• Your kid takes violin lessons from your sister, a professional violin teacher.
• Your Mom babysits your kids a few days a week.
• Your brother is living in the spare room of your house.
• Your best friend, a professional mechanic, fixes your car when it breaks down.

Should you exchange money for these services? If you were dealing with strangers then the answer would be simple: yes, you should exchange money. But this is family, and money and family is a volatile combination. What should you do?

The answer is… it depends. Your sister, the violin teacher, could expect you to pay her (since it’s… you know.. her job!) or she could be insulted that you’re trying to pay her to spend time with her niece and nephew. There’s no way to know unless you talk to her about it.

If you’re in this situation, you might be tempted to take an educated guess based on what you know about your sister, but I highly recommend you don’t do that. There are a lot social expectations here.

For instance, she may actually want to be paid, but if you don’t pay her she probably won’t argue with you since social norms say siblings shouldn’t pay each other for services. She could start feeling resentful because she doesn’t want to work for free, and then start feeling guilty that she feels resentful… and it’s a vicious cycle and she probably won’t bring it up to you.

Or it could be the other way around. It’s possible that even though she doesn’t feel like she needs to paid, she’s afraid to tell you to stop paying her since it might hurt your pride… or something. Awkward.

The point is if you guess wrong, the situation won’t resolve itself. The longer you let the problem fester the worse it gets, and in the end it can only be solved with an open, honest conversation about what each person wants. You might as well have that conversation in the beginning. It’ll be easier that way. And don’t wait for them to initiate the conversation. Most people won’t do it.

Talking to the Giver

If you’re the one receiving a service from a friend or family member, and you think you need to have a conversation with them about payment, you can easily make the conversation go well. Just, have the giver decide whether or not to be paid and assure the giver that neither answer will negatively affect the relationship. Doing that empowers the giver, which is a good thing.

Of course you need to actually show that you’re OK with either answer. Don’t be pissy if your sister says she wants to be paid for the violin lessons she’s giving your kids. Be gracious and agree to pay her. If you don’t have the money to pay her, be honest about it and ask her for suggestions on how to solve the problem. Then go do something fun together.

There’s a chance that your sister may be insulted for being asked if she wants to be paid. If that’s the case, assure her that you’re only trying to pay her for the value she’s providing. It’s a compliment, not an insult. Both sides look good this way.

Talking to the Receiver

If you’re the one giving services and you’re feeling resentful because you aren’t being paid by your friend or family member, you’re in a tough place. The conversation you have with the receiver more than likely won’t go well because nobody likes being told their free ride is over.

Before you start creating drama, figure out what category you’re in:

• You need the money
• You simply want to be paid for the work you do
• You feel like there’s something lacking in the relationship

If there’s something lacking in the relationship, asking them outright to be paid could cause more problems than it solves. It says, “you don’t feel like family to me anymore so you should pay me like the other strangers I work with do.” Assuming they do start paying you, every time money changes hands it will reinforce your estrangement. Not good. (Unless you really do want to poison the relationship. If that’s the case, by all means…)

Instead, ignore the money issue and focus on healing the relationship since that’s where the problem is. What would need to happen in order for you to feel OK with the idea of serving your family member for free? How can you make that happen? Work to make it happen.

Even if you’re the kind of person who always wants to be paid for your services, if you feel your relationship with your friend or family member is broken, you should focus on fixing the relationship before you go about asking to get paid. Once the relationship is healed, money can change hands without problems. Yes, it’ll take longer, but better that than making the relationship worse. Alternately you could stop providing your service to them until the relationship is healed.

If the relationship is healthy, but you need the money or simply want to be paid for your services, try having a frank conversation with your friend or family member about it. Be humble. Be honest. Be gentle. If they’re sane you should eventually be able to come to some kind of agreement. If the conversation ends badly, and you feel you were misunderstood, find someone both of your respect to talk to them about it. There’s nothing wrong with being paid for your services, even if it’s family doing the paying.

Doing business with family is trickier than doing it with strangers because of all the unwritten social rules, but it’s not impossible.

Chapter 4 of Dan Airely’s Predictably Irrational opens with the following paragraph:

You are at your mother-in-law’s house for Thanksgiving dinner, and what a sumptuous spread she has put on the table for you! The turkey is roasted to a golden brown; the stuffing is homemade and exactly the way you like it. Your kids are delighted: the sweet potatoes are crowned with marshmallows. And your wife is flattered: her favorite recipe for pumpkin pie has been chosen for dessert.

