Rabbi Akiva Rutenberg - Overcoming Challenges in Marital Harmony and Other Relationships

[Music] my name is Robin Berg one of the founders of the Emmitt organization and one of the topics that we really focus on that Emmitt is shaman bias and relationships and Emmet has had the supposed to run for major couples retreats some of you have been at our retreats and each one is really more phenomenal than the one before it and these retreats focus on Sheldon diet they focus on parenting and it's really encouraging to me to see so many people come to work on their relationships to be the best spouses and the best parents that they can be I think the true heroes of the Jewish people are those who work on themselves and who constantly strive to be the best that they can be so Kazakh brooked all of you my background in addition to being a rabbi I also have a degree in clinical social work and I have the opportunity to give a class to couples before their wedding I've given it about 200 times give or take and it's really one of one of the things I look forward to the most and Emma and I'm doing one tomorrow morning is is giving this class and helping couples start their relationships on the best way possible and whether you're a newlywed whether you've been married for many years each one of us is working on these issues of show and bias and parenting and hosaka booth with all of you very often we grew up in homes where let's say our mothers did not work and we have a certain picture in our mind of what a mother should be doing and although we're all intelligent and sometimes this can actually happen to the most intelligent people can do the stupidest things right and I actually had a conversation with a neighbor of mine going back a few years ago who was upset about here the husband was upset that his wife was not having dinner ready as she used to and then I asked a few questions and basically the wife had just started working full-time before she had working just a little bit she was working for pun and she was getting home look around six o'clock 6:30 and the husband was getting home at about 7 o'clock and he was expecting basically the same supper to be ready as if she wasn't working and this is an intelligent person but somehow it didn't compute in his mind that she's in a different situation now than she was before it was such a given like you know you turn on the sink and water comes out so life cook supper this is done laundry is done this is done that's done and the reality is when you have two people working in a home it changes things it's not so simple and quite frankly it could be than in many situations it's better not to have two people working full-time now we could get into the whole discussion of the cost of living here in New York but it's extremely high and all the different expenses and whether it's housing expenses or whether it's the the tuition expense or whether we're talking about the wedding expense and I'm not talking about for the couple that's getting married there's there's tremendous amount of expenses and a tremendous amount of stress on families and my my answer to this although we could talk about this I could talk about say the length but my answer in short is there's one thing which has to do with the obligation from the ketubah of a husband and wife to each other but there's another thing which has to do with common sense you know we say there's four sections of the shot on our walk and the fifth one it's common sense using your ha ha using your tab and very often arguments and fights and disagreements break out in areas that don't need to come up break out but if we would just be more understanding and realized that the dynamic here is different from where you grew up and therefore it has to be treated differently so many so many problems could be averted often I find the arguments get so quickly out of hand when it's so not necessary where a husband might say you're not doing this to his wife and it'll come across as an attack and she might respond with why do you think I have to be doing this and it can quickly quickly escalate to something which is very very problematic and if they'll both look at the situation from the side of we're both in this together we're both trying to build a family together the the situation could be could be be escalated very quickly very often we put the effort in what we think is effort but it's not what the other person needs and we have a tendency like a rubric of mention with the five love languages to be exactly like us even though logically we know that that's not the case and when we talk about effort in marriage so much of the effort is in the thought in the the care in the facial expressions you know we say 80% of communication is nonverbal which means that you could be making a lot of effort but somehow your body language is coming across like you don't really want to be there and sometimes it's subconscious that's we have to get to the therapist you know it's in the deep subconscious but our body language comes across in ways less often different than what we actually think that we're doing and I think it's important to keep that in mind I'll share a very quick story that I share with couples that just touches on the idea of effort and this was a couple that my wife and I had the opportunity to learn with before their wedding and it goes back like probably all close to a decade ago and the wife the the fiance the collar getting married in about three weeks and she says to my to my wife she says you know my husband had my my fiancee hasn't said I love you to me yet is that a problem and she stuck I know that he loves me but he hasn't said those words so I was learning with the shaitaan