More Wise Advice

More wise advice from Sally Brampton who writes in the Sunday Times. I put an earlier piece of her advice on this Journal here There is also a sample of Eric Berne's marvellous book 'Games People Play' - which Sally recommends as well.

All you need is love, right?
Wrong! It takes a whole lot more to make a relationship work

If there is one area in our lives where most of us struggle, it’s relationships. That’s the bad news. The good news is that they can be improved. It takes hard work, but anybody who says, “If you have to work at it, it’s not worth it”, is probably in denial or an unreconstructed romantic in search of Miss or Mr Right — who, guess what, they never succeed in finding.

With two failed marriages behind me (I’m now, happily, on my third), I take an intense personal interest. We learn how to have relationships from our parents, and some of us are taught rather better than others. My early lessons were not good and, eventually, I was in such despair that I took myself off to therapy to learn how to undo some of my more destructive habits and responses. I am still learning and I still get things wrong (old habits die hard), but one thing I do know is that negative behaviours aren’t written in stone.

Recently, I was having dinner with a girlfriend who has the best marriage I’ve ever seen. She and her husband like each other and laugh a lot, but it can’t simply be put down to good luck, right man, right woman. Perhaps that’s why I study them with more than forensic interest. At dinner, she was telling a story about her mother: “I was so angry when I put down the phone, I had to call a friend and unload before he came home so I didn’t dump it all over him.”

Unloading high emotion or anger before my husband walks through the door had simply never occurred to me (as I say, a rubbish early education), so it struck like an epiphany that it’s not so much what those friends do, as what they don’t, that makes their marriage work. Call it reverse psychology. It’s all very well to be told to be gentler, kinder or more tolerant, but such well-intentioned instructions are so wildly abstract that they are close to meaningless. Understanding what we shouldn’t do, rather than what we should, might provide a better and more useful insight. In that spirit, I made my own list of 10 relationship no-no’s.

1 Don’t blame somebody else for the way that we feel

We have to take responsibility for our own emotions, rather than handing them over to our intimate other. And we should not confuse their emotions with our own. Say our other half comes home and yells at us about something inconsequential because they’re stressed at work. Our first response is to take it personally and feel aggrieved. Better to take a step back and look at what’s really bothering them. A little empathy, a simple question — “Are you okay?” — can defuse a potential row in a way that hostility met by hostility never can.

2 Don’t to try to change the other person

In trying to change someone, we’re playing the “if only” game, as in, “if only you were tidier/more sociable/less complaining/more generous, our relationship would be fabulous”. We cannot change other people. All we can change is our own responses and behaviour. That doesn’t make us total wimps, nor does it mean we can’t ask for what we want or need. We can, but as adults, not as children. Adults explain, children complain, which takes us straight to rule No 3.

3 Don’t use the word ‘you’, replace it with the word ‘I’

Take charge of your own feelings, as in, “I feel this when you do that”, rather than, “You did this and made me feel that way”. Say your husband (or wife; bad behaviour is gender-free) never helps out around the house. We can explain that we’d like it if they helped more, or we can complain that they never help, which takes us to rule No 4.

4 Ban the words ‘never’ and ‘always’

They are almost always accusatory, as in, “you never empty the dishwasher” or “you always forget my birthday”. Add a jabbing finger and you have almost definitely moved into blame territory. Along with blame comes criticism and its bitchy close relation, contempt — both are poisonous to a relationship. If there are sticking points that can’t seem to get resolved, appeal to somebody’s good nature — “I wish you’d remember my birthday, it really upsets me when you don’t” is far more likely to result in ribbons and roses than snide comments about selective memory, just as contemptuous remarks about how remarkable it is that dishwashers load themselves are far more likely to mean you end up with a sink full of dirty plates.

5 Don’t be defensive

It’s simply another form of blame, as in “it’s not my fault” (it’s yours). Trying to see another person’s point of view is not stepping down, it’s stepping forward. It is not a sign of weakness but of strength. It takes generosity to put ourselves in another’s shoes, and if relationships thrive on any single gesture, it is to take our personal feelings out of the situation and show generosity.