The festivities continue into the late afternoon. You loosen your belt and sip a glass of wine. Gazing fondly across the table at your mother-in-law, you rise to your feet and pull out your wallet. “Mom, for all the love you’ve put into this, how much do I owe you?” you say sincerely. As silence descends on the gathering, you have a handful of bills. “Do you think three hundred dollars will do it? No, wait, I should give you four hundred!”

This is not a picture that Norman Rockwell would have painted. A glass of wine falls over, your mother-in-law stands up red-faced; your sister-in-law shoots you an angry look; and your niece bursts into tears. Next year’s Thanksgiving celebration, it seems, may be a frozen dinner in front of the television set.

During the rest of the chapter he describes how “market forces”–using money to pay for the value of something–and “social norms”–acting out of love or honor–don’t mix. In this case, attempting to pay your mother-in-law for her socially priceless home-cooked Thanksgiving meal is a very bad idea.

This story struck a nerve. I could easily envision my family reacting this way, and it’s the kind of thing that bothers me. What’s inherently wrong with putting a price on Thanksgiving? Is it actually priceless? Why are we uncomfortable thinking about it? It doesn’t make any sense.

Our Distant Relative the Chimpanzee

A few months years ago I read Frans de Waal’s Our Inner Ape, which shows how apes exhibit many of the tendencies we think of as unique to modern humans, including reciprocity. According to the book, emotionally close chimps have a fluid relationship. Neither chimp keeps score. They help each other out when they can and don’t worry about what’s owed. Chimps that aren’t close to each other care about what’s owed. They expect payback for favors. If chimp A extends himself for chimp B who he is not close to, A expects B to help out when he needs it. If B doesn’t there will be problems.

We experience the same thing all the time. If you help an acquaintance move his couch you expect that, barring extenuating circumstances, when you need to move your couch he’ll help you out. But if it’s your best friend or sibling it feels like a different situation. When you help them out, you aren’t thinking of it as insurance that you’ll get help later. You’re doing it because that’s what you’re supposed to do. Because it feels right.

As a rule, these sort of evolutionarily acquired behaviors show up as instinctive feelings. Fight or flight is a good example. Parental attachment to children is another. So it makes sense that we feel uncomfortable when our close friends keep score of favors. It’s instinctive.

How does this relate to Thanksgiving at your mother-in-law’s? I’m getting to that. First we have to talk about money.

What does Money Have to Do With it?

It’s just about impossible to fit money into social norms… for a number of reasons:

• It’s too neat. Reciprocity is instant. The score is always even.
• Most of us don’t have the means to pay for the gifts we are given. If you calculate how much you’d have to pay at a restaurant for the quality of a well cooked home-made meal… it’d be a lot. A multi-course holiday feast would be even more. Or how about getting help moving across town? Professional movers are expensive! If we had to pay for our friends’ services, many of us wouldn’t be able to afford it. And if you added to that a tip for them doing it without expecting to get paid… yeah.
• Putting a price on a gift given lovingly taints it. It’s gone from “gift” to “product to be purchased”. Doesn’t matter if you were generous with how much you thought it was worth, it’s still tainted. We don’t like it when someone tries to buy our love. It feels icky and wrong. You have to give a very convincing explanation to have money taken as a token of appreciation instead of a form of payment.
• Giving money says “You are a stranger.” When you go to a restaurant, you pay for the meal. The restaurant staff has scratched your back by giving you food and a pleasant atmosphere, and you scratch theirs by paying for the service with money. The restaurant owner, presumably, provided you with the meal primarily so he could get paid. You paid for it so you could complete the transaction as quickly as possible. Money is how mutually beneficial transactions between strangers happen.

Going back to Thanksgiving at Mom-in-Law’s, she got pissed that you tried to pay her because she felt she was being treated as a stranger, someone who can be paid off and never thought of again. And she thought you were trying to buy the gift she gave you out of love. Sure, you didn’t mean it like that, but her flipping out was instinctive.

So that’s why no one pays for Thanksgiving. Of course, Thanksgiving is a contrived example since most of us weren’t planning to pay Mom-in-Law in the first place, but this “you don’t pay family for favors” thing has other everyday implications…

Ahoy Mateys! There be a weddin' happnin' here.

