for a group who moves effortlessly between broad modes of communication - phones, cell phones, faxes, voice mail, eMail, internet, pagers, tv, movies, magazines, snail mail and espresso bars - genX'ers don't seem to be expressing ourselves clearly to that one person who is most central to our lives. if we were, i don't think the divorce rates would be so enormous.

in a good, healthy relationship all the terms - the conditions - of this contract, implicit and explicit, have to be completely understood by both people. there can be no assumptions. assumptions generate miscommunication. because, in fact, it's no communication. it's a one sided, ill-informed, undiscussed decision.

uncommunicated conditions are blatantly unfair and act as poison to a relationship. in a sense it's like setting a trap for the other person. you're waiting for them to violate a secret condition you've made on the relationship. if they fall short or fail this condition(s) of love, then your love is revoked or reduced - without the person being aware of that penalty. and love being taken away is the exact heavy penalty we fear in marriage.

i feel fortunate. my former wife made her expectations known a good portion of the time. from her background, she developed an assertiveness and an outspokenness which, unfortunately, not everyone has. she often placed disclaimers on her viewpoints and laid out expectations up front because she had been so misunderstood and disappointed in the past.

disappointment, often, is a contributing factor in divorce. and what is disappointment but something not happening which we thought would happen, or vice versa.

sadly, is a romantic relationship continually on a balance scale, on a see-saw of expectations? expectations which are fulfilled and ones which aren't. and does the end of a relationship naturally happen when the scale eventually becomes unbalanced by just one too many unmet expectations pulling down the weight of romantic hopes?

do all experiences and personal qualities carry the same weight or different weights? meaning, does it take an equal number of hopes which are met and which strengthen the relationship to an equal number of dashed hopes for the scale to begin dipping into the negative zone? or, do one or two or three unmet expectations and hopes have far more weight than a hundred loving, caring experiences and positive personal qualities? how long does this imaginary scale have to be "down" before the relationship breaks?

each of us enters a romantic relationship with a certain set of notions of how we want things to be - of what we expect from a relationship. we bring these ideas with us and they're in place even before a relationship is under way. these expectations are cultivated, and conditioned, over many years. they are shaped by our own positive and negative relationship histories. they're shaped by the works of fiction we read and watch; by the music we listen to. our understandings are shaped by true stories family and friends tell us.

with these unspoken wants operating in the background, there can be a lot expected of the other person. this can be advantageous, and it can also be ruinous. if the couple are close and can communicate well, a set of expressed expectations can be a helpful guide to how to treat the other person. but if the relationship isn't honest, assumptions; misinterpretations and misunderstandings happen. disappointment happens. accumulated, uncommunicated disappointments eventually reach a reach a breaking point and get expressed in one way or another. sometimes a relationship can be too far gone by the time all those mini disappointments finally are communicated.

of course, there's usually a mixture of both explicitness and assumption at work in a marriage. it seems to be the nature of men and women to miscommunicate. we are inherently different and experience our inner, and therefore outer and expressive, lives differently.

the key is accept this and respect it. the challenge is to understand it and comprehend it and live within it. throughout my marriage i had regarded our relationship as the most open and honest one i knew of. we loved each other deeply and were interested in one another greatly and talked openly our entire 5 year relationship. even an afternoon was too long for us to be apart. but it took a divorce for me to finally understand how separate the languages we spoke to one another were. we both used all the same words, the thing was as a man and a woman we had different expectations behind those words. however, even though my former wife was excellent at expressing her feelings and expectations to me - which then improved my skills as well - i maintain that there was some unmet expectation, some unspoken disappointment which finally factored into the decision to "not want to be married anymore". once, i asked her how did she expect me to be. her answer was; "just like her father". while this is not much of a stretch - and, yes, i expected her to match some of my mother's traits, too - it was enough of a secret disappointment - an unmet expectation - to factor into a decision to divorce.

i believe it's important to align the other person to one's expectations. although, to tell someone else what you want, you need to be clear about it yourself. and in our twenties, we're not always clear on what we really want. so, we wait and see, or we dive in headlong into things. and by the nature of being young, we discover many things aren't what we want. so, we continue to define our expectations and personalities using the process-of-elimination. sometimes we're married during this process of aligning our expectations.

within my former family-in-law, there existed a feminist leaning. my mother in law was an accomplished professor at an all-women's college and my former wife had attended an all-girls high school. this definitely broadened my horizon's. though, for all the ideals espoused, life still essentially boiled down to "traditional" expectations. men were expected to be the strong-but-sensitive bring-home-the-kill providers, and the women would take it from there, thank you very much. in my opinion, my former mother in-law was far more confident and assured about how to integrate feminism into her marriage than her daughter was. why, then, was my former wife so unsure? especially being a student of feminism and having good teachers. was it youth, or mixing it with our generation's issues or a combination of the two? at any rate, for all the expectations - i.e.: the "new" acceptable codes of behavior - feminism has laid out for men, today there appears to be currents of "traditional" role responsibilities still present.

virgin/whore, poet/warrior. what is a man's role in the post-feminist world now? what is expected of a husband, what qualities are women honestly seeking in a potential husband they're dating? while men are often maligned for wrestling with the - in the woman's view - "petty" internal conflict of wanting one woman to fulfill each of the virgin/whore roles, it seems to me today's women must conquer within their own psyche's a poet/warrior complex. often i hear women express their desires to simply have their feelings acknowledged and appreciated by the man they love. the poet sensitivities. these same women, if asked directly, admit they wouldn't even romantically consider for marriage a man without a steady job, career goals, wealth - or atleast the promise of soon to be wealth. the warrior aggressiveness. in the same way that most women can't always fulfill both roles, so most men can't always evenly divide themselves up, either. is the man's purpose solely to provide financial income so that the woman may have her babies and have them clothed and feed and schooled? and is there a dichotomy in the fact women also want (need) closeness and emotional intimacy, but for the man to go and earn all enough money to provide the best for her (their) babies, today the man is required to apply much time and energy to a career in order to earn that sort of wealth. and spending that kind of time and energy means being away from home often, not being around as much and therefore running the risk of becoming distanced not only physically, but eventually emotionally, too. and then resentment can build that her needs aren't meet and he's neglecting her. and the reason for the neglect is so he can provide her what she desires: a family. and to have that family requires making money. and making money these days all too often requires excessive amounts of family-time-robbing commitments from the relationship.

again, it's back to balance. perhaps our generation simply isn't in a position to do it and have it all simultaneously. perhaps we need to either do the career, the marriage, the kids sequentially and/or reign in our standards a little.

(perhaps we need to learn from the dual-career couple boomers whose own children i've openly witnessed saying to their parents: "i hate you" when they're not around enough. is earning enough for the bmw worth the expense of a child's neglect? is this what we want?)

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