Louisa and Michael living with a bunch of hippies/uni students on a Border Leicester stud near Armidale in 1974. Little did I know we were about to enter the danger zone and I would discover the meaning on pain. (She had already discovered it...)
The following is an excerpt from the book. The first half of the book is posted as the first entry on this blog. You can email me for the whole manuscript if you want it. Gratis.
.........
This book is called a “Self Defence Course” because that’s what it is. It sets out plainly and simply a three-step process you can follow to disarm and capture your enemy. But unlike any ordinary self defence course, it’s not about your enemy – it’s about you. Only you can stop the pain that both of you are feeling as you struggle to come to terms with each other. Ghandi said: “Be the change you want to see in others.” Every counsellor and expert will tell you: you can’t change people. Endless nagging doesn’t make men better husbands. Retreating into your cave and acting hurt hasn’t worked with your wife yet, has it? It doesn’t work with mine.
Fighting with her doesn’t work. She only gets more entrenched in her point of view. Reasoning with her doesn’t work. Let’s face it, women are not reasonable from a male point of view. She’s not going to change… she’d have done it by now. If you think hunkering down and waiting out the storm will see her become sweet and loving again, you are wrong. The odds are she’ll get worse and finally she’ll press the eject button.
[If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got. – Anon.]
You have to take the battle up to her. Force change on her by changing yourself. Come out of your corner and hit her with every thing you’ve got in your arsenal of Love. You can love a woman into submission.
[The kind of marriage you make depends upon the kind of person you are. If you are a happy, well-adjusted person, the chances are your marriage will be a happy one. If you have made adjustments so far with more satisfaction than distress, you are likely to make your marriage and family adjustments satisfactorily. If you are discontented and bitter about your lot in life, you will have to change before you can expect to live happily ever after. -Evelyn Duvall and Reuben Hill]
This Course challenges you to lead the way in renovating your relationship. It challenges you to change the way you think about your partner, what you do and say to them, and how you think about yourself.
Be warned. This Course is easy only if you are flexible and courageous. Do you have the guts to truly love your wife? That is the question you will answer to yourself as you go through the stages of this Course. Remember, the love that you are seeking is searching for you right now, according to Deepak Chopra. Are you ready to answer its call?
[“Although it happens spontaneously, falling in love isn’t accidental – there are no accidents in the spiritual life, only patterns we haven’t yet recognised. All love is based on the search for spirit. This is the first major insight to be found in romantic love – it really isn’t about two people falling in love. It is two people seeing spirit in each other.” - Deepak Chopra]
Stage 1: Forgiveness
The tactic that puts you on top immediately
Looked at from a common sense point of view, I am talking a load of rubbish. My plan for putting you back in control of your married life makes no sense at all. (It is is “counter-intuitive”. Example: to fly through the air we use a machine made of metal that weighs hundreds of tonnes. Now does that make sense? No. But it works. It’s called a jet aircraft.)
Stage 1 in the Self Defence Course For Men In Marriage is Forgiveness. That’s right. Hit her with an act of Compassion. Forgive her for all the nasty things she has said to you. Forgive her for the way she has made you feel so many times – like a piece of dogshit on the ground. Forgive her for trying to destroy your marriage. Forgive her for trying to reduce you to the level of the guy who pays for everything but doesn’t get to enjoy any of it. (It’s called alimony.) Forgive her for thinking only of herself. Forgive her for having an affair or for considering having one (if that’s happened).
[Marriage is the only war where you sleep with the enemy.- Gary Busey]
Now this ain’t easy. But the payoff is so huge you’ve got to try it. Sounds outrageously impossible? It’s not. And the benefits, my friend, are fantastic.
Forgiveness Benefit 1: The pain in your guts goes, almost disappears. You feel better and better the more you can forgive. That’s because only the strong can forgive. By acting strong you feel strong.
Forgiveness Benefit 2: You become more powerful in your dealings with her. Calmer. More controlled. Stronger. Less reactive. More mature.
Forgiveness Benefit 3: She notices, don’t you worry. In a marriage conflict, she is scanning your reactions for any tiny sign of weakness so she can go in for a shot. It’s survival time for her… and for you. You are both living on your instincts. She will sense your new strength.
An Act of Forgiveness is easy to say, hard to do. Here is a simple way to start.
