The word canard comes from a French expression which means to half-sell a duck, in other words, to make a fool of someone. A canard is a ridiculously false report, a fabrication.The first canard is couples have to work at marriage, that hard work can make a marriage work. Isn't that more than ridiculous? Isn't that a contradiction in terms? If you love strawberries, did you have to work at loving strawberries You don't have to work at being with the one who's right for you.
Right halves have a natural understanding. The whole vocabulary of their relationship, their language, is different. They don't pretend or act. Their true feelings spring from the heart, not from a book or a counselor's technique. That's unnatural. No matter what you do, you can't turn a wrong one into the right one. What you need is a natural marriage, the right marriage. Why would you want something so wrong you have to work on it the rest of your life?
The second canard is all couples have to compromise to make their marriage work. I like that word compromise, it's such a polite word. It's easier to live with than its synonyms: accommodation, concession, truce, cease fire. We talk about compromising our principles, compromising confidential information, a compromised immune system.
If you both compromise, does that make you both losers? And if only one of you compromises, you become the servant of someone else's desires. How much can you compromise before you lose yourself as a person? This is why some marriages are hard work, it's all that compromising you do because you're with the wrong one. You ignored the buts, excepts, and if onlys. If you want to compromise, live on tiptoe, and bite your tongue all the time, you might as well marry into the royal family.
Using the word compromise is a way of glossing over the truth. Instead of saying I'm giving up what I want, or I'm surrendering my wishes, or I'm letting her control me, you can say, "Oh, I'm just compromising." The one person you don't compromise with is your other half, the one person you are so closely connected to that you live as one.
The essence of being right halves is that you are sharing a life. You never feel like you are making a sacrifice. Sacrifice means the death of something: your wants, your needs, your desires, your spirit. With right halves solutions that are perfect for both of you appear. Over and over again, things appear which are right for you both, better than what each of you thought you wanted. This is the one relationship, the only relationship, that compromise and sacrifice are not a part of. Your other half is the rest of you and you don't have to compromise with yourself.
The third canard is that improved communication skills can make a marriage work. If you can't speak to your mate from the heart, if you can't talk to them about anything and everything, who can you talk to? If you have to talk to a paid stranger, doesn't that tell you something is backwards? If you don't feel safe, comfortable, and happy with your mate, if you don't trust them, if you think they're stupid, lazy, hurtful, or mean, these are sure signs you shouldn't be with this person.
I'm sick of hearing that all couples fight. People who tell you that are setting you up to get into a wrong relationship. They are teaching you from the point of view of their own ignorance and lack of understanding. They are not with their other half. They're clueless.
The canards--about hard work, compromise, and communication skills--are so dangerous because they are lies believed as truths. People go into marriage believing they can work on the problems after the wedding. They hide things about themselves, fool themselves that they can accept the things they don't like about the other person, or think they can make their partner change. Between not knowing what love is and believing in the canards, the marriage is set up to fail. Many of us go down the aisle with one foot in the counselor's office and the other in divorce court.
If you're dating someone and having these problems--needing to work at it, compromise, having trouble communicating: the very things that comprise a bad marriage--face up to it. It just plain isn't right. Nor will it ever be right. Stop it now. Like oil and vinegar in a salad dressing, you and your partner won't stay mixed together very long. Believing in just one of the canards is enough to trap you. If you let the canards rule your life, the canards will ruin your life.
Wayne and Tamara Mitchell are authors of Your Other Half