and the next week I asked him I said he's a very bright guy he's working in Wall Street and a very nice person and I said to him I said you know just curious have you bought your wife flowers your fiancee flower and he says no should I so I was getting getting the feeling that something is a little bit roll off and then I said what about write her a card and he's like no so I challenged him and I said listen it's Thursday night for this Shabbat buy her flowers write a little card it doesn't make a difference what it says and give it to her before Shabbat and I said I'll follow up if you want to Shabbat to see that you did it I call multi Shabbat and he says to me goes rabbi you're not gonna believe what happened we went to the florists to finalize the arrangements for the wedding and the florist gave her flowers I didn't have to do it like I like okay we're okay we got we got a problem here houston we have a problem right so so I dug a little bit deeper and I asked him I said has she has she ever written you a card and he said to me a card he's like she wrote me a 30 page letter of all the dreams and that she has for our marriage and all she was very emotionally expressive and he wasn't so emotionally expressive but they made a very nice couple and I explained to him something which I think is very important for all marriages which is that I told him if you write the silliest little thing on a little card that just says the word love somewhere there it just says something nice it's gonna be gold to her because she knows that this is something that's not so easy for you to do and I think when we think about effort sometimes we don't we have to think about what does my spouse need what is what exactly talks to them and very often effort is not the thing that makes you sweat it's not it's like it's like we say it's not about working harder it's about working smarter we live in a time where technology has literally taken over our lives and just to piggyback on Shabbat I think if it wasn't for Shabbat I don't know how anyone does it without Shabbat honestly so at least we have that one day without technology and one of the advices advice that I would give is take advantage of Shabbat because on Shabbat so we were shown a Shabbat were not tempted by the technology so make sure that at least on Shabbat you're giving your spouse and your children the proper attention this comes with planning you know to give our spouses attention to give our children attention what I've learned in my own life and sometimes the hard way is it comes with planning properly ahead it doesn't just happen we need to have times when we're not using our phones at all we have to have times when we're giving full attention to our spouse to our children and in order to do that I really believe and like I said before I'm struggling with this myself you need to plan ahead and for example as clásico said sometimes Shabbat is the day that people end up sleeping a lot more than they would sleep the rest of the week but if we want to connect with our family whether it's our spouse or our children we can't go into Shabbat super tired because we need to be able to be attentive to those who we really care about on Shabbat but in general technology is extremely extremely challenging I think it's very very important that we make it a priority to set limits to set limits on technology and to to try our best to make sure that we're paying attention to our spouses properly there's studies that they've been doing more and more studies today and because smartphones although these seems like they've been around forever are only really about a decade old in America and just now major studies are coming out of the powerful powerful impact that the cellphone has on our minds and let alone the radiation which is potentially an issue but they there's a tremendous amount of studies now that are showing that the connection to seeing our cellphones is similar if not stronger than heroin like the addiction the cellphone addiction to wanting to see who texted me who was at me how many messages do I have and if we think about how strong that is we all know that heroin amongst other drugs destroys marriages destroys families and destroys life technology is doing the same thing in many many ways and although it's a great car technology is a great strength that can be used to bring people together and you can text 100 people for a share and you can do amazing amazing things with technology like anything very powerful it can be used for the good and it can be used for the bad and I think we have to be very very cognizant and aware of how strong this is I saw a study that the average person and I have a feeling that many of us are better than average in this which is not a good thing touches our cellphone close to 3,000 times a day okay so let's be careful very often as we're Vicki go mentioned and the question mentioned a wife can feel that her husband is too close to his mother I find this particularly an issue if by mistake you married a nice guy okay because then the guys who aren't such nice guys they don't have such a problem with this but it's the guys who really care and are really nice people that very often feels stuck and sometimes it's more of an issue with the oldest son sometimes it's more of an issue with the youngest son but the issue is the guy feels stuck he feels like if I make one step to the left my wife says you're a mama's boy if I make one step to the right my mother says you're a traitor to me and they feel stuck and what do people do often when they feel stuck they blame their wife for making a problem with their mother they blame their mother for making a problem with their wife and they go