Step 1: Think it. Think about how she sees things. Try to imagine you were her in this situation. Criticise yourself a little. How have you let her down? Even if you think she’s unrealistic, it’s how she thinks and you’re not going to change that in any other way than by following this Course. Try some “Compassion”. Compassion – ‘suffering with’ or ‘walking with another’s suffering’ – is the ability to acknowledge pain in another and support their struggle. I have found that you cannot know or understand the pain of another unless you have felt pain yourself. And the deepest cut you have received determines how deeply you can feel for another. So use the pain you’ve been given to project your feelings into hers. How must she be feeling? Women hate conflict and causing pain in others (contrary to appearances). Try some Empathy – ‘feeling within another’ – the ability to know what it feels like to be someone else. Climb out of your selfish skin for long enough to see what other people see… and you’ll be amazed. It’s the first step to taking back your power.
The “Empathy Exercise” is very important – I have seen it open up a man’s eyes in an instant. In a blinding flash of insight, someone close to me came to understand just what he’d put his partner through and he was able to forgive her easily… whereas only an hour or so before he had been full of bitterness and anger. All that was gone and only tears of remorse remained. He had opened his heart and he now could express the love she so badly wanted. (But was it too late for him? She thought so. More on this case as it unfolds.)
You may need some help for the empathy exercise – someone to guide you through. A counsellor, a coach, a female friend who can gently open your eyes by asking questions.
Step 2: Say it. Say to yourself: “I forgive (her name) for (whatever I believe she did that damaged me and our relationship.)” It may feel strange at first, like a new golf swing… but repeat it several times. Get used to the idea. You’re not letting her off the hook – she did those things. But you are saying you don’t want revenge for it. You don’t want to hurt her or get back at her. You want to replace that feeling of revenge with a feeling of understanding. She did it. She’ll have to wear it. But you’re not judge and jury. You are now a bystander.
Step 3: Write it. It might help to write her a letter (which you don’t send). Set down all the ways she hurt you and how it made you feel. Go into as much detail as you want – express your anger. Finish by telling her you have forgiven her. Tell her what you feel for her deep down and how much you want the relationship to work. Then either burn the letter or hide it somewhere. You might want to read it again to remind yourself in future how you took the first big step towards mending your problems together because you are the bigger person in the conflict. You had the guts to change the way you reacted in the situation, choosing courage in the face of fear and anger. And you won.
Step 4: Feel it. It can take a long time to reach Complete Forgiveness. Once you do, you feel no anger about how you have been treated by her. You feel sorry for her instead, and you feel sorry for the part you played in making her act that way. You feel like trying to make it up to her. Your pain and anxiety about what happened to you has almost all gone.
“A happy marriage is the union of two forgivers.” - Ruth Bell Graham
What do I know about Forgiveness? It saved my life and my marriage. Here is the story of my “long, dark night of the soul”. When my defacto wife of four years walked out on me with our 3 month old child, she moved in with a new boyfriend under the same roof – in the next room! I was stunned and blind-sided. There was nothing I could do to stop it. No physical attack on the guy would have brought her back to me, no attack on her would have either. They were protected by law. I took her to a lawyer to see whether I could stop her leaving the country to follow this guy overseas. The lawyer laughed me out of his office with the words, “You’re just a jealous boyfriend. You have no rights.”
[The Sixth Eternal Law of Marriage:
Love forgives and forgives and forgives again.]
I was crushed, beaten. I was the father of this child and the Law said, “You have no rights. You are nothing.” So all I could do was what I did. When the pain had subsided enough, I tried to understand her and why she was acting as she was. (Empathy.) And I realised she was starved for love and possibly suffering some post natal trauma or depression, brought on by my behaviour. I had withdrawn emotionally after the birth and become a workaholic to pay for this new family I had found myself providing for. I had abandoned her at age 22 to handle a new baby on her own in a foreign country, far away from her family. I felt her pain. (Compassion.) No wonder she was easy pickings. I could only Forgive her – and I did, little bit by little bit – and defend her when both our families condemned her and made her feel outcast. I pleaded for understanding because I understood what she had gone through. I was at fault. If I had loved and supported her, she would never have left me. I created my own pain.
When I had forgiven, I felt better about what was happening, more confident I could handle it. Forgiveness makes it easier to do the next important step. Surrender.
