We’re well past five positive interactions this morning, aren’t we? asked R as he wrapped his arms around me lovingly on Valentine’s Day.

Earlier we’d watched a CBS Sunday Morning story about the Chemistry of Love. The author of a soon-to-be-released book on the science of a good marriage had noted there’s a mathematical ratio that can predict whether love lasts: 5 to 1.

According to Tara Parker-Pope, good marriages have at least five positive interactions (like a loving squeeze of the hand or a shared laugh) to every one negative interaction (like a critical comment).

Oh, sure, I replied, I think we’re well over the five and it’s not even noon!

R grinned devilishly and paused for a little added drama.

“You bitch!” he called out with zest, and then scooted from the room.

There aren’t many wives who’d laugh hysterically when their husbands call them a bitch on Valentine’s Day.

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

– ee cummings

Over coffee a friend recently asked me what I’d learned so far from this marriage reboot experiment. This is what I told him:

I’ve been reminded that bridging the gap between an idea and an action is tricky. When I proposed the Year 20 Reboot to R, he agreed fully. But it took us several months of one or the other crying out, reboot! during disagreements before we began to get into the habit of it. Anyone who’s serious about rebooting their own relationships needs to anticipate the habit-forming stage.

I’ve learned that it’s easier to reboot a difficult conversation when both partners are on board with the idea of rebooting. I know, seems kind of D’oh! While I don’t believe rebooting a relationship completely requires both partners to be part of it (I’ll say more about this below), it’s so much easier when both are. I’ve been pretty good at remembering to challenge my assumptions about R’s motivations and rebooting myself during disagreements, and R has gotten better at that too. I sure am grateful we can be each other’s support system for this experiment because it would be a lonely endeavor otherwise.

I’ve concluded that what I’ve said for years in my conflict resolution work is true: It is possible to change the conflict dance when only one partner of two changes their own steps. When R’s too ticked to reboot, I rely on my own mental reboot to change how the conversation unfolds and gets sorted out. Virtually 100% of the time, if I can reboot myself and my own attitude, R will adjust his own responses, subconsciously perhaps. It’s been freeing to be reminded how much I can influence how well a conflict conversation will go solely by changing my own response.

Most importantly, I’ve confirmed that what I believe about someone is a choice and that I can consciously choose to abolish a belief, even after 20 years. When I find myself getting annoyed with R because of something I long ago concluded about him, I’ve practiced negotiating with myself: What if that’s not the whole picture? What if it’s more than what I think? How would I be acting differently if I were allowing love to guide me instead of judgment? It’s been pretty stunning how frequently I can just toss a belief that may or may not be right but sure as hell isn’t serving me well.

Lots more learning ahead, I suspect. I’m loving it.


© 2009 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved. Posted at The Year 20 Reboot.

Missy Moo came into our lives three weeks ago. She’s a charming, happy little mutt from a kill shelter in West Virginia, brought to NH by a dog rescue group. We think she’s probably shih tzu and poodle, though she’s got a scruffy terrier look and attitude that completely abolishes any idea that she’s a prissy dog.

Smudge, our scrappy little Puerto Rican street dog, who’s been terribly lonely since our Newfie mix passed away over the summer, is besotted. He loves Missy for two reasons: She plays with him constantly. And her terrible manners make him look like canine good citizen of the year.

We’ve taken to calling her Miss(ing) Manners.

And been tempted to purchase earplugs, given Missy’s penchant for near-constant barking. We’ve had many a rescue dog over the years, nearly all of them arriving with behavioral problems prior owners never bothered to address (and probably helped create). We’ve helped nippers and chewers and house messers and barkers all find their inner canine good citizens. We thought we were pretty damned good at it, too. But Missy’s barking was unlike anything we’ve ever experienced. Loud. Screeching. Constant.

So one of our first calls was to Keryl, our dog whisperer extraordinaire and Smudge’s other great love (she brought dog agility into his world and when he sees Keryl he practically explodes with joy).