6 Don’t sulk or stonewall

Men are particularly good at this; usually on the pretext they are “just keeping their head down”. Silence can be a form of punishment (as hostile in its own way as noisy anger) and refusing to engage makes conciliation impossible.

7 Don’t keep a battle going

Learn to accept an apology as well as to apologise, not necessarily for the action (sometimes we are right to be angry), but for the situation: “I’m sorry we had such a silly quarrel”.

8 Don’t make assumptions about other people’s behaviour

How can we learn not to do this? By stopping and asking ourselves a few simple questions: “How do I know if that’s really true? Am I overdramatising this?” We might, for example, assume somebody is late because they don’t care, whereas the truth is that they can be late for any number of reasons that have nothing to do with us. Other forms of mind-reading include expecting other people to fulfil our wants and needs without stating them clearly (“he/she should know”) and are based on yet another assumption: “If he/she loved me, he/she would know.” Nobody, however intimate, is clairvoyant.

9 Don’t be controlling

Your other half might be rubbish at cooking, but constant interference is not going to make them any better. People are imperfect, even the ones we love, and control is a form of game-playing. If you set somebody up, they will almost always fail. One game couples like to play is withholding affection or sex, but the real casualty, often fatally wounded, is the relationship, as both people draw further apart. Another form of game-playing is victim. “I was only trying to help” is a subtle, manipulative form of control.

10 Have good manners

Not in the sense of frigid politeness (which can be as riddled with contempt as outright insults), but as in treating your other half as you would your closest friends: with respect, affection and tolerance. If there’s one thing that has always struck me about those friends with a good marriage, it is that they are unfailingly considerate of each other. If you can do all that, you’re a better creature than I am, but what I can truly say is that I try. Where there’s a will or, to paraphrase, a willingness, there’s almost always a way.

Sally Brampton in the Sunday Times

Helpful reading: The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by John Gottman and Nan Silver (Orion £8.99). Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships by Eric Berne (Penguin £8.99)

Favourite Places - St Ronan's

Usually, when one returns to a place one knew as a child, it seems smaller. Not so the huge old house and great cedar in the drive at my prep school, St Ronan's. Click the heading for some more photos from the visit, including some of the soon to be completed sports hall for which the school raised nearly £100,000 more than its target, showing how well-regarded it still is.

The Joy of YouTube

Pablo Casals playing The Song of the Birds at the UN

YouTube is a phenomenon that has no equal. On its vast databases are all the music of one's youth, performances or interviews with people who were heroes to one's parents, glorious songs from different countries, business interviews, virtuoso performances of every classic piece that one might long to hear, instructional videos of every description and of course film clips (and sometime complete films).

This wonderful facility is completely free to the user (thanks to Google) and is even available hand-held on the iPhone. This is truly one of the wonders of the modern age.

Lord Mayor's Dinner at the Guildhall

The Lord Mayor, Nick Anstee, gave a dinner for the President of South Africa, Jacob Zuma at the Guildhall on 4th March 2010. It was the usual ceremonial affair, beautifully done. The Gloucesters added some royal flavour and Mandleson was the principal government representative. Little of substance was said in the speeches, though Zuma did lay unusual stress on the point that nationalisation of the mines was not the government's policy.....Click the heading for some photos

The Joy of Podcasts

Initially put off by the rather techie name for TV and radio recordings in a digital format that can be played on a computer or mobile phone, I have been slow to take to podcasts, but now understand their appeal. Inevitably, it's taken the iPhone and the connections that make it play through a car's speakers to effect this change. I can now listen to the Economist (which has a 'voice' version) and superb programmes like Melvyn Bragg's 'In Our Time' using the fairly unprofitable time while driving to catch up - or learn for the first time - about fascinating subjects like the dispute between Newton and Leibnitz over which of them 'invented' calculus. More recently, I have been hooked by 'A History of the World in 100 Objects' and David Reynold's 'America: Empire of Liberty'.