“Whenever you are confronted with an opponent, conquer him with love.” - Mahatma Gandhi
Handling the pain
Pain is not negotiable. It comes with the turf. Love and pain go hand in hand. You won’t escape pain by doing anything mentioned in this book. But you’ll know greater joy. The twin virtues of compassion and empathy – mentioned by the Dalai Lama as the essential building blocks of love – are both grown inside you by the experience of pain.
So don’t fear pain. Welcome it like a brother. It is your teacher and liberator. Once through its Course you will emerge like a warrior, battle-scarred but hardened and wise in the ways of the battlefield. And afraid of no one, especially yourself.
There are two types of pain: clean pain and dirty pain. Clean pain is pain you know you cannot avoid. You understand how you contributed to it, brought it on yourself, and you face the music. Clean pain usually teaches us a lesson and then lets us go. Dirty pain is pain you deny or try to run away from. It catches up to you and it is harder to take than clean pain. This is because you are denying the role you played in creating it and resisting its lesson. I know which type of pain I prefer.
[Never say marriage has more joy than pain. -Euripedes Alcestis]
You never get used to pain, but you can become comfortable in the knowledge that you’ve felt it and survived it before and you’ll do so again. Knowing this can give you courage to go on when others drop out of the fight.
[I think men who have a pierced ear are better prepared for marriage. They've experienced pain and bought jewellry. -Rita Rudner]
[“When you’re oblivious to ways marriage can operate as a people-growing process, all you see are problems and pathology – and the challenges of marriage will probably defeat you. Your pain will have no meaning except failure and disappointment; no richness, no soul. Spirituality is an attitude that reveals life’s meaning through everyday experience; however, don’t bother seeking sanctuary in your marriage. Seeking protection from its pains and pleasures misses it purpose: marriage prepares us to live and love on life’s terms.” - Dr Raymond Schnarch, Passionate Marriage]
Stage 2: Surrender
The tactic that turns the tide
Here we are at Surrender. This is the single most important point of this Course. It is the most powerful weapon you have at your disposal. Surrender, lay down your arms, stop the war. Stop struggling. Win by losing. How can you get started? Easy. Cry. That’s what I did. I burst into tears one day and confessed that I now understood what my approach to love had done to my wife – starved her of the deep affection she craved. I’d finally “got it.” She did not believe it for some months, but I set about wooing her on a scale not seen since Romeo and Juliet. Eventually, 25 years of scepticism collapsed under the siege of my love.
So OK. You can’t cry – it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you surrender. Surrender to the inevitable. Fall on your sword. Concede the field to her. Sue for peace on her terms. You will never win the battle with your wife while you struggle against her. Love is the only weapon left to you that will be effective
Like Forgiveness, this is ‘counter-intuitive’. That is, it sounds back-the-front. Yet it is precisely what will work because the opposite is the case if you do the opposite – continue fighting. If you continue fighting, she will walk away – and you lose. You’ll never win that battle by arguments, threats, bullshit or lies. You will lose if you fight. It’s that simple.
Surrender? Give up? Lose your power? Yes, and no. It sounds insane, but believe me it works. The moment you appear to lose in the eyes of your opponent in the war of the sexes, you start to win. The tide turns. Don’t ask me why. It just does. The reason can be found in this story from ancient Celtic mythology.
A good marriage is therapy, every living day. – Steve Biddulph, Manhood
One of the knights of the Round Table was captured by a king and told he would be executed at dawn. He could save his life by agreeing to marry a woman in the king’s court who was a hag by day and a princess by night, or a hag by night and a princess by day. Morning came and the knight was asked, “What’s it to be, Sir Knight. Death or Life?” The knight chose life. The king called for the woman to be brought before him. The knight then gave his hand to the woman. When asked to choose whether she be a hag by day or by night, he turned to the lady and said “I will let the lady decide.’ She replied: “Sire, as you have given me sovereignty, I will be a princess by day and a princess by night.”
The knight – representing you and me – surrendered his power to the lady and she in turn solved his problem for him by changing herself. (Remember you can’t change people by nagging, criticising or by force. You can only change them by making them want to change – by inspiring them to do it.)
