This probably is not surprising to you, because admittedly, it is absurd to be engaged one day and not engaged the next day. But there are exacerbating factors, and basically, the way I got him back was to be more likable.

I have spent most of my career overcoming my lack of social skills by studying research about what makes people likable. And I think the research I’ve applied so systematically in my career is finally helping me in my personal life.

Here’s what we know about being likable:

1. Don’t give ultimatums. It’s disrespectful. Instead, be a negotiator.
The farmer does not want to be in this blog. As you might imagine, we have this discussion a lot.

First it was like this:

Him: I don’t want to be in the blog.

Me: You have to be. I can’t live without writing my life.

Then the conversation was like this:

Him: I don’t want to be in the blog.

Me: How about if you can edit whatever you want?

2. Try to think about situations from the other persons’ perspective.
That worked for a while. But the problem is that I’ve been setting boundaries about what I write about for my whole life. He’s only been doing it for a year. And after the Thanksgiving Day post he felt like he did not do a good job. In hindsight, he thinks he should not have let me write about that.

But here’s the farmer’s dilemma: He is fascinated with the idea of living an honest life.  And he loves watching me do it, but he’s horrified to realize that there are a million versions of every story, and the person with the big blog audience gets extra weight for her story.

3. Don't hide what really motivates you; secretive people are not likable.
So I am back with the farmer, but we have new rules about what I can write. Well, I think we do. We were going to. But then we had to think about the ramifications. If I don’t write about the tension on a farm, then who is writing about that?

Do you read The Pioneer Woman? I love her blog. I love her blog so much that I told my designer he should make me her blog.

He said, "You don’t want her blog. It’s huge. It probably takes five full-time people to run that blog."

I said, "No. I do want her blog."

He said, "I think you want her life."

The Pioneer Woman does have a great life. Every guy in the photos on that blog is on a horse or about to get on a horse, and all the men are hot. Their rear ends poke out of chaps. Everywhere. And their tough, gritty faces suggest they’d ravish me in bed.

Sure I want that blog, and that life.

I also love how that The Pioneer Woman never, never never disrespects her guy. The Marlboro Man. That’s his name. He’s always studly, sexy, kind, fun.

The farmer is that, too, but there are issues. He’s not studly when we’re having a fight. The problem is that I’m drawn to writing about the fights, and the Pioneer Woman is drawn to writing about pies, and feeding the Marlboro Man.

I am a great cook. But this is not the sort of thing that would go over well on this blog. I’m the kind of cook that understands principles of food so I don’t ever use a recipe. But I’m not drawn to tell you how to make pot roast perfectly as a precursor to cowboy sex. I’m more drawn to tell you that I experimented with fruit in stew and accidentally used bad wine, and to fix it I laced it with brown sugar. And it’s not just that the farmer wouldn’t eat it, but neither would the farm cats, who will eat almost anything in winter.

I want to put a recipe of that. The worst stew ever. With grass-finished beef, of course. Because the farmer gets a full cow butchered and then stores it in his freezer. And before he knew me he used to turn everything into microwaved hamburger, but now he brings me gifts of frozen cuts of grass-finished beef that I defrost over days and turn into dinners to wow him.

The secret, really, to amazing cooking with beef is to spend a lot of money on ingredients and then do almost nothing to them. The farmer did not know this until he was with a city girl who will spend $5.00 on a bag of spinach.

4. Try to look at the positive side of things; people like optimists.
I digress. Sort of. Not really, though. Because what I’m telling you is that what would be perfect is if I could be the Pioneer Woman and only tell you good things about me and the farmer.

But what about that she’s living on a family-owned ranch that is a business, and surely, she had to sign a prenup? Surely her in-laws are nuts over the possibility that their son gets run over by a stampede and she inherits his part of the ranch and marries a different guy with a tight ass in flowing chaps and gives her share of the ranch to him?

What about that? Was there discussion?

Is there discussion over that she has so much traffic on her blog that surely she earns more money than the Marlboro Man? This is not easy stuff to deal with. But there is nothing about that.

Unfortunately, for me, the world loves reading the Pioneer Woman. And so do I. She’s upbeat and her site is gorgeous, and no kidding: the minute the farmer broke off my engagement I started thinking there’s gotta be a guy on her ranch who’s right for me.

But I am drawn to write about only the hard things. I don’t need help from a blog community to know that I’m great in the kitchen. I need help from a blog community to figure out my anger management problems . Because I need to fix that fast: The farmer won’t put up with me yelling anymore.

So I guess that’s what I’ll blog about. I have an anger problem with the farmer, and, honestly, everyone at work is sick of my anger issues, too. So I have a problem. It’s so much more interesting than the cupcakes that I decorate so well that my friend said she could sell them in SoHo.

5. Understand peoples’ boundaries and respect them.
This would be a great place for a picture. Of a cupcake. But what I’d like is a picture of me, and the farmer.

