1. Forgive everyone everything.
2. Write a letter of thanks and affirmation to your spouse and children and send the letters by traditional mail.
3. Give away a few books you have loved to a few people who you love.
4. Call an employee aside, or approach your boss, and express gratitude about something in the organization.
5. Phone a former teacher.
6. Drop in on an elderly friend and sit and chat for a long while.
7. Leave a significant tip for someone who makes your life work a little more efficiently.
8. Drop in on your children at school simply to tell them you love them.
9. Write an affirming note to someone who is now on the periphery of your life but who used to be in your inner-circle.

Women who lose themselves to a lover or a spouse, do so because they did not bring enough SELF into the relationship in the first place. They “soft-pedal,” downplay, or compromise who they are in order to be accepted and loved.

Conversely, a woman, with a healthy sense of self, understands, before she even meets a man, that no man, (marriage, or children) will make her happier than she already is. Such a woman will not “lose herself” in a relationship because she does not invest all of her hopes and dreams in any relationship. Healthy people do not expect relationships to offer what relationships simply do not, and cannot, offer.

If a woman sees a man, (marriage, or children) as a means to be delivered from some unhappy state, or as possessing the key to finding true happiness, she has already sold herself to the illusion that her happiness and fulfillment somehow rests within the hands and the power of others.

Bringing strength, self-awareness, self-assured-ness, personal goals, courage and determination (a developed “sense of self”) to a relationship (in other words, refusing to “soft-pedal”) may indeed scare off a man who has a poor sense of himself, but it will invigorate and attract the kind of man who honors equality, mutuality and respect.

“Forgive yourself for the mistake you made when you were so young then ‘turn the page.’ The first step in faith is the hardest.” Cheryl, (Durban)

“Why would she EVER want to waste her wonderful husband’s time and distress him by telling him about a jelly fish of a man who does not respect any woman he comes across?” Fiona, Durban

“Her past is not letting her keep him happy. She can’t make or keep anyone else happy. Should she tell her husband? Absolutely! Hard to believe it wasn’t discussed when getting serious about each other.” (Anonymous)

“Let the past stay in the past. She needs to forgive herself and try to get the lesson from the experience. There is no point in burdening this “wonderful person” she is married to, other than to have something to hook her insecurities onto.” (Anne, North Carolina, USA)

“This matter, in my opinion should have been dealt with in the courtship stage, but unfortunately it was not.” (Cliff, Estonia)

“She will never trust him, and he will never understand her present insecure behaviour, until she tells him about her past. It’s an invisible elephant in the room. It’s a risk she needs to take so her past is no longer allowed to define her present.” (Jenny, UK)

“When I was 18 I met man (30) through a dating site. We were both sexually inclined, myself more so because I was exploring. He told me that he had ‘marital discord’ and was separated from his wife. He also had a daughter whom he loved. We got emotionally involved and decided to meet. We met for two days and were intimate. He left saying he would be by my side but wouldn’t marry me. I decided I would never marry anyone if it were not he. We’d used to talk on the phone. After a couple of months his wife and daughter came back. He asked me to be careful when I phoned him. I became more and more insecure. He never understood it. He always called ours a ‘platonic relationship’ and my behavior immature and stopped taking my phone calls altogether. Now I’m 29 and married to a wonderful person but my past haunts me. I’ve started doubting my husband when I know he never hides anything. He doesn’t know anything about my past and I cannot tell him. I love my husband very much but my past is not letting me keep him happy. What do I do?”

Does she reveal her past or not? Readers please help.

Rod,

I was thinking of you today at lunch. I happened to have snagged a C.S. Lewis book on my way out the door to catch the train to work, and I was reading it at my favorite Indian place. I’d snatched the book just for train-reading, but I’ve noticed with Lewis that after you’ve put him on the shelf for awhile, when you pick him back up he blows your mind all over again. And, I suppose, somehow, you and C.S. Lewis and Anthony Hopkins are all jumbled up and associated with each other in the movie-theater in my head.

The trinity of associations probably grows out of the fact that Anthony Hopkins played C.S. Lewis in ‘The Shadowlands.’ And then you sort of look like Anthony Hopkins, or at least I’ve always thought so. There is, too, the British accent and cadence that thrums in my head when I read the words on the page. But then there is also a deeper connection between you and C.S. Lewis, insofar as you both have played similar, particular and transformative roles. C.S. Lewis having done so passively and abstractly, and you having played a more active, concrete, and engaged role. At any rate, when I came back to the office, I looked you up. I read some things you’ve written recently. I looked at pictures of you and your boys. The boys are quite handsome these days, and they appear happy in the photographs, which made me happy in turn.

The letter I’m always meaning to write you, Rod, has grown and grown in my mind as time has passed, until by now it’s an epistle of such out-sized proportions I don’t think I could ever commit it to paper, or put the majority of it into words in any sequence that would make sense, even if I was just talking to myself.

So instead, I thought, I’ll just write Rod a little note. To tell you that I think of you often, and that things that you once said to me–some of these ideas and principles that you tried to explain to me so long ago– have continued to save me in times of trouble, loosen my anxiety in tight spots, strengthen me when strength has been needed. So, I guess: thank you. A thousand times. The way I’ve lived my life Rod, if you could speed it up it up and stream it together into a single image, has been like a man pulling the trigger to blow his brains out and instead of dying his life is saved.

And, indeed, you did get through to me, Rod. Though it took awhile.

A decade and change, if I’m doing my accounting correctly. By which time, of course, we’d fallen out of touch.

Also, I’ve had occasion to think of you some of these late nights at the office. Recently, it’s become a kind of professional necessity for me to immerse myself in and commit to memory the recent history of Africa. And that gets me thinking about you, too. Both you and your boys.

I just wanted to touch base and let you know that I’m thinking about you, old man. That I love you, that in the body of Christ you are close to me always, feeding me, reanimating me, and reminding me to get my shit together. I love you, Rod.