SMART LOVE

By Vincent Fudge

Establish healthy communication in your relationship with this insightful guide, which includes activities, examples, and experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lloyd Vincent Fudge Jr
• Release date: Jul 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781087890951

Vincent Fudge

A high school dropout with a criminal record, Vincent Fudge II spent eight months homeless before joining the military. He used educational benefits from the military to earn both a bachelor's and master's degree in communication, then ventured across the country with his wife and first child to finesse his way into one of the nation's top military financial services associations. He built a house for his family, had two additional children, and wrote his first relationship improvement book inspired by his marital missteps. After facing marital adversity and re-evaluating his life goals, he started a life coaching business. He worked for sugar water and used life's lemons to make lemonade. He currently lives in San Antonio, Texas, with his three children.

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SMART Love

SMART Love:

The MANual

Vincent Fudge II

© 2020 by Lloyd Vincent Fudge Jr.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV® Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Details in some anecdotes and stories have been changed to protect the identities of the persons involved.

Prologue

As a surveyor, I encourage you to consider how to learn from these shared experiences and not place judgment on who was right or wrong in any scenario that tells the story of our journey. The goal of this project was to document how I approached fixing my marriage, deliberately detailing the exercises we worked through. I found that a lot of advice I had read or had been given tended to be ambiguous, and for the advice to be applicable, I had to take what I could from it and implement my own interpretation of the advice. Many people discuss what worked for them without describing how they did it.

It is my hope that you find truth in my truth, either in finding a way to articulate your similar struggles with my words, identifying with my self-reflection, or (at times) self-deprecation, as I chose to be transparent with my vulnerability. I hope you find value in the breakdowns of how relational improvement exercises were executed. I also hope that you can learn from my faults by not making the same missteps and by seeing the occasional error in my judgment.

There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn; whatever steps we take, they are necessary to reach the places we have chosen to go.

—Richard Bach

What Working through It Looks Like

The What, the Why, and the Stakes

Once upon a time, a knucklehead named Edward faced a domestic violence charge for putting his wife’s head through a wall as part of an argument over tampering with the thermostat. I was Edward. Edward was me. I was the knucklehead. Definitively, I believed this to be the incident that would either make or break our marriage.

The events that were catalyst to this project happened just days before the traditional New Year’s celebrations. In reflection, the previous year was overall a good year for my wife and me; we completed the new-construction home-buying process days before my thirty-first birthday and had a personal high annual grossing year. I had accomplished a handful of other significant milestones, but I found myself exhausted of the relationship I had with my spouse. My wife, Ebony, and I had been on and off in our overall relationship over the past decade. Several years into knowing one another, we had our first child together, Elizabeth. We decided to get married two years ago, about four months ahead of our second child, Elijah, being born. The first year and a half of marriage had been tumultuous—full of episodes, meltdowns, things unsaid, bad behavior—but also had enough good times to not make civil separating the easy and logical solution.

When I thought about myself and how I identified the biggest challenges I saw in our relationship, I thought that, because it was dangerous for us both to have high levels of emotion about anything at the same time, I often felt the need to turn down my emotional volume in order to maintain our relationship. The most significant side effects of this action were that I progressively became less emotionally in tune with my wife and found myself more distant from and less compassionate with my family. Being consistently nonchalant had a negative impact on my family and specifically with my wife. It had gotten to the point where I did not feel anything toward her, and our coexistence, for me toward her, had become more out of tolerance than love based on our parenting commitments.

An analogy I used to describe my situation was that I had built a great and mighty statue of my accomplishments out of marble. The problem was that the foundation was fractured. Corrupted, in an irreparable way. I had the choice of either continuing to find ways to prop up my statue and be okay with the flaws in hopes that I could keep the monument erect (as to not lose everything I worked for), or I could just let it all fall apart—let the statue (my life’s work) fall to pieces—and start over with the knowledge gained from experience and rebuild the right way with the right person. I did not have the courage to squeeze the trigger on letting things fall apart for two reasons: I did not want to lose what I had worked for over the many years, and I was afraid of the life impacts to myself, my children, and those around me.