He won’t do that. He is figuring out boundaries. And that’s definitely one.

Another is yelling.

And another is his family.

I am figuring out boundaries, too. I would be insane to say that my blog is more important than he is. But, in some ways, it is. My blog is what makes me able to support myself–I can support myself, somehow, as long as I’m posting to my blog. And my blog is what makes me able to not feel isolated on a farm in the middle of nowhere. I’m always connected to people if I’m blogging.

But I told him that I’d stop blogging about him if he wants me to.

I could offer that only because I knew he wouldn’t want me to. He likes it. He likes that we would have had to keep a secret, forever, that we considered an abortion, but now we can talk about it openly and he can tell people what he thinks. He’s from a farm in the back, dead end street of a road in the middle of nowhere. No one ever asked him what he thought of abortion before. It’s interesting to him. To have a real discussion.

It makes him uncomfortable. But the thing is that the stuff that is most interesting to me is what makes me uncomfortable.

So we agree that we are back to where we were: Me blogging and him getting final edit to any post with him in it.

And I say, “Thank you so much. You make me feel really loved.”

He says, “Tell that to your readers so they know that. “

And I say, “They already do.”

Comment on: How to make yourself more likable

Until now, I have been pretty much on the outside of this American tradition: The tradition of building up Thanksgiving to be a great family moment and then the family not living up to it. But everyone still does Thanksgiving basically because they love their parents. I’m not gonna say here that I don’t love my parents. But it’s a special kind of love that does not involve being with them for holidays.

But this year is a big switch for me, because I’m doing Thanksgiving family drama—with the farmer.  There is family drama because the farmer has three sisters who think I have a morality problem. Like I don’t have morals.

In fact, the whole family thinks this, and those with Internet connections print out blog posts about sex acts and send them, via US mail, to less connected family members. The outcry crosses state boundaries from Wisconsin to Illinois, and sometimes, I think they are googling terms like Penelope Trunk and sex. I mean, it’s not easy to find the stuff they are finding.

Wait. You are wondering, right? What they’re finding? Here. Here’s a list of some links. And, now no one has to do any morally-compromising searches. It’s all right here:

The often-sought, ill-advised, business-trip tryst

When women get power at work, do they use it like men?

Six Sex Scenes (my 1994 master's thesis, graduate program for english, Boston Univ.)

Honestly, I like the sisters. Their ideas about how to live life seem fine. I think I’m living the same morally responsible lives they are, even though they’ll never think that. Also, the farmer’s parents are always very kind to me and my sons.  So, it seems like Thanksgiving should be okay.

But Thanksgiving in a family where there’s a family business is different.

I’ve always meant to write a post about the farmer’s business acumen. He reminds me of the most resilient, innovative startup guys I know. The only difference is that he’s not doing Web 2.0—he’s doing cows. There are pieces of the family business I’m dying to tell you about. Like, the sweetness of the farmer and his parents working side by side for twenty years to pay off the farm, and the cleverness of the farmer figuring out how to be part of the local food movement without organic certification.

When I first met the farmer and his parents I saw rolling fields, warm milk and grass-finished meat. Now I see them just like the other family businesses:  Family conflict.

Cut to the farmer’s kitchen. I am cooking the farmer’s beef and the farmer’s squash, and if you think this is insignificant, consider that when the farmer told his parents that we’re getting married, the dad’s first question was, “Can she cook?”

The farmer takes out his phone and plays a message for me from one of his sisters. They are leaving messages pleading with him to dump me. Sometimes they cry. For him, of course. For his future – like I’ll take his money and run.

Also, sidenote: I think the sisters think the farmer has enough money and shouldn’t get any more, so they are outraged that he wants to negotiate with his parents, and they blame this on me. (Don’t get excited: The farmer has a lot for a guy who has done a good job farming and spent almost no money in fifteen years. But I could be with an investment banker if I’m marrying for money. Believe me, a farmer is not a smart move for marrying for money.)

After the voicemails and the ensuing doldrums, I remind him that our marriage counselor (no, we’re not married, but we’re early birds catching the worm) said that his family would be a big problem for him.

He tells me that we need to call the lawyer.

This is how we operate.  I always want to call the marriage counselor to make sure the farmer still loves me. And he always wants to call the lawyer, to make sure he’s going to be able to keep farming with his parents.

Is there anyone else who needed to sign a prenuptial agreement before Thanksgiving? I did. I had to sign to make sure the parents feel certain that I’ll never get my hands on that farm while they are alive. I signed. After all, my board would go ballistic if I did not have a prenup that protected my company. So I figured, okay, now everyone is happy in business-land.

But the problem with a family business is that if everything is not done up tight, by lawyers, then everyone has different ideas about who owns what. The farmer’s family business is, I think, a mess.

So the farmer’s family is negotiating. The farmer is telling his parents that if they can’t come to an agreement then he’s selling his portion of the land and leaving.