Keryl diagnosed Missy’s central challenge as reactive barking brought about by the anxiety of having been bounced around and not knowing what to expect, what to be worried about, what’s acceptable and not. So she reacts to everything — every sound, every squirrel, every bird flying past the window. Beneath her cheerful, confident demeanor is a scared and off-balance little mutt.

Keryl’s advice was straightforward and she worked with Missy and me for an hour to get us started:

1. Get her attention. When she’s barking up a storm, she doesn’t even notice we exist. We don’t get her attention with raised voice — we get it by happily singing her name.
2. Reward her for giving her attention to us instead of what prompted the barking. Missy’s really food-oriented, so a tiny piece of treat does the job.
3. Redirect her energy away from the thing that prompted the barking. This usually means running into another room with her following in curiosity, then having her practice sit or touch or stay for a moment, followed by another tasty morsel.
4. Be really consistent with the other obedience work so she learns what’s ok and not, and learns we’re in charge so she doesn’t need to be. Reward her best behavior with love, don’t pet and soothe when she’s reactive.

Of course, it’s impossible not to note the parallels between teaching Missy new behaviors and what I also know works with humans in conflict situations. And to extend those lessons into my own life and the Reboot experiment.

It’s more effective to get someone’s attention with a smile than a snarl.

It’s more effective to reward what’s working than punish for what’s not.

Soothing reactivity takes practice, repetition, and commitment. If R and I are mildly reactive to certain of the other’s behaviors, and we’ve built that over 20 years, it’s going to take the full year of our experiment to change habits.

But, damn, it’s not freaking rocket science.

As I type this, Missy is zonked in front of the fireplace, snoozing away instead of balancing precariously on the living room window sills so she can bark at every MacDowell Colony artist who strolls by. It’s almost 9:00 a.m., we’ve been up for 5 hours, and not a single bark has come from that little mouth.

That’s a record. We’ll see if we can get to 10:00. If not, we will tomorrow, or the next day. One redirect at a time.

What we see depends mainly on what we look for. – Sir John Lubbock.

It’s easy, in a blog about rebooting a marriage after 20 years, to focus on the not-so-hot to the detriment of all the good. When I first told R about my desire to blog the Reboot, that’s the very concern he aired. It’s too easy to discount the good stuff, as though it’s expected and therefore of less import than the stuff that needs “fixing.”

So this is a post about celebrating the joys we want to hang onto during the Reboot. And it’s a post about my Midwestern guy who has more romance left in him than I give him credit for sometimes.

R and I decided to go back for a visit to Burlington, Vermont, where we met 20 years ago, as part of the celebration of two decades together.

But R took it one step further, closet romantic that he is: He proposed we recreate our first four dates.

Those dates happened in quick proximity to one another: Our first was breakfast at his house (He cooks! I thought to myself as I drove over there) followed by a hike up Mt. Hunger. We enjoyed each other’s company so much we decided we didn’t want the day to end when we got back down the mountain. So that evening we went on Date 2: Dinner at the Champlain Mill followed by theatre at the Saint Michael’s Playhouse.

It was the 4th of July weekend, so we decided we’d spend the next day together, too. We hung out at the Burlington Waterfront for much of the day and evening, dipping our toes in the water while we talked for hours on the Boathouse dock and later watched the fireworks light the skies over Lake Champlain.

Our last date was a trip up to Burton Island, where we rented a rowboat to get over to the island and then a canoe to spend the day circling the island with frequent stops to swim, picnic and hang out. (Aside: If you’re a reader who knows R, ask him sometime how he felt about the long row back to shore! It’s a story for another time.)

Well, we almost pulled off a perfect replication of those dates. You know what they say about the best laid plans of mice and men. The weather was awful, with torrential rain and car-denting hail keeping us off any serious mountaintop and off the water.

We couldn’t do Mt. Hunger without risking lighting strikes, but we did manage to get to the top of Mt. Philo between rainstorms. We spent time at the waterfront. We made it to the Playhouse for a romantic production, and while the restaurant at the Mill is no more, we dined very happily at A Single Pebble.

