Relationships: 3 Truths

Relationships As I work with men and women, and their spouses, I find that one of the biggest issues that comes up is how pornography use affects their relationships. one thing that I often see and one thing that happened in my own relationship was that my wife thought that for her to be happy she needed to control me and my pornography use. If you haven’t read that story go back to my blog and check out the one titled, “My wife used sex as a way to try and control me and I wanted her to” Lots of wives and husbands do this to varying degrees, especially when their spouse isn’t behaving in a way that they want. This is the rules part of all our relationships. We have all these expectations of how our relationships should be. As I have learned and grown from a pornography user and now as a coach, something that each of us has to learn is that our relationships are just one thing. They are our thoughts about another person. If you have ever had a boss you can’t stand but someone else loves them, you know what I am talking about, even if you have never thought about it this way. Another good example of this is our ward bishops. They can be figures that are beloved by almost everyone, but there are some that we just don’t get along with. And we also have ideas about who they should be and how they should behave. As an example of how we think people aught to behave, When I was a young man I attended a youth conference where there happened to be a tv on in the lobby showing some Saturday night live reruns. In my house we had never been allowed to watch SNL because my parents had opinions about it. But there, in that lobby I saw a member of our stake presidency Julian Breillatt watching and laughing at SNL. Now, being the know it all teenager I was, I said something about how I was surprised he was watching it. and he responded that he loved SNL and thought it was very funny. Incidently, a number of years later, this same good man was the temple sealer who married my wife and i. My thoughts about what a member of the stake presidency should and shouldn’t watch were a manual of sorts for this man. But at that moment, I learned that I didn’t have to believe everything I thought about how others should behave. I could just let people behave without having to judge them as fulfilling some arbitrary set of rules that I thought. Our relationships with others depend solely on our thoughts about that person. What I thought about president briellatt watching snl could have been that he was a bad person and that I would never value anything he ever said again as a spiritual leader. Or, as was the case, I didn’t take his behavior to mean anything other than he was a man, doing the best he could. And when it came time for him to officiate in our wedding, I was happy to have a man who had been part of my life for many years there to officiate. When it comes to spouses, this same lesson can and, I’ll say, probably should, be applied for the sake of everyone’s happiness. Specifically, when it comes to pornography use, oftentimes, I find that spouses feel it is their duty to hold their loved one to a certain standard. And when that standard hasn’t been met, they are to punish, cajole, withhold affection from and judge the other party. So, in my relationship with darcy, I know that my relationship with her depends on my thoughts about her. My thoughts about her depend on my expectations of her and how well she meets those expectations. I also can’t have “love” for her, but that I have loving thoughts about her. Because, as we know, our emotions and feelings are generated by our thoughts. So, when I think about her lovingly, I feel love. I also know that I can’t be mad at her. I only have thoughts that create the feeling of being mad. I make me mad. Just like when I used pornography, she, her thoughts, were what made her mad.