Suzanne Venker - 14 Feb

A POST HILL PRESS BOOK

ISBN: 978-1-61868-844-6

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-61868-845-3

The Alpha Females Guide to Men and Marriage:

How Love Works

2017 by Suzanne Venker

All Rights Reserved

Cover Design by Quincy Avilio

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Post Hill Press

posthillpress.com

Published at Smashwords

DECIDE TO STAY

Ceding control is only half the battle. The other half is equally significant: you have to change your attitude toward men and marriage. Your attitude is the single most important determiner of your success in life, whether were talking about your job or your marriage.

Let me restate that because its so important: Your attitude is the single most important determiner of your success in life, whether were talking about your job or your marriage. Life will throw you a thousand curve balls. So will marriage. But it isnt the curve balls that matterits what you do with those curve balls. And what you do stems from how you think.

Women have robbed Peter to pay Paul. They may be more successful in the professional sphere, but they know next to nothing about love.

So what are your views on marriage as an institution? Are they traditional in nature, or do they match the cultures more progressive, cavalier view? The America of today teaches two basic tenets about marriage: that it isnt necessary, and that it neednt be permanent. Marriage and motherhood are also no longer a womans raison d tre . Her career is.

Thats a tectonic shift in attitudes in a short period of time. Previous generations of women embraced marriage and all that came with it. They considered love and family life to be the center of life, not a side dish. We hear a lot about how bad things were for women back in the day. But the truth is, women have robbed Peter to pay Paul.

They may be more successful in the professional sphere, but they know next to nothing about love.

The Happiness Factor

Todays culture teaches that marriage is supposed to make women happy, and that if it doesnt, a wife should leave her marriage and find happiness with someone else. Heres a paragraph from a typical article about marriage, entitled Confessions of a Semi-Happy Wife:

Beneath the thumpingly ordinary nature of our marriageevery marriageruns the silent chyron of divorce. Thank God for divorce, which may be the last-standing womans right to choose. One eloquent swing of the ax and happiness is thrust firmly back into our own hands.

It is impossible to overstate the significance of messages like this one. When a woman hits a wall in her marriage, and she will, the culture doesnt give her the tools she needs to climb over it. Instead, this is what she gets: If youre not happy, leave.

Talk about sabotage! Whos never unhappy? And why should becoming a wife (or a husband, for that matter) guarantee ones happiness? Yet this directivelifes too short; move on if youre unhappyis pervasive, and its tailored specifically to women.

To be clear, Im not arguing that divorce isnt sometimes necessary. The problem is that we live in a culture that equates divorce with liberation, rather than as a last-ditch solution for extreme circumstances. Ask any honest psychologist, and he or she will tell you divorce is a temporary relief at best. More often than not, divorce creates more problems than it solves.

So lets change the paradigm. Rather than assume divorce is the answer to marital conflict, change your views about marriage itself. For instance, the purpose of marriage is not to make you happy . You and you alone are responsible for that.

In the last chapter, we discussed the brains ability to control behavior. Did you know were also capable of controlling our thoughts? Its true we cant help what enters our brainswe cant control our feelings, in other wordsbut we can change the way we think about those feelings. We feel with our hearts, but we think with our brains. So use your brain to overrule your heart.

Make yourself happy.

I have a saying that I keep on prominent display in my office. It reads: Happiness is something you decide ahead of time. I also keep those Seeds of Happiness lying around. Both help train my brain to be happy. I admit its not the most romantic route to happiness. It might even sound like Im forcing myself to be happy. Then again, maybe Im just being smart.

Harvard scientist Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling Upon Happiness , writes that when it comes to happiness, most people have the wrong map. Natural happiness, he says, is what happens when people get what they want. That A in school, for instance. Or that car, or that award, or that house. But studies show that getting what we want doesnt actually make us happythats why the joy associated with these events is short-lived. Its the reason we need a new happiness fix to help move the feeling along. After about three months, that thing we imagined would make us happy, whatever it was, has virtually no impact on our happiness at all. It was a tease.

Take buying a new car. You know how at first it feels really great? Its so clean and full of new possibilities. But give it a year, and the car starts to lose its vitality. You get used to it. You wake up one day and realize its just a car, a mode of transportation. It no longer feels the way it did when you bought it. Thats because the purchase of the car didnt make you happy. Euphoric, perhaps. But not happy.

So what will you do when the euphoria has waned? You could trade the car in for a new model in order to get the euphoria back. But remember: the joy wont last. Thats because the key to happiness lies in your ability to create it . Gilbert calls this synthetic happiness. Synthetic happiness isnt a result of natural origin or happenstance. Its produced.

Too many people think of happiness as something over which they have no control, something that happens to them. Its easier that way, for sureand more fun perhaps. But it doesnt last. And dont you want something that lasts? In our society, we have a strong belief that synthetic happiness is of an inferior kind. Yet synthetic happiness is every bit as real and enduring as the kind of happiness you stumble upon when you get exactly what you were aiming for.

Ironically, its womens definition of and e xpectations for happiness that undermine their own happiness. The best shot any one of us has of being happyin any domain, but especially in marriageis to have no expectations. Not high, low or medium expectations . None. Rather, go with what you get, or with what youve already chosen, and create a happy life from that. The psychological immune system works best when we are totally stuck, when we are trapped, writes Gilbert.

That may sound counterintuitive, but it follows the same logic as that put forth by psychologist Barry Schwartz. In The Paradox of Choice , he writes, When a decision is final, we engage in a variety of psychological processes that enhance our feelings about the choice we made relative to the alternatives.

It also reflects something Martha Washington once said: The greater part of our misery or circumstances depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances. And finally, what Abraham Lincoln noted: People are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

The Green Grass Syndrome, or Satisficers vs. Maximizers

What keeps alpha females, in particular, from being able to be happy in a less-than-perfect marriage is they insist on having the absolute best at all times. If they dont, they feel they are living a lesser life. This is part and parcel of the alpha females naturally critical nature. At heart, shes a maximizer. A maximizer is someone whos rarely satisfied or who cannot make do with less than perfect. You can see how this would be debilitating when it comes to marriagenot just for her but for her husband, who cant possibly measure up to such high standards.