I received a comment recently on one of my older blog posts: Why should we assume love but not expect our husband to assume respect??? I knew immediately that I had done a bad job of writing that post. I do not recommend anyone Assume Love for the benefit of their spouse, only for their own benefit. When we Assume Love, we stop an unhelpful but instinctual response that’s happening in our...
I’ve been blogging for quite a while now, since Valentine’s Day of 2006. If you’re new to this blog, the Assume Love Archives must seem a bit overwhelming. So let me try to sum up the basics for you. First, I write about marriage and committed life partnerships, not about relationships in general. I write for people with a mutual and public commitment to love each other, an...
We all have both explicit and implicit memories. The explicit ones we can generally retrieve on demand: who taught our 9th grade Algebra class, what the weather was on our wedding day, what we ate for breakfast this morning. Alzheimer’s erodes these memories, and we have none from our earliest years because our brains could not form them yet. The implicit ones are the hidden influences on...
Have you ever had one of those discussions where you just know you’re right and your wife or husband is wrong? Not the sort where you debate whether Bigfoot exists or not, but the sort where you think it makes sense to buy a bigger lawn mower or to stay away from Aunt Zelda’s third wedding and you’re getting an argument. There are two ways to handle these. The most common seems...
In Part 3 of this series, I want to address a comment added to Part 1. I want to address it because I remember thinking like the commenter around a dozen years into my first marriage, and it kept me from fixing my marriage or even believing it could be fixed. Here’s the first part of the comment, which Matt wrote but so many others could have, too. Well, since this IS the assume love...