Of all the things we did and old haunts we visited, one was most special to me: We walked from our hotel in downtown Burlington to North Beach, where we’d met at the Discover Jazz Festival. I remember Rod was wearing a white t-shirt with an image of the globe on it; superimposed on the globe was the peace sign and one word: Imagine.

At North Beach this summer, R and I figured out approximately where we were standing when we met. We had a lovely long smooch and then stood hand in hand, looking out over the water.

Until the pools of groundwater soaked through our sneakers and the guy on the huge mowing machine made it clear we were in his way.


© 2009 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved. Posted at The Year 20 Reboot.

“When you scatter crumbs all over a floor I finished vacuuming not five minutes ago, it conveys you’re disregarding or devaluing the work I’ve done.”

A version of that sentence has come out of my mouth for 20 years. I call it the Breadcrumb Battle.

Somehow, R butters his toast in such a way that breadcrumbs scatter in a delicate pattern around his feet. I’ve watched him over the years, trying to figure out why my bread buttering and his yield such different crumb results. Sometimes when I’m standing there watching, I step outside of myself and am horrified to realize I’ve probably spent a total of a couple of hours of my life diagnosing bread buttering problems. I’d like those hours back, please.

It’s one of those classic, apparently minor skirmishes that couples get into – Should the toothpaste be squeezed from the bottom or the middle? Should it be recapped? Should the toilet seat be lowered after a guy uses it? Should the paper towels unroll over the top or from underneath? Mercifully, we don’t skirmish on any of those. No, we (I?) choose breadcrumbs.

Oh, for God’s sake.

When I’m teaching new mediators their craft, I use toothpaste and paper towels to illustrate an important lesson: It’s not about toothpaste. It’s not about paper towels. It’s not about toilet seats. It sure as hell isn’t about breadcrumbs. And don’t take the easy route and diagnose it as a power struggle, either.

Our classic skirmish goes something like this:

Me: You’re scattering breadcrumbs on the floor again. I just finished cleaning this floor!
R: I didn’t mean to.
Me: I don’t care that you didn’t mean to. I care that you did. Intention and impact are two different things.
R: It’s just a few crumbs. Gee whiz. Sorry!
Me: It’s not about the crumbs and you know it. It’s about me putting in time and effort on something and you disregarding it and messing it up within 30 seconds. There’s a whole long list of things like the crumbs.
R: Is this going to turn into a long conversation involving martyrdom? Because I’m not really interested. I said I’m sorry. We’re done here. [Picture his back as he walks away with his crumby bread.]

A single skirmish doesn’t matter. Even a few of them don’t matter. But they can add up and start to matter and my goal here is to stop those suckers dead in their tracks.

So the other day I heard the toaster pop. I turned to watch the crumb show. I had just swept the floor. The stage was set for a classic Breadcrumb Battle.

But not, as it turns out, inevitably so.

As a few crumbs drifted onto the lovely dark Italian tiles, I played a trick of the mind with myself.

When my brain followed it’s now-habitual path, “There he goes again, devaluing my work,” I forced it down a different path. It didn’t like it, but my will is stronger than my brain’s whiny habits, so I won.

I forced my brain to ask these questions, quietly to itself: “What if this has nothing to do with what he thinks or doesn’t think of the work I do around here? What if he’s pondering more important things, like the future of life on this planet? Or his research project? Or the new committee the town just asked him to serve on?”

The end result? Still crumbs on the floor, yes. But no skirmish at all. I shrugged and walked away. The old method left the crumbs on the floor as well, so I’m no worse off.

And to be fair to R, there are plenty of other housekeeping faux pas he has modified over two decades, at my request. When I’m 100 and looking back on my life, I know I’ll fondly recall those crumbs because it meant we were both still alive.

Might as well look at them fondly now.


© 2009 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved. Posted at The Year 20 Reboot.

I’ve had a heretical thought in my head for two weeks. I have to get it out so I can walk around it and stare at it and decide what to do with it. So here we are. Before you go all righteous on me because of that headline, read on.

One night, sitting in the living room, I watched R while he read the newspaper. I watch him sometimes.