One year ago today, me, Aaron and some of our local friends gathered at the entrance to Nichols Arboretum. We walked to the riverfront in full pirate regalia singing sea shanties. When we got to the right spot Aaron and I said some words, got spaghetti thrown at us, and then signed some rather serious papers. Yes, Aaron and I got married a year ago. Also, yes, our wedding was in June.

The story starts last fall when I got my job at the University. As with all University jobs the benefits were fantastic. Excellent retirement plan, excellent vacation plan, and of course, excellent health-care plan. Aaron was still working for the start-up company, and his benefits were… less excellent. We did the math and figured out that we’d save money by having him be my dependent on my plan. He’d easily qualify as an Other Qualified Adult since we’d been domestic partners for two and a half years. Our plan was to go with that until the wedding in June and switch to spouse afterward. Then for kicks we figured out how much we’d save if we were married…

Between tax and insurance we figured we’d save around $700. That was a pretty amount significant for us. Was waiting until June worth $700? We’d been engaged for 9 months already, been living together for two and a half years…

After a few days of mulling it over we decided that, no, waiting until June was not worth $700. We also decided that we’d keep the “wedding” a secret. We’d know, the government would know, and no one else. That was the plan..

Then we found out that our friend was already an ordained minister of the Universal Life Church. Meaning she could marry us. For free. Unsurprisingly we let her in on the secret. Our friend agreed to marry us with the condition that the wedding be a Pastafarian ceremony, we agreed as long as the people present kept it a sekrit, and the rest, as they say, is history.

I wish that was the end of my post, but a lot of things happened afterward that I didn’t expect. Things that would have made me think twice if I had known about them. Below I’ll share some of those things.

It ended up being more meaningful than we intended it to.

We’d intended for the first ceremony to just be play acting and paper signing. No one would need to know about the “wedding” because effectively nothing had changed. Sure we saved a bit of money and would file our taxes differently, but other than that had anything significant happened? We were already living together.

But the “wedding” was in the Arb, a place that has special meaning to us and where we would have loved to have had the June wedding.

And then three months later (exactly) we bought a house. If we hadn’t been legally married we wouldn’t have even considered buying a house together.

Between the wish fulfillment and the house buying, the September “wedding” ended up meaning more to us than we expected/intended it to. Oops.

This wasn’t a bad thing or a good thing. It just wasn’t anticipated.

It’s hard to keep secrets.

I think I enjoyed having a special little secret for about a week. After that it was frustrating. People I cared about would talk to me as if I was signing the papers in June and I wasn’t. It was weird. And uncomfortable because Aaron and I weren’t the only people at the “wedding”. Were the people at the Sekrit Pirate Wedding better than the ones that weren’t? I didn’t like thinking about that question.

Clearly I wasn’t going to be able to keep this thing secret for the next 9 months. We needed to reevaluate our position, so we asked ourselves, “Why are we keeping the secret wedding a secret?” There were two reasons: 1) we didn’t want people to take the June wedding any less seriously and 2) we didn’t want people to feel bad about not being at the secret wedding.

When we looked at the first reason, we decided that reasoning was flawed. Keeping the September wedding secret meant that the people who came to the June wedding would be there under the false pretense that we hadn’t signed the marriage license yet. We’d be lying to them so they’d believe a lie. Um… not so wonderful. As for the second reason… that’s their problem, not ours. The point was to save money, not to exclude people. That should be fairly obvious.

So we decided to tell people if the subject came up in conversation. No official announcements because we felt that that would be making a big deal out of the elopement.

This was, again, more unanticipated than bad. I didn’t think I’d have a hard time keeping it secret since nothing had changed for us, but the topic kept coming up. Mostly people would ask if our June officiant was ordained, and of course, he didn’t have to be anymore since we’d already had the papers signed. Our choices were lie or tell people. *Sigh*

Some people took not being at/knowing about Secret Wedding Really Hard.

A lot harder than I expected. Not everyone, but some.

I was totally blindsided by this. A true wedding, to me, is about a public commitment. This “wedding” was about saving money on taxes and insurance.

This was decidedly a negative thing, and is something I’d have paid more attention to if I were doing it again. There were a few people I left out of the loop that I shouldn’t have.

People didn’t know how to interpret the June wedding.

This wasn’t very surprising given that we didn’t know how to interpret the June wedding. Which one was real? Was the June one just for show?

There we were, two people who’d been living together for 3 years, signed the marriage license 8 months ago, and the ceremony wasn’t even in a Church. The only things the June wedding had going for it were elaborate costumes, food, dancing, and cake.

