Is it possible no DB tool can save my marriage?

[workinghardguy]

I'm pretty new at this, but Michele does say that there's no guarantee... and when you think about there are so many variables at play that how can there be? It's one thing if we were making widgets or a recipe. Add more of this, take out of some of that and voila things are fixed. But this isn't that. It's messy and emotional and hard to figure out. Maybe there are mental health issues, maybe there are deep-seated emotional issues, or maybe it's just not meant to be.

The other morning I was listening to This American Life. They had a very short story that I loved and made me think of this whole mess that I and many of us are in. Bear with me for it will seem an odd corollary, but... the Vienna Sausage company makes natural casing wieners. After making them in this Rube Goldberg like factory on the south side of Chicago for a very long time, they finally built a new state of the art facility on the northside.

They opened the factory and things started up, but soon they realized something was very wrong. The sausages weren't the right color and they didn't have the right "snap" to them. They checked formulas, temperatures, timing, ingredients and nothing got better.

Then one day a bunch of guys were having beers after work and got to talking about an old co-worker of theirs, Vic. Vic worked at the southside factory for 50 years and his job was to take the finished sausage off the line and carry them, through about three blocks worth of factory, to the smoker room. And then it hit them... that was the problem... Vic didn't come to the new factory and Vic's route didn't exist. It was the time it took and the temperature of the route that he took that was the missing ingredient.

So what the heck is that point of that story? No matter how hard we try or what we do, our relationships might have a "Vic's route" in them somewhere. That one component or issue that we just don't see and unless we happen to stumble across it like the workers happened to over beers, all our best efforts can still be for nothing.

It's not a rosy or happy thought, but you have to invest in this to make yourself better and hope that by extension it makes your R better. I know, for me, I'm doing this so I can be the male role model and mentor to my son that my father could never be to me due to his illness and early death. The stuff I've figured out in the just the last 13 days is more valuable to me at this point than anything.