In my eleven years in the service, people have always asked me my secrets of living good while living clean. I used to respond with them immediately by saying, to live good and clean, the secret is not to have a secret, live honestly. Dear readers, I am LT Bien Isabelo M Clarete, a husband and a father of two children, for the rest of this article i will share with you one of the concrete examples of applied honesty and how to make this your own secret of living good by living clean.
Cynics say that we can’t please everyone, thus, after reading this, i just expect same birds of the same feathers to appreciate honesty more, while some readers may call me names like tupperware, orocan or synthetic (more popular than plastic). To the rest of you, please read and understand for what i will share with you, would make your spouse’s doubly happy and would strengthen your family ties.
I believe that honesty is the best policy, and for years, i have equated honesty to faithfulness and have validated that they are actually in equilibrium.
After receiving their salary, i observed that these are what most husbands do next: Declare everything to your spouse and dispose as planned (takot sa misis); Declare some portion - and share only how much you want (may sikreto); or Don’t declare at all - for this is my income and i worked for this (what a machismo!)
My fellow gentlemen, Hitler died long ago, and two of his greatest failures in life is his failure to listen and plan with his team, thanks to him, for that failures, I learned from him. I believe that when you declare your income to your spouse and plan where to use them, you are actually building a team, a team that leads your family. And this is a team building activity for free where you can practice leadership and have the chance to actively communicate with your wife.
When you declare some portion of it, you may be planning something good or something bad. I mean, you may have something to surprise your legal partner in life but there is a high probability that you may spend it to satisfy your pleasures. Of course some pleasures as a self-gift for working hard for the country is not bad, but as a real man, our definition of pleasure always crosses the borderline of infidelity. And when you don’t declare at all, you may be planning something very good or something very bad. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination…
Honestly, i did not dig into so much research to make this article. But because i believe that as a leader, it is inherent upon us, to be a keen observant of life and as an adviser to our people particularly those who have dwindling relationships. And for eleven years of leading people, 35 years of being a brother to my seven sisters and, i have known for a fact that undeclared or misdeclared income is the root of most relationship evils. By the way, I am a graduate of a self-titled course “Master’s Degree in Observation of Life” (just kidding), and my never been written thesis tells about my observations of people and relationships (some were unfortunately my people). Keen observation also taught me that people who have undeclared income tend to have lots of surprises but also have lots of mysteries.
And to all real men who may be reading this as a past time, when you got married, and vowed to be as one body, one mind and one spirit: it means that you have surrendered your bachelor’s freedom. And that every part of that “one” has to feel or at least know the feelings of the other part.
To my co-earners, I ask you to declare every single centavo of your income and encourage an atmosphere of trust and honesty to the spouse whom you have vowed to love without condition: in sickness and in health and poorness and in wealth till death do you part.
But, but please don’t just stop from reading and understanding this article, always remember that “it is not what you know that matters, it is what you do with what you know that counts (Robert Pike).
(this article was published in the Navy Journal in 2010)
(this article was published in the Navy Journal in 2010)