It’s like winning the war by refusing to fight. When you surrender to love, you are crowned with glory. Why? Because no woman can tolerate injustice. Your wife seeks to gain the advantage at every encounter when you are ‘gridlocked’ (the normal state of marriage – trench warfare) because she sees you as being unjust. She’ll have a laundry list of the things you do wrong or don’t do. She feels victimised by you, just as you feel victimised by her.
But you see things differently: from where you stand, she’s victimising you. No matter what you think about it, the version of reality you have to deal with exists inside the mind of the person who you are trying to win. Her version of reality is the one you’ve got to work with. You won’t convince her she’s wrong. Have you ever been able to do that? Never. That path leads nowhere.
[The Seventh Eternal Law of Marriage:
Struggle ceases when you surrender to Love.]
Give in, admit you have been 100% wrong and declare that she is 100% right. Surrender unilaterally and sincerely. Then watch what happens. When I had demonstrated my surrender was not a faked conversion, Louisa was quick to defend my old self and give strong praise of much of my old behaviour. (The stuff they never mention, like killing yourself to provide nice homes and private schooling for the kids and cars to drive and overseas trips. The very items you feel justify your feelings of victimisation. “Where’s my reward for killing the buffalo? Where’s all the sex I should get?”)
She can’t fight with an opponent who surrenders. You become strangely powerful. You have re-defined the battlefield. You’ve change the game. It’s no longer about scoring points off each other – she’s better at that than you are anyway… she gets more practice. Instead she is forced to contend with a man who has changed and taken away from her the target she enjoyed hitting. You gain power.
Surrender is the secret to success, the central point of this entire exercise. It is the silver bullet that slays the vampire and puts you back in the driver’s seat in your marriage.
“When they are fully committed in love, the husband sees God in the wife and the wife sees God in the husband. On this basis they are able to surrender to each other, because they are only surrendering to the spirit in everything.” - Deepak Chopra
First aid for sick marriages
Surrender is emergency treatment for a marriage sliding into the divorce courts. If you do nothing else in the short term but Surrender, you should have bought the time you need to salvage the situation. In most cases. If you can get her to stop seeing the lawyer, stop kicking you out of the family home, stop walking out the door herself, you have stopped the bleeding. Now you need to work on a cure, and fast.
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave himself up for her. - Ephesians 5:25
Surrender is so unexpected and powerful, it usually stops women in their tracks. They can’t handle it. They’ve never seen it before… especially in you. The uncharacteristic behaviour that follows catches them by surprise and puts a question into their minds. “Maybe he’s genuine. Maybe he’s flipped his lid. He might have changed. Let’s see…”
And you’re back on the front foot. You’re controlling the agenda. You’re controlling the timing. You are centre stage. Now it’s time for the performance of your life. Now it’s time for the wooing to start again, big time.
Why me? It’s not fair
Hold on! It takes two to tango. No ying without yang. She contributed at least 50% to the state of our marriage. Why should I have to do all the forgiving, apologising and the wooing? Why should I be the one giving in all the time?
Good question. I’ve had two middle aged male friends reject my Total Love Attack strategy. Let’s call them Alex and Trevor, because those are their names. They rejected the approach on the grounds that:
1. It means “doing what you’re told”. That is, total submission to a woman as a mommy figure.
2. I was just “c***-struck”. That is, so stoked about my wife and so desperate to hold on to her (for sex) that I had lost my mind.
These opinions are fairly typical for Australian males. Both these guys are sad sacks who live without partners after unsuccessfully trying to live with women on many occasions. Both of them desperately want to have a successful relationship with a woman – to give and receive love. But neither of them can see a way to do it without handing their balls to the woman on a plate. (Ouch!)
The reality is this: she’ll hand them right back to you, with interest. And that interest can include the best sex you’ll ever have, far better than the big, tough “Macho, Macho Man” will ever get. That’s the best reason I can think of for the “Surrender” strategy – sex. Lots of it.
If you judge people, you have no time to love them. -Mother Theresa
But there’s more science to it than that. There are 7 reasons why the male has to take it on the chin and make the running in the Total Love Attack strategy:
REASON FOR TAKING THE FALL #1: The girl is leaving you, sport. She’s the customer and you’re the salesman. Get this: Rule Number 1 - the customer is always right. Rule Number 2 – if the customer is ever wrong, go back and read Rule Number 1. It stands to reason that you might need to make a few concessions, at least until you get her back on the team.
