Special Guest: Tim Kellis, Author of Equality: The Quest for the Happy Marriage

Good morning boomers! I've got a special super duper treat for you today. Tim Kellis, author of the relationship book, Equality: The Quest for the Happy Marriage is here with us today to answer whatever relationship questions you might have!

To begin with, let me tell you a little about Tim:

Renowned Wall Street analyst Tim Kellis takes on what could be considered society’s biggest problem today: divorce. The journey that led to him tackling such a significant issue was both personal and professional. After a successful career that eventually landed him on Wall Street, Tim met what he thought was the girl of his dreams, only to see that relationship end with bitterness and anger. The journey included work with a marital therapist, and after he discovered the therapist wasn’t really helping decided to tackle the issue himself.

Ambition and a strong aptitude for math helped lead Kellis to discover how to make relationships work. His math skills led directly to an engineering degree, nine years in the telecommunications industry, an MBA in finance, and finally on to Wall Street, where he became the very first semiconductor analyst to focus on the communications market.

After publishing a 300-page initiation piece entitled Initiating Coverage of the Semiconductor Industry: Riding the Bandwidth Wave, Kellis became a leading semiconductor analyst at one of the biggest firms on Wall Street. The experience he gained as a Wall Street analyst provided an excellent backdrop for becoming an expert on relationships, and resulted in his relationship book entitled Equality: The Quest for the Happy Marriage.

You can visit his website or his blog to find out more!

And this is what his book is about...

The journey through Equality: The Quest for the Happy Marriage includes a trip through history, where the most significant lessons civilization has learned over the last few thousand years are used to demonstrate not only the way to set up a positive relationship, but the causes of that relationship turning negative.

Additionally, I dive into the science of psychology to answer the most basic question anyone asks who goes through the pain of divorce, “why didn’t we work out”?

The basic premise of the book is that we have a 50% divorce rate yet there doesn’t appear to be anything happening to help solve this problem. Just because divorce has become a significant part of our culture doesn’t mean we should simply sit back while countless families suffer through the agony of splitting up.

The toll to society tomorrow because of our culture of divorce today is impossible to determine but future generations will have to deal with this change to the culture that has occurred over the last two generations.

For the first time in history I elaborate on a psychological solution to our psychological problems so that couples can learn how to change the direction of their negative relationships. In essence, the psychological objective is to understand what happens mentally between two people who make one of the most important decisions of their lives, to get married.

The objective of this book is to provide real, logical help to couples so that they can learn how to stay out of the divorce trap. The bottom line is to learn how to set up your relationship so that you can maintain a happy, healthy, harmonious, loving, affectionate, intimate marriage.

I'm so excited he has offered his expertise to answer whatever relationship questions you might have here at Boomer Chick today. To start off, he's answered a few questions to get us going. If you'd like to leave Tim a question, he'll only be here until the end of the day so get your questions in early!

Boomer Chick: What's a positive working relationship?

Tim: The funny thing about this question is I refer to this section of the book as the pedantic section, because from the outside a positive working relationship is described by the critics as boring. The positive working relationship is one where conflicts are solved as a partnership, in a similar manner as corporate partnerships resolve their conflicts. This can only be accomplished when the inevitable conflicts are resolved as disagreements, logical discussions, even about emotional issues, not by arguments, which are emotional discussions. Martin Luther King referred to this as civil disobedience, you can disagree on anything just be civil about it.

Boomer Chick: Explain what you mean when you say in the book that common sense is the foundation of a relationship?

Tim: The unfortunate reality about our psychology professionals today is they have yet to establish a foundation for resolving the inevitable conflicts that are again a part of almost every relationship. Dr. Phil even writes in his book that he basically did not solve a single serious relationship conflict in 25 years of practice. But fortunately the rest of society has for thousands of years been developing what I call the underground of society, questions to issues that are solved in mass, without the egos of leaders. We refer to this as common sense. Common sense is simply the solution to problems where the subjectivity of the individual is removed from the equation. This takes the emotional perspective of the insecurities, which are the root causes of the troubles in our relationships, out of the discussion.

Boomer Chick: Why should relationships work?

Tim: First and foremost is because of the influence of divorce on children. I chuckle every time I read another research report that concludes divorce has no material impact on the children. If those conducting the report were to only ask the children if the divorce of their parent troubled them then the outcome of all of those research reports would be the opposite. Does divorce impact your intellectual development? Not materially. But divorce does teach you one important negative character trait about marriages, to quit when the going gets tough. Now you as a child can respond by being stronger than your parents, but this influence is still something you must come to grips with. We will be dealing with our culture of divorce for generations.

Secondly, we are now in the age of spirituality, what is known as The Age of Aquarius. If we believe in the notion of spirituality then we also believe in the notion of soul mates, we fall in love with the one we were meant to spend our lives with. If we do not overcome our emotional issues then we leave that job for future generations of our spiritual existence.

Please, everyone, leave your questions below!