Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Contracts or how to avoid a divorce - part deux

After a very insightful feedback on the my post  from an unexpected source of relationship wisdom and one illuminating comment by a life guru on an actual situation I was going through, I have a few observations to make on marriage and contracts:

1 - If you frame it as a contract, you lose it. The problem is if you try to make informal relationships too formal, you'll lose the easiness and flexibility. You'll end up with a stiff relation without any spontaneous movement. Nothing more boring than scheduled romanticism.

2 - If you focus too much on the details of the contract, you may loose the big picture. Why are you willing to spend the rest of your life with that person? The big picture should be because you love them. A lot. Sometimes is good to take a step back and remind yourself why you're doing this in the first place.

3 - I still think it's a valid internal process to figure out more or less what are your expectations regarding a marriage and the act of codifying expectations may be truly insightful (my bet is that most people will have kind of unrealistic expectations on marriage but they never really thought about it)

4 - Can we make a Tiger Woods clause? In Portuguese - "apelou, perdeu"! Roughly translated as you don't play fair, you loose. Immediately. (OK, so this clause comes from my obsession to understand what the heck was Tiger doing with all those women - NY Magazine called them half-hookers). So, en hommage à S., I just had to mention Tiger.