Direct Answers: Frank Answers to Relationship Questions Book

Since 1999, Wayne and Tamara Mitchell have been answering relationship questions from newspaper readers around the world.

Now they have assembled a collection of their best answers to questions. This book, Direct Answers, is grouped around themes: wanting a relationship, dating, marriage, married with problems, divorce, and beginning again. The book also analyzes common problems like jealousy, cheating and addiction.

Each column contains a real life situation, its solution and the understanding behind the solution. Wayne and Tamara use stories, quotes and analogies to explain the essence of the problem and their answer. By example, each column teaches a concise lesson.

What Wayne and Tamara really teach is an approach to life, and they are willing to point fingers. Too much advice tries to make you take a part in something in which you have no part.

Their approach is illustrated by the following bonus column, which is not found in the book:

Standing Alone

My mother-in-law of 17 years is a nasty, difficult European woman who has been in America for 45 years. I don't know if we're having a culture clash, a personality clash, or both. For starters, in the beginning when my husband and I lived together she called me a whore, then the day after the wedding she asked me to call her mom. I refused.

We've been having loud arguments ever since. This upsets my children, so three years ago I stopped talking to her. It took her two and a half years to figure out that's what I was doing. She causes major marital problems as my husband refuses to protect me from her. He says she's always been that way, so tune her out. That's what he's done since high school.

Well, I can't tune people out. She criticizes my cooking, states I shouldn't have married her son, then denies it all when I confront her. I am considering a divorce over this as I can't live with someone who doesn't support me. Yet I don't want to break up the family.

Marianne

Marianne, G.K. Chesterton wrote, "There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematician that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one."

Sometimes a man doesn't realize a woman values him for his ability to protect her from harm. If the man won't stand up for her, she will lose respect for him. When your husband was growing up, he treated his mother like annoying music on the radio. He couldn't turn her off, so he learned to tune her out.

It's not that he disagrees with you. He knows she's a problem. The dispute is how to react to her bad behavior. A book we recommend is Susan Forward's "Emotional Blackmail ." It is a primer on how to handle annoying people like your mother-in-law.

In countries where women are free to initiate divorce, divorces are usually initiated by women. When a woman gets to the end of her rope, it no longer matters if her husband is finally ready to act. It is as if a switch has been thrown, and there is no turning back.

If your husband doesn't deal with this problem, then he's left the choice up to you. He needs to realize this. The Susan Forward book can help you both, but if he won't confront his mother, then in six months we may get another letter from you. That letter will begin, "I met this man…."

Wayne & Tamara