During the last year of my first marriage, right before it crashed and burned in divorce, I was online searching for answers to the marriage problems I was having.
I started with trying to learn the Islamic laws of marriage. It turns out that improves your relationship about as much as the Islamic laws of sacrificing an animal improves your cooking.
Then, I turned to the coaching world. After all, I was a professionally trained coach and had taken dozens of personal growth seminars and read perhaps hundreds of books at that point.
Still… nothing seemed to help.
Eventually I found a guy who’s blog I had been reading and he offered a 3-day Relationship Workshop… in Las Vegas.
The irony of that didn’t dawn on me until much later.
He was promising to teach a lot of valuable information, including ‘how to know for sure if you should end your marriage or not’. I was totally hooked. I must have read that invitation letter a dozen times.
The event was around $500 and I had just started my business so I had clients but I was still pretty broke. That was a big chunk of my monthly income. But I had to do it. I bought the event ticket and was ready to go… but the event was in about 6 months time.
By the time I flew all the way from Barcelona (where I lived at the time) to the event, it was already too late.
We had already separated and I made it clear that I was ready to put the final nail in the coffin and get divorced.
I still attended the 3-day training. (I figured I had a heck of a lot to learn about creating loving relationships!). And I had some wonderful insights… But I learnt one of the most depressing relationship ideas ever:
Over time, the claim was made, in any relationship, things get worse. Why? Because a relationship involves sacrifice. And each time you sacrifice, you build up a little bit of resentment. And over months, years and decades, that resentment builds up to the point where you just can’t stand each other any more!
The safest way, according to the trainer, was to call it quits before you have too much resentment and then start again with someone new.
Now, I was no relationship expert, and life had certainly made me very humble, especially in the domain of marriage. And I couldn’t quite put my finger on it… but something about this concept really didn’t add up.
Fortunately, a few months later I was blessed to go on a different retreat with the dear Chip Chipman, who recently passed away, may God rest his beautiful soul.
Thanks to the enlightening few days I spent with Chip, it suddenly all became as clear as day to me…
That’s NOT how feelings work!
The feeling of anger or resentment doesn’t get in a Delorian going at 88 miles per hour and travel through time, from the past into the present and future!
And resentment certainly doesn’t come from your partner or your ‘sacrifices’ either.
In reality, it’s much more simple than that.
You wake up each beautiful day and if your thinking is grumpy, you’ll feel grumpy. Until, usually without trying or doing anything, it clears up and you ‘change channels’ in your mind and your thinking changes. Then you might start thinking in a cheery way and you’ll feel cheery.
Whatever you think, you instantly feel.
It’s got nothing to do with your marriage or your partner’s behaviour or mistakes, (of which I’m sure you’ll tell me, there are plenty).
Get clear on this one thing, and everything in your marriage starts to change.
And you realise just how lucky you are to have those days, months and decades of life with your partner.
If you want to save yourself the hundreds of thousands of dollars I invested to learn about this stuff, and not have to travel to Vegas or anywhere else, and skip all the painful mistakes I made, then I have something special for you.
You can get all of my best ideas, inspiration and the spiritual teachings that I learned from great Islamic teachers and the best minds in psychology, all packaged up into a professional weekend training on how to improve your marriage (and your other most important relationships).
It’s a 2-day Zoom event called, “Loving With Presence” and you can get your ticket here:
