Don’t make everything a Best Practice.
Three months after B.J.’s wedding, Kristen declared a moratorium on my Best Practices. The system, she told me, had gotten out of hand. Apparently, eighteen months of constant discussion about self-improvement had finally caught up with her and she couldn’t take it anymore.
Kristen didn’t have a problem with my sense of determination per se, but by the end of the summer it had become clear that the Journal of Best Practices was dominating our life. “It’s disrupting more than helping,” she told me. “It’s emotionally draining.”
It is? I wondered. I hadn’t noticed, but then, not surprisingly, I hadn’t considered things from her perspective. Perhaps it was draining to talk to her husband several times a day about his own behaviors and whether he was “likable enough.” Maybe it was disruptive to be woken up at night only to be informed of my latest plan to give her more closet space—a Best Practice I had intended to refer to as Donate all clothes not worn in twelve months, something I was convinced would make her think I was a truly remarkable husband.
Once she pointed it out to me, I could see that the scope of the Best Practices had expanded to include rather impertinent topics. Absurd even. By the time I mastered being fun at parties, which was not long after I began working on it, Kristen and I had addressed almost all of the underlying factors that had created problems in our marriage. With those core disciplines out of the way, I turned my attention to other, less critical things—things that amounted to minor annoyances. Don’t dawdle when mowing the lawn, for instance, was something to keep in mind if we had to go somewhere that day, but as a Best Practice it didn’t warrant the same amount of effort as Be present in moments with the kids. But I couldn’t make that distinction. I was on a roll and I didn’t want to slow the pace of transformation (see “obsessive tendencies”). I wanted to improve even more, even if it meant that my nightstand drawer—that central repository of paper scraps, Post-it notes, and journals—would collapse under the weight of my ambition. That’s where Kristen and I differed.
Had I kept the process to myself, it might not have been so bad, but I always insisted on her participation, even when she had other things to do. Which was all the time. As a working mom, Kristen’s days were packed. If she did have a few minutes to herself in the evenings, she would want to use that time to chill out, not to project slides against the wall to review my progress on such initiatives as keeping the refrigerator more organized and staying calm in the grocery store.
As with so many other things that are plainly obvious to most people, I had to be told that annoyances were to be expected and tolerated in any relationship, and especially in a marriage. Though I may not have realized that on my own, once it was explained to me, I understood exactly what it meant. Kristen put it this way: “You hog the blankets, Dave. You take months deciding which computer to buy. The instant we all pile into the car and shut the doors, you fart. That stuff is so annoying, and so not a problem.”
What was a problem, she explained, was beating myself up over every little thing and creating drama that nobody needed. After all, her expectation was that the Best Practices would eliminate all the drama. (Though I don’t know who she thought she was dealing with.) It was okay to aggravate her, but it wasn’t okay to drop what we were doing and formulate a Best Practice anytime I did, nor was it healthy to sacrifice otherwise happy moments for the sake of analyzing problems ad nauseam. It wasn’t okay to allow the Best Practices—the process of healing our relationship—to interfere with our relationship. If we did, then we’d be letting Asperger’s win.
“So, let me get this straight,” I said. “Even if I’m not flawless and I annoy you sometimes, you can still love me and be happy?”
“Yes! Exactly, Dave! That’s what love is. That’s what marriage is. That’s what we have! Isn’t that great news?”
It did sound like great news. So great that I could hardly process it. Ironically, I had to write a note in my journal reminding myself not to make everything a Best Practice. I knew that I was going to have to practice it. I envisioned myself frustrating Kristen in countless ways, and I could see myself laughing it off. Yes, I put the empty cereal box back in the pantry. Yes, she found it and now she seems irritated. No, I’m not on trial; no, she’s not keeping score. It really is no problem, just like she said, so let it go.
What I couldn’t have envisioned, however, was how much trust would be involved in allowing myself to let things go. It wasn’t easy. I assumed that, like me, Kristen made judgments against everything she saw and held grudges for decades. Although she had never given me any reason to feel this way, I had always assumed that if I was anything less than flawless, she would one day pack up her things and move on to greener pastures, perhaps finding herself a no-maintenance guy who loved grilling out with the neighbors and folding clothes. Being secure in who I am was going to take some getting used to.
