Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The Checklist

AuthorHouse

Chapter One

Fatal Attraction

I was someone who was always attracted to the damsel in distress. I fancied myself as a knight in shining armor always willing to sacrifice life and limb to rescue the fair (and frequently, fallen) princess. I believed the Cinderella fairy tale. Most people do. It's a lie.

As I analyzed the demise of my first marriage and began dating again, I recognized that I kept getting attracted to women that had many of the same characteristics of my ex-wife. On one occasion, as I spend an evening with some friends who knew my ex-wife, they quietly confided in me that the woman I was dating reminded them of her. In fact, they pointed out specific similarities that had completely escaped me. And the similarities weren't at all physical. It was this particular revelation that prompted me to start The Checklist.

One thing jumped out at me - screamed at me. All of the damsels in distress that I was attracted to hated one or both of their parents. I began to analyze the psychology behind that.

When I met my ex-wife she was in her teens and did not like her home situation. She had been adopted and her mother had told her at a young age that she wished that they had never adopted her. She had become very close to her father. The mother was jealous and stepped between them in the relationship. She grew to hate her mother and wanted to be on her own. When I met her she latched onto me. She was attractive, in distress, and I mistook her desperation for love.

One of the books I read after my divorce was Scott Peck's The Road Less Travelled. In that book he nailed my ex-wife to a "t". It was while reading his chapter on Passive Dependency that I began to peel back the onion. The verse I quoted at the beginning of this chapter from Genesis is what led me to my first criteria. That, in combination with the 5th Commandment: "Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land the Lord thy God giveth thee" (Exodus 20:12 KJV) became the two kernels that I use to flesh out what I consider to be the most important criteria of the seven.

Criterion 1: Look for someone who was raised with love and loves/honors both their mother AND their father. This is the foundation of self-esteem.

One Comes From Two

How do two people become one flesh? They have a child.

That child is half its father and half its mother. If that child loves both parents it loves itself. It has high self-esteem; and high self-esteem can weather the roughest of life's seas. If that child hates its father but loves its mother, it hates half of itself and loves the other half. To the degree that it hates half of itself, that child will sabotage any success it aspires to because it cannot allow its hated half to succeed. It has low self-esteem - a form of self hatred.

Self Inflicted Suffering

I was in a parking lot outside of a grocery store back in 1992 and I saw a For Sale sign on this practically new Mercedes 350 SL. It said, For Sale - $100.00, and gave a phone number. I took down the number and called it later in the afternoon. It had already been sold. I asked why the price was so low. He said that he was in the middle of a divorce settlement and the judge had told him he had to sell his car and give half the proceeds to his ex-wife. The car was probably worth $50,000. He had settled for $50 instead of $25,000 because he couldn't stand the thought of his ex-wife (whom he obviously hated) benefitting to the tune of $25,000 from the judge's ruling. While he may have hurt his ex-wife, he also hurt himself.

I witnessed the same thing happen to a military officer who got out of the service after 16 years (failing to qualify for a 20-year retirement) because he couldn't bear the thought of his ex-wife getting half of his retirement. He was willing to settle for no retirement rather than share a retirement because of the animosity he felt towards the mother of his child.

How much more hostile do you think a child (who hates a parent) will be towards anything that that parent could take positive credit for in the case of their child's success? If the hated parent wants them to go to college, what do you think they will do? They will sabotage any goal they set because they can't stand the thought of sharing any success with the hated parent.

This is the same rationale a teenager who hates his or her father uses when he or she takes drugs or alcohol. A hatred for a parent leads to a hatred of self, hence the 5th Commandment. If you honor your father and mother, you honor yourself and you avoid the self destructive and self-sabotaging behaviors that would ensure your failure.

One Can Only Give What They Are Given

The other aspect of this criterion is that a child that is raised with love, in turn, is capable of replicating that love as an adult. We can only give what we have been given. Our ability to demonstrate love is contingent on the love that has been demonstrated towards us.

A child that has not been raised in a stable and loving environment cannot create one out of whole cloth. And watching love depicted in movie theaters is only frustrating for them because the movie ends after an hour and a half but the relationship they are trying to develop doesn't materialize that fast.

Love is demonstrated by service that requires sacrifice. Love is felt when one is served. A parent bonds with a child when they serve them. They make their child meals. They take them to parks. They fix their favorite foods. They watch their ball games. A child feels loved when their parent invests time in them. They learn what a parent is supposed to do. When a child has a nurturing role model, that child, in turn, becomes a nurturer. Nurturing is a virtue that must be felt before it can be developed.

Nurturing Doesn't Negate the Need to Love Both Parents

Being raised in a nurturing environment does not necessarily negate the need to love both your parents.

When my mother was 5 years old her parents divorced. She was doted on by all of her relatives and felt very loved, but her father was an alcoholic and seldom kept his visitation commitments. He was a chef and she asked him to cater her wedding reception. He agreed, but showed up late and drunk. Right there at her reception she told him he would never see her children - and he never did. I never even saw a picture of my grandfather. My mother never spoke of him.

It was after I was born that my mother became a foodaholic. Eventually, she became obese. Over the years this self-destructive behavior turned her into a 5'9" 390 lb woman. She became an expert on diets but never had the self-discipline to stick with one.

When I was 25 I obtained a copy of my grandfather's death certificate. He had died when I was 12. My mother mentioned it three years after the fact.

My mother happened to be visiting me a year or so after I had received the Death Certificate. I had her father's Death Certificate lying out on our coffee table. She decided to pick it up and read it. A few seconds after she started reading it she looked shocked - like she had been stunned by new information.

...