I was emotionally stuck in the fourth quarter of last year to the determent of myself and everyone around me. I was no longer effective with my self-care remedies of withdrawing into myself, trying to figure things out. I had become much less resilient in overcoming adversity, and the life challenges I was facing continued to increase in complexity. I was not eating right or sleeping well, and I was struggling with a lot of repressed anger. Unfortunately, I did get a handle on myself before I blacked out in response to not wanting to entertain a conversation that I tried to walk away from…regarding the damn thermostat.

The Thermostat Issue. Tensions were high as a result of being financially overextended and a not-very-well-executed holiday season. My father came to our house on his birthday so we could spend time together and do family things. While my father was using the restroom, my wife and I broke into an argument I instigated when I noticed that the thermostat had been tampered with. I proceeded to update the lock code on the thermostat so that it could not be tampered with in the future, and my wife had become upset because she only changed the temperature by three degrees because the children were cold. I insisted that they dress accordingly and to not tamper with the thermostat because it was programmed in a way that fit our budget. After threatening to tear the thermostat out of the wall if I did not provide the password, she explained that not having thermostat access made her feel like less of a homeowner. Since a portion of what she contributed to the joint bills account was intended to cover the electric bill, she said she would remove her funds from the joint account if money was not being allocated correctly. I said, Fine, assuming that would be the end of the argument.

When I retreated into my office to check my schedule for the upcoming week, she approached me again, seeking to continue the conversation. When I did not acknowledge her willingness to continue the conversation, she responded poorly to my lack of responsiveness by demanding my attention through snatching my laptop off my lap, slightly scratching my hand in the process. In hindsight, it was the lack of respect and slight negative physical stimulation that set me off. It was completely wrong for me to respond the way I did; there was no excuse. I shot up out of my chair, grabbed my wife’s arm, and shouted vulgarities. My wife tore her arm free of me and slapped me across the face. I palmed her forehead and slammed her head into the wall behind us. I continued to pin my wife against the wall as she lashed out at me until my father came in and broke us up. Instinctively, my wife called 911.

My intentions were to stay with my mother for a few days, and the police arrived while I was in the process of packing my bags. My wife ultimately refused to press charges, but the officers chose to arrest me anyway, declaring that the state would press charges on her behalf. After forty-seven hours in jail and a $3,500 cash bond, I was released back to my family, just in time to bring in the new year.

Truth be told: the hours in jail were just what I needed. I needed to hit rock bottom. I needed a wake-up call. It was in this time I realized I had received what I prayed for—just not in the way I thought I would.

When I found I was beyond self-help, I went to God for understanding. Often I pray for what I desire, be it the courage to do something or the wisdom of understanding why something was not meant for me (the gift of hindsight). When I realized I had lost emotion for my wife, that at the time I could not manifest positive emotion for my wife by my own means and that I could not fake the level of caring and emotion needed to foster a healthy relationship, I prayed for the genuine emotion to save our relationship or to take things falling apart out of my hands. I asked for this in prayer because if separating was what was best at the time, I did not have the courage to do it.

And we know that in all things, God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

—Romans 8:28

While I sat contemplating and brooding in jail, I had an overwhelming emotion I struggled to contain—not anger but remorse. I was sorry for lashing out at my wife the way I did. She did not deserve the reaction she got, regardless of how I felt she contributed to the incident. I was embarrassed, ashamed. I felt I failed my children, I failed myself, and I failed my wife. My lashing out did not come from malice; I literally broke away from reality for a moment. When I returned, the look on her face was one I never thought I would see and never want to see again. Anguish. Fear. Confusion. Disappointment.

In jail, I felt I was so…low. There was nothing more I wanted than to go backward or forward in time just to make things right. Walking the path of redemption with legitimate intentions was where I needed to be to fix my emotions for who was supposed to be the love of my life. I needed to hurt about it. I needed to feel it. The outcome of this situation required jail time; I could have lost my fancy job. We could have lost the house we built. We could have needed to file for bankruptcy. At that point, it would not have been farfetched to throw divorce on the pile, too, and burn it all up. Though I would have still retained everything that made me me, the hard reset would just be forced, and I would be back at ground zero with all my lessons learned to rebuild my life the right way.