I suppose it’s appropriate that my wedding ended up being an exercise in thinking about “what makes a wedding a wedding”, but appropriate is not the same thing as fun.

This was another neutral thing, although this one I saw coming. We’d planned to keep the confusion to ourselves by keeping the September wedding a secret, but when that didn’t work… oh well.

We could buy a house.

Getting married earlier meant we could get the house we’re living in now. If we’d waited until June we probably wouldn’t have it.

This was a major advantage that we hadn’t considered in September.

It was a Huge emotional stress relief.

I remember right before the September wedding I spent a lot of time thinking about what getting married meant. Signing papers meant breaking up would be a legal mess, so I took the time to think things through. Also I knew that in June I wouldn’t have the time for contemplation, and even if I did it’d be hard to be detached when we’d spent all that time and money on the wedding.

If I had to guess, I’d say the lack of time to digest what’s happening is a major reason why brides (and maybe grooms too?) freak out right before their wedding. I remember a feeling of uncertainty right before and after the September wedding. That would have been extremely unsettling in June, but since the damage had already been done I was very calm and happy.

This was undoubtedly a nice side effect of eloping first.

The June wedding had a special meaning.

And the September one did too for that matter. Unfortunately I didn’t figure out what these meanings were until June.

The September wedding was about me and Aaron. No one else. The people that were there were 100% spectators. I think it’d have been a similar experience if none of them had been there.

The June wedding was less about us and more about the communities we love and are a part of. The wedding was made possible by our communities. Without them it wouldn’t have been the same wedding… at all. It was us saying “Yes, we love you. We’re here to stay!” It was also the place where Aaron and I solidified what our marriage meant to us. September was all non-verbal. (I think I’d committed to loving him even if his arm got torn off by a shark… or something.) June was verbal and explicit. Our vows and our readings were very meaningful to us.

This was another nice side effect of eloping first.

Given the same circumstances, but knowing what I know now, would I do it again?

If the practical incentives were there, yes I’d do it again. (I’m really happy we could buy the house.) But I’d do it differently. Namely, I’d have told people about the September wedding without hesitation, and I’d have explained that the September wedding was private and the June one would be public and community focused. Both real. Both different.

If there were no financial incentives, would I have eloped?

That is, if it was just as easy to buy a house, and we wouldn’t have saved money on the insurance, would I have done it again?

I don’t think I would have for 3 reasons.

1. It would have taken a lot more courage. Here at least we could tell people we did it for tax and insurance purposes and they’d mostly understand. Eloping for emotional purposes only… not so much.
2. I wonder what the experience would have been like to do it all at once. I felt like I was missing something by being so calm at my wedding. I’ve heard it’s supposed to be a crazy emotional experience, and I wasn’t freaking out at either the September or June wedding. :-/
3. We could have gone to the Arb a day or two afterward and had our private time to process our vows. I think that would have had a similar effect.

All in all this eloping before getting married thing was an interesting experience. I’m happy we did it.

And with that I raise a tall glass of grog to you all. Arr! Happy AnniversARRy AARRon.

The Wedding Party (Click for full size)

Aaron and I are the ones in the center in case you couldn’t guess. I made my dress and the dresses for the two ladies on the left. And by made I mean I could have done just about all of it myself, but due to time constraints I sought out a lot of help from my friends.

Not sure I’d make the same decisions if I were doing it all over again. On the one hand I’m happy that the dresses were pretty historically accurate and they turned out well. On the other hand it was a hell of a lot of work for people who don’t do reenactment. Chances are I would have made mine myself and then either ordered the rest from a Renaissance festival clothing website or made them a lot simpler. Such is life. I hadn’t intended to do more than mine in the first place and then things happened and I ended up making them. :-/

So, things I learned.

Our Community is Pretty Awesome

I have a great group of friends that really came through for us for our event. I think the only people involved with the wedding that we didn’t know intimately were the caterer (who just supplied the food; no staff) and the site person. Everything else was done by someone I’m either on a first name basis with or is family.

I’d talked a while back about how modern secular weddings are missing something, and I realized something about my wedding. It may not have had the religious aspect, but we definitely tapped into an old tradition… the tradition of everyone in the village working together to make the wedding day(s) happen. That was really special. And happy.

Sometime in the coming weeks we’re going to have a Thank You party for everyone who helped out with the wedding. There’s a pretty good chance Aaron and I will get weepy at that.

