Hi everyone!
If you do this one thing today, you will receive hundreds of dollars in FREE gifts immediatly available. COOL prize givaways and a chance to make your relationship even better than you can imagine!
On tusedayFebruary 2, go to HTTP://www.themarriagemanual.com. Order 1 copy of our book (or more:) and you will be guided to our very special bonus page. A portion of the proceeds will go directly to earthquake relief efforts in Haiti! Thank you in advance, you won’t be sorry!
There are 2 reasons that many people believe marriage is so hard!
The first reason is because at a relatively early age we decide to get married. For women it is around 27 and for men 32. This is barely enough time for us to discover ourselves, what lights us up and what our purpose is here on earth.
Believe it or not we are more than someone’s wife or husband , mother or father. But the need to have a child often dictates our timing of events. So the real reason for our marriage struggles is we haven’t even realized our individual joy and now we are happily ever after for better or worse .
The seond reason is that until we are complete within we have little desire to find out what our partner really needs from us to feel loved. Most of us have no idea what the other person really needs from us or why. We wing it or emulate the teachings of our parents.
Finding out who we are is a constant journey, and with children that road takes a detour.
We should never stop discovering ourselves, aim to try things in life that we have a curiosity about, those especially that make us feel worthwhile.
MEANTIME…. Find out what your partner needs and give it to them, plain and simple.
You know your girlfriend does not like to go out of the house without make up, play tennis or take criticism from you. You know your guy friend loves his college football team, drinks scotch and likes blondes. You try to appease your friend’s right? Your spouse is the same kind of friend with the same different needs but only more important. Find out what they need and be their friend.
The Marriage Manual makes it REAL easy for you. All the work has been done, all you have to do is ask and you shall receive! A new friendship will be born!
Happy New Year !
Wow another year has passed! One thing for sure time stops for noone!
A new year brings up a lot of thoughts, hopes and dreams for many people. Mostly we all want to be a better and happier version of ourselves.
What would that look like for you and how do you get there?
I can’t tell you what happiness looks like for you but I can tell you it is the most satisfying state of being to be in!
Once you recognize just what will make you happy I highly reccomend commiting to getting there.
When you are happy you feel good,confident and not angry at or about anything, period!
You cannot feel happy 100% of the time but you sure as heck can feel happy 90% of the time. This is what you will get when you can train yourself to be happy.
1.An infectuous smile that causes people to smile back at you.
2.A LOVING SPOUSE that will spoil you rotten.
3.Children that worship the ground you walk on.
4.A fun and exciting life with endless opportunities and possibilities.
5.Glowing skin and wonderful health.
6.Grattitude for everything you already have!
And those are just for starters!
Happiness is the new skinny it takes commitment and exercise. But first it takes the all important decision that you will be happy.
I have been happisising, hey new word for about 11 years!
How to Happisise?
I will give you the steps that I took and take although they are not written in stone except#1!
.1. Forgive your parents. You are one half of your Mom and one half of your Dad. On my website http://www.themarriagemanual.com
you can download a free ebook Called “If You’reHappy and You Know It”. You will find out if you are happy and a script you can use to call your parents.
Call them up, read the script and you will have a life like you cannot imagine. Example: picture yourself lying down on the floor with someone that weighs 350lbs sitting untop of you….forever… and then one day he gets up!
2.Forgive the rest of your family if you do not have a loving relationship with them. Do not give up on this. Your parents are waiting for you to forgive them, your brothers and sisters have their own issues and may take a little longer to warm up to you if they have been estranged!
3. Forgive all the people you want in your life but are not sure how they feel about you.
4.Forgive yourself for all ill thoughts about deserving to feel this good and know that you are making a difference in peoples lives by being you!
5.Make a list of all the things that make you happy write them down and refer to them as needed.
6. When someone asks you to do something even though you don’t really want to; do it just once and tell yourself it will be fun and it will, garuanteed!
7. Read self help, inspirational and motivational literature. Attend semminars, workshops or anything that will help you develop into a greater person!
8. If you feel angry at someone, mostlikely that someone is you. Do what ever it takes to undo that feeling. Exercise, shop, paint, call a friend, stop working for the day..yes feeling happy is your most important job! sleep, have a cocktail, have sex, whatever makes you feel good…DO IT until that anger or sadness turns into feeling good.
