Precious

So a ways back, when I would find interesting short news articles, I would copy them into a text file, and store them away. This digital clipping book soon became unwieldy, and I stopped adding to it, and eventually forgot about it entirely. I was wandering through some old folders, from old computers, and found them.

One interesting story was about an acupuncturist in Japan, who, when he found his marriage foundering, turned, of all places, to his library of business books to figure out how to turn things around. According to the article, he hit upon 8 simple precepts:

1. Listen to your wife attentively at least once a day without asking her to hurry up or get to the point.
2. Share the housework.
3. Do not forget to say “Thank you” and “You are kind.”
4. Never look down at your wife.
5. Do your work together with your wife if you are self-employed.
6. Do not fight. Listen to your wife patiently at first, even if you think she is completely wrong.
7. If there is something you really need or want to buy, persuade your wife daily so that she will come around to understanding why you want it.
8. If you want your wife to change, you need to change, too.

On the face of it, it all seems rather quaint, really. The kind of stuff that you expect to hear from elderly couples on how they managed to remain married for 75 years or some such. Although I will admit to being a bit dubious about number 7.

To be sure, the article that I'd found treated the whole thing with a mix of "news of the weird" and "oh, those wacky foreigners." Of the acupuncturist's choice to scour business books for marital advice, the article gushed: "Yet as preposterous as it sounds, this unusual approach actually worked." But looking on the whole thing some 15 years later, it seems pretty clear. Because all of the precepts presented can really be summed up in one:

Value your spouse, and your relationship with them.

And isn't the central point of most business books to treat your business as something valuable, and therefore worth spending the effort to nurture?

I'd noted that I've been wandering the Internet recently, and I've been reading some think tanks. Having found my way to the American Enterprise Institute and from there to the Institute for Family Studies, I popped back over to read some of their articles on marriage, and what was interesting about them was the high value that they placed on the institution, and the societal benefits thereof.

And I'm sure that valuing the institution of marriage works for a lot of people. But I wonder if the reason so many marriages fail is a lack of the sort of valuing of the partner that I saw in that old article.

Not, of course, that I'm one to talk. I am, after all, an Ineligible Bachelor™, one of the roughly ten percent of Americans (according to Pew Research) who has no intention of ever walking down an aisle. The person who sidles up to a friend who has just announced their engagement and stage-whispers with a broad smirk: "Run for it. I'll cover you." But even with that, I get it. Love is about valuing people. And while that might seem obvious, I'm not sure that it really is. Fortunately, there are always people out there who come to understand this, and are unashamed to tell us.