Every day, men and women with relationship “challenges” go through this little dance. It’s a dance of avoidance, avoiding what’s really bothering them. Avoiding what’s really important. Broken vows and broken promises serve up a multitude of problems that today’s couples are finding harder and harder to avoid. For certain, marriage ain’t what it used to be.

Yet avoiding these little problems can have huge implications for you and all your other relationships. A snowball effect occurs. If you’re not happy at home, it will eventually find its way into other parts of your life as well. Maybe your production at work drops off or you simply don’t smile anymore. Either way, your friends, family, and co-workers start to notice that you’re not yourself anymore. Suddenly, you’re different.

When a Swarthmore College student turned a guided tour of the Web into a detailed journal of his life, blog communication was born. That was in 1994. By 2007 that one blog had grown into 106 million blogs. Seventy-six percent of them document personal experiences to share with others. The 15 most popular words used in communicating those experiences are blogger, blog, stupid, me, myself, my, oh, yeah, ok, post, stuff, lovely, update, nice and a four-letter word that begins with “s”. Although that word isn’t in my dictionary, Merriam-Webster proclaimed another four-letter word to be 2004’s word of the year. That word was blog.