They can’t see it from the road but I have placed a message for drivers today on my door:

The truly happy person enjoys the scenery on a detour.

The highway one block north of my office is closed, and so traffic is being detoured past my office door. It took a bit longer to get to work today, and I think for lunch, the pizza next door is looking good.

Sadly, the highway is closed because someone jumped from a bridge early this morning. I haven’t heard whether he survived. He might have: it’s not much of a fall. But because he was making a scene and threatening to jump, the police closed the highway last night, and a poor woman who didn’t see the cruiser directing her off the highway, plowed into the cruiser.

So, to you who jumped, not only did you hurt yourself, but two others are in hospital because of you. Surely that wasn’t what you had in mind.

But maybe you did have in mind to create a scene, to make the world stop and take notice, because you were feeling hopeless. So we’re all stopping and taking notice, but not really of whatever it was that was bothering you. Rather, we’re all, or most of us, anyway, annoyed at the interruption.

Ah, I hear horns honking. People aren’t taking this so well, having to drive on slow roads, bumper to bumper, on Monday morning.

Back to you, the jumper. What happened? I suspect some of what happened was biochemistry. You were depressed all winter, perhaps. And now that the weather is warmer and the light is increasing, you were feeling better. Unfortunately, not better enough to see an end to your troubles – just better enough to end your troubles.

Are your troubles ended now? I’ve always wondered if there’s a life after death. But I’ll find out about that someday. No rush.

For you, though, there was a rush. They say that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. I wish that you had seen that your problem was temporary. I wish that you could have seen how many people you have hurt by your actions today (not just those of us stuck on the highway). I wish that you could have seen that your life was meant to be more.

I wish that you had come here. We could have talked. You might have felt better. And a lot of other people wouldn’t be so grouchy today.

I did not have many girlfriends in high school. I was a geek, a browner – literally – and the most action I saw was during theatre arts class. During theatre arts, Miss Coleman would turn out the lights and encourage us to take dramatic positions in the dark. When the lights went out, Bill Laflame and Eddie Edwards would grab me and pulverise me. When the lights came on we would freeze positions, mine always slightly wobbly.

Marlene was kind enough to go with me to the prom. I think her mother drove us.

Dana was my first serious post-high school girlfriend. We met in math class at U of T. She was Lithuanian. I am not. Her father took the chocolates that I gave her and fed them to the Doberman guard dog that they kept on their property. For some reason the dog was always loose whenever I came to visit.

So I gave up on girls and concentrated on getting a job. I’ve always had this thing for helping people, saving lives. It is why I tried to get into medical school for awhile. Also why I joined boy scouts: besides the fact that it gave me a legitimate excuse to get away from my family for whole weekends at a time, we also were part of a city-wide search and rescue team.

The Canadian Coast Guard has this amazing job for university students. It is still available. . Looking for adventure? I was. Somehow I heard about this Inshore Rescue Job and I decided, if I couldn’t have a girlfriend or get into medical school, then at least I was going to have a kickass job. So I went down to 1 Yonge Street and talked to the people in the Coast Guard office, and I started preparing to get the summer job of a lifetime.

One of the requirements for the job was cardiopulmonary rescuscitation – CPR. Sort of advanced first aid. You learn how to help someone not only when they’ve stopped breathing but when their heart stops too. You can break ribs if you do chest compressions the wrong way. Hell, you can break ribs if you do chest compressions the right way. But they have you practice on a life-sized mannequin with a compressible chest and a paper readout – Annie. And you have to take a course.

So I went to this course, in the basement of the instructor’s home, on Bathurst Street, in Toronto, with my friend Larry, from boy scouts. It was a Saturday in January, 1980. January 19th.

It was an all-day affair, and Larry and I teamed up together for the morning, practising landmarking chest positions on each other and getting the hand positions right for chest compressions. I was shy. I didn’t really look around to see who else was there. Until the instructor said, “Change partners and work with someone you do not know.” Worst nightmare. Like waiting to get picked on a sports team. Who would want to be my partner?

Everything happened very quickly. Everyone had a partner but me, and this absolutely gorgeous vision of a young woman, with the most amazing eyes, and wavy long brown hair (I learned later that the waves were a perm she had had for a party the night before). Not having had much experience with the opposite sex, I wasn’t good with pickup lines. But I noticed her wearing a blue U of T t-shirt. “Hey,” I said. “We go to the same school.”

We paired off for the afternoon and practised landmarking chest positions on each other. When the time came to do the test on Annie, she turned out a perfect tape. I had to work on mine for awhile. A long while. People started to leave for home. For some reason she stayed.

By the very end of the day, when I finally passed, and she was still there – and Larry, waiting for me – I screwed up enough courage to ask her out for lunch.

She had a boyfriend, she told me. But he was out of town – he lived in Winnipeg. And yes she would go out to lunch with me.