REASON FOR TAKING THE FALL #2: She hasn’t contributed 50% to the relationship problems. Girls are very relationship savvy. She may have started half the fights, been in the wrong 50% of the time, and caused 50% of the grief… but you were the one who had the main problem with relationship. Blokes are like that. We’re not comfortable with our feelings, we have no training or role models to follow. We think she should be satisfied that we hang around and allow her to cook and clean for us. When it comes to investing in the relationship, she has put in 80% to 90% of the effort. If the relationship’s broken, then we can only blame the maintenance guy who hasn’t been on the job – you and me.
REASON FOR TAKING THE FALL #3: She has been hurt bad for a long time by your rejection of her love, your refusal to make her feel cared for, your refusal to accept her feelings as valid, your refusal to make her feel special, and your refusal to share your feelings with her. (You didn’t know you were doing this, but that’s what you did, and there’s no way you’ll convince a woman that it’s OK to do those things because she doesn’t believe you didn’t know. She thinks you think the same way she does, remember? In fact she misinterpreted everything you did, but the fact remains – she was hurt, bad, for a long time, and you’re the culprit in her eyes. And she’s the customer.
REASON FOR TAKING THE FALL #4: We are able to take it on the chin. Men are less emotional than women and can see the logic of sacrificing something up front for big returns later on. God knows we suffered in silence for long enough during the open warfare in this relationship. We can take a good hiding with our mouth’s shut. We’re big enough to swallow our pride and get on with the job.
REASON FOR TAKING THE FALL #5: Someone’s got to give in and change the game. If you remain deadlocked, there’s only one outcome – the one you committed yourself to avoiding at the very start of this book. You lose her. Do you want to be right – and alone? Or loved and respected? Women don’t love you because you can beat them in an argument.
REASON FOR TAKING THE FALL #6: Women have a good trailer load of anger against men in general to unload to begin with, even before you added your pile of manure to it. She needs to offload some psychological garbage before she can truly be fair and reasonable in a relationship. Many women have been hurt by their fathers – felt abandoned when he was a boozer, when he walked out on the family, when he wasn’t there for her when she was growing up (too busy at work). Then they are hurt by the many idiot boy friends that they encountered – sexual predators, emotional pygmies and boofheads (like you and me) who hurt their feelings, used and abused them, rejected their offers of love, treated them the way we thought girls had to be treated if you were any sort of real man: ie. badly. Then there is the “patriarchy” – the old male-dominated society. Sexism. The feminists got one thing right and 99 things wrong. The one thing right was the way society valued females in the old days as less important than males – women couldn’t get certain jobs, couldn’t rise to the top, were treated as domestic servants and child bearers by Society. This is now largely not the case. But if you were brought up under the old regime, you grew up thinking that as a girl you weren’t good enough. Who got preference over you? Males. What are you? A male. “They’re all the same.” Though it wasn’t your fault, you share the collective blame. Female logic. But if you had an abusive mother, for instance, part of your anger would be directed at the other women in your life. You couldn’t’ help it.
REASON FOR TAKING THE FALL #7: You’re a male. So you’re wrong. Everybody knows it – watch the TV shows and ads. They don’t show women being stupid dorks. Only males. Feminists have done such a good job of bagging males as a gender that the whole of society now feels comfortable bagging one gender. No wonder boys are difficult at school – they are taught to think of themselves as stupid by the media well before they get to school. So we play up to expectations. If you expect to be wrong, you’ll be wrong.
“There are only two things wrong with men. Everything they say and everything they do.” - 3M Post-It Note
For all these reasons, the best strategy is to own up as the culprit, take your medicine, and smile. If no girl wants to buy your brand of love long term, you need to change the brand you’re selling. Get the new and improved version of Masculine Love and you’ll be a hit.
But be warned, women don’t want a good little mamma’s boy tied to their apron strings. They don’t want a man who’ll do as he’s told all the time. They want a man who respects them and who they can respect. They want a wild man who will sweep them up in a romantic adventure, dominate them like a brute, ravish them, then set them back on a pedestal. They want a guy who makes them feel so secure and loved that they can trust him to take over making the decisions and captaining the ship.