Detachment? Have I talked about that here?

Detachment is a pretty good policy in general, but it’s especially important in anything where your friends are helping you out with stuff. It’s one thing to yell at a stranger because something they did didn’t meet your expectations… you’re not going to hang out with them after the contract is up. With friends, you really shouldn’t yell at them for not helping you the way you want them to. For one thing it’s mean to yell at anyone. For another, they’re helping you! Yelling at someone for volunteering their time does not win you anything except grief. Plus, chances are whatever your vision was wasn’t that important anyway.

Also it’s hard to have a complete vision of everything. Better to give people the space to be creative. The more detached you are from your vision, the more surprised and happy you’ll be by what you end up with. For instance, I had no idea what I wanted from the flowers. Giving my friend the freedom to do what she wanted meant I got pleasantly surprised and I didn’t have to spend time explaining what I wanted.

So yeah, yay detatchment!

I like running events

Not that I was actually running this one. We had people on site in charge of making sure things got done, but I think I’d like being in charge of such things too. We’re thinking of having an anniversary dinner dance next year with more dancing a fewer funny costumes. Methinks that’d be a lot of fun, and a lot less work to plan.

It’s nice to be officially married

Aaron and I signed the papers in September, but we didn’t publicly change our status until after the June wedding. We’d been in limbo for 3/4 of a year and by the end it was really annoying. We didn’t know how to introduce ourselves to new people. We didn’t know whether or not we should let people know we signed the papers. Etc. It was weird. I have more thoughts on this that deserve their own post. Suffice it to say, I’m happy to be able to call Aaron my husband now.

I like kayaking

We went kayaking on our honeymoon. I could see myself doing more of that. There’s a club in Ann Arbor I might join. I’m wary because I already have a busy schedule, but I’ve been feeling like my “likes being in nature” side doesn’t get enough attention.

Will probably keep doing one of those things I’d thought about quitting

In the last check-in I’d said I was planning to give up some positions I have. I’ve decided to hold off on doing that for one of them. I’m excited about where that one is going and the person I had in mind for the job I think won’t be that interested in the new direction.

Still a few more wedding thoughts

I have about three posts in my heading related to our wedding and marriage in general. Hopefully after that I’ll be done with this topic.

That’s about it for me right now.

Wedding

Oh man, this has been eating my time and energy. (In case I haven’t mentioned it, the wedding’s on June 6th. Less than a month away!) Some of the energy/time eating’s been due to worry. Some of it’s been having to face uncomfortable (but good!) things like writing up vows. Some of it’s been guilt at not having personally made much progress on the gowns in a while. (My friends have been incredibly helpful, though.) Here’s what I’ve learned:

• I have great friends. Seriously. They’ve been so helpful and supportive… in an unconditional way. I don’t know how to thank them enough. I don’t know the right way to say thank you.
• I don’t have this money thing down. This has to do with the “I don’t know how to thank my friends”. Part of me thinks I should give a cash gift to thank certain friends that have been over-the-top helpful. Another part of me thinks any gift I could afford to give would be less than what their work is worth. It has to do with the “No one Pays for Thanksgiving Dinner” problem. I want to stay firmly in “social norms”, but I don’t know how to do that. I’m sure they’d be alright if I didn’t strictly give anything, but I still want to. I just don’t know.
• I’m better at being a manager than a producer and I feel uncomfortable about it. When I look back on the past few weeks I haven’t made that much. I’ve made my hat, and I’ve attempted to make the hats for my bridesmaids, and even on those hats I’ve gotten other people to do significant parts of them. Things have been getting done, but I feel weird that I’ve mostly been in the position of “tell others what to do” or “tell someone they’re on the right track” more than I’ve actually been producing.
• *Whispers* I kinda like being a manager. Ok, I said it. It feels good to be in power. And scary. And guilt-inducing. “Only bad people like power.” etc. etc. But things are getting done… I’m just not doing them. No one resents me at the moment (except perhaps some family… but that’s neither my problem nor related to this issue) so I must be doing something right.
• It’s a good idea to not expect your friends to do anything. One thing is ask people to help but not expect them to come through. If they do, I’m thrilled. If they don’t, that’s OK too. This way I totally avoid resentment. Not everyone’s in the same position to give, and that’s alright.
• It’s hard to apply this to my family. All of us have expectations. And resentment. It’s not pretty.

