Addictive things have to be treated as if they were sentient
adversaries—as if there were a little man in your head always
cooking up the most plausible arguments for doing whatever you're
trying to stop doing. If you leave a path to it, he'll find it.The key seems to be visibility. The biggest ingredient in most bad habits
is denial. So you have to make it so that you can't merely slip
into doing the thing you're trying to avoid. It has to set off
alarms.Maybe in the long term the right answer for dealing with Internet
distractions will be
software that watches and controls them. But
in the meantime I've found a more drastic solution that definitely
works: to set up a separate computer for using the Internet.
thinkahol * on 03 Jun 11In my previous post, I introduced you to the first part of Pamela Haag's provocative new book, Marriage Confidential: The Post-Romantic Age of Workhorse Wives, Royal Children, Undersexed Spouses, and Rebel Couples Who Are Rewriting the Rules. The 21st century, she argues, is a post-romantic age of melancholy marriages. The couples are not acutely stressed nor entangled in constant conflict - they are just melancholy. They signed up for the marriage pact and lost a vital part of themselves in the process. In that first post, I reviewed some of the problems that Haag diagnosed as plaguing some contemporary marriages. Here, I will go through a few of them and tell you about some of the solutions Haag learned about in her research and interviews. Remember, her goal is not to generate alternatives to marriage but alternatives within marriage that have the potential to keep the marriages together. To longtime readers of Living Single, I bet you will anticipate the conclusion I am leading up to before you get to the end of this post.