One intense sexual storm in a hay barn means more to her than three years of tepid lovemaking. She wants passion and purpose in a man, and she carries a weighty desire in her, a passion somewhere between erotic feeling and religious intensity. – Robert Bly
So there is a period of proving you are a New Man… waiting for her to trust that the New Man won’t disappear and leave the old man in his place. Once she trusts you’re fair dinkum, you get your balls back. And your life. And as she becomes less defensive, you’ll even get admissions of guilt and apologies for her part in the disaster that nearly became of your marriage. But don’t hang out for that. She may not ever mature to that extent. Just be glad you’re still there.
Better than sex
The following sentences from Deepak Chopra’s book The Path To Love might appear mysterious, but “surrender” promises far more than domestic harmony and more sex.
“Through surrender the needs of the ego, which can be extremely selfish and unloving,, are transformed into the true need of the spirit, which is always the same – the need to grow. As you grow, you exchange shallow, false feelings for deep, true emotions, and thus compassion, trust, devotion, and service become realities. Such a marriage is sacred; it can never falter because it is based on divine essence. Such a marriage is also innocent, because your only motive is to love and serve the other person.
“Surrender is the door one must pass thought to find passion. Without surrender, passion is centred on a person’s craving for pleasure and stimulation. With surrender, passion is directed toward life itself – in spiritual terms, passion is the same as letting yourself be swept away on the river of life, which is eternal and never-ending in its flow.
“The final fruit of surrender is ecstasy: when you can let go of all selfish attachments, when you trust that love is at the core of your nature, you feel complete peace. In this peace there is a seed of sweetness perceived in the very centre of the heart, and from this seed, with patience and devotion, you nurture the supreme state of joy, known as ecstasy”.
Ecstasy! I felt and feel that ecstasy still. It was an intense feeling euphoria for months after my ‘epiphony’ and now it has settled down into an infatuated glow whenever I see or think about Louisa. I can’t help myself. I am deeply in love with her – I always was, I just couldn’t express it. Something was blocking my feelings: maleness. Once I had given up the struggle and surrendered, my feelings flowed freely and love was born fully formed and whole. Life became blessed joy, sex became a sacred journey of delights, and Louisa eventually became a princess by day and by night.
The change had to happen in me before it happened in her.
Stage 3: Woo her
The tactic that delivers lots of unbelievable sex
Let’s get down to it. What do you want out of life? Wait: I can guess: lots of unbelievable sex and a life free from nagging. Here is the carrot for following the steep path of love You get to do the things you want to do – have more sex, stay up late to watch the game, eat unhealthy food, etc. And you get to laugh a lot more. Why? Because your wife is happy because she is in love – madly in love – with you.
How can this be? It’s because you have wooed her all over again, only this time the infatuation doesn’t fade. It becomes permanent… because you dedicate yourself to wooing her. Everyday. Ceaselessly.
[The Eighth Eternal Law of Marriage: Love begets love.]
Why must you woo her? Because inside their minds and hearts women only want one thing: to be in love, all the time. Sweet romantic love, from a Prince Charming who showers them with attention and affection. It works like a perpetual motion machine:
Step 1. You act in a loving way.
Step 2. She becomes more loving and loveable.
Step 3. You in turn find it easier and more fun to give her loving attention.
Step 4. She in turn becomes more loving… and on it goes.
For true love is inexhaustible; the more you give, the more you have. And if you go to draw at the true fountainhead, the more water you draw, the more abundant is its flow. -Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The term “making love” means having sex in our time, but there was a time when a man could be making love to a woman just by paying her attention. Women love attention. They feel affection for those who give them attention. You “make” love grow in a woman by wooing her. She in turn makes love grown in you by her reaction – sweet, sweet lovin’.
John Gray (in Men are From Mars, Women Are from Venus) agrees with me. He says that if you make sure your wife’s love needs are being met by demonstrating your feelings in action, it will ‘open her heart’. And it in turn opens yours because “a man’s heart opens as he succeeds in fulfilling a woman.” Wooing doesn’t mean bullshitting and lying – false praise and a box of chocolates. You’ve got to deliver the real stuff. It helps to know what a woman really wants.
[The Ninth Eternal Law of Marriage:
The pursuit should not cease at the altar]
This next section is the longest in the Course because it aims to fix the basic problem inside you: you just don’t understand women. If you did, you wouldn’t be in this hole. It’s like trying to play a round of golf with no clubs. You can swing all you like, but you won’t score.
More next week....
