I always differed from my peers with my special interests. That’s how it was at school, at university, and later in life. In the 1990s, when everyone was watching VCR, I read Sholokhov in the reading room of the village library. At university, when everyone went to cafes and nightclubs, I wrote articles for the youth newspaper and did community work. And then I met people with similar views, and together we began to implement various community projects.
I’ve often wondered why people have such different interests and values in life. How are they formed? When do they form? By whom? Here and there I began to come across articles and books about the influence of the environment on a person, about the fact that a person, his interests, his values are completely shaped by the society in which he is, or rather, by the public opinion on which he is bound. The people with whom a person communicates, the books he reads, the programs he watches – all this forms in him certain attitudes and patterns of behavior. That’s how I found the answers to my questions, and then I was only convinced of the correctness of this approach.
Why am I writing about this? Because in building harmonious family relationships, public opinion has a key influence. For example, public opinion may dictate to me that I should not be selfish in the family. If difficulties arise, I must cancel my pride and adjust to my spouse. Or maybe it’s the other way around, when public opinion tells me, “If you’re not happy with your husband, get a divorce!” In this case, by public opinion I mean relatives, friends, colleagues at work, i.e. the environment with which I am in constant contact.
Public opinion is able to give me the necessary strength to rise above my selfish nature and to disregard my pride and move toward rapprochement every time I am separated from my spouse. For example, the strength of the community in some weight loss circle allows me to stick to certain diets. As soon as this influence disappears, i.e. I stop going to this circle, I immediately go back to my usual unhealthy eating regimen.
My husband once told a story about how he quit smoking. He read Allen Carr’s book, which had a huge impact on him, and didn’t smoke for two years. Then he got into society and made friends with people where almost everyone smoked, and gradually went back to his cigarettes. When we got married, he quit smoking again because I can’t stand cigarette smoke. That is, under my influence he had the strength to rise above his bad habit.
If you ask what this has to do with family, the answer is obvious. I don’t have the strength to fight my nature alone. In short, with their purely personal interests, their reluctance to get close in moments of disconnection. It’s unnatural. But the environment, by influencing me to convey the value of giving up selfishness for the sake of my spouse, values this kind of behavior, elevates it. So I become special in the eyes of this environment, I begin to be respected and honored. That’s the way a person is built. Public opinion is much stronger than the individual.
In this way, I can change while being influenced by my surroundings. Let’s say my spouse and I joined a society called “Keepers of the Family Hearth. We are beginning to get support from him. We are slowly mending our relationships because we have received “brainwashing. After all, by influencing each other in this small environment, we begin to behave differently. With that kind of leverage, we always have the strength to come together in moments of coldness in the relationship.
In the following essays I will describe in detail how to learn this relationship technique with your spouse. I’m sure there are times of crisis in every family from which it is very hard to get out, and the imprint in the heart remains for a long time. But by mastering the technique of getting closer to your spouse under the influence of the environment, you can quickly get out of such situations, feeling renewed and opening a whole new page in the book of marital happiness.