Good thing: I think this wedding is going to happen. Yay!

Guilt

I’ve been afflicted with guilt since… at least elementary school. I remember walking to the bus-stop, worrying and feeling guilty about not having worked on homework that was due in a few days. My hope was that I’d do the right thing in order to avoid the self-punishment. It’s almost never worked, but I feel like there has to be some sort of consequence for me when I don’t keep my promises. I’m starting to see that this reasoning is flawed, but it’s a long-ingrained habit.

Here’s a list of things I’ve learned/realized about my guilt problem:

• I’ve been doing this for a long time. See above.
• I don’t know what a life without guilt looks like. Do I go around breaking promises all the time? With no punishment, why should I be good?
• Hey! That sounds familiar! It’s the “Without the Church people would lose their sense of morality” argument. That’s clearly false. “Good requires Guilt” is probably also false, maybe even for the same reason.
• Still don’t know how to deal with me not keeping my promises. The best of I’ve come up with so far is to:
  1. Figure out why I broke it.
  2. If it’s because it’s something I don’t actually want to be doing, I forgive myself and move on.
  3. If it’s for some other reason I first apologize.
  4. Then I do whatever I can to fix it.

  So, in keeping with that. I’m sorry I didn’t update last Saturday’s post like I said I would. I’m not sure when I’ll get to it. Right now this blog is, sadly, not quite my top top priority. Aside from the obvious tops of Relationships and Work, Wedding comes first right now. Then Blog. Then everything else. I still want to edit that post because I want to improve my writing, but editing takes time and energy I have a hard time providing right now.

  Not sure how much I like this method for guilt-dealing mechanism.

So that’s my check-in for this week. Methinks this will be a good way for me to get in my “one post a week” minimum (and let you get to know me a bit better).

On The Simple Dollar the other day Trent talked about how using the average price for a weddings in the US or in your city as a gauge for your own wedding is a bad idea. It makes you think you have to spend that much because if you don’t you’re being cheap. You don’t care about your guests or something. Better to focus on the elements that are important to you and not get swayed by the people saying you must have six servers catering your buffet or it’s too difficult to sew your own dress. He also said the following.

If you spend all of your time comparing the major things in your life to others based on their cost or their perceived value, you’re saying that what others want is more important to you than what you want. Never let any important choice in your life be governed by what others want.

This is your life. Live it the way you want. Ignore what everyone else says you must have and says you must spend on it. This is about you, not them.

Our wedding certainly echoes this idea, what with the Tudor theme, vegan dinner, and non-religious ceremony, but I wonder… Are weddings really supposed to be about inflicting the beliefs of the couple on the guests? I don’t know.

At one point weddings were more about the community accepting a new family unit than about the family unit itself. The couple usually had the same background too, so in a sense it was about them too… but push come to shove it was still more about the community.

These days it’s common for couples to come from different backgrounds. If they’d like a truly traditional wedding then one person has to put aside their own heritage in favor of the other. (Not usually preferable.) The other option is to mix and match traditions. When couples mix and match traditions the wedding is transformed from this set in tone ritual to a reflection of who they are. Most of us prefer this route.

I feel like something gets lost with the non-traditional wedding, though. You aren’t tapping into a long history of tradition. You aren’t following the rights and rituals of a community. You’re just making stuff up.

But then there are plenty of people who merely “go through the motions” too. Ritual doesn’t necessarily imply meaning. It’s totally dependent on the individual. I like old traditions. I like that history, so such things have a lot of meaning for me. I know that isn’t the case for everyone.

And, just because it’s new and “made up” doesn’t mean ye modern wedding can’t be meaningful. In fact it’s hard for it not to be meaningful since you have to go through the effort of coming up with everything! It’s just a different kind of meaning. It’s more in the moment. It’s about you and your spouse-to-be showing your community who you are and that you’re committed to each other. But it’s more about you.

There are two parts to the process. The first is to be the kind of person who not only gives good advice, but gives it in such a way that it strengthens the relationship. The second step is to use the right words so they take the message the right way. In this post I’ll focus on cultivating the mindset. Next week’s will be on using the right words.

So let’s get to it! Below are things you can do to help yourself BE a better advice giver.

Ask your friend for advice

Chances are your friend has some area of expertise that they’re dying to give you advice on. Maybe they’re an excellent cook, and you have a complicated dinner party you’d like to prepare. Maybe they’re incredibly well organized, and you’d like to improve that in yourselves. Basically, humble yourself by asking them for advice. The idea here is that if your friend sees you humbling yourself, they’ll feel more comfortable doing the same with you.