To live at my house. Let me just say that when we tried that out—where he lives at my house and doesn’t farm—it really sucked.  He missed the farm and I kept telling him he could buy another farm and he kept saying that he misses farming with his parents. But his lawyer tells him he doesn’t have a choice except to be prepared to leave (and live as a grouch at my house). Because how else can he negotiate?

I think negotiations like these are the only way for family businesses to survive.

I used to work at my grandma’s bookstore. I worked with a cousin—Laurie. She told me I should move to LA even though no one wanted me to. Everyone thought it was a crazy idea. But Laurie explained that the job of families is to keep you in line with the rest of the family, in a predestined path that is good for the family. And your job is to create your own path.

It seems to me that often, families are complicated, hurtful and constraining. But a family that is in business together must somehow rise above that, and encourage each member to express themselves, and find what moves them, and act on that. It’s a more generous model of a family that what most families are.

So this Thanksgiving, for me, is like watching a play. I don’t have a huge stake — I just want to be with the farmer, wherever he goes. So I watch, from afar, hoping everyone can agree on how the business should be, and hoping no one mentions how much they hate what I write.

Meanwhile, I think the sisters are hoping to wait out the storm. The farmer has dumped so many women that his family can’t believe I’d have staying power. And, of course, he has dumped me 15 times, so the family does have a point.

I ask him what I should talk about. “What if they bring up my miscarriage?”

“They won’t,” he says, “They’ll bring up the weather.”

And he laughs. Because of course, I’m more conversant on reproductive rights than the weather. And no one talks weather better than a farm family.

We get into bed and talk about how we will only spend a couple of hours at Thanksgiving with his family and then we will go back to my house where we will have Thanksgiving with my Ex. (Need I say more about this situation than that the dinner with the Farmer and the Ex will be the more relaxing of the two?)

We talk about how the farmer needs to do chores in the morning with his dad. And we need to bring two pies for his mom. And we go to bed all cuddly because the farmer loves talking logistics. Farming seems like it’s about land and animals and being close to the earth, but it’s really about the logistics of land and animals as you try to control the earth.

I look at the farmer and say, “Oh. You’re so happy now because we talked logistics.” Then I kiss him and turn out the light.

The next morning, at the breakfast table, we eat hamburger because he doesn’t feel like it’s a meal if you don’t have meat, and I won’t eat pork because even though I’m with a pig farmer, that doesn’t mean I’m not Jewish.

I want to ask him about what he told his sisters about me and my kids coming to Thanksgiving.

I say, “I need five minutes to talk.”

I have to tell him the duration because he doesn’t like conflict without a set endpoint. I once explained that the endpoint for personal conflict is death. But he needs something sooner.

Comment on: Thanksgiving drama on steroids: Adding a family business to the mix

Retail is a great way to get flexible work, (which is why I think we should see a surge in educated people taking retail jobs.) But most people don't aspire to retail because the work is not intellectually engaging. On the other hand, most of the intellectually challenging work in this world comes with inflexible schedules.

So the trick is not to get flexibility, the trick is to get it without losing engaging work and avoiding a pay cut. Also, keep in mind that flexible work is not about the hours, it's about control. Because most of us are fine with working long hours as long as we have control over those hours.

Given these parameters for thinking about flexible work, here are the tricks for landing that sort of job:

Be a star. There are great stories all over the place about women who negotiated. Brenda Barnes was CEO of Pepsi, then she quit to take care of three kids. She came back and took a position as CEO of Sara Lee. That’s the ultimate flexibility: A CEO position in the Fortune 500 with seven years off to raise kids.  But who is as talented in business as Brenda Barnes? Not many of us. The flexibility you can negotiate is directly commensurate to the star power you established before you started negotiating.

Be relentless. Flexibility comes, usually, after proving your worth to a company. Which means you can’t job hop to get flexibility unless you’re a rock star and can make it a precondition for hiring. Non rock stars need to stick around longer. Prove your worth, and then make tons of suggestions to get the specific flexibility you want—a new department, different hours, less travel, on-site child care, maybe a satellite office near your home.
You need to propose options that are solutions for you.  And if one doesn’t work, try another.

Know your bottom line. I wouldn’t work without enough money to have household help. It was a precondition for me being available at all times to the company—I needed household available at all times to me. This gives me the ability to create the type of flexibility I need in my life. At one point, things got so tenuous that I had a huge screaming match with one of my investors over my salary. But I didn’t budge. I had the confidence that I knew my line in the sand, and I wasn’t going to cross it.

Gear up for big risks. Screaming at my investors. And crying. And getting thrown out of the attorney’s office where we were. Those were big risks. I could have lost my company. But I didn’t. And I didn’t lose my salary either. But I took big risks. You never know what risks you’ll have to take to get what you want. But it’s safe to say that if you are aiming for flexibility in corporate America, you will need to risk your job, or your salary, to get what you want.

