Dear Jack, I do hope you don’t mind the truth, ‘cause I’m going to say some very hard truth in this letter. Think of a fluffy whiff of cloud hanging between heaven and earth. That’s how your life is right now. You’re just hung there, not moving forward or backward – Just an eccentric piece of the mechanical vagaries nature. There’s a form to your marriage, just like the cloud. Yet the marriage has no form. Continue reading
My dear Jil, do you know Elizabeth Moss? You probably know her as Peggy, Peggy Olson in the Mad Men drama series. In the series she’s the former secretary who ended up as advertising executive, breaking the glass ceiling for women. She made one major mistake – had a child for a married man, eventually giving up the child for adoption. But she didn’t allow the mistake to define her. She somehow pulled through. Continue reading
My dear Jil, you know I’ve always expressed my doubts about your money-denominated relationship. Your marriage is now at an impasse, and if you don’t make a radical shift in values and philosophy, it will unravel. The record of your marriage almost reads like a bank ledger. The marriage is totally transactional. It’s all about who bought what, who didn’t buy what, who’s owing whom and who, what’s outstanding… That doesn’t feel like marriage. It sounds like commerce – marital commerce. Continue reading
My dear Jack, let me teach you two laws to be cognizant of in this relationship. The two laws seem obvious, sound almost stupid. Yet they’re so potent and powerful. Sometimes, laws and principles seem so obvious. Take gravity for example. Continue reading
My dear Jack, you have to be careful about emotional abandonment. It may spell doom to your marriage. You can’t afford to emotionally neglect your wife. It’s consequential. Continue reading
Dear Jack, but I thought I had explained this to you before. You’ve written me about it. For clarity let me state it again: it is good to marry in church but it is not compulsory. Continue reading
My dear Jil, the problem sometimes is that we think successful relationships are auto-regulated. Nothing could be farther from the truth and such notions are a mirage. It explains why it seems people are expecting in relationships and not giving. They expect things to happen to them and so the relationship becomes one-sided, one party doing the giving. As long as the other party is putting effort into the relationship, the relationship will seemingly work; until the counter-party begins to expect some reciprocity for all his investment, emotional and material. Continue reading
My dear Jil, the problem sometimes is that we’re so focused on our wedding objective we lose sight of the marriage. So determined are you to marry this guy you’re not thinking of the viability of the marriage. You’re focused on momentous victory, not what lies beyond the “victory”. Such “victory” can only be pyrrhic. Continue reading