January 2008 Archives

"Hello!" to the couple of people who actually visit my blog and to the hundreds of people who accidentally read it in syndication.

Our family just got back yesterday from southern California. My parents took everyone to Disneyland and we did some other stuff as well. This was my first time to Disneyland since I was five years old and the first time for my wife Christine and our children.

Weather was an issue while we were in California. A tornado warning was in effect on Thursday -- the night we arrived and flood watches were in effect on Saturday evening. We were fortunate to have pretty decent weather on Friday and Saturday, the days we actually spent walking around inside Disneyland. Being that this time of year is about as off-season as Disneyland gets, we were able to visit a seemingly maximum number of attractions within the park due to short or non-existent lines.

The kids got their mouse-ears hats with their names embroidered on them, and got to spend a lot of time with their cousins. On Sunday, we drove down to Long Beach and walked through the aquarium exhibit there and then, between torrential bursts of rain, drove up the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH) and visited a beach so the kids could see the ocean. Unfortunately, the weather didn't really lend well to actually playing in the water. Oh well. There's always next time.

When we returned to Utah Monday afternoon, our flight was delayed over an hour due to blizzard conditions in Utah. All in all, however, it worked out great and we all had a relatively good time.

I don't usually use the Fozzolog to dispense relationship advice... Well, let me think about that. When my wife and I were living with her brother and his wife as their marriage was crumbling, I guess I did say quite a bit about bad behavior in relationships then. So... let me start over: I haven't usually used the Fozzolog to dispense relationship advice since we moved out of my wife's brothers house when his marriage was crumbling. That being said, I have something to share that may or may not be of value to people who are in challenging, confusing relationship with a significant other.

Recently, a young woman I'm friends with has been talking to me about the relationship with her boyfriend. I recognized right away that she was a "needy" person in the relationship. As she talked to me about the problems she was facing, I told her about a relationship I had with a girl named Amy when I was in college. I was head over heels in love with Amy and couldn't get enough of her. Amy loved me, but she really grew uncomfortable of the constant pressure of my affection and my needs. To be blunt, I was smothering her. Then, one day, she told me she thought we should spend some time away from each other -- she needed "space."

This cliché of young love -- "I need space," was a dreadful thing for me to hear and I responded by giving her exactly what she did not want: more attention, more neediness, desperation, and more obligation to attend to me. Long, painful, ridiculous story made short: the relationship ended. I got fat, depressed, and still bear some emotional scars of the breakup today.

During the months that followed that painful split, as I tried to grapple with why a relationship that, in my mind, seemed so perfect, didn't work, I ran across a book in a bookstore titled "The Two Step." This book, more than anything else, opened my eyes to what should have been obvious, but wasn't: I was hogging the "dance" of the relationship.

This book does an excellent job of explaining how healthy relationships usually involve two people who regularly switch roles of "the seeker" and "the sought" back and forth. From there, it describes common types of dsyfunctional relationships and what can be done to make the relationship healthy. The authors use the metaphor of a dance to describe it and it works well. The book is simple to read- lots of fun drawings and simple messages. So, I found myself telling my needy friend about this book and even dug it out and scanned a couple pages from it for her. It's been about fifteen years since I purchased the book and it's still doing some good.

If you or someone you know is going through a difficult time in a relationship or having trouble getting past a failed relationship, check out this book. You can get it from Amazon.com and lots of other places, I'm sure. I noticed Amazon has some nice excerpts available you can look at to get an idea of what the inside of the book is like.