Be careful what you wish for. If you win the flexibility to do your work when you want to, and you make space in your day for your kids, you still did not get more time in your day. For example, it’s clear to me that there’s a surge of email from 9pm – 11pm eastern, as kids across America go to bed and parents jump online. So we’re better parents and engaged workers, but Oprah magazine reports that more than half of people who are married say they don’t have enough time for their spouses.

Comment on: How to find work with a flexible schedule

http://creativeclass.typepad.com/thecreativityexchange/2007/04/the_singles_map.html

I do not live near any single men. Well, I sort of do. My divorce lawyer has set me up with a few men in my hometown, Madison, Wisconsin. He told me that I am too focused on my work life. I need to get my personal life in order.

Here's how things went:

One guy was a little chunky in the middle, but he is a real estate mogul. I know, you're thinking, real estate mogul, in Wisconsin? Are there any? There are a few. I mean, Lake Michigan is a nice place in the summer, and also, someone's gotta own the real estate around the Green Bay Packers stadium. And besides, you can invest in real estate from any state, really.

So I went out with the real estate guy. He said right away that he wants to diversify, and I thought right away that I'd get him to fund my company. But before I could move in for the kill, I started falling for him. Which was very bad because I did not have my dating pitch set. Only my company pitch. And, he actually said to me, "You need a better pitch." About my marriage. He said that. He said I need to explain in a quick way what happened with the marriage.

I told him that I think that my husband probably has Asperger syndrome, and, hell, probably I do, too. And we are the marriage of varying degrees of social awkwardness. I told him that's why I think our marriage fell apart.

That did not go well.

Fortunately, in a town like Madison, all the rich guys go to the same divorce lawyer, so my lawyer had another idea. A furniture store owner.

I was like, "DUH! Do you not see my income in these divorce papers? I cannot date a furniture salesman because maybe I'll fall in love and marry him and he'll stop working and then divorce me and I'll be supporting two men for the rest of my life and still not be having sex."

The divorce lawyer is a guy who can withstand many hysterical fits in one day probably because he charges hourly for them but also because it comes with the territory when you are helping people get through the worst time in their lives and they need someone to blame for it. So he said, "It's not just furniture. He owns every furniture store in the state."

I said I'd consider it. And while I was waiting for the divorce negotiations to kick into high gear, I noticed that all furniture delivery trucks have the guy's name on them. Like there is a furniture monopoly in Madison or something.

So I called him. And then I got this idea.

I had this radio show in Madison but I didn't like doing it because it really doesn't help my blog. So I stopped doing it because local radio is local and internet is not local. But then I thought that I could get this guy to give me a new dining room set if I could say his name on the radio during my show. Like, product placement. And then I started fantasizing about my dates with him and at the end of a great night of marketing discussions and drunk flirting, we would end up putting great furniture inside a truck with his name on it and drive it to my house.

That's the problem with all my dating. I can't stop letting my mind turn it into a business transaction. I thought for a second that I had changed my ways when I finally got a guy into bed. After missing just about every cue he gave me over the course of almost two days. So there we were in bed, but I realized that he's got all this great information about recruiting, and my company, which is actually in recruiting, could benefit from that.

So I asked him how candidates differentiate themselves.

He said, What?

Then he said that the best candidates never let anyone know they are looking. They just let people know what they're great at.

We talked and then I was happy that I had something to write about and I fell asleep in his arms.

This is how I know I better move to a place that has more single men. Because look, I've gone through three already and not been able to stay focused on the non-work part of things. I need more chances to figure out how to separate my work life and my personal life. I am not totally sure how to do it.

Am I the only woman with this problem? Don't most women spend the majority of their time with men in a work situation? And don't most women train themselves to not do dating when it's time to do work? So how do we retrain ourselves? I am so good at figuring out how to do business with every guy I meet. How does this translate on a date?

Comment on: How to shift between work and dating

Many people ask about my divorce. Usually it's because the person cares about me. But with the investors, there is no pretense. They just want to know if Nino is going to get a large percentage of my stock in the settlement. The risk to them is that at some point, Nino would have so much stock in my company that it wouldn't be worth my time to continue doing the company. The investors want to make sure they don't get involved in a situation like this.

So I assure the investors it won't happen, but honestly, I have to work hard to make that true.

For the most part, divorce is a divide-down-the-middle thing. For an entrepreneur with a venture backed start-up, the trick is finding the middle. Because there's no perfect way to figure out the value of the company. I try to make the company look valuable enough that I can pay off our debt and support the kids, but not so valuable that Nino thinks it's his ticket to divorce heaven.

My lawyer, Allan, sees it as his job to put the fear of God in me: If I cash out big and it turns out I mislead people in the divorce proceeding, then Nino can come after me for everything. "Just be honest" is what Allan tells me. For $400 an hour.

I refer him to the blog post where I say that lying on one's resume is an art form and honesty is not black and white.

He tells me that divorce law is different from career advice.

I say I think the difference is that career advice has more than a one-time use.

