The Golden Rule

I keep making the same mistake.

The first time, I was at a Bar Mitzvah party and after chatting with this fabulous woman a while, I blurted out how lucky she was to be such good friends with her husband.

Her response: silence. Then she confided that a few years back, she and her husband had separated for seventeen months.

Yesterday, I was at a roller rink helping chaperone a school field trip, when for some reason I felt compelled to tell the parent I was talking with - another terrific woman - how lucky she was to enjoy her husband's company.

This time there was a long pause before she shared how there'd been numerous times in her twenty-year marriage when she'd been ready to run.

On the bus ride home from roller-skating, I sat with my friend Kimberly. We've gone through a lot together including our second divorces. But on this trip, the talk turned to her parents' marriage and what it did or didn't teach her about how to be a wife, a mother, and a friend.

"So you think you did a lot wrong in your marriage?" I said.

"Oh yes," she replied. "But I didn't know differently. It was how I thought you could treat a husband."

The Golden Rule says, "Treat other people as you would have them treat you." But do we? Did I in my first marriage? in my second? Of course not. And look at the results.

The sun is finally out this morning. My son is at his dad's. This evening I'm meeting the man Kimberly fixed me up with for a drink. In the meantime, I think I'll go for a walk along the lake where, alone with myself, I'm hoping I'll get a little break before encountering my next blunder.