13 Ways a Bad Marriage is Like a Rubik’s Cube

We were at the bookstore. My kid spotted a Rubik’s cube and did the, “Mommy, pleeeeease?” thing.

I felt a wave of nostalgia and said, “That thing will drive you crazy.” Before I knew it, I was at the register with the cube and some cash.

Roughly an hour later my kid was screaming, “Mommy why won’t you help me solve it? Why are you being so mean!?! I wish I could hit you!”

I knew that frustration.  Oh, I knew that frustration.

“Honey, I can’t help you solve it because I don’t know how. I told you that thing would drive you crazy.”

She hurled the cube across the room. The cube went to toy jail—for its own good, of course.

But it wasn’t in toy jail for very long. I got curious, you know? Next thing I knew, my husband was trying to talk to me and I was telling him to leave me alone because I was busy.

“You’re busy with the Rubik’s cube?” he asked incredulously.

And that’s when the addiction was born. I realized that You Tube had not been around back in the 1980s when I’d first gone crazy trying to solve the cube. Soon I was on there watching video after video with titles like “the absolute easiest way to solve the Rubik’s Cube” and “This way is even easier to solve the Rubik’s Cube than that other video that you just watched.”

They all talked about algorithms and gave instructions like: Right inverted, down, left, top, left inverted, up.

If you don’t understand that instruction, neither do I. Even after watching one  “easiest way to solve the Rubik’s Cube” video five times in a row, I still had no idea what the guy on the video was trying to get me to do.

So I went with trial and error.

Within 24 hours, I’d managed to get one side completed. But then I messed it back up while trying to get another side done. I kept the cube with me and I pulled it out whenever I found myself with free time. While waiting for a meal at a restaurant, I worked on it. The waiter offered to help. He stared at it for a while. Then he said, “No, I might mess it up even more.”

And then he said, “I need to get one of those.” He looked longingly at the cube, as if it were a real life pin up girl from Playboy. I knew frustration would soon be in his future.

A couple days later, as I sat at my kid’s lacrosse practice, various parents watched and made comments. There was a hush as I managed to get it to look like the first picture that accompanies this post. They waited for me to completely solve it.

But I didn’t. I knew my limitations. I wanted my kid to see it before I accidentally messed it up. So I put it in my purse.

Later I showed the cube to my kid and to my husband. I boasted, “I’ve almost got this thing’s number.”

And then I did the unthinkable. I worked on it some more while I was sipping a glass of wine.

Now it looks like the second picture with this post.

Still I have faith that I will eventually solve the cube. It might take the rest of my life and 50 more You Tube tutorials, but I just know I can do it.

And that brings me to the topic of marriage. Although I don’t know what it’s like to successfully solve a Rubik’s Cube, I strongly believe that the process is very similar to successfully saving a bad marriage. After all, a bad marriage is a lot like a messed up Rubik’s Cube. Like solving the cube, saving a bad marriage:

1. Initially seems impossible.
2. Includes periods of elation quickly followed by periods of depression and frustration.
3. Goes more smoothly if you get advice from experts (from You Tube, blogs, books, and in real life) about how to do it in the easiest way possible.
4. Will cause you to get angry with anyone who refers to a remedy as the “easiest one,” because there’s no easy way to save a marriage—just as there’s no easy way to solve a Rubik’s Cube.
5. Requires trial and error.
6. Is a process. This process involves making many different mistakes—some of them over and over again—and eventually learning from them.
7. Requires periods of problem solving interspersed with periods of the silent treatment. If you are starting to feel like you are about to plunge a knife into your spouse’s chest, it’s probably time to back off for a bit, just as it’s time to walk away from the cube once you feel the urge to throw it across the room.
8. Isn’t as frustrating if you are willing to laugh at yourself.
9. Is just as frustrating as it is rewarding.

10. Will bring people out of the woodwork who will claim that the only solution is cheating.

11. Should never be attempted while any form of alcohol is in one’s system.

12. Is safer if there are no hammers, axes, guns, or sharp objects within reach.

13. Never ends. Even if you solve it, you always run the risk of messing it back up again. But once you’ve saved it once, you’ll know what to do. It won’t take as long and be quite as frustrating to save it the second, third, fourth or 100^th time.

Don’t think of a bad marriage like a bad problem. Think of it as a puzzle. As my favorite therapist Jonathan Alpert likes to say, “The minute you change your view from problem to a solution or a puzzle or an adventure it takes the sting out of it.”

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