Allan thinks this is not true because he thinks that one day I will divorce the farmer. He says, "Your farmer has land in the middle of nowhere. If you like farmers, I have a farmer for you. He owns the land at the end of [sworn to secrecy – major road in Wisconsin]. And he just sold a bunch."

I remind Allan about how pissed off he was when I wrote a post about the last guy he set me up with.

Allan concurs: I am a nightmare to set up on a date.

This conversation takes place on the short walk to the building to meet Nino and his lawyer.

Allan asks me how I'm feeling about custody.

This is why I like Allan. He cares about me. He is thinking of the flurry of phone calls I made to him after I read that women who make a lot of money are losing custody to their husbands who make no money.

"Where did you read that?" Allan asked.

"In the London Mail."

Allan said, "Forget it. This is Madison. Don't worry about it. If you want to know what to worry about, worry about the company."

I didn't know if I should believe Allan. I didn't know if I should worry. I have so many mentors who help me with my start-up: almost all of them are men, and all are extremely generous with their time and ideas. But none has experience losing custody as a mom.

So I asked Nino one day, when it was our three-year-old's birthday and I was premenstrual and I forgot half of the goodie bags, "Do you think we parent equally or do you think you do more?"

He said, "I think you do way more than I do."

I said, "Really?" I should have recorded it or something. But instead, I cried.

He said, "Could we just have a normal birthday party? No crying?"

Okay. So, flash forward, to the meeting with our lawyers. And in our ongoing quest to be normal, Nino and I sit in the room and we try to do niceties. But niceties are difficult for me and Nino. Not because we are not nice to each other, but because we are bad with small talk. I feel an affinity to him when both of us are befuddled during lawyer small talk about the weather and the Badgers.

We get down to business. Which is the business of figuring out how much my business is worth.

Nino's lawyer, Steve, is worried that my business is stupid and I'll never be able to pay off our debt. He says, "So much of the business is you. What if people start saying bad things about you?"

I say, "Haven't you been reading my blog?"

Nino says, "No. I told him not to. I thought it would be too expensive."

Steve says, "I've looked at it."

I say, "Did you like it?"

Steve smiles. Or maybe he says yes. I can't remember. But I remember getting the distinct feeling that he would let me use his name in my blog posts even though Allan told me to never use Steve's name.

Me: Didn't you see the comments? People tell me I'm an idiot all the time.

Steve: Well. I didn't see that. But I saw the letter to the editor in the Wisconsin State Journal.

Allan: I have it right here.

Me: What? What is that? A scrapbook?

Allan: Yeah. Sort of. Here is where you were covered in the New York Times. Steve, did you see this?

Steve: Oh. What is this?

Me: Let me see the letter to the editor. Oh, this is just some over-educated person from Madison whining about how her graduate degree mattered.

[I look up. The lawyers are lost in the clips. Nino is shaking his head incredulously. Then everyone looks up.]

Me: I get hundreds of comments each week saying how stupid I am.

Steven: Really? I think I don't understand how the business works. I thought you were an authority.

Me: It's a fine line, stupidity and authority.

Nino: [giddy at the line of questioning] Oh, do you think so?

Steven: Can you explain the company again? How do you tell investors that you are going to make money from this thing?

Me: Well, I think the way I explained it last time probably didn't work for you. So, I have an idea. Would you like me to give you the pitch I give to investors?

Steve: Sure.

Me: Should I stand? I usually stand.

Steve: Okay.

Me: Well, I usually have a PowerPoint presentation as well.

Allan: We can imagine it.

Allan is excited that I'm going to do the pitch. He thinks our best-case scenario is if Nino and his lawyer understand the company very clearly. Allan says they'll leave all the stock to me if they see it's in everyone's best interest.

So it turns out that the key to a good divorce is good communication. Hilarious. For people who are not us.

I look over at Nino. He's never even asked me what my company does. I am secretly happy to finally tell him. I think he should be more curious.

I do the pitch. At first I sort of tone it down, but then I get rolling. I realize that I don't need the PowerPoint. I say, "We aggregate people who blog about their careers." Then I talk about how great the bloggers on our network are: "Super-engaged employees that employers are looking for." I toss around some financial estimates and explain, "We encourage employers to recruit by having a conversation in the blogosphere."

Steve says he thinks that companies don't know what blogs are.

Steve says he doesn't see an employee shortage in Madison law firms.

These are not good observations. I worry that I have not explained things well.

But then Nino says, "That stuff is not going to be a problem. The problem is that the PR people won't want to let everyone talk to bloggers."

I say, "Nino's right. That's the weak link in the plan. He's so smart. That's why I married him."

Comment on: The entrepreneur's guide to a good divorce settlement

At this point we've been seeing the marriage counselor for a few months, and believe it or not, I've learned a thing or two about communicating. We all want to think that our communication problems at home are different from the communication problems we have at work. In fact, though, corporate training companies like VitalSmarts have shown that communication skills are the same at home and at work, just the stakes are higher at home, where getting fired is not just a new job hunt.

