Can this marriage be blogged?

The answer, apparently, is no, as least for one Penelope Trunk. This blogger/Boston Globe columnist'smost widely read posts tend to be on the subject of work-life balance - specifically, on her own home life and lack of balance/communication therein. My husband and I wondered how HER husband felt about her sharing the details about their marriage counseling, to wit:

"At this point, I think my husband is going to tell the mediator about how he gave up his career for the kids and me and he is totally disappointed. But instead he says to me, 'A lot of people I talk with say that I am being abused by you'.”

Trunk has recently announced that she is getting a divorce - and she is blogging about it.

This is sad of course, but what I find interesting, in a schadenfreude-typisch way, is that the posts on divorce and marriage counseling are categorized under "fulfillment." On Trunk's blog, there are no "marriage" or "relationship" categories, although there is a "parenting" category. I can draw only one conclusion - that her husband didn't want her to create those categories.

I find it unnerving that she jumps quickly from announcing her divorce to describing her Myers Briggs personality type, because I have been interested with Myers Briggs since I was in high school (and a school shrink gave it to me - but that's another story...).

She cites this observation about ENTJ women like herself: "Their demanding, objective, competent, and independent nature is not particularly endearing to most men." I wonder how far back her interest in Myers Briggs (MBTI) goes. MBTI can help adults learn to communicate much better with their friends and family. Here is my MBTI story:

I am an INTP. My husband is an INFP. So we see eye to eye on a lot of things (housekeeping is not a priority, we find driving directions to be exquisitely boring, etc), but the T/F differential means that we make decisions in different ways - I am guided by logic, and he by emotion.

When we were first married we had to deal with consolidating our (minimal) finances. D. had recently engaged in conversation with an American Express representative in a shopping mall (NOTE to husband: REAL financial managers don't work out of kiosks), and as a result decided to dump his share of the proceeds of the sale of his parents' house into an AmEx variable annuity. We did a financial plan with this AmEx dude, and he recommended that we purchase whole life insurance. I was then reading "Personal Finance for Dummies," and the Dummies author J. Tyson very clearly recommended against whole life insurance - it's a high commission product with very little long-term value.

I knew I needed to persuade D. against AmEx bozo's recommendations or we would be wasting our money. I thought about how I could make my argument, and decided to try to speak his language, the language of emotion. I heard myself saying "it makes me really angry that this guy is not really looking out for us." Phrases like "it makes me angry," or "I am really sad" do not spring readily to my lips. I felt very weird saying this. The surprise that I had in this case was that I actually started to feel angry when I delivered my scripted pitch to my husband. And, almost equally surprisingly, the pitch worked. The appeal to D's sense of loyalty to his family worked much better than a Mr. Spock-like disquisition on the relative merits of whole v. term life insurance.

So I continue to think that the MBTI is a useful tool.

Oh, and I promised my husband to give him credit for the post's title. And I won't be creating a "marriage" post category either.