Free The Marriage Book by Lisa Grunwald, Stephen Adler Page A

and do it. I mean it. I would say the three ingredients to a successful marriage [are] surrender, capitulation, and retreat. If you’ve got those three things—
MATALIN:
Spoken like a true liberal. What a martyr. Faith, family, and good wine. That’s how we do it.
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    PHIL M C GRAW
    “MARRIAGE MELTDOWN,” DR. PHIL , 2011
    Starting in the late 1990s, when Oprah Winfrey introduced him as a regular guest on her talk show, Phil McGraw (1950–), a.k.a. Dr. Phil, dispensed relationship advice to TV audiences with a homey and straightforward, if occasionally scolding, air. The daytime Dr. Phil show, which began in 2002, proved extraordinarily popular in its own right as McGraw took on parents and children, siblings, in-laws, and of course husbands and wives. With episodes like the three-part “Marriage Meltdown,” Dr. Phil joined a pop-culture tradition of finding, airing, and sometimes provoking marital blame.
    MTV’s The Blame Game (“Where broken-up couples go on trial to find out whose fault it really was”) began in 1998 and ran for four seasons. The syndicated Divorce Court began in 1957 and has run, albeit in different incarnations, ever since.
     
ANNOUNCER:
Who’s to blame? Do you feel like your marriage is hanging on by a thread? Do you feel like divorce is your only option? Watch three couples go through an intensive relationship overhaul, as Dr. Phil challenges their commitment to each other and puts their marriage to the ultimate test!
DR. PHIL:
(To the three couples) There are topics, and then there are issues. A husband can come home, kick the door open, say, “Why is the damn tricycle in the driveway again?” That’s a topic. What’s the issue that makes that so sensitive? That’s what you’ve got to find out. Maybe it’s that they haven’t had any sex in two months, and he’s frustrated about being rejected or hurt. I don’t know. But I want to deal with issues. I don’t care who said what to who at mother’s front door two summers ago on the Fourth of July. If I look like I care, then let me get a different look on my face, because I don’t. My goal is to give you guys an opportunity here where you can try to find a way to give yourself a chance to live in harmony.

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    IRONYDESIGNS, 2013

COVETING
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    BUDDHA
    THE DHAMMAPADA , CIRCA 3RD CENTURY BC
    One of the most familiar Buddhist texts, the Dhammapada is a collection of more than 400 sayings ranging in subject from flowers and evil to happiness and anger.
    “Hell” in Buddhism is not an eternal destination but is, like other states of being, transient. Likewise, while there are no commandments, per se, in Buddhism, one of its central “Five Precepts” guides followers to refrain from sexual misconduct.
    Four things does a reckless man gain who covets his neighbor’s wife—demerit, an uncomfortable bed, thirdly, punishment, and lastly, hell.
    There is demerit, and the evil way to hell: there is the short pleasure of the frightened in the arms of the frightened, and the king imposes heavy punishment; therefore let no man think of his neighbor’s wife.
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    OTTO RANK
    DIARY, CIRCA 1904
    In his own version of the Ten Commandments (beginning with “Thou shalt have no God”), Austrian psychologist Otto Rank (1884–1939) took the biblical tenth commandment one step further.
    Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, for there are plenty of others.
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    JIMMY CARTER
    PLAYBOY INTERVIEW, 1976
    Former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter (1924–) became the thirty-ninth president of the United States in the wake of the Watergate scandal, presenting himself as an outsider, an honest man of strong values and straight talk. His most unfortunate—and famous—example of the latter came about during the campaign, when he was interviewed by Robert Scheer for Playboy magazine. The article ran for a dozen pages, but the passage that follows was what people remembered. It was responsible for a 15 percent drop in Carter’s poll numbers and for