So in the spirit of acknowledging that work and home require the same communication skills, here is what I've learned so far:

1. Make sure the person you're talking to is ready to hear what you're saying.
One reason there are so many comments about my posts about my marriage is that men (it's mostly men) fear the emasculation of my husband via blogging. There is, of course, little sense of irony among these men that my husband's masculinity would be very precarious if a few blog posts could derail it.

Regardless, this post is about our marriage. So if these posts bother you, you should ask yourself why you are reading past this paragraph.

2. Instead of complaining, ask for what you want in concrete, measurable terms.
In counseling, my husband and I had the earth-shattering revelation that we are treating each other like crap. So, we each got to ask the person to do some things that would change that dynamic and help us feel better about our relationship.

My husband asked me to stop throwing things, which really pissed me off because I have thrown things twice, in fifteen years, both times at a wall, but he brings it up constantly like I have a track record for throwing daggers at his head.

Please, don't send me emails about how even one thing thrown is traumatizing, okay? I had about ten million things thrown at me as a kid, and the police were at our house all the time, so throwing only twice, and relatively innocuously, is actually a triumph, and the result of ten years of therapy so I don't repeat what my parents did. No kidding: Ten years.

Here's what I asked from my husband: That he say or do one nice thing to me every day. He definitely got ripped off in this bargain. Do not write to me about how this is a metaphor for our marriage. It isn't. In all marriages that reach a low point, both people are getting ripped off equally, or else someone would threaten to leave. And neither of us is leaving.

3. Give feedback if expectations aren't met, even if the effort is good.
The first day comes, and he writes me a note to thank me for taking care of the kids. Here's what it said: Thanks for taking care of the kids. Here's where he put the note: On my Facebook wall.

I didn't even know he had an account on Facebook. And before you go to mine, let me confess that my assistant does a lot of my Facebook stuff – which is not uncommon because many professionals are on Facebook only because of peer pressure.

My assistant sends an email to me to let me know my husband says, Thank you for taking care of the kids.

I don't want to tell my husband that he is crazy for posting stuff like this on my wall where thousands of people see it. But after three days of Facebook-based gratitudes, I remind him that my assistant manages my Facebook page.

He says, "Oh yeah. I forgot." Then he keeps sending stuff there. He does chocolates. Then flowers. Then plants. By now, my Facebook page looks like a greenhouse.

I count the days until we will be back in a counseling session where I can ask for something different.

4. Take responsibility to make your boundary needs clear.
Then I got an email from Ryan P: "I see on Facebook that you and Nino got married. Congratulations."

That's when the Facebook thing became too much. I realized it was my husband's way of doing our marriage publicly. Mine is blogging, his is Facebooking. So I wanted to tell my assistant to unmarry us because I don't want to be linked to him online because I'm so sick of him. But Ryan P pointed out that if I do that, everyone would think that we got unmarried, "which would be worse than announcing that you're married." So I had my assistant fix it to say I'm married, but not say to whom.

5. You must keep talking. That's the only way to make progress.
The other assignment we had from the marriage counselor was to have a conversation. Yes, that's where we stand–we must be directed to talk with each other.

It takes us a while. I have been travelling a lot which throws off everyone's schedule.

So on Friday night we put the kids to bed and we sit down to have our conversation. We sit on the kitchen floor because it's already freezing in Madison and our house is hard to heat, but the kitchen is always warm. We sit across from each other on our impractical-for-a-kitchen but squishy-soft pink rugs. There is a soft hum from our refrigerator. There is an orange glow from the Halloween lights my son taped across the wall.

Our conversation topic is pre-selected for emotional safety: A book my husband's reading. James Kunstler's The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century.

My husband refers to this book as peak-oil literature. I am shocked to hear he's reading anything at all because he spends so much time taking care of our kids.

He knows all the scenarios about what will happen if we cannot use technology to replace oil, and he feels strongly that it's too late to make a difference with recycling. Here are things we talk about:

• If we cannot transport food then we all have to farm. There will probably be a feudal system because only some people own farmable land.
• Cuba is a test case for this. When they could not get oil from the Soviet Union, everyone had to farm. It has been deemed a success by agronomists.
• There is some point when oil gets so expensive that it's no longer useful for maintaining infrastructure and then infrastructure collapses and oil is worth nothing.

I ask a lot of questions. I find all this fascinating, and so does he. We talk about the author's blog, Clusterfuck Nation, and I have a moment of blog-title envy. We talk about teaching our two kids to farm. From a book. Because how else would we know? And there really aren't books like that because historically neighbors have taught each other. Besides, we would need oil to get the books to people.

I tell my husband that I like the idea of not having any oil. It's a much more simple life, and it's appealing to me. "We would need to live close to people we love. We'd spend a lot of time sitting on our pink rugs talking."