I’d spend the next several months mastering the skill of being loved and accepted by Kristen. I had to remind myself numerous times every day that she wasn’t judging me, that she just wanted me to live my life without overthinking it. I made a pretty big deal about not making a big deal of things. The result? I no longer felt the grip of anxiety or the overwhelming sense that I was doing everything wrong. For the first time in almost ten years, I felt comfortable just going about my days. I felt reborn. Which was not a bad outcome, considering that a year and a half earlier, when our marriage was suffocating, I felt as though the entire burden of reconstruction was on my shoulders.
But a burden isn’t a bad thing. My desire to become a better husband and to earn back Kristen’s friendship helped us to achieve one of our primary objectives: I learned how to manage my behaviors and moods on my own. Kristen never set out to make me flawless, she just wanted me to be able to manage myself, and now I am able to do that.
That’s not to say that I don’t have to be careful. Far from it. Like anyone battling an affliction—be it addiction, hyperactivity, an eating disorder—I have to manage my behaviors every day if I want to be successful. If I don’t, I can find myself retreating behind old habits. I forget to go with the flow, I lose sight of other people’s perspectives, or I begin to absent myself from my family. Brooding, silence, resentment—it’s all there, waiting for me. Even in our second year of Best Practices, I made these mistakes, usually because I became distracted by either an unexpected argument or some random short-term fixation, like lifting weights or taking nature walks. I’ll probably continue to slip from time to time. My brain wouldn’t have it any other way. But now when I slip, I don’t fall. I know how to keep myself up, and I know how to move on. Even if I were to fall, Kristen would be right there to help me up. Laughing, the way she does when I slip and fall on my ass, both literally and figuratively. That’s what marriage amounts to.
Enough about me, though. The morning the Best Practices were born (Pi Day, my fellow nerds), Kristen and I embarked on a mission with one objective in mind: to save our marriage. A worthy goal, if totally ambiguous. Save the Earth comes to mind: Oh yes, definitely. Which part? We didn’t know it, but the first year and a half of saving our marriage was really about understanding who we are, what our relationship actually is, and what we both need to do to make it work. Eighteen months, dozens of Best Practices, and innumerable hours of soul-searching later, Kristen and I finally reached this awareness. (I’m rather amazed we lasted five years without it.)
But we still weren’t there. Our marriage was better, no question, but it wasn’t exactly working. When Kristen curled up next to me in bed during our weekend in Chicago and told me, “You get me,” she was wrong. Or at least, wrong-ish. I didn’t get her, entirely. I understood who she was, how she behaved, what made her laugh. But I didn’t understand what she needed. For our marriage to work, I had to understand that.
With the final evolution of the process—Don’t make everything a Best Practice—after two years of lugging around notebooks, folding the frigging laundry, calling for performance reviews, and interviewing myself in the shower, I finally got Kristen. I understood what she needed from me: put the notebook down, love her, love the kids, and simply be—be myself so that she can love me back. That’s it. It seems unspeakably easy to me now, but perhaps I should consider that a testament to how far we have come since renewing our commitment to each other and to our relationship.
It’s a funny thing. By liberating myself from the process of becoming a better husband, I actually became a better husband. I also became a better dad. But I wasn’t the only one transformed by our journey; Kristen had also changed. I just had to get out of my own head long enough to notice it. Once I set my notebook aside, I saw that we had become our own perfect version of the family I’d always envisioned. In every room of our house, framed pictures now adorn the walls and tabletops, telling stories of some of our happiest moments together as a family. Granted, these pictures were all taken by other people who had framed them and given them to us as gifts, but the pictures were still of us, and we had finally managed to hang them on the walls—that’s something to be proud of. We were eating homemade dinners together, dinners that Kristen had prepared while I ran through the sprinkler in the backyard with the kids, wearing my goggles and dreaming of the day when I’d be able to afford a wet suit. Kristen and I were going on dates (or rather, going on the exact same date time after time, God bless her heart). And best of all, it was our affectionate hugs that were now being interrupted by two little sponges squeezing in to absorb all of the love. All this from a journey to earn back my wife’s friendship.
One final thought. For those of you in a relationship blessed by perfect compatibility, continual bliss, and matching clothes (I’m looking at you, Andy and Mary), I’m happy for you. Thank you for reading this book to each other under a warm blanket. For the rest of us (I’m looking at you, everyone else), when you find yourself staring defeatedly at your spouse over breakfast or watching them hunt through the dryer for a pair of socks, and you wonder, Who in the hell did I marry?—and you will—I can now say with absolute certainty: there is hope. You can turn things around.
I have the nightstand drawer to prove it.