Steven Kalas is a behavioral health consultant and counselor at Las Vegas Psychiatry and the author of “Human Matters: Wise and Witty Counsel on Relationships, Parenting, Grief and Doing the Right Thing” (Stephens Press). Contact him at skalas@reviewjournal.com.
Love will overpower all your planning
January 2011. Lambeau Field, Green Bay, Wis. Sixteen degrees.
The regular season finale between the Chicago Bears and the Green Bay Packers. Historically, there are few NFL rivalries more heralded and intense than that between the Packers and the Bears.
As I file toward the turnstile, I see them. A couple. Eyes pouring love and smiles into the other. Holding hands, bumping bodies. You can see the light pour off of couples like this. They are in love.
He is wearing green and gold. A cheese wedge hat. Camouflage Packers ski pants. A Packers jersey. Packers beads. His face is painted green and gold. I’m thinking he’s a Packers fan. Which is why I blink my eyes in shock and surprise staring at his wife/girlfriend. She is wearing bright orange ski pants. Her puffy jacket has a bear’s head on the back and a “C” on the front. She is wearing a Bears headband a la Super Bowl XX quarterback Jim McMahon. She’s hot, I grant you; but, ugh, a Bears fan! This joyful couplehood is less likely than Paris Hilton dating a returning Mormon missionary.
I’m still laughing as I find my seat. Where did they meet? How?
And how on earth did they negotiate this unlikely alliance?
When people come to me to talk about finding great love, they often find themselves needing and wanting some tools to “cull the herd.” Middle-aged folks especially want to know if there is a way not to waste their time in the dating pool, treading water with bozos or being dragged under by those who can’t or won’t swim.
I often talk to these folks about the need to hone the List of Non-Negotiables. On this list are the things you won’t negotiate. The things you won’t live with. The things you won’t live without. This list leads you into every encounter, every date. It measures the potential of relationship in a lightning flash, discarding clunkers without another thought.
The List of Non-Negotiables is especially empowering and healing for people who finally get around to ending poor quality, conflicted, or in some cases even pathological dating/marriage relationships.
Afterward, these people tend to doubt themselves greatly. They hold their own better judgment as suspect. “Work up the List,” I say. “If you can’t trust yourself right now, then trust the List.”
When people are healing from divorce or anguished breakups, they frequently will swing the pendulum of the non-negotiable inventory waaaayyyyy out over the edge. They will expand the List to include Fierce Prejudices disguised as non-negotiables: “I could never date (a Democrat, someone not in my ethnic group, someone out-of-state, an atheist, a biker, someone with tattoos, a bald guy, a Minnesota Vikings fan, someone who drinks white zinfandel, which is actually hummingbird food and not wine at all), etc.
OK, those last two belong to my own Fierce Prejudices.
Sometimes brokenhearted people will add to the List of Non-Negotiables carefully nurtured icons of bitterness and cynicism, disguised as actual values. Take for instance the infamous, “I’ll never marry again.” I tell people all the time the only thing you can know for sure about that utterance is the person saying it won’t be marrying you.
Whether you’re in, entering, exiting or looking for great love, a List of Non-Negotiables is a good thing to have. I polish mine up on a regular basis.
And yet … it’s still amazing what love can do.
“I could never marry a Democrat,” you say with a contemptuous snort, and you believe it deeply … until you meet her. Or him. And you say, “Hmm … I might have been hasty about that ‘never’ business.”
And you fall in love and get married and either agree to never talk politics and sleep in two separate bedrooms on Election Day, or you learn that, in love and respect, your passionate differences become a begrudging respect that strengthens the bond of your relationship.
We don’t get to decide when we fall in love. Or with whom. And falling in love has a way of further honing your list of non-negotiables.
Specifically, it distinguishes between what truly can’t be negotiated (infidelity, domestic violence) and what was just posturing on your list as arrogance and ego-defense.
Take a long look at your life partner. Give thanks for those attributes that, had you been in charge of the universe, you would never have looked for, desired or chosen. Instead, love chose you and said, “Surprise!”
Still, I’m really glad my girlfriend doesn’t drink white zinfandel.
Dodged a bullet there.
Steven Kalas is a behavioral health consultant and counselor at Las Vegas Psychiatry and the author of “Human Matters: Wise and Witty Counsel on Relationships, Parenting, Grief and Doing the Right Thing” (Stephens Press). Contact him at skalas@reviewjournal.com.