from the family of one’s childhood
To build intimacy combined with some autonomy
To embrace the role of parents and absorb the impact of “Her Majesty, the Baby’s” arrival
To confront the inevitable crises of life
To establish a rich sexual life
To create a safe haven for the expression of difference
To keep alive the early idealized images of each other
A marriage survives when both partners admit their individual inadequacy to the challenges before them. A marriage survives when the partners agree to take lifelong courses together—in subjects like empathy, communication, and recommitment. The good news is you don’t have to get an A+ in any of them. If you get a solid B you’re doing pretty well.
EMPATHETIC WISDOM
When marriages break down, it’s because one or both partners feels unknown and misunderstood. When people feel unknown or misunderstood, they minimize and excuse their own failings: “Okay, I’m screwed up, but you don’t see and understand me!” They shift the blame onto the other person and reinforce their own worst traits.
Marital love is a seeing love. John Gottman, the dean of marriage scholars, grasped the essence: “Happy marriages are based on a deep friendship. By this I mean mutual respect for and enjoyment of each other’s company. These couples tend to know each other intimately—they are well versed in each other’s likes, dislikes, personality quirks, hopes, and dreams. They have an abiding regard for each other and express this fondness not just in big ways but in little ways day in and day out.”
Marital love is understanding the other person’s patterns. In Things I Wish I’d Known Before We Got Married, Gary Chapman describes a variety of different personality types that can coexist in marriage. There are painters and pointers. In conversation, painters describe an elaborately detailed picture of an event. Pointers just get to the nub. There are organizers and free spirits. The organizer sweats the details. The free spirit figures the details will take care of themselves. There are engineers and dancers. The engineers want to logically think through every decision. The dancers will go with their heart. These differences can be conflicts or complementarities, depending on how well each partner understands the other and accommodates.
Marital love is being aware of how the past is present in the marriage. Psychologists joke that a marriage is a battleground in which two families send their best warriors to determine which family’s culture will direct the couple’s lives.
Before you were together, the influence of these lineages was largely unconscious; it was just the way you did things. But in the first few months of marriage, your way of doing things comes into contact with another way of doing things. This new awareness usually is not a gradual, scholarly awareness in which you calmly stroke your chin and say, “Hmmm. Interesting.” It often comes in the form of an unexpected eruption. You completely overreact to some small thing your partner has done, and in the middle of your overreaction you are silently asking yourself, “What the hell is going on?!”
“We too often act from scripts generated by crises of long ago that we’ve all but consciously forgotten,” Alain de Botton writes. “We behave according to an archaic logic which now escapes us.” For example, people who were raised with conditional or critical love may hear “I wish you hadn’t done that” as “I’m about to leave you!” They may have trouble understanding that anger doesn’t threaten the relationship.
Couples who possess an empathetic understanding step back and understand how each member responds to stress. One of the most common forms of marital breakdown is the demand-withdraw cycle. One partner makes a request of the other—clean the house, show up on time—but there’s a hint of blame within the request. The other partner hears the request as nagging or complaining. Instead of fully engaging, this partner just withdraws. This prompts the person doing the requesting to repeat the request with a more explicit assignment of blame and to up the criticism. This causes the withdrawing partner to withdraw more. If the withdrawing partner occasionally gives in, this reinforces the message to the demanding partner that blame and criticism work. More blame follows until the withdrawing partner goes into complete withdrawal and disassociation mode. The more one lashes out, the more the other withdraws.
Healthy couples step back from the cycle and help each other grow out of it. “The magic of a couple’s relationship is that, when two people fall in love, whatever