Mil Marriage Infested With Honey Badgers?

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Honey badger is nasty when he is eating cobras. Dis-gusting when chowing on bee larvae. Kinda cute while cracking pistachios.  Honey badger is an absolute disaster when invading your military marriage.

Ever since Randall’s "The Crazy Nastyxxx Honey Badger" video hit YouTube last year (watch video here), the most fearless mammal in the animal kingdom has enjoyed celebrity status.  Cuz honey badger don’t care.

In military relationships, we can get an infestation of honey badger. That ain’t a good thing.

In a military relationship, blame seems to do its work a lot like Randall’s honey badger. We’ve all heard it. Shoot, we have probably all done it. At least one conversation in our house has gone like this:

Cars are not my job! Cars are your job! If you got the inspections on the cars done, then I wouldn’t have gotten that ticket!!!

It is pretty hard to know what date is on the sticker when I do not drive the car! Because I am deployed.

If you weren’t in the Navy, you wouldn’t be deployed! And then you would have time to see the sticker!!


Zing! Honey badger don’t give a crap. As long as the blame can be dumped on the other partner, honey badger wins.

The honey badger of blame never wins. In an ongoing longitudinal study of marriage funded by the National Institutes of Health, blame was listed as one of the top five things divorced couples regret about their relationship.

Marriage and family therapists have also noted that blame is the one thing a marriage cannot withstand. You can come back from adultery. You can withstand money problems. You can revive a dead sex life. But if you consistently blame your partner for your problems and your partner blames you, you’re done.

Ms. Vicki, Military.com’s relationship columnist, told me that she sees this all the time when counseling military couples in her private practice. “Each one of them comes in with a long list of why their partner is at fault,” said Ms. Vicki. By working through the lists with the couple, Ms. Vicki says she can often see what the real issues are. Which are almost never on the blame list.

So what are we supposed to do when the car sticker wasn’t changed and the cop is walking up to the driver’s side with his ticket book out?

Hold down the honey badger. Ms. Vicki says that the first thing to do is to hear the honey badger crop up in your voice as you blame your partner and then….wait for it….stop. Stop blaming your partner.

No need to start blaming yourself, but stop blaming your partner. Instead look at the problem as something that now needs to be solved. Married life in the military is full of problems that crop up and have to be solved—and two people working together to solve those problems are all that it takes. Honey badgers need not apply.

 

 

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