McMillan says that you may be acting selfishly without realizing it. "When you need every single thing to be exactly the way you like it, you have to know that there are not a lot of men who are going to find that attractive," she writes. "It's okay if the pillows on the sofa are out of place." She offers another example. "If you're needy, it means you see yourself as a person who should be on the receiving end of most transactions. This is an unrealistic expectation, to say the least, in the context of marriage." McMillan offers her solution in a single word: service. "I want you to serve your husband – and for that matter, everyone else around you," she wrote. "You will be a much happier person. I'm not suggesting you turn yourself into some sort of maid... I'm saying you need to step into the idea that loving someone is about giving something, not getting it."
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