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But things did not go well. Almost every guy I went out with ended up wanting to do business with me. (Yes, I went into business with one of them.) And often when I met with an investor about the next round of funding for my company, our meeting (that was invariably at some swanky restaurant he owned) turned into a date by the end of the evening.

I started questioning the idea that I should be so frank about looking to get married. Life is one big negotiating opportunity, and I saw I was not doing well. Also, I noticed that men don't generally ask for what they want. The classic example: They ask you out to lunch when what they really want is sex.

There is so much written about how women are not as good at negotiating as men are. Lots of studies show that women don't even start negotiating — nine times out of ten, men will ask and women won't. And when women do negotiate, they don't get what they want as often as men do.

There is no solid research to tell us the why behind the poor negotiations. Most people who toss around ideas about why women don't ask, toss around some version of the idea that women don't like conflict: Women like to collaborate; women are caretakers.

I don't believe this, because in a relationship, women are typically more comfortable with conflict than men are. In fact, women are more likely than men to bring up conflict in a relationship. And men are more likely to withdraw from conflict. (This last link is so fun. It's dating tips for guys from AskMen.com - a site that is always right on target about how women think.)

Anyway, I think the reason women do poorly in negotiations is that women assume you should ask for what you want, but men know that's not how the game is played. Men know that you need to be aware of what you want, but that's not necessarily what you ask for.

So then it makes sense that men negotiate more than women because women are facing conflict head-on and men are not. It's much easier to approach someone you are not going to instigate conflict with. So negotiations work best when you don't assume you need to ask for exactly what you want.

Think of the sex example: If a guy approaches you for sex, you hang up on him. If he approaches you for lunch, you think he's very sweet. And then later you have sex.

Salary is another situation where you are better off not asking for what you want. In salary negotiations, you always want to wait until the other person gives the number. Even though you know what you want, if you say the first number, your counterpart will tell you it is higher than he or she was planning to pay, no matter what the number is.

When someone asks how much money you want, a way to get out asking directly for the very high salary you really want is to say things like, "I want to consider the whole package not just salary" or "I want to make sure we are a good match before we talk about salary." This forces the other person to give a number first, and then you can say you want more.

My friend Chris Yeh gave me another good example of when you should not ask for what you want: Founding a company. He said if you want advice, ask for money, and if you want money, ask for advice. For those of you who have dealt with investors, you'll recognize that this is exactly how the world of startups works.

And based on my own experience of trying to date while running a startup, I think this might be true too: If you want to go into business with someone, ask them on a date. And if you want to date someone, go into business with them.

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Another factor that has a huge impact on your ability to negotiate is the power of your BATNA — or Best Alternative to a Negotiated Deal. William Ury, author of the negotiation bible "Getting to Yes," says that the key to effective negotiation is learning how to read the core needs of each side. If you can estimate the BATNA of each party, then you'll be clear on where you can push during the compromising stages.

I learned about Ury's methods when my husband and I were in couples therapy. The therapist taught us to stop trying to change each others' needs and to understand them instead. This is how we got better at accommodating each other in a way that didn't crush us. And it was a great lesson in negotiating that went way beyond our marriage.

Ury focuses on strategy — he teaches how to understand the big picture from both sides. But you also need to have some tactical plans. I learned mine from one of my former bosses. My strengths are management and coming up with ideas. One of the reasons I took a job with this guy was because I knew he had totally different skills from mine: He was a great dealmaker, especially in business meetings.

This boss gave me so much negotiating advice it could fill 50 columns. Here are seven of the most memorable tactics I learned from him:

continue reading at Yahoo Finance

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But when asked about writing under a different name my editor said, "When you're Dominick Dunne you can negotiate with Time Warner."

And herein lays the problem with most negotiations. You are in a great position if you have something to leverage, like, another person willing to give you the same type of deal. This is called your BATNA (best alternative to negotiated agreement). But in most cases, one party has an especially terrible BATNA. In the case of me and Time Warner, if I said no to them, they would have ten million people who would love to write a column for them. If they said no to me, I would not have a column.

Yet most advice about negotiating assumes you have a good BATNA. In an interview I did with William Ury, the author of my favorite negotiation book, Getting to Yes, he said that negotiation is all about knowing your BATNA and knowing the other party's BATNA and then helping both of you to get what you want.

If you think about negotiating from this vantage point, then you can understand why job hopping is okay in today's market: the BATNA for young people is stronger than the BATNA for hiring managers. Hiring managers are scrambling to hire young people and the young people are quitting faster than human resources can replace them. Meanwhile, the alternatives for young people are increasing – they can live at their parents' house, they can start their own company, and they can travel. All great alternatives to getting a job at a company.