I had to reach a point of acceptance for whichever outcome was God’s plan for me. I also knew that for me to fix my marriage on the platform of emotion I had just been provided, I needed a strategy and plan of action through which to focus my energy and efforts.

Herein lies the context of SMART Love.

I had never been good at being in a relationship. Or rather, due to a lack in relational experiences, I struggled with understanding how to be a good relational partner beyond merely being a solid and consistent provider. In my growing up, my mother had several consistent suitors, which led me to understand that not only did she know how to be one of the most independent people I have ever known, she also understood how to be a good relational partner. She had an abundant amount of life experiences in both respects. I, very selfishly, had almost always been about myself. I had mistreated, misled, manipulated, dismissed, and fucked over several dozen women while focusing on my goals and adding notches to my belt. The three times I called myself being in love ended disastrously, and it was not until the year before I got married that I realized the severity of the reckless disregard I had for other people’s emotions over the years. My karma, I suppose, was rightfully where and how I wound up, for better or for worse.

What I had always been good at was writing and talking—strengths I capitalized on through the university. While I had the opportunity to learn more about interpersonal and relational communicating, I did not make time for understanding or growing in that way. I focused on how to articulate in an organizational communications sense, and with my motivations toward career progression over marital satisfaction, I wound up managing a team of software developers that delivered iterative enhancements to a suite of desktop tools utilizing a specific delivery methodology called Agile. I was pretty good at what I did. I enjoyed my work and felt the value I delivered in the workplace. If I ever did anything right, it was my work. This SMART Love project was an opportunity to bring my work home with me, providing some of the same principles and rigor that worked on the team that I managed to my relationship in hopes of finding the same measures of success.

The Methodology. Consider this. (Stay with me. This is a bit dense, but I promise I will pull the thread through and make it make sense.) In the workplace, my boss would allocate X amount of dollars to spend in a year with a set vision as to how that money would be spent, and the value delivered ultimately was tied to how each enhancement aligned to my boss’s shared vision of what right looked like. I would take that vision and share it with my team, and we would align to the shared vision. Next, we would have a discussion about how we would commit to working together to deliver work that aligned to the shared vision, which was defining the guidelines for how we would commit to working together. The development team and I would define what success looked like, and we drafted a team agreement that everyone signed as a means of accountability for how we committed to working together for the dedicated period. The way we wrote our commitments was using the SMART format, which promoted consistency in what we committed to.

SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound.

When two people enter a relationship together, they enter it with a shared vision of what the relational potential looks like. (Consider that relationships that do not have a shared vision do not work out. If one person views marriage while the other one views friend with benefits, the relationship will not work. Alignment on shared vision is paramount.) The first thing that should happen is a conversation of alignment on shared visions: Do we share the same vision of success for our relationship? The outcome of that conversation should be a clearly articulated understanding of what right looks like for the relationship. While most couples get this right (or think they do) without even having the conversation, the second step is where all failing relationships fall apart: execution.

Imagine two people who share the same view of their relationship but are not aligned on how they are committed to working on their relationship. Call them Jack and Jill. Assume that both Jack and Jill are equally invested in the relationship, and both are actively trying to improve their relationship. Consider this one of several scenarios that could arise: Jack contributes value to the relationship in his own way based on what matters to him. Jill does the same and contributes value to the relationship in her own way based on what matters to her. Jill may not appreciate Jack’s efforts to improve the relationship because Jack is not doing what Jill wants or needs Jack to do in the relationship (or vice versa; the roles can be interchangeable in this example). While Jack is absolutely trying, his try may not be in the way Jill desires him to try. So Jack gets frustrated and does less trying and resents Jill for not trying in the relationship the way he desires. Jack and Jill dwell in mutual resentment and contempt for one another, and the relationship eventually fails, not due to a lack of trying to work on their relationship but rather not having a shared understanding of how they viewed their relationship and how they agreed to work on it.

Approaching shared vision creation in relationships is a process of conversations that lead to understanding if executed correctly. The first step in shared vision creation is to divorce the social standards of what a relationship should