It's hard enough to analyze or discipline oneself if unattached. Many people diminish their shortcomings in their own minds, and inflate their strengths. I'm no stranger to this - in business school, people are taught to do this in interviews to land a job, even if it comes back to bite them later.

In a marriage (a dirty word lately in many places), it can become even more difficult, because if the marriage is even a little bit healthy, a token of one's own ego is lying right next to you each morning. As Alec Baldwin said in his sometimes hilarious role in the 2005 film, "The Departed":

Marriage is an important part of getting ahead. It lets people know you’re not a homo. A married guy seems more stable. People see the ring, they think ‘at least somebody can stand the son of a bitch.’ Ladies see the ring, they know immediately that you must have some cash, and your cock must work.

Base humor, for sure, but it leads to an interesting point if followed through: some people think merely being married is enough and it's okay to use the ring as a shield, sort of like a cop's badge. In a society where many marriages are anything but healthy, a disconnect results for many.

If you're healthy and have a good attitude, you should know you're not perfect - even if you have a spouse who makes you feel like a million bucks. You might say, "I feel like crap because I've been eating a bit much lately and have been too busy to work out." Your husband or wife might respond, "you look fantastic" unless you're morbidly obese, but it doesn't change the fact that you might want to try working out a bit more. But again, that token of self-inflation is sitting right there telling you that you're okay, you're perfect, you're a catch - so why bother?

This becomes dangerous, because when typical marital problems arise - an argument that becomes a bigger deal than it should - it turns out one might not have been paying attention to the problems that manifest themselves in those arguments. So the psychological disconnect of, say, feeling like crap physically but not hearing it from the person who matters most comes to a head, and other issues wrap themselves around whatever it is the couple is arguing about, creating a complex web of problems that only serve to frustrate in the moment.

What does one do to address issues of self-analysis before they spiral out of control or begin affecting personal relationships? A fresh approach might include the following:

• Having time to oneself is important for each spouse. This is unavoidable for some - in my situation, both of us work, so I do have a couple of nights to myself. Do you like being alone? Hate it? If so, why? I find I think more clearly when alone, but I end up wanting to come back to the company of my family after a long while. Still, the time is useful for me to take a more objective look at myself than I normally would.
• Be honest with yourself about your interactions, your career, your relationships with your other family members (parents & siblings rather than children & wife). Basically, the life outside of the marriage. Is it healthy? If not, why not? Do you bring those problems home with you?
• To perform this analysis, the aforementioned time alone is needed. Write in a journal; speak to a friend; join a support group if you need to.

Whether we like it or not, our society is so overly social that it's expected one will have an extremely busy life outside of a long term relationship,such that people seek it out and don't allow a marriage or long term relationship to grow to its fullest potential. But if two people are right for each other, there should be no jealousy over hanging out with friends occasionally, or being able to spend some time alone. It's natural, healthy, and it should be encouraged.

Marriage alone isn't enough, and it shouldn't be used as a defense against self-analysis. As a spouse and as a parent, one needs to work even harder to ensure he or she is getting better as a person - that your spouse would still want to marry you even if you had just met yesterday; that your children see you as a positive role model instead of just the person who provides. Marriage, in this way, is a continuation of growth as a person, except you're doing it as two people instead of one. Just don't let that idea fool you out of accountability for your own actions and your own quality as a person.

People constantly engage in various behavior that threaten to disrupt the status quo in society. Since modern politics, there have been two ways for leaders to respond to this problem. Conservatives have argued that it's easiest to change people's behavior by giving them the freedom to alter their cultural and social patterns. Socialists have suggested a more straight-forward solution: tax people who don't behave.

The "tax motivation" underlies much of socialist politics. But there's reason to be critical. Just think of speeding. Corrupt readers are familiar with my position on speeding, which is that it's a pretty weak way of increasing traffic security. Driving fast doesn't necessarily mean that you're a bad driver; on the opposite, a lot of people, especially elderly, can be dangerous on the road at low speeds.

So what about forcing drivers who speed to pay tickets? The answer is quite simple: you don't alter your driving behavior just because you're forced to pay a fine. You pay it and you move on. High income drivers are also able to just pay and continue speeding as before. Sweden understood this and installed speeding cameras on many roads to photograph violators. The problem? The authorities are forced to inform you on the road with signs before you pass any camera. So, drivers slow down, drive slowly past the camera, and move on. In case they're lazy, they can always look up on the web where every single camera is located. In short, speeding tickets are useless.

Taxing people to change their behavior doesn't work. But leaders never learn. The Green party in Sweden campaigned during the election with a policy suggesting raised gas taxes to force people to buy "green" cars. But people living on the countryside who are dependent on driving everyday to work are unlikely to pay two or three times the money for a new green car, just because the gas price is up. They are more likely to just pay up the money and move on. In the end, all the taxation is doing is stealing money from people's wallets. And just think about all companies who are dependent on delivering products by car. In reality they'll experience a company tax.

Socialists blame classical liberals and capitalism for worshiping money, but it is socialists who believe we can change the way people think and behave, just by forcing them to pay more money for a service. People don't work that way. They need more factors to take into consideration before they change behavior. Think of the IT-boom in the late 90's in Sweden. The government claims it was financial policies who made it big, but the reality is that many companies allowed their employers to buy a home PC to a cheap price. The result? Their kids played around with Windows DOS after work and became computer gurus. When I was a boy I had a friend who never joined us when we played football or chased girls. He stayed home and built home pages for different organizations before the term "HTML standard" was even coined.

Giving people more money, on the other hand, is in many cases a good motivator. Pay an employee more money and he or she will take on more responsibility and work longer hours. We like to contribute to our company, but we're not willing to become work slaves unless we see a special reward coming our way. Socialists have never understood that positive reward always is better than negative punishment. If it was that easy, I'd paid the Russian hackers who send out Viagra spam to my email a lot of cash, a long time ago.