Larry was stunned. He had known me for years, and had never seen me utter a romantic word, much less ask a girl out, much much less ask a girl out who already had a boyfriend. I danced all the way to the subway.

And that’s how I met my wife. At a CPR course. The first thing I did when I met her was put my hands on her chest.

I was talking to my youngest daughter about this yesterday, musing about the way people meet. She met her boyfriend in school. I met my wife at a CPR course. One woman I know met her partner at a swinger’s club, and can’t get him to stay faithful. Another met hers at a bar, and can’t get him to stop drinking. I can’t get my wife to stop saving people’s lives.

“What advice should I give my clients?” I asked my daughter, “About where to go to meet the right person?”

“Tell them to go nowhere,” she said. “The right person will come at the right time in the most unusual place.”

She’s only 18 but she’s very wise.

It worked!

So here is an earlier pencast that I posted on Facebook….

This is a different kind of blog. This is a test, and if it works, then I’ll put some other stuff here shortly.

This is a pencast. A pencast is something I can do with my “spy pen” – the pen I warn all of my clients about when they first come to see me. The spy pen records audio as it writes. I use it in my clinical work (and I don’t share any of this with anyone) and I am beginning to explore sharing it as a teaching tool.

If it works, you should be able to see writing and hear audio when you click below:

There, how did that work?

Valentine’s Day was this week. I posted an Onion video on my Facebook page, just for fun. You can find it here. If you’re not familiar with the Onion, they do satire. But if you watch the video, you’ll probably figure that out for yourself.

Every year, on Valentine’s Day, I head to Russell’s Flowers in downtown Hamilton and buy an inordinately large amount of roses. I repeat this process a few months later, in May, on our anniversary.

I only go to Russell’s these two times each year. Well, I go again if someone dies. But I don’t call very often. Each time, though, the guy who takes my order asks, as soon as I say, “I’d like to order _ roses” – as soon as I say that, he says, “Is that Mr. Brown?”

I didn’t think it was that many roses.

I like roses, so I assume that my beloved does too. The first year I did this she was going out with someone else. He gave her roses, too. My roses made their way to her room. His went to the chapel. I won.

Why so many roses that Russell’s knows me by my order? First of all, to be fair, I think that the guy at Russell’s has a good memory. And call display.

But about the roses:

I once read The Parable of the Seven Cows. It’s a bit sexist. If you like, you can tell the story about the Seven Cow Husband or even the Seven Cow Partner.

It was the custom in the Philippines that a man seeking a bride should pay a “bride price” to the young lady’s parents. Of course the price paid depended both on the desirability of the girl and the means of the suitor.

People traded for what they needed, and livestock was the common currency. A dull, plain girl might fetch a couple of geese for her parents, while the parents of an exceptionally fine woman might receive as much as two cows.

A certain man came seeking a wife. He found the woman he loved and he approached her parents, asking for the hand of their daughter in marriage.

Now the daughter was beautiful and bright and would have made any man proud. In the currency of the day she was probably worth at least a cow, or more, if the man could afford more.

The man was what we would call middle-class. He worked hard and had some means. He could conceivably have afforded a cow or even two for this woman.

Instead he offered the parents SEVEN cows. It was an amount completely unheard of before.

The happy couple were soon married. And in time, it was obvious that there was something unusual about this couple.

The wife dressed modestly but with discriminating good taste, she proudly held her head high, and she entertained guests in her home with dignity and style.

Her rank in the community increased a hundredfold, and before long she became known for her great beauty and grace.

After all, she was a seven-cow-wife.

“I am not in love with you anymore.”

If “I love you” are the three words every lover wants to hear, these eight words are the polar opposite, and for many seem to be the death knell of the relationship.

“Why did you leave him?” I asked a client.

“I wasn’t in love with him anymore,” she answered. As if that explained everything.

Another time the woman of the couple comes to me, crying, “He says he’s not in love with me anymore!” As if nothing could be done.

Others tell me it’s a natural thing. You meet. You fall in love. You have amazing sex. And then it all cools off and you become roomates. The only solution seems to be to go online or to a bar, meet someone new, and do it all over again. As if falling in love is something you can do only once per person, for a limited time only.

Is it so?

I grew up in a different time and under the influence of different people. Like Bill Cosby. Bill Cosby once did a comedy sketch that began this way: “In every relationship there are times when you wake up in bed in the morning, you look at your partner sleeping peacefully on the pillow beside you, and you think, ‘You parasite.’” I heard this sketch before I had had any relationships of my own, and so I went into my first relationship expecting that there would be times like that, times when I would look at my par–tner (Freudian slip there – I almost typed ‘parasite’) and think un-in-love-like things. But Cosby’s sketch went on with the parasitic partner telling him to take his daughter to the football game, so they – Cosby and the partner – were obviously in a committed relationship and, presumably it got better again, later in the game.