Out of the blue, a little voice in my head asked, in a tiny whisper, like it just knew it damn well better not say it too loudly, What if you job as his wife is to make him happy?

Now. I was raised by a feminist mom, to be a feminist, and am a feminist. Rod is also a feminist. As are most of my closest friends. So that little voice was too heretical for the likes of me. I brushed it off as though it was a mosquito.

Damn voice. Came back. Several times. Yesterday it came back while I was driving home from buying new dining room chairs. How very domestic of me. Buying chairs and listening to a voice suggesting my job is to serve my husband. I could practically feel the apron.

[Aside: My mom wore an apron when I was very little. But not for housekeeping or cooking. She wore it so she could carry kittens around easily when they needed TLC and nursing. She could do other stuff and still keep an eye on them, one in each apron pocket. Our house was where abandoned and feral former housepets always seemed to end up.]

Any way, back to the story. You know, the voice may be right. What if it is part of my job, part of making our marriage work even better?

No, not my job to make him happy – only he can make himself truly happy. No, not my job to avoid or hold back things that will create unhappiness, because that would be manipulative and disingenuous.

But I do think it is my job, as half this life partnership, to…

• Not create unhappiness.
• Add to R’s happiness at least a little bit and preferably a lot every single day.
• Make sure anything I’m unhappy about can get talked, dealt with or let go without poisoning.

And if it is my job, then it’s R’s job to the same for me.

I tell my conflict coaching and training clients that behavior change is more than the stopping of the behavior we want to shed. Nature abhors a vacuum. I know this from my doctoral dissertation, which researched the conditions that lead to behavior change.

R and I can’t just stop doing the annoying things that leave little pieces of debris in our marital wake. We have to start doing things that aren’t even about debris.

So I’m going to experiment for the next few weeks. Each day, I’m going to ask myself what I’ll do to contribute to R’s happiness. And I’m going to act on one thing, every day. Let’s see how I do.


© 2009 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved. Posted at The Year 20 Reboot.

I’ve been thinking a lot about beliefs lately, and the way beliefs influence the joy factor in a relationship.

There are the beliefs that originally led us to choose a lifetime with the person on the other side of the bed, and that keep us in the partnership.

There are the beliefs that led us to choose him or her and which have changed, worrying us a tad.

And there are the beliefs that we didn’t hold when we first merged our lives and developed at some point along the way. Some are ones that strengthen the bond, some are ones that eat at it.

A belief feels so viscerally part of reality, but it’s really a mental construct. It’s wrong to confuse “belief” with “truth,” but we do it anyway. I see that confusion muddy the waters in disputes I mediate, and I’m not less susceptible to it than others.

So what to do with the beliefs we hold about our partner and are the kinds that erode the relationship?

It seems to me that the first step is to distinguish something we’ve chosen to believe about someone from “The Truth,” to be more humble about our deductive powers than I suspect we are when we judge harshly. I want to hold power over my beliefs, not my beliefs over me.

© 2009 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved. Posted at The Year 20 Reboot.

This video, dubbed the “I-do dance,” has been making the rounds on the ‘net today. When I watched it, all I could think was, This is the kind of joy and fun loving we should aim for all the time. “We” in the broadest sense, not just R and me.

R and I used to go dancing a lot. We’ve gotten out of the habit – the Burlington, VT music scene made it a bit easier than the Peterborough, NH one. Nevertheless, it’s time to dance again.

[Can't view the video in your feed reader or email? Click here to view it in your browser.]

The Reboot experiment isn’t about starting with a clean slate. There are two decades of love and laughter and joy we want to keep – and have even more of, greedy people that we are.

I’ve been thinking a lot about all the laughter and have been in stitches this week as I think through all the funny moments.

One of the first inklings that he might be the man for me came a couple of months after I met R.

I was in his house and happened by a hallway window I hadn’t really looked out before. In the distance was the iconic Vermont mountain, Camel’s Hump.

“Oh,” I said, “I didn’t know you could see Camel’s Hump from here.”

Faster than a speeding bullet R replied, “Well, I try not to watch.”