9.Think about all the good things in your life you already have and say thank you!
10. Remember your priorities. Love yourself your husband and your child and then your family. The greater connection and attachment you have to your core group the greater your completeness and joy will be!
I have this friend who lives near me. We really care about each other but are having the worst time communicating. By nature we are completely opposite, but each have attributes that are of great value.
Upsets, hurt feelings and anger have defined this relationship from her side.
Obviously when one person has feelings for another person they care.
I am trying my best to understand this woman and to learn to communicate to her in a way she feels I care. How many of us are misunderstood by the people we care about, what are they holding on to that we have no idea we’ve done wrong?
Can any of you relate to this? What about your spouses, do you always understand each other, are you mistakenly hurting the people you love the most?
I know it is politically incorrect to sell your product on your blog, but in our book The Marriage Manual, we spell out the differences in the way men and woman communicate. It is MIND blowing to think that the way we normally talk is making the other person cringe! Because we wrote the book, does my husband understand me better?
Only when I want to make SURE he gets what I mean to say.Most importantly is I know what NOT to say to hurt him.Communication is tricky from the very beginning when we learn to pronounce our vowels. You travel to a different state and they have learned to pronounce their vowels differently than you!
The best way I can think of to be understood is to ask the person I am talking to if they have gotten what I have said and if they have any questions?
Can you believe it’s almost 2010? Where does the time go? All I know is it goes and you can’t get it back.
It’s been a hard year for everyone. We have all had to adjust to some change whether we wanted to or not. The media, your parents and everyone around you spits out the same stuff from their mouths, the same mantra over and over. We’re going down, nothing is going to be the same, we were comfortable and now we won’t be anymore our life is worthless….. ok so I’m being a little dramatic but u know what I mean. If all we hear is the doom and gloom around us its a lot of energy to be the cheerful one!
For me, I have chosen not to participate in the fallen economy and have concentrated my thoughts more on lifting myself.
I am very excited about 2010. It’s another year to reinvent yourself into anything you can possibly imagine . If you can see it you can be it, really really!
Infact, you must be careful of what you wish for for it will surely come.
The more you want itand the desire will feel deeper than a food craving, your head will fill with these thoughts and it could be anthing….new red car, a million dollars, a great relationship, new perfume, the answer to a burning question ,a friend to call, you name it… and the more excited you feel about what you want, big or small…the universe does not judge, will come when your’e ready for it. It almost feels like you already have it! When I asked my husband to marry me, I thought he had said yes:) what ever it is will just show up in your life exactly when u need it.
How it gets there DOES NOT MATTER.
It may look different then what you might expect, come in a different form, the love of your life may not be the blonde u’d imagined! Not to worry it will be just what you ordered! Trust and know that you can have it all!
My wish for mankind is to believe that you are the same as any other being. The only difference is your results.
We all start on the bottom and thats not a bad word. Bottom is good you can see what everyone else is doing above you and try to stand out something none of us have been taught!
At the beginning of the year I write down 3 big things that Iwould like to complete with the help of my husband. I tape it to the fridge. This year I have sold 5oo0 copies of our new book The Marriage Manual, paid off a house and bought a building……funny…hee hee!
So I’ll do it next year!
Where are you going next year? Will you be happy there?
My husband and I have a very good relationship. We work from home side by side and spend numerous hours together. We rarely argue and in ten years we have probably had one or two fights. Being honest with myself, I picked the fights and they were all about me and how I was feeling about myself!
Most marriage specialists would say that it is healthy to fight once in a while.
The reason they say this is because they don’t feel that you should hold in your resentments and instead let your feelings out. I agree that you should never hold in your negative feelings. Negative feelings eat away at your insides and cause dis-ease. People fight and argue because they do not know how to communicate.
Communication is the key to a successful and healthy relationship. Most couples do not know how to effectively communicate to each other.
The first part of communication is when you are feeling hurt or wronged by the other person to step back and see if you can look into yourself.
