Mr. Right

When we give the ‘yes’ word, it means we are actually going to start it all over again. That thing that our parents did, that we were born into, and that surrounded us in the most impressionable years of our lives and of which, almost unnoticeably, we have become a complete reflection.

By this I don’t mean a carbon copy but rather a complementary version that made it possible for us to live comfortably in the environment that our parents had created.

We may not realize it, or we may not want to admit it, but when we start our lives as young adults we carry a lot of baggage. In some cases the baggage may be lighter than in others, however, it still is baggage and, mind you, ‘my parents never fought’ is pretty heavy baggage, if you ask me.

Don’t get me wrong, though, I am not headed in the direction of blame-it-on-the-old-folks. They did the best they could. Now it is up to us to give it a try. In fact, after years of working on my own glitches I have very little patience with finger pointers.



Most of that considerable investment in time and energy started within a few years of married-life.

Fourteen years ago, I married ‘Mr. Nice’ also known as ‘No. 1 for being stuck in a broom closet with.’ I married Matt. He was one of the cool kids: smart, good-looking, and… ‘nice.’

We met when we were both studying abroad at a sleepy European university and I was drawn towards him because he looked familiar and read familiar stuff. But the million dollar question is: Why did I end up marrying him?

And here lies the key to all the flee-bitten baggage that’s stored away in the basement of our psyche.



In a way, when we marry ‘Mr. Right’ we set ourselves up to re-live our childhood – only this time we have more of a say in it. The question is: Will we be brave enough to use that power effectively?

So, let’s say, we all go ahead and marry our moms’ and dads’ newer editions, often without realizing it, because it ‘feels right.’

The trouble then starts when we ourselves begin to act like our personal role models. But the real killer is when the kid in us is added into the equation: That whimpering, whining creature that quivered with existential fear every time mom frowned or dad didn’t want to share his fries.

That fear can become quite over-powering and make us say and do the most irrational things. I, for instance, throw full fledged tantrums and generously share my large stock of multilingual expletives. I am working on that. Matt, on the other hand, recedes into a catatonic all-is-good-state, when it really isn’t.

Admittedly, both are not very mature reactions but childhood trauma conditioning, as I call it (and there always is trauma – real or perceived), is a powerful factor in molding everyone’s response to fear.

And that auto-response is hard to control because it becomes second nature. It’s what we keep doing over and over again when we feel beleaguered whether it’s over-eating, over-spending, over-cleaning, or simply not-listening, complaining, finding fault and playing the martyr. It may feel ‘right’ for a moment (because we have done it forever) but it will ultimately end up getting us into trouble in that most intimate relationship of all.


What’s even harder to get a grip on, however, are the underlying fears themselves – most of which are as irrational as the responses we have come up with to counter them.

They are hard to pinpoint and some of them may go way back. But whatever it takes to face them, trust me, knowing where to start feels a lot better than being stuck in some auto-response mode and, therefore, re-living the same frustrating scenes over and over again.

Yet, many of us choose to just do that, anyway. Instead of pulling in their indexes and blaming whoever is available, or otherwise opening their eyes to face the challenge, they choose to remain stuck in an uncomfortable but familiar mess like a fly floating in a glass of warm coke.

Here is the simple truth: Marriage is a real bitch because it won’t be sound or good unless the demons that are snoring away in some convenient corner are woken up and kicked in the rear.