Welcome to Truth and Relationships. The main purpose of this site is to help educate you to the fact that you believe a very damaging myth about life in general. I believed it too, and spent 12 years of my life absolutely miserable because of it. Most people who believe this myth don’t even realize it, and invite pain and misery into their lives as a result. They struggle and struggle to eliminate it from their lives and realize that they can never completely do it. Eventually they resign themselves to accepting that misery as “normal” and live a mediocre life as a result.
I’m here to help solve that problem.
I’m not trying to sound overly dramatic, but doing this has eaten at me and eaten at me for so long, that I can’t help but do it. I’m not a religious man, but saying this feels like my calling is the best way I can describe why I’m doing this.
Some of the things I’m going to post here are going to seem harsh. My ideas are going to be unpopular when compared to the conventional way of thinking. They are going to make people angry. I’m doing that on purpose, not because I enjoy making people angry, but because when people are angry, they dwell on things. They talk about them with other people. They think about them more than they would if I told some happy story that illustrates my same point. I want to make sure people can’t help but continue to think about and talk about these things each time I post something.
Hopefully as people discuss what I’ve posted, they’ll realize that my posts really aren’t so crazy after all. Hopefully they’ll realize that I’m being direct and honest in a way that they aren’t being with themselves. Hopefully what I say will help people the long run even though it might initially hurt them to think about.
This blog is going to talk about relationships. It’s going to talk about what we as a society currently believe about them, what we’re willing to accept from them, why we get in them, why we get out of them, and everything in between.
I’m not a doctor or a psychologist or a marriage counselor…but I’ve spent enough time talking to those people that I could probably have a degree in counseling by now had I met with them in an educational setting. I’ve also done enough of my own research into relationship self-help techniques that I could rattle off the most common recommendations given by the most popular counselors and therapists like they were my own ideas.
I’ve spent this much time talking to those relationship experts because I spent 12 years committed to a bad marriage. It wasn’t bad in the normal ways that people would expect. Most people would have actually described my marriage as really good.
My ex-wife and I never hit each other. We never cheated on each other. We had a nice home and we were close with our families. There was no psychological abuse or overt actions that were meant to cause any harm to each other what-so-ever. We had friends we hung out with and played in sports leagues together. We had two kids and a dog and vacation property. We went out to eat, took vacations, and paid our bills.
Our problems were related to our struggles to find common ground when it came to hobbies, child rearing, and any of the other normal daily activities or decisions married couples argue about. We rarely reached a consensus when discussing those differences and whatever decision we landed on left one of us unsatisfied at best, angry as the norm. Most people would say we were a typical married couple that got along sometimes and argued other times.
There’s nothing I can point to you would instantly say was “bad” about our marriage, but I again say, we had a bad marriage. I define it that way because with all that we had, our personality differences and different life preferences consistently led us to arguments and struggles that were never completely resolved. There was always resentment and frustration of one form or another that lessened our comfort and enjoyment of each day. It was like there was a dark cloud on the horizon that could roll in at any moment and erupt into a storm of torrential proportions.
Over the course of those 12 years I used all the techniques that books and counselors taught me in a concerted effort to try to make progress towards making our marriage happy. I had committed to my marriage and I was going to live up to that commitment regardless of all the ups and downs we dealt with. That’s what you’re supposed to do right?
That undertaking is the one thing in life that I failed in completely. Regardless of what I tried, regardless of the compromises and recommended communication techniques I learned, I never made any measurable and lasting progress towards making my marriage better. In actuality, all of those efforts made things worse.
I blamed my wife, I blamed the counselors, I blamed their techniques, and I blamed the things that happened around us that we couldn’t control. I couldn’t figure out how trying so hard to make improvements and using all the best techniques available, never yielded sustainable positive results.
After a while I started to spend more time figuring out why things didn’t work rather than continuing to try new things to fix us. I asked myself what was causing our issues, rather than asking myself what I could try to do about them.
The answer was shocking and simple when I finally discovered it. We were a married couple that had nothing in common. We were supposed to love each other, and we didn’t even like each other.
Most people accept that their feelings for their spouse will change over time. They are perfectly content when their intense physical attraction and unwavering feelings of affection are replaced by nothing more than an acceptance of their spouse as a constant in their life. They don’t realize that those things happen not because of a natural passage of time, but because incompatibilities lead to frustrations and animosity towards their spouse that directly detract from your feelings for that person. It is those incompatibilities that force compromises and concessions and lead to the general deterioration of the feelings, desires, emotions and attraction that you originally felt for that person.
Once I came to that fundamental realization, I decided the only way to avoid that “normal” cycle of marriage is to find someone who would be 100% compatible with me in every way. I got divorced, set my compass in the direction of perfection, and started the journey to find a sustainably happy life and a perfect marriage.
Before you even think that finding that type of compatibility is impossible…read these words and absorb them…
I FOUND HER.
My life and my marriage are now truly amazing. I am truly happy. Happy doesn’t even really describe it actually. Ecstatic, over the moon, blissful…those are some words that describe how I feel. I don’t just feel those emotions once in a while, I feel that way all the time. I also feel calm, comfortable, rested, relaxed, and at peace with my life and my future.
I want to share that feeling with you. I want to explain to you how I got there and help you get there too so that I can make an impact on your world. I want to do that for enough people that I make an impact on society. This is where I’m starting.
Please visit some of the other pages of this site. They all talk about different beliefs and topics related to this issue. Some of them point out flaws in society’s current way of thinking or the current way relationship “experts” try to help you deal with your problems. Others give you detailed recommendations about how to immediately make progress towards improving your current relationship or finding one that is your individual perfect.
I invite you to follow my blog and hopefully it will change your life for the better. You can also follow me on twitter (@youbelievemyths).
I hope that the messages here and tweets I post will help you realize that societal misconceptions have trained you to stay in relationships that aren’t worth maintaining. Staying in those relationships limits the amount of real peace and happiness you can experience in your life. Staying in one of those relationships makes your life common.
Being common means you aren’t as happy as you can be. Being common is mediocre. If you’re reading this because you’re looking for help to improve your relationship or because you wonder if you need improvement, you are common. The good news is there is something you can do to change that.
I’m nobody of note…and I figured this out. You can do it to.
I hope you join me.
truth and relationships 