Ask yourself if you are happy with you. Are you tired, overworked, bored, in a career that is not satisfying, have nothing in your life to be excited about, scared or fearful about something?
If you can answer yes to any of these it is easy to blame another person for your unhappiness and cause a fight. The only thing fighting does is make everyone feel worse! In a relationship, 99% of the time your anger is misdirected.
The next time you feel you want to pick a fight with your spouse go through the above reasons for possible disconnect. Ask yourself what you can do to help yourself with your issues. What would make you happy?
If you feel you need to share with your husband, calmly, say honey I am feeling this way and I need your help. Do you know of a way you can help me feel better? I am sorry if I have taken this out on you, IT IS NOT YOUR FAULT!
Without getting into the shopping details I went back to Macy’s to pick up My husbands loot!
I had a little time to kill. I was forcing myself to not think about work.
The sales were everywhere you looked and plus Macy’s over a week had sent me numerous catalogs with deep discount coupons 20%, 15% all day!
So I found a very stylish blue jean jacket, it’s not for the snow but fashion forward for me. It’s double breasted with brass buttons, kind of looks like a Michael Jackson Jacket. It is short and has pleated ruffles at the bottom.
I almost did not care how much it cost because this was it if it fit!
Secretly I have been looking for something similar that I couldn’t define until I saw it! I actually liked it so much that I bought my 20 year old daughter one too. We are going to visit her in NYC (she studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology) in two days and I wanted to bring her something special!
Later on that evening I blurted out to my husband that I had picked up all of his new clothes and bought 2 jackets for Zoe and me. Well you know, probably with your own husband there is nothing matter of fact about you buying 2 jackets!
The conversation started with how much I loved the jackets, how I have been looking a long time for this and why haven’t I told him I was looking for these. I told him I only tell you when I’m looking for electronics because you wouldn’t care about my blue jean jacket.
This is not normal, but just last week we were at a thrift store and he found a whole rack of used regular jean jackets. He thought I would be so excited and called me over. I kind of snubbed him with the uninterested look!
Then he said well I care about blue jean jackets and related his story.
I told him it was the style I liked and that some women have 10 blue jean jackets and when I have a moment I will let him know who does!
He usually does not have a whole lot to say about the clothes I purchase. He has his own idea of what I would look good in. Wish I had her body!
I was talking on the phone today with a friend. She was recently divorced with 2 small kids. I asked her if there was any hope to reunite with her husband.
She said no because they got married for the wrong reasons. In fact her experience was exactly the same as mine. We both were with partners who were “good enough” at the time but not good enough to sustain a relationship for the long haul! We both were freaked out about the time situation and the need to have a baby in our 30’s. I would assume that we are not alone!
In our 20’s we are focused on our careers or landing a husband not necessarily on discovering what we need. So after we get married and have children our window of time to discover ourselves is gone. The need still exists although! We are never really satisfied with anything until we meet our own needs.
Today women are having healthy babies in their 40’s. To have a great relationship with your spouse and to raise an emotionally healthy and independent child, the ultimate goal of a parent. We must be at peace with ourselves, on the road to self-discovery and self love.
Too many women have never even picked up a self-help book. My advice to you would be to stroll down the self-help isle in your local book store or library. See what pops out that apply s to you, educate yourself so you can personally develop as a person.
At this point in your life all you know is what your parents have taught you and it is what their parents have taught them. We are a product of our environment, we tend to do what everyone else does.
There is a big broad and ever changing world out there, you have one lifetime. Find out who you are and what lights you up and go get it!
When I got married for the first time my parents asked me whether I wanted money for a down payment on a house or a wedding.
To me this was a no brainer I wanted the money. My mom was disappointed and said, “You are my first daughter I couldn’t possibly not have a wedding for you!”. So I got both! It cost a fortune and eight years later we divorced.
My cousin was married the year before and more money was spent on his wedding than most people make in a year. One month after they were divorced!
Everyone deserves a beautiful wedding. Today there are so many possible ways for you to create the wedding you have always dreamed of without spending your life savings!
Getting over what the “Jones” wedding looked like, a little creativity and asking for help from your artistic friends will get you something very special, memorable and lovely!
Ask yourselves who is this wedding for?
