Enemies Of Love In Life’s Busy Calendar, Be Sure To Block Out Special Time For Loved One
When Dr. Paul Quinnett begins marriage counseling with a warring couple, he often asks them to hand over their appointment books.
Often the only time they’ve scheduled together is the hour they’ve arranged to meet with him.
“What’s wrong with this picture?” Quinnett asks, as he breaks into a hearty chuckle.
Quinnett, clinical director of Greentree Behavioral Health, will present a workshop on “Time, Space and The Enemies of Love” at Holy Family Hospital’s Women’s Conference Feb. 8.
Most people truly do fall in love and get married intending to stay in love, Quinnett says. When they wind up angry, resentful and blaming their partner, he believes they should be blaming one of the many “enemies of love.”
Time ranks near the top of Quinnett’s enemies list. Quinnett, the author of “Pavlov’s Trout,” has a book in progress on this topic.
“We have materialism, careerism, two-career families, and nanoseconds, Day Timers and Day Runners, and planes to catch. All these things to do. Where is the time for love?” Quinnett asks.
Without time to talk, to reconnect, and to embark on wild weekend adventures, Quinnett believes love fizzles.
When Quinnett’s son was married, Quinnett gave the couple $2,500, with the restriction that the money could only be used for one of two reasons.
Reason No. 1: Spend $100 a month on a hotel room for a romantic getaway.
Reason No. 2: Spend the whole wad on marriage counseling, which they would need, Quinnett says, if they failed to spend it on reason No. 1.
Couples need “anticipated fun events” on the calendar: dinners, drives around Lake Coeur d’Alene, weekend getaways. “Make it the two of you against the schedule,” Quinnett says.
Quinnett often asks men how often they change the oil in their car. Every 2,500 miles maximum, they respond with religious fervor.
Then he asks how often they take their partners for a weekend at The Coeur d’Alene.
The answer is more like every 100,000 miles.
When couples bind together against the enemies of love, the relationship flourishes.
The enemies include kids - “I know lots of couples who have little kids and they don’t have locks on their bedroom doors. They don’t have any privacy;” in-laws - “Until you can both laugh about each other’s mother, you’re not well;” and money - beware the “400-pound mortgage.”
The best defense against each of these enemies: peace talks.
“When do people try to talk about their marriages?” Quinnett asks. “In the bedroom, last thing at night, when they’re tired, and sometimes they’ve even been drinking.
“Would you go and negotiate the peace talks with Vietnam under those conditions? No, but people do that.”
Nowhere is talk more crucial than in the business end of a marriage.
Quinnett tells of a pair of Realtors, deliriously in love, who nearly wrecked their marriage because they forgot to talk.
One day they got together for lunch, each bursting with good news, and discovered they’d each bought a duplex without consulting the other.
In the middle of this lunch, they realized they had a $200,000 balloon payment coming due at the same moment, and the marriage nearly ended.
“Not,” says Quinnett, “because they didn’t love each other, but because they didn’t have a policy about how to make money decisions.”
Whether it’s hammering out agreements on spending money, or on how to gracefully signal each other when it’s time to leave a party, the solution is plenty of uninterrupted conversations.
“It takes time to work all these little things out,” says Quinnett. But after 35 years of marriage, he’s convinced the time spent pays off, and that love is truly worth the effort.
“We know people in relationships live longer, are less vulnerable to addiction and suicide,” Quinnett says. “Being isolated as a human being is the worst thing that can happen to you.”
The Women’s Health Conference will be Feb. 7 and 8 at Cavanaugh’s Inn At the Park.
The theme is “Your Personal Vision of Success. Hold on Tight.”
Featured speakers for the conference are Connie Podesta, a Texas human relations consultant, Jennifer James, a columnist for The Spokesman-Review and a Seattle cultural anthropologist, and Jackie Pflug, a Minnesota special education expert who survived a terrorist attack in 1985 as she flew from Athens to Cairo.
Workshop topics include “Having It All: New Definitions of Success,” “What’s Up in the Workplace?” and “Life Would Be Easy If It Weren’t for Other People?”
MEMO: See also sidebar which appeared with story under headline “Conference details”