One caveat: Don’t do it just to improve your chances at getting your friend to ask you for advice. That is, don’t ask them for advice on something you don’t need advice on. If your friend is a master chef, don’t ask him for advice if you have no actual interest in cooking. If you’re more organized than your friend, don’t ask them for advice on organizing… unless there’s something specific they do do that you’d like to do. Just be genuine when you ask for help.

If you aren’t being genuine, they’ll be able to tell, and you’ll get labeled as condescending, which… honestly… would be accurate. Your friendship can’t be very good if you can’t think of any area in which your friend can actually help you.

Again, the goal here is to be humble enough to ask for advice where you aren’t knowledgeable and to value your friend for what he/she is good at. It feels more comfortable to ask someone for advice if they owe you a favor and we like sharing/being valued for our passions.

Actively Work on That Area Yourself

Let’s say there’s something you specifically want to give your friend advice on, one of your first steps ought to do is to work on that area yourself. “Get the log out of your eye before telling your brother to get the speck out of his” and all that jazz. This has the benefit of establishing yourself as an expert (so you can actually give good advice), showing your friend that it’s alright to work on that area, and improving yourself in that area yourself. (If it’s good enough for your friend, it’s good enough for you, right?)

If you’re lucky you might even get some insight into why your friend is still struggling with it, although in my experience you probably won’t. You want to fix it right now, your friend doesn’t. Your experience will be fundamentally different. Resist the urge to get frustrated with them as that will make it harder to listen to them when they try to explain what’s stopping them.

Be Patient; Care But Not Too Much

Detach yourself from the situation. If the person you want to help sees that you care too much, they may avoid you even if you’re the best person to go to. Why? Because you’d put too much pressure on them to change, and not only to change but to do so at your pace. Think about it, why do many of us seek out self-help books or blogs instead of asking our friends and family for advice? One reason, of course, is that our friends and family don’t give great advice, but another is that they want too much for us to follow their advice. We don’t want to disappoint them if/when we fail the first time. We also don’t want to feel obligated to do it their way. Books don’t care if you disregard their advice.

When I’m trying to figure out who to go to for advice, I look for/expect three things in my advice-giver:

1. They’ll be supportive.
2. They’ll give me good, honest advice that’s in my best interest.
3. If I fall they’ll help me pick myself back up and try again.

If I suspected any of these is false, I probably won’t ask… and I won’t appreciate it if they give me their unsolicited thoughts. (Although I am trying to work on the last part.)

The only way to meet all three conditions is to be detached. I can’t really be supportive if I’m clouded by my own expectations. I can’t give good advice if I’m basing it on what I think the situation is. I can’t help them when they fall if I’m too frustrated when they do.

Nurture Your Love

Common advice for married couples is to put some time and effort into keeping the feeling alive. Focus on the things you enjoy about your partner. Do fun stuff. If you don’t you run the risk of only thinking about the qualities in your partner you don’t like.

This advice can be applied to all of your relationships, especially those where you’re starting to see the other person’s flaws. It’s important to remind yourself why you care. Like your significant other, you run risk of focusing on the negatives with your friends too. In addition you might start seeing them as your project, someone you want to fix to give you an ego boost. This is not good.

By nurturing the love, you remind yourself why you’re friends with this person and that they are your equal. They have as much to teach you, as you have to teach them. You respect them.

If you do all of these things you can be pretty certain that your intentions are aligned with good things. I think if any of my friends embodied these qualities, that is,

• They were humble enough to ask for help
• They were experts in or were working on an area I needed help with
• They were detached from the outcome of my situation
• I knew the loved and respected me

I wouldn’t hesitate to ask them for advice, since by doing this they would meet all of the criteria I mentioned earlier. And not only that, if they told me out of the blue that I was doing something that was self-defeating there’s a good chance I wouldn’t see it as a personal attack.

So, next week, you can look forward to a post on how to use the right words convey your advice and how to give them unsolicited advice.

Here’s the definition I’ll use, and for clarity I’ll use two generic names: Alice and Bob. When Alice is getting Bob to do something he wouldn’t ordinarily do, she is manipulating him.