Five years later and a lot of growing up I met the man of my dreams.
He shared my values and agreed to make this wedding about us and for us.
We had a budget of $5000.00. The night was beautiful and the wedding was elegant. A great time was had by all.
This is what we did:
I wanted an outside wedding and I would not take rain for an answer! Everyone thought I was nuts and kept asking what we would do if it rained. My answer was it’s not going to rain!
I do not recommend this unless you are a deliberate creator. Our date was Sept 3 Labor Day weekend. In Michigan the chances for rain are 50/50. I took my chances!
My brother lives on a lake and I asked him to host the wedding in return for a weekend of babysitting his four kids and the left over food and drink.
Commercial wedding venues are not the only game in town. In fact, they are a dime a dozen. Think about a place where you could imagine getting married and let yourself really see that place, ask your fiance if he could see himself getting married there. You may have discovered your special place where you have to go back to every year…hey a girl can dream!
Possibly you or your spouse can trade something bigger for a Venue. You can go to http://www.craigslist.org and find a house swap in some exotic land.
My childhood friend’s father was a judge. We asked him to perform the ceremony. This worked out well since I am Jewish and my husband’s Baptist.
Our guest list was small at fifty people. We invited the people who we knew and cared about the most. Many feelings were hurt including ours, but after all this was about us.
There are SO many invitation and stationary places online and offline it will make you dizzy. Scrap booking is a huge hobby and special stores sell paper and all the supplies needed to create your own invitations. Buy a calligraphy pen and see how you can be an instant professional!
The menu: I figured cooking for twenty was easy so why not for fifty?
I made a huge Caesar salad in a garbage bag add in the dressing at the end shake when it’s time… got salmon and steaks for the grill, boiled a 3 cheese tortellini, and bought some delicious bread. All that was left was tossing in dressing for the salad and pesto for the pasta at the end.
We hired waiters from my favorite restaurant to prep, cook, serve and clear the food. They were happy to do it for $15 an hour.
My friends offered to make a large fruit salad and I traded a permanent wave (I am a hair stylist) for an amazing wedding cake made from a local baker.
We bought all of our own wine, beer and liquor.
The day of the wedding I went with my mom to the farmers market and bought all the flowers. It was a blast and an incredible savings! We used my vintage green vases on top of the white table cloths as centerpieces and rented tables, chairs, dishes and a tent. We hired a friend who was an artist to decorate the tent. He was very excited to do it, created a masterpiece and did not charge a lot.
I traded a photographer friend hair services in return for black and white photos. I also found a wonderful Jazz band and negotiated a great rate (on his night off)! I paid half price for a videographer. There are lots of people that can do things like this for your wedding, you just have to ask.
There are a endless details to planning a wedding. My advice for a fabulous wedding.
1) Set a budget
2) Make a list of everything you need and everything you want.
3.) Do what you are good at and find people to help you do what they are good at. Don’t stress..take baby steps…forward!
It is absolutely possible!
Our wedding was spectacular, the weather was perfect, the sky’s were painted and …the next day it rained like cats and dogs!
I feel like Julie in the movie “Julie on Being Julia” In the movie Julie decided to cook one recipe each day from Julia Child’s french cook book and then blog about it. She was not sure if anyone was ever going to read it. I can relate.
I started blogging on and off for about a year with a different account. It was a chore. Now it is cathartic.
If anyone is reading these blogs I would love to hear from you even if I say something you completely disagree with. That is what makes the world go round our differences!
I want to try to stick to the subject of relationships and marriage since I did write a book on the subject. My goal is to add value to your life, relationship and marriage in each post.
Interesting story for women out there who may be self conscious about their bodies.
Last week I was feeling a little frisky and wanted to know what I could do to make my husband want me in a major way. We were at a department store and he replied matter of factually “dress in something sexy.”
So later that day it was raining and he was watching a movie.
I have this lace camisole from a 100 years ago. It was long and covered my butt. I felt silly but he smiled and said this is different. You can guess the rest. He was one happy camper and so was I for days after.
A couple of days later I asked my husband if it would of mattered if I was 30 pounds heaver in that outfit would he still want me? He said matter of factually “of course”!
It is hard to get that huh?
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