That said, sooner or later each of us finds ourselves in a situation where we have a really lousy BATNA. I find myself in this position a lot, as a writer. For example, a very large syndicate asked me to write for them. It would have meant having my column run in 400 newspapers at a time when I had about ten newspapers. I sent the contract to my lawyer, thinking he'd just take a quick look and say yes. But he told me that there was a clause that made me essentially unable to write for anyone else. Ever. We tried negotiating and they wouldn't budge. Of course they wouldn't. Millions of people want to write a syndicated column.  So I had to say no. It was a very hard decision. In hindsight I am thankful for that lawyer, but for years after that, every time I found myself struggling, I worried that I did the wrong thing with the syndicate.

When Yahoo offered me the chance to write for them, they gave me a difficult contract. I gave it to the lawyer and the lawyer was very frank: It's not a great contract, but it's a great opportunity, and you should take it. So we talked about some things I could try asking for that would not be that hard for Yahoo to give on, just to be nice. I gave Yahoo a short list, they picked a few things, and I signed.

So what have I learned from all this?  If one person has a great BATNA and the other has a terrible one, it's not really negotiations; it's trying to get a little something extra. It's asking for a favor. If you approach negotiations from this perspective then you are much more likely to get a little bit of what you want.

Figure out where your counterpart might be willing to give a little. Even if your BATNA clearly stinks, most people you negotiate with will be willing to give a little just to create some good will for the working relationship you are establishing.

So you can read all the negotiation advice in the world, but if you have a terrible BATNA, what you really need is advice about how to ask for a favor. And, ironically, the advice for asking for a favor is the same advice for negotiating: Know what is most important and least important to both parties.

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One question we did not practice was "How much money are you expecting?"

When the ice cream store owner asked, I said, "Well, my parents are cutting off my allowance for the summer so I'd like twenty dollars a week." That seemed like a lot because I wouldn't need money for school lunches.

Later, my mom pointed out that I gave a number so low that it would have been illegal. In the end, the owner paid me minimum wage for a 40-hour week, and because I had asked for so little at the beginning, by the time I was a doing the job of a manager I was making less than some scoopers.

So I quit, and moved to a pizza parlor where I got extra money for cutting the salami with the machine that cut peoples' fingers. It wasn't until later in my career that I realized there are established strategies for salary negotiations, and if you follow them, you will likely get the salary you deserve without risking the loss of a limb.

I got a lot of practice doing that in my twenties - having about ten jobs in ten years. I got a sense of who would negotiate and who wouldn't. I learned to read people in business. And then I realized that you can use these skills for a lot more than just salary.

One of my bosses gave me the book Getting To Yes. He said the book would help me manage because every management moment actually has implied negotiations.

When I went to couples therapy with my husband, the therapist assigned us reading. (Who knew therapist assigned books?) But guess what it was? Getting to Yes.

It was a great idea. Because then instead of paying a therapist to entertain our insane ideas of changing each other. We learned how to make the other person feel happy about giving us what we want by making sure that they get something, too.

So I was excited when I had the opportunity to interview the author of Getting toYes, William Ury. He's director of the Global Negotiation Project at Harvard, and his new book is The Power of a Positive No: How to Say No and Still Get to Yes. Here are his five best tips for doing well in negotiations.

1. Take a break.
Ury calls this "going to the balcony" in order to get a big picture handle on what's going on so that you are not getting too worked up over irrelevant details. He says, "When we negotiate when we're angry we give the best speech we'll ever regret."

2. Know your BATNA.
This is negotiator-speak for "best alternative to a negotiated agreement." That is, if you have to walk away, what's the best you can get? This tells you how much power you have in negotiations. The person who needs the agreement the least has the best BATNA and the most power.

3. Put yourself in the other person's shoes.
Ury describes negotiation as an exercise in influence. "You need to change someone's mind, so you need to know where they are right now." This means listening more than talking. And the first question to ask is Why. You will hear their needs, but you need to know the underlying cause for the need. For example, if your boss wants you to work a 16-hour day. To negotiate with your boss, you need to understand why – what needs to get done in those hours. Maybe you can get it done a different way.

4. Learn to say no.
"In order to get to the right deal, you need to be able to say no to the wrong deal. Saying no is fundamental to the process of negotiation." 

Tip from the department of great-if-you're-him: Warren Buffet once said that he doesn't understand "getting to yes" because he just says no until he sees a perfect yes. Buffet says you only have to give four or five great yes responses in his work in order to be a billionaire.

5. Be clear on your values.
For those of us who might not see a perfect yes, deciding on no is more complicated, and we have to be really clear in our own minds about what we value and what we need. Sometimes a no is surrounded by a deeper yes. For example. You say yes to the values, no to the tactics and yes to going forward. Ury calls this a positive no. But he warns that if you're in doubt, then the answer if probably no.

What I take away from Ury is that good negotiation is a combination of good self-knowledge and good people skills. And, not surprisingly, this is the combination that gets you a lot of things in life.

There are opportunities in each of our lives to practice negotiations constantly – even, as Web Worker Daily points out,  in email. You can do it with a spouse, with a boss, with your neighbor who doesn't clean the yard. The better you get at the small stuff, the easier the big moments of negotiation will feel.

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