Chapter 1 WHAT MAKES MARRIAGE WORK?
Have you and your spouse ever planned a big romantic getaway only to find that once alone together, you fall into the same argument you've had twenty times before? Maybe it's about plans for the future -- whether to buy a bigger house, when or if to have a child, how to save for retirement. Or perhaps it's a past wound -- the way he acted on the honeymoon, or her fling with a co-worker that ended years ago. Or it could be a never-ending debate over housework, disciplining the children, when to have sex, or how to spend vacations.
I know a woman who traveled with her husband all the way to New Zealand, only to have a nasty spat the night of their arrival. He wanted to go deep-sea diving the next day; she wanted to sun on the beach.
"Your ideas are always so reckless," she fumed. "Why can't you just act like the middle-aged man you are?"
He retaliated, "You stifle my sense of adventure," adding a note of quiet contempt: "You bore me to tears."
Soon she was in tears, as their cross-fire continued for about an hour, until they finally called a truce. Stinging from one another's insults, they sat there realizing a worse pain: they could travel to the end of the earth together and still be stuck in a war that stared fifteen years ago, fighting the same battles over and over again.
Sound familiar? Or are you and your spouse more likely to avoid such skirmishes at all costs? Perhaps you're more like another couple I'm familiar with, who will float through such a vacation together, giving in to one another's wishes, carefully sidestepping any potential disagreement, burying past disappointments, stifling any complaints, ignoring any suggestion of conflict. If you and your spouse are this way, the odds are neither of you would say what's really on your minds; that way there's no friction and nobody gets hurt. These are peaceful matches -- except for this occasional, unpredictable twinge of restlessness. It might surface, say, when he tosses his jacket over his shoulder in a certain way, or when she brushes a wisp of hair from her eyes with the back of her hand. It's these small, familiar gestures that can make you remember: There used to be more passion here. You wonder what happened to all the laughter and affection. When did life together become so flat and colorless?
Or, maybe, at least sometimes, your marriage is like that of another couple I know. They go out for a Sunday afternoon in town together. She wants to do some browsing in shops; he starts to get visibly impatient. She begins to sulk, thinking, "He doesn't really want to spend time with me. He's so uncaring." Meanwhile, he broods, "She's spending too much money -- she's so selfish. Why can't we just enjoy going for a walk?" And for the rest of the afternoon the two are caught in separate ruminations about each other's faults.
Or, perhaps you and your mate are like still another couple, no longer even spending such time together. Come Sunday, she's caught up in a whirl of chores, helping the kids with school projects, trying to get the laundry done and the house in order; he's out playing softball, working on the car, or watching football on TV, or puttering somewhere. If your relationship has lots of times like this, the two of you may be living in parallel universes under the same roof.
And yet this is the person you loved so deeply when you got married, the person you sincerely meant to stick with through the joys and hardships of life. But despite your best wishes, there are moments when it seems impossible. It's as though some powerful, subterranean current takes hold of you both and leads you down a path of negative thinking, destructive feelings, painful action and reaction, drifting toward isolation and loneliness.
What is this mysterious current? Today, as we witness the dissolution of so many marriages, it becomes more crucial than ever to find an answer. And finding that answer has been the mission of my research these past two decades. Through intense, detailed observations of hundreds of couples like these, I have charted the invisible emotional currents between husbands and wives, underground streams of feeling that can burst to the surface either as a spring of harmony or a well of discontent.
In pursuit of the truth about what tears a marriage apart or binds it together, I have found that much of the conventional wisdom -- even among many marital therapists -- is misguided or dead wrong. For example, some marital patterns that even professionals often take as a sign of a problem -- such as having intense fights, or avoiding conflict altogether -- I have found can signify highly successful adjustments that will keep a couple together. And fighting -- when it airs grievances and complaints -- can be one of the healthiest things a couple can do for their relationship (indeed, how you fight is one of the most telling ways to diagnose the health of your marriage). You will see more clearly why such conventional assumptions are dead wrong as you read my explanation of the often elusive emotional dynamics of marriage, dynamics I have mapped in a simple model that can serve as a template for seeing your own marriage with new eyes.
The good news is that if you become familiar with these maps of what shapes the emotional currents in marriage for better or worse, the seemingly elusive forces that are at work in your own relationship need not be so mysterious to you, nor are you at their mercy anymore. In this book I will show you how to detect these forces in your own relationship so that you can see the hidden emotional profile of your marriage as though through an X ray. By making these hidden forces visible, you can start to control the direction of your marital journey -- calling a final truce on destructive arguments, corrosive ways of thinking about each other, and the downward spiral of reactions that can destroy a marriage. Instead, you can open the door to a more vital, fulfilling relationship.
DEMYSTIFYING THE MARRIAGE CRISIS
If you are worried about the future of your marriage you have plenty of company. There's no denying that this is a frightening time for American couples. More than half of all first marriages end in divorce. Second marriages do worse, failing at a rate of about 60 percent. Although many social scientists believed that divorce rates had leveled off in the 1980s, new data suggest the opposite: the divorce rate is actually getting worse as time goes on. A 1989 study of U.S. Census records by researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that, based on 1985 data, divorce among recent first marriages stood at a shocking 67 percent. In other words, two out of every three new couples are headed for divorce -- unless something changes. That "something" is what this book is about -- how to change your marriage to save it.
There's no question that the statistics are distressing, especially if you fear that your own marriage may be in danger. What makes the numbers even more disturbing is that no one seems to understand why our marriages have become so fragile. It is as if some hidden, evil force is loose in America that is making marriages fall apart. But the reason marriage and its troubles seem so mysterious is really quite simple: until recently, almost no scientific studies of this complex relationship had been done. The vast majority of books of advice to couples have been based, at best, on the insights marital therapists have gained from the couples they happened to see, and, at worst, on mere anecdote and theoretical musings.
And most of the research on marriage has suffered, in my opinion, from a number of flaws ranging from asking the wrong questions to conclusions that are simply not valid. The solution, of course, is to conduct solid experiments that examine stable and t