Manners, the magic sauce of marriage.

Those of you that have access to my journal can answer the question of why no blog posts since March 6th.  It was the 5th when I took a header during a zoom session, my entry into the doldrums of health care and injury treatment. But enough , , ,,

I have been married off and on for 65 years. How often I have heard said, or read, that marriage takes hard work. Not sure I agree.

It wasn't lack of effort that sank Barbara's and my marriage. Well, maybe in a way it was. I put a lot of effort into the marriage -- but enough? Who am I to say? But Barbara did not, could not. Not a fault; she just did not have any effort to spare from her struggle with chemical dependency, in her case dependency on JD. Even after achieving sobriety, her efforts were rightly focused on her demons.

That is the extreme situation. If less afflicted folks adopt a simple standard, marriage is easy. That simple standard? Manners. Manners your Mother taught you. Manners the Golden Rule yields. Manners the Boy and Girl Scouts taught. Manners my Aunt Sis used to push on her nephew and nieces.

Good manners are practiced less and less in this coarsening country of ours. Ann's friend Mary Mitchell swims upstream, writing about and lecturing on manners as a business: lecturer at the State Dept's Foreign Service Institute, consultant to a broad array of international corporations, author of nine books on etiquette and civility, plus Mary in person, politeness personified.

Manners and marriage? Show gratitude. Listen carefully and without judgement. Listen without interrupting. Smile. Imagine oneself in your spouse's shoes. Patience and forbearance. Express, explicitly, admiration for those qualities that attracted you in the first place for the roots of those are likely viable in both of you. Take the initiative. Converse; conversation is the universal solvent.

Time dulls these if one is not self-aware. Pain and physical problems of one's own turn one's attention inward. I am now struggling with this. Practice selflessness -- putting the needs of another ahead of your own. Selflessness is hard to habituate and sustain. 

And of course, show to others the mannerly behavior one wants to receive, aka the Golden Rule. 

Manners make marriage easy -- well, not easy, perhaps, but manners are the lubricants that make marriage increasingly easier. It is not hard work to be polite, to show respect, to demonstrate empathy, to smile -- perhaps to laugh.