It’s a pretty wide interpretation of manipulative. If Bob is biting his fingernails, and Alice tells him it’s bad for him, even that falls under this definition of manipulation. Her technique might not be effective, and she may be saying it for his benefit alone, but that’s besides the point. Alice is still trying to manipulate Bob. Alice is still trying to change Bob’s behavior.

The thing to realize here is that manipulation in this broad sense is part a part of life, and it’s not always a bad thing. In fact, it is often wise to allow yourself to be manipulated. If someone shows you that your behavior is not aligned with what you profess to believe, you’d do well to reconcile that. If someone is calling you to be a better person, you shouldn’t fight it just because someone else suggested it.

So the question is, what’s the difference between positive and negative manipulation? The answer is quite simple: positive manipulation is when someone gets you to do something that makes your life better in your eyes. Negative is when it makes your life worse in your eyes.

As far as your life is concerned the form of the manipulation really shouldn’t matter. If someone uses guilt to get you to do something you already know you ought to be doing, you should still do it. The key thing here is you know it’s the right thing to do. The fact that they used low-blow tactics is beside the point.

Similarly if someone appeals to your higher values–a method of manipulation I particularly like–and calls you to put more time into your non-profit group of choice, the time spent there may not be the best for you. If you already spend lots of hours at your day-job and then spend as many at your non-profit group your family and friends may get short shrift, and you may find that the new use of your time hasn’t made your life better. The fact that the person used a good method of manipulation is, again, besides the point.

In other words, when someone is attempting to get you to change your behavior it’s the content, not the form, that matters.

This changes, of course, when you’re the one trying to change someone else’s mind. The content is still very important, but most of us have a hard time taking advice that’s presented in the wrong way. If you want to be listened to you’d do well to get both content and form right. That’s what this Friday’s post will be about.

My husband and I have made three vacation trips to San Diego in the past year. We fell in love with the area the first trip and spent the next two trips scouting out the “small towns” surrounding San Diego trying to find just the right spot. Our third trip we attended our San Diego friend’s wedding and met many locals who were friendly and actually invited us to dinner while we were in town. I have no problem making friends, and although we weill be leaving our friends here, I am positive we will make new friends in California.

Some of our Illinois friends and mostly our family have chastised us for our future plans to relocate. Protests range from … “It’s so expensive out there,” “Aren’t you afraid of earthquakes, you can’t get insurance, you know,” “How can you leave your job and start over?” My husband’s out-of-state sisters advised us to “wait until Mom is gone before you leave her here alone in Illinois.” My mother, who is so emotionally dependent on me, just cries every time I try to put “replacement me” people into place to help her. Both of my siblings live out of state also and have not spoken to our mother for more than a year. We continue to put our ducks in a row to complete this move, but emotionally we are both being drained.

Reading this excerpt really pushed my buttons, especially the bit in bold. I understand we don’t have the full story here, but what nerve those sisters have to tell their brother to stay put. If they really cared about their mother they’d move back home to help! I’m not really sure what to think of the rest. The reasons they give the couple to stay behind are really besides the point. There’s lots of reasons to move from Illinois too!

Should they leave? Should they stay? I’d say it depends on the resentment factor. If staying in Illinois would make the couple feel resentful then they should leave. Martyrdom is not a good place to be. It also sounds like their Illinois people don’t really have the couple’s best interest at heart. (The book all but says otherwise… but the book is very weird.) If they did they’d try to be helpful and set up systems to keep the relationship alive and well. Maybe they’d consider moving to San Diego too. Maybe they’d give them a copy of the book. Maybe try to find out what it is about San Diego that draws them there. Maybe Illinois also has it. There are lots of options. Guilting someone into staying behind, though, while it might work, is a really bad thing. It poisons the relationship. If you want someone to resent you, guilt them into curbing their desires. That’ll make it happen right quick.

I got lucky. Ann Arbor is a place I genuinely want to live and it’s close to my family. I’ve had experience living out of state too. I lived in Austin, TX for 8 months, and while it had its perks it was missing some important things like… fall. Another place I considered moving to was Asheville, NC, but in all seriousness it was a lot like Ann Arbor except it had mountains. Might as well stay in Ann Arbor. After thinking about it some more, I realized that the only places I’d really want to move to are Canada and Europe, since the culture would actually be different, there’d be national healthcare, and in the case of Europe, history would be all around me. But I don’t feel really compelled to leave Ann Arbor, right now, so why should I? I suppose that’s the ideal situation. Find a city near your family that actually fits your personality. Then you satisfy yourself and your family.

What do you think?