receives a call from God who tells him to go to Nineveh and warn them that, unless they change, all 120,000 of them are going to be destroyed by His Wrath.  Jonah would rather see them fry in Hell, wants no part in the rescue plan, and he takes a boat going  in the opposite direction.

While he’s asleep, there’s a storm so terrible it scares everyone around him. He stays asleep. It’s an interesting metaphor.  Sometimes we get so comfortable with our  own hatred we forget it’s there.  Those around us notice the storm but we are asleep to it.

Here’s a modern example, a letter from the files:

“Yes, I’m pissed off and furious. However, I also have a son who needs me right where I am, taking care of him, because she is too ‘busy’ to be a parent. So, I keep it to myself for the most part, and just do the best I can for the kiddo.”

I knew one family where the mother was mad as hell and she imagined she kept it to herself. If the kids said, “Are you angry?” she’d say “No” and put on this strange smile, eyes like points and a smile from the nose down.  The kids called it her “iron grin.” She’s hardly alone. Many of us believe that we can hide it when we are mad as hell.

Some believe that if you let the other person know how hurt and angry you are, then the other person wins.

In fairness, we have to acknowledge that it is never easy to be that angry.  I remember once asking a man who’d been arrested for throwing things at his wife, “What are you so angry about?”  He shook his head and backed away from me in his chair, “Doc. You don’t want to pull the cork on that bottle.”  Certainly he didn’t.

One woman so hated her ex that she avoided dealing with him directly and as a result she had to deal with him through lawyers. It cost her a lot of money. She had better uses for that money. She also hated the fact that she hated him. She denied the impact of her hatred on her own life. This made her much less intelligent in her dealings with him.

When we hate, and then hide from our own hatred, we take  parts of our Self, valuable qualities, and seal them over where they can’t be harmed, where can do no harm to others, and and also where we can’t take advantage of the character strengths they embody. Hide away your compassion and you don’t get to be compassionate.  Hide away your principled anger and you can only be angry in an unprincipled way.  But there they are, these character strengths, as precious as one of your physical organs, buried in all that baggage, hidden under the hatred. And that’s why you hold onto your baggage.

When you run away, you run like a child, with a little back-pack of stuff you don’t want to leave behind, and that was Jonah in the first chapter, asleep on top of his baggage while the storm raged.

The story of Jonah gets much more complicated. In the second chapter in order to get rid of all that stormy energy, the folks on the boat threw him overboard.  Suddenly the seas are calm.  I was in a men’s group a few years ago and we had a member who imagined he was a much nicer person than he actually was.  We asked him to leave the group. Things lightened up for us all and someone quoted an old Yiddish saying. In English it goes like this: “When he leaves the room, it feels like a good friend just walked in.”  This was what happened on the boat when they got rid of Jonah.

As for Jonah, he was immediately swallowed by a whale and everything went dark. If you are single at midlife, you yourself may have to spend a little time  in the belly of the whale. If you are driven by hatred, even in a small sense, there is a time when you just have to stop and calm down.

Jonah sits alone in the dark and laments.  He finally says to himself and God, “Okay, I’m ready to be a different person.”  This too is part of the midlife transformation. After you calm down something new springs up in your heart. There is a willingness that wasn’t there before.

As soon as the willingness appears in Jonah,  his story changes direction. The whale spits him out and he finds himself on the shores outside Ninevah. That’s another interesting metaphor. So often, as soon as a person is willing to take a next step, the opportunity appears.

Along with every new piece of inner growth, however, there is usually a test.  In the Jonah story, he goes to the Ninevites, says, “You people have to change,” and everyone says, “You’re right,” and everyone changes effortlessly. It’s a miracle! No arguments, no explanations, no grinding penance; just sudden, easy sunlight. All those evil people are happy and rejoicing. This is an Old Testament comedy moment because Jonah hates the easy success.  He curses. He is miserable. He says, “I’d rather be dead than witness this.”   You don’t often read about God making jokes in the Old or New Testament, but this is an example.

Jonah can’t stand the all the smiling faces and celebrating so he goes outside the city and sits in the sun where he can watch and sulk. This sets up the next joke. God makes a tree so Jonah is in the shade and Jonah mellows out a bit. Then God makes the tree die, Jonah’s in the hot sun again, and again he says that he’d rather be dead. So God says (and I’m inclined to hear the comment with a Jewish accent and read like a punch line to a joke), “What kind of a person are you that you can feel sorry for the death of tree which was a gift from me in the first place and then you do not care at all for possible death of 120,000 people who are clueless?”

That’s where the story ends. It ends with a question: How can you think of yourself as a compassionate person as long as you hold onto your hatred for people who are essentially clueless?  We in the congregation are supposed to handle this question.

Compassion for the clueless is not easy.  The Polish poet, Czelaw Milosz, said, “We always hope that somehow everything will be all right because others are better than we are.” But we can’t expect others to be more forgiving and compassionate that we are ourselves. In a relationship, we each have to contribute to the good will and resilience.  And this is true even when we decide that someone is not to be trusted.

Or, as another rather famous Jewish man said, “Forgive them. They don’t know what they are doing.”

There is a message here.  You can’t just pretend to be a nice person.  If you want renewal, you have to have genuine compassion. Again, this is not easy to do. The message of Yom Kippur seems to be this: If you are going to change, change deeply. Stop having an emotional investment in seeing other people suffer, especially clueless people.  Back off your oath that you will never forgive the so-and-so for whatever it was he, or she, did. It’s the New Year.

If you can’t do this, then you bring into the new year, (or the new relationship) the idea that it’s really okay to punish people you are close  to for doing things that might hurt you. You are invited to give that one up.

What you gain is a chance to make fresh start.

First, there is just the animal connection. Every creature on earth, bugs, fish, birds, marsupials and mammals comes in two sexes. The animal connection is important and it is deep. But it’s not all.

We are also social animals and we live in tribes and families and communities and cultures, all with intricate demands which we honor. Any mating of two people has to answer to social realities.

And finally, we are spiritual animals. We each believe that our individual lives do matter and we care about how we use this gift of our life.

So in the great scheme of things, as important as physical chemistry is, it is not the whole taco. Even so, it is not to be ignored. Here is a quiz to help you think about some of the aspect of physical chemistry. All the answers are based on psychological research. Answer each question, true or false.

1. Physical Chemistry (PC) develops over time.
False. Relationships can develop over time. Social and spiritual considerations can outweigh matters of physical chemistry. But PC is immediate. It is an animal response. It is connected to immediate sense perception, and it is based on mechanisms which evolved over the million years when humans were just another kind of wild animal.

Devendra Singh, University of Texas. Study of female form, ration of hips to waist: 25/36 .69 Universal signal

Digit Ratio: a Pointer to Fertility, Behavior and Health
(2002) John T. Manning
Rutgers University Press, New Jersey, USA.

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