Havanna Travel

Direct Answers - Column for the week of September 15, 2003

I have a couple of questions for you. If a person no longer feels they love their spouse, is it time to divorce?

Also, do you think a person who has had an affair can change enough for the betrayed to forgive and continue the marriage? Is it possible to salvage a marriage after the affair?

Marie

Marie, a book could be written on each of your questions, but the last question sounds like the one you are really asking. What do you mean by salvage?

Do you mean the cake just fell on the floor and the guests are arriving. Can we patch it together and serve it from the kitchen so no one notices what happened? Or do you mean, after an affair, can you have the kind of marriage you would wish for your son or daughter?

Marriage is a relationship different from all others. You can date many people, you can be friends with many people, you can be neighbors to many people. But the act of getting married says I choose this one unique being to share everything with me for the rest of my life.

The basis for willingly binding yourself to one person is love. Their fidelity allows you to believe in their love. Their fidelity allows you to sustain your love. But if that person is unfaithful then they, not you, have brought their love into question. Infidelity validates your doubts about their love.

The idea of fidelity is in the marital vows because it is essential. Fidelity is the one thing promised in virtually every religious tradition and understood worldwide. Why? Because breaking faith breaks the marriage.

It is possible to forgive betrayal, but in our experience it is not possible to forget it. That would be like forgetting you have kids. It isn’t going to happen. The unfaithful person would like the other person to forget, and the one betrayed would like to forget, but barring amnesia they cannot.

How do you believe “I love you” after you have been betrayed? That is what people ask us years and even decades afterwards. For some people who stay in the marriage, divorce was not an option. For many people, it is not the case that they healed after infidelity. They simply live with the pain. Is that a “marriage” salvaged?

Others claim you can get over infidelity. We say you may not be able to overcome infidelity. The difference is we focus on the innocent party.

Wayne & Tamara

Shop Talk

I am an advice columnist myself, a Dutch one from Holland. I read your column online because I appreciate your work, your tone and style. My question is how do you get your quotes from world literature?

I mean, the questions from your correspondents are pretty much straightforward. Mostly I agree with your advice, but you quite often have allusions to Shakespeare or Hemingway or other writers, allusions which corroborate your point in a wonderful, illuminating way.

How come you have these citations at hand so easily? Do you go through books when answering questions? Do you have citation books or indexes? Or just an excellent memory?

Beatrijs

Beatrijs, a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti talks about a pickpocket who looks at a saint and sees nothing but pockets. We write about relationships because we see the world as nothing but relationships.

When we look at a letter, our experience and these allusions just pop out. In the case of your letter, it was a line from a poem one of us read decades ago.

We don’t have perfect memories either. Most of us know much more than we think we know. Part of finding the answer to our problems involves letting what we know out. Part of finding the answer to our problems involves reading each situation with the sum total of our life experience.

Wayne & Tamara

About The Author

Authors and columnists Wayne and Tamara Mitchell can be reached at www.WayneAndTamara.com.

Send letters to: Direct Answers, PO Box 964, Springfield, MO 65801 or email: DirectAnswers@WayneAndTamara.com.

If you’d like to save some dough on your car policy , there are 3 things that you can alter to help you lower your rates.

Let’s look at all three, and see where you can make some changes.

Your Lifestyle

We realize that you’re not going to turn the way you live upside down just to save a few bucks on car insurance. We wouldn’t either. However there are things that you can do that might save you big.
Drive fewer miles and be a safer driver. Insurance companies always offer incentives to safe drivers, which can mean a big auto insurance discount.

There’s good reason for this. For every speeding ticket you get within one year, your odds of being at fault in a car accident increase exponentially. So hit the brakes!

The less you drive the less you pay, too. If you can carpool or use public transit to and from work, your rate will go down. Lower your mileage and you’ll lower your premium.

Another thing that will certainly affect your rates is the presence of teen-aged drivers in your home. However young drivers who are good students, or who drive older model cars, may earn you an auto insurance discount.

Your Car

The kind of automobile you drive will have a big effect on your insurance costs. High profile cars (this means both sporty coupes and popular vehicles preferred by thieves, like Toyota Camrys ) will earn higher rates than lower profile minivans and station wagons.

Of course, newer and expensive cars mean higher collision and comprehensive rates. Driving an older model can lower your car insurance premium by quite a bit.

Don’t feel like changing your car? A simpler way to earn a discount auto insurance rate is to install safety devices on your car.

Car alarms and locator devices can also reduce the expense of comprehensive coverage. Many insurers will offer you savings if you provide proof of having some sort of anti-theft device installed.

Your Provider

Shopping around several car insurance companies may be the best way to save on car insurance. Rates for the same coverage can vary drastically from one provider to another, and collecting a few quotes before making your decision can mean real savings.

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———-The author, Jonathan Krakowski, writes a regular column for Taxes In-Depth, an award-winning tax information site.

He also edits Health Insurance In-Depth and Auto Insurance In-Depth, both pro-consumer guides.

So many pictures and images can be spoiled by backlighting. You know the scenario: your friend is sitting in your conservatory with the windows behind her. You take the picture and she is darkened and silhouetted. The backlighting has fooled your camera and the wrong exposure (for your subject) has been selected.

The reason for this is all down to your camera. The meter in the camera calculates the correct exposure - or so you think. In fact, it calculates what it THINKS is the correct exposure, only in the example above (and any other situation with excessive backlighting) there is an abundance of light. The camera takes all the light information and averages it out. In this case, it will expose the scene less because it sees too much light.

However, your subject wants more exposure as she is not being lit in the same way. Her face is in low light or even in shadow. The camera doesn’t know this, of course.

The answer? Increase the exposure by a stop (or even two). This will increase the exposure for your subject to show face and body detail. The alternative approach is to take a meter reading not from the whole scene but from the subject alone.

Both ways will give you excellent results.

Eric Hartwell runs the photography resource site http://www.theshutter.co.uk and the associated discussion forums as well as the regular weblog at http://thephotographysite.blogspot.com.