Before his days on the Tonight Show, I heard Jay Leno’s standup comedy at a local university.  He quoted a statistic just released that married men live longer than single men but that single women live longer than married women.  He joked that men should present something like a dowry before asking for a woman’s hand in marriage and explain, “This is for the life I am going to suck out of you”.  This joke still cracks me up after all these years-years where I have remained interested in the relationship between marriage and health/longevity. 

The somewhat orthodox explanation of this relationship is that married men have healthier lifestyles than single men due to women’s nurturing natures.  Women also typically take on more of the work related to household and children, leaving less personal time for exercise.  The newest study with this theme is from Ohio State University which found that large, potentially risky, weight gains are more likely for women after marriage and for men after divorce.   

My week has “weighed” in on this premise, not in terms of divorce but physical separation.  My husband and daughters were overseas last week visiting family and I was home with our teenage son.  As we were eating dinner one night I was trying to explain to our son and account for the extra time I felt I had.  He thought cooking smaller quantities for meals saves time. I know that I definitely spent less time in the car and the kitchen and was more active, mixing social time with activities like tennis and walks. 

My husband, on the other hand, told me they had been eating a lot and he was looking forward to getting home to a routine that includes more physical activity.  Yesterday was their first day home which began with a morning run together and many activities, including a lot of cooking and, for me in particular, eating.  As “head chef” in our household, I do most of the sampling to taste.   I don’t remember ever being hungry yesterday and I was not even hungry when I woke this morning.  My daughters and husband so thoughtfully brought me a dress from my favorite little Parisian boutique.  Since this shop does not use traditional European sizes, our daughter chose the size based on how she knows our bodies compare.  The dress is a little too big for me so I hung it in my closet.  I figure that in a week or two it should fit just perfectly.

We have a Baker Extraordinaire on our staff who regularly brings all kinds of homemade sweets to share. All baking aside, she is an extraordinary woman, but as long as she continues to bring in dessert, we are all happy to help it disappear.  So I just went to the kitchen to help myself to a piece of creamy, sublime cheesecake and bring it back to my desk while I type this blog.  I did not know exactly how this blog would take shape—I only knew that I wanted to write about being present in relationships.  I had no way of knowing that cheesecake would become a “piece” of the story…I will get to that in a moment.

The lessons of “being present” have come to light many times in my life and again last weekend while watching the film “Midnight in Paris”.   The protagonist of the story, a successful Hollywood filmmaker with literary ambitions, is in Paris with his fiancée and her parents and gets transported each night to Paris of the 1920’s where he meets and socializes with his idols-legendary writers and artists.  He becomes so captivated by these “midnight” rendezvous that he checks out of his present day life with his fiancée and her parents.  While romancing a woman named Adriana in these 1920’s excursions, he learns that her “golden age” is not the era she is living but that she wishes she had lived during the Belle Epoque of the 1880’s.  He begins then to wonder if there is ever a true “golden age” or if it exists only due to the temptation of nostalgia.

We may not time travel in our relationships, but to be anywhere in our thoughts other than where we are is to deny and cheat the magic and wonder of the present.  If you have ever been in the company of someone whose thoughts are elsewhere compared to being with someone who is fully present is to know the spiritual virtue of presence.  Henry David Thoreau understood the power of presence when he said, “the greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when someone asked what I thought and attended to my answer.”

And, yes, we engage varying levels of presence in eating just as we do so in our interpersonal interactions.  The cheesecake was delicious but I barely remember eating it because I was thinking about this blog.  When I noticed the plate was empty, I felt disappointed and dissatisfied, as if I somehow missed the experience.  I often tell my children, “do what you are doing while you are doing it” as a reminder that multitasking removes them from the full experience of the moment and here I was ignoring my own advice.  I know that being present builds intimacy in my relationships and also draws attention to the richness of life because life only happens in the present.  I know that to romanticize another time, like the characters of Midnight in Paris, is to miss out on the joy of this time.  And I know that I appreciate food more when I actually look at the food, noticing the textures and savoring the tastes.  I hope that reading this reminds you to be fully present in all of your moments, especially in your relationships.  I plan to do the same… but first I think I will head back to the kitchen to give another piece of cheesecake the attention it deserves.

I have often been interested in how human behavior manifests similarly at the micro and macro levels.   Last month I attended a talk by William Davnie (sponsored by the Foreign Policy Association) on sanctions and non-proliferation that, oddly enough, offered some fantastic marriage advice, reminding me of these connections.   Although Davnie never mentioned intimate relationships, his outline on positive and negative tactics in conducting foreign policy, could have been called, “Best practices in marriage and intimate relationships”.  Do you recognize any of these common “foreign policy” tactics happening in your own relationship?

It comes as no surprise that negative policies are the least effective:  war and sanctions. No matter what words we use to describe war (i.e. “military intervention”), violence or force is always wrong, yet it is alarmingly still prevalent in close relationships.  Globally, at least one in three girls and women will be abused in their lifetimes, most often by someone they know intimately.

Since sanctions fall into more of a gray area of morality, I believe they are much more common in relationships.  Davnie spoke about how political and economic sanctions have generally not been effective because they end up causing unintended consequences such as hurting innocent people rather than the intended target (whom often have other allies or resources to take care of themselves).  In relationships, sanctions are often emotional or psychological and, as well, ineffective.

I had a client who would impose “sanctions” on her partner when he acted in ways that displeased her.  These sanctions included things such as making plans without involving him, withholding affection, humiliating him in front of friends and family, and an assortment of other aggressive and passive-aggressive performances.  To borrow from language of political sanctions, these “generated resistance” in her partner.  He did not reach out to her or change the behaviors she was reacting to, as he was not even aware of what they were.  In fact, the sanctions caused the list of his behaviors she did not like to grow.  I can hardly blame the guy for withdrawing from a woman who was acting outright rude and disrespectful-his reaction was quite normal and self-preserving.  In this particular case, he found an “ally” in a co-worker, someone who provided for some of his emotional needs, including listening and empathizing with the sanctions he was experiencing at home.  This, of course, caused even more issues in their relationship.

Not surprisingly, effective foreign policies are positive, reduce stress and increase problem-solving capacities.  What may perhaps surprise you is how similar the positive foreign policies are to what relationship research suggests for healthy close relationships.  In fact, Davnie’s list of effective ways to conduct foreign policy looked much to me like a PREPARE/ENRICH or Couple Checkup report:  Define interest, identify threats/opportunities (strengths/growth areas), build alliances, economic cooperation, and intelligence sharing. I left this talk recognizing that, while few of us may work or have direct influence on national foreign policy, we all interact on individual levels where we can choose to use positive tactics that are effective, productive and may someday be reflected in larger social patterns.