hang out with their friends and this is not this is not the the right solution the right solution is is a husband this is something that I teach in the class I gives the couples before the wedding a husband has to know that his first and foremost priority is his wife and it doesn't mean that he doesn't have a mitzvah kubera vain doesn't have a mission what to respect his parents but his first responsibility is is to his wife and with Kozma with intelligence we can figure out a way to make sure that both the mother and the wife feel that they're taken care of first and foremost we have to accept that we're not going to make everybody happy all the time that's a recipe for disaster and it takes a certain amount of clock MA example let's use an example couples married for two years and a mother who lives a few blocks away calls at 10:30 at night and the couple was gonna go to sleep soon and the mother says my boy whatever she calls him some sweet name for him and she says Sasha come on please my the light in the hallway broke you're the only one you're so tall you're the only one who can fix this light you don't want your mother to fall right and she mentions on the side and also your I haven't seen you in a few days you know and what is he supposed to do so the worst possible thing he can do is say I love to come to my wife won't let me go that's that's that that's the worst thing he can do the smart thing to do is to unless she's literally in a second and the danger is he should say listen I'm very tired it's hard for me to come tonight but I'll come tomorrow right after work or I'll come tomorrow before I go to work and the idea is is that he has to go tomorrow if he doesn't go tomorrow then he's in big trouble but if he goes tomorrow chances are everything is gonna be okay when I tell couples is 95 or hope maybe even more maybe 98% of parents want more than anything else that their children should be happy even their in-laws even those they want they want their children to be happy and if they're from the 2% that don't want their children to be happy they need help send them to a therapist to find a good therapist but you can't do anything about that and if also if they want you to be happy people respect people who respect themselves and finally I'll just say to what Rebecca goes I'm sorry too I think they were my kids I mentioned also I find or maybe I think I live in New York mansion is I find that couples very often subconsciously maybe not on a conscious level if this if they're not feeling so close to their spouse they may not directly tell their parents to get involved but they give messages that the Sholem bias isn't so strong and that actually encourages the parents to get involved and sometimes I've actually witnessed this where children will get the parents involved because safer to make them the enemy than to make themself the enemy so the stronger you can have shown by it with your own spouse the stronger your marriage is your relationship is you almost can be protected fully from this issue people think of attraction as a physical thing and this is a very big mistake attraction is just as much on the emotional side of the spectrum and the spiritual side of the spectrum as it is to the physical when I teach couples I draw a diagram of a triangle if you picture a triangle with one side being the physical the next side being the emotional the third being the spiritual I like to call the meaning the purpose of life and life is made up of these three things intellectual I guess is somehow connected as well but these three things make up life and we tend to think of attraction as being a physical thing but I'll prove to you that it's not physical and the proof is is that when you feel close to your spouse they seem much more attractive then when you're a little distant from them when there's a distance suddenly that pimple on their face looks a lot bigger suddenly then you know if your spouse is is short or taller this or that's something a little bit different it seems more odd and what's the reason for this because our essence as human beings is we have in the summer we have a soul the connection that we have with our spouse is not purely a physical one or I hope it isn't it's so much more than that it's on the spiritual and on the emotional plane as well and if we realize this then we won't look at attraction as being purely a physical thing and very often when you start feeling that it's because the emotional connection is not where it should be having said that on the physical side it is important for couples to take care of them physically and I often tell couples I say a healthy marriage is made up of two healthy individuals and that means that even though you become one when you get married you're still in a way an individual you're a person who has your own needs and you have to take care of those needs you have to take care of your physical needs your emotional needs and therefore be able to be there for your spouse so it's a it's a big topic I'll end with with one other point when when a person when a person says that they're not finding their spouse attractive sometimes sometimes it can come from a deeper emotional psychological issues where they're actually having issues with themself and this is like some deep psychology here and I would recommend that you talk to your local therapist or find a good therapist to discuss this but there's something called projection if that happens and we're basically if a person doesn't feel good about themselves they'll project that on their spouse and sometimes what happens is a person doesn't feel attractive themself and therefore they'll start saying I don't find my spouse attractive you [Music]