The New York Times commented on Radio 4's podcasts this week, writing:

“In Our Time,” a program on “the history of ideas,” is in a class of its own. Each week the host, Melvyn Bragg — a BBC veteran, whose life peerage makes him Lord Bragg of Wigton — offers a panel of academic experts, with Oxford and Cambridge heavily represented. The guests have titles like “associate professor in philosophy and senior fellow in the public understanding of philosophy at the University of Warwick.” They talk about arcane topics from history, literature, science and philosophy, throwing off casual asides on subjects like Sigmund Freud’s theory of “gain through illness” — the idea that people become neurotic because it is useful to them.

Mr. Bragg doesn’t spare the stage directions: Would you please tell us about this? And We’ll Get to That Later. But his careful questioning and quick wit underlie the brilliance of “In Our Time” — its ability to draw in listeners on subjects that they would not expect themselves to care much about, or perhaps even to be able to tolerate.

I convinced a friend to start downloading the program when I mentioned an interesting discussion of logical positivism. The next time I saw her, she told me that she was hooked and that a new episode on the Siege of Munster — which had popped up on my iPhone, but which I had not rushed to hear — was surprisingly fascinating.

Intellectuals also talk about ideas on a second BBC Radio 4 program called “Thinking Allowed,” but its focus is “new research on how society works.” The host, Laurie Taylor, interviews professors and authors on subjects that are contemporary and often a bit whimsical. There have been episodes on acquaintances — people somewhere between strangers and friends — and a phenomenon described as “laddish masculinity in higher education.”

The discussions often involve scholarly inquiry into the minutiae of everyday life, with special attention to the role of social class — a subject rarely discussed in the American news media. On one, an inquiry into the sociology of car behavior suggested that when two middle-class couples ride in a car, the owners of the car are likely to sit in the front, with the second couple in the back. When two working-class couples go for a drive, the men are likely to sit in the front and the women in the back.

Making abstruse subjects accessible to nonexperts can be a challenge, something Mr. Bragg, a self-proclaimed nonexpert, appreciates. “Thank you very much, indeed, for bringing that down to us,” he told the panel at the end of the show on logical positivism.

After a brief pause, he announced the following week’s topic: “The Ediacara Biota, pre-Cambrian life forms, which vanished 542 million years ago — were they the earliest form of life?”

Click the heading for a link to the Radio 4 podcasts.

Saatchi Gallery - New Art From India

The Saatchi Gallery has again put on a fascinating exhibition of new art - this time from India. Click the heading for some examples.

Click here for the earlier exhibitions:

New Art from the Middle East
New Art from China

Favourite Places - Whitefield

The road though Whitefield, north of Bangalore, India. Click the photo to get a proper sense of this timeless scene

Sadly, since this photo was taken, some time in 2007, there has been a huge road building project through Whitefield and most of these great trees have gone.

Sucker for Sunsets

The sunset gives an ordinary school building in a neighbouring street a starship quality

Number 22 Jermyn St

A dear friend, Henry Togna had a hotel in Jermyn St - Number 22 - as did his parents before him. It sadly closed in October 2009 as its long lease (from the Crown Estates) was up and the building (known as Eyrie Mansion) was to be rebuilt.

Number 22 was particularly favoured by Americans who returned to it year by year, loving its old-fashioned charm and more recently under Henry, its carefully refurbished comforts. One of those was Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, who has written a most beautiful piece in praise of the hotel and the streets of London around it. You can read it by clicking the heading. And if you have time, don't miss some of the many comments below the article, added by other American visitors to London who clearly hold it as dear as he does, sometimes in as fine a prose as his.

The Joy of Breakfast

On these still dark winter mornings, breakfast is a singular pleasure, particularly when taken in the warm kitchen full of the smell of toast and coffee. It is a still greater pleasure when the weather allows it to be taken in the garden under the apple tree. And when travelling, though I subscribe to the view that 'breakfast should not consist of things bizarre', foreign breakfasts can also be a joy. Click the heading for some more photos.

Breakfast on the terrace of the Hotel Eden, Rome