That’s what I expected would happen in my relationship. We would meet, fall in love, have amazing sex, have parasitic moments, and it would get better.

So I met and fell in love with this woman in 1980. And I have to say, we’ve had our moments of amazing sex and not-so-amazing non-sex. But I’m here to tell you that falling in love isn’t something you have to do only once for a limited time, and then you have to change partners.

Falling in love is a feeling. Like anger. Ever been angry? Sure. Were you only ever angry once with a given person, and never had the feeling again toward said person? Probably not. So why, then, should you fall in love once, and once you fall out of love, expect never to fall in love again with that same person?

Just saying.

You see a car you like in the lot and the salesman, all smiles, hands you the keys and says, “Take it for a test drive. No obligation.” You’re delighted because you know you’re not really going to buy the car, just take it for a spin, and it’s not going to cost you a dime.

You climb in and there’s that new car smell. The engine leaps to life at the turn of the key – not like that clunker you’re driving now. The acceleration is quick, the steering smooth. You head for the highway ramp and for the first time in years you’re not flooring the gas to merge with traffic. “This is nice,” you say out loud. But you’re still just taking it for a “free” spin, planning to drop the keys back in the salesman’s hand when you return.

By the end of the test drive you’re not so sure, your face falls as you catch sight of your rusting heap waiting to reclaim you, and you’re mentally making readjustments to your budget. The salesman has the paperwork out – low monthly payments from now until eternity – and before you realize it you’ve tied the knot on a new car. Sure there were two or three models you were going to test drive besides the one you just bought, but you’re here and it’s suddenly a lot harder to get out of the feeling that sometime during the test drive you fell into a commitment with this particular vehicle, and what’s one car compared to another, anyway? Sigh. Here you are. Here you will stay.

“Try before you buy” looks like a buyer’s dream but it only works if the buyer has a very strong constitution. You have to have the guts to say “No thanks” if you think that this isn’t the best deal for you. It means shouldering disappointment, having to wait longer for the new item, and accepting a certain amount of implied guilt: the other party, even though they promised you a no-commitment trial, is now looking reproachfully at you as if to say, “If you weren’t going to buy in, why did you lead me on?” There’s a reason that “Try before you buy” is so prevalent in the marketplace: it encourages consumers to buy, even when buying is a bad choice for them.

However just because something is bad for you, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have the right to choose to do it. And you might or might not want to be informed of the risks. In the past, Statistics Canada has been a good place to go for information on risk, but StatsCan today is facing severe cutbacks. The census is shorter, ostensibly because Canadians have a right to privacy, the government says. I think that StatsCan is being reigned in because people don’t want to be told about the risks inherent in what they choose to do.

For example, most of the people I come in contact with in my practice believe that living common-law is a good idea, a sort of “try before you buy” into a marriage. But the facts say otherwise:

“Living common-law is … strongly associated with a first marital breakdown. In fact, the risk is 50% higher among people who lived with their partner before the wedding than among those who did not. This finding is supported by recent Canadian research which clearly shows that marriages preceded by a common-law union are distinctly less stable than those that began at the altar, possibly because the tradition of marriage is less important to people who have participated in non- traditional conjugal relationships.” (1)

Living common-law before marriage makes the marriage more likely to fail – fifty percent more likely. Thirty-eight percent of all marriages in Canada eventually end in divorce (better than in the U.S., where the divorce rate is closer to 50%). If you live common-law before you marry, the chances of your marriage ending in divorce increase to 57%.

I think the problem here is “Try before you buy”. Moving in together seems a relatively easy thing to do, sort of like a free test drive. But as soon as you move in together, you give up your independence. Maybe you sold your home or let your lease go, and got rid of that extra bed, stove, and fridge. So now you’re sort of stuck together. If it doesn’t work out, you’ll have to buy a new stove and fridge. Who has that kind of money? Then, like the customer at the end of the test drive, you’re committed to a Ford, even though you’re starting to wish that maybe you’d held out until you tried the Jaguar down the street.

If you’re already living common-law, what should you do? Have a strong constitution. Don’t just fall into the commitment. Think about it. Thinking it wasn’t such a good idea? Start saving up for your own fridge and stove, and hold out for a better vehicle.

This is a controversial topic, I know. I publish my thoughts with some trepidation. StatsCan lost their budget after publishing such things. Have I offended you? Do you think I make a point? What’s the upside of living common-law? Email me. I’d love to hear from you.
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1. Warren Clark and Susan Crompton (2006), Til Death Do Us Part? The Risk of First and Second Marriage Dissolution. Canadian Social Trends Summer 2006, p. 24. Available online, http://www.statcan.gc.ca/access_acces/archive.action?loc=/pub/11-008-x/11-008-x2006001-eng.pdf