a) changes the subject to some triumph of his own; b) acknowledges the triumph with a grunt and then gets back to his own business; or c) belittles the triumph by asking, “Are you sure you’ll be able to handle this new job?”
Masters also learn never to sulk. Sulking consists of feeling angry about something but determined not to communicate about it. “The sulker,” Alain de Botton writes, “both desperately needs the other person to understand and yet remains utterly committed to doing nothing to help them do so. The very need to explain forms the kernel of the insult: if the partner requires an explanation, he or she is clearly not worthy of one.” The sulker is returning to childhood, and dreams of finding a mother who understands what he wants without words or explanation.
Nobody becomes more reasonable when they are blamed and attacked. Nobody becomes mature because their spouse, in the middle of an argument, screams at them to “Grow up!” The advice books offer a better formula, even if it is hard to follow while angry. First, try to state the problem in neutral terms. Then, stroke, stand, and contract. Remind the person that you hear and understand them (stroke); state your positions clearly (stand); find a way to meet in the middle (contract).
THE ART OF RECOMMITMENT
There are two classic crisis periods in marriage—just after the children are born and in the doldrums of middle age. In the former, the temptation is to replace the complicated and difficult relationship you have with your spouse for the joyous and captivating love you have with your children. In the latter crisis, people in middle age are haunted by a feeling of generalized sadness and incompleteness. There’s a sense that life is slipping away, and a tendency to see the spouse, with all of their flaws and negativity, nagging and unhappiness, as the real problem, the real anchor that is holding you back from your fullness.
During these crisis moments, there’s a tendency to recoil, to distance yourself from your partner. You begin to dissociate and withdraw. You construct parallel lives with outside interests and separate friend groups. You get used to marriage without intimacy—the marriage bed, as they say, where the spouses are a centimeter apart and a million miles away. You use drugs, booze, work, or the care of your children to occupy the psychic space formerly filled by the marriage.
In a study at Cameron University in Oklahoma, Joanni L. Sailor interviewed people who had fallen out of love. The quotes she collected are a searing testimony of how horrible it is to be in a relationship after the fire has died: “During sex there was no kissing. I remember just craving to be kissed, but not by him.” “The pain is so overwhelming.” “I think I cried for a year.” “Yes, it was the depression caused by profound loneliness.” “My love is disappearing; my heart feels like he is stepping all over it, and he does not seem to care.” “My personality had been rejected….It changed me permanently….I spent several years with no personality at all.”
After dissociation, you come to that terrifying time when the love in a marriage seems to dry up. Sometimes marriages truly are dead. Neither partner can hurt the other any longer, because neither really cares. In that case, divorce happens. But in other cases the embers are still warm, and the marriage just needs an act of courageous recommitment. And that is the next course in the curriculum of marriage: the art of recommitment.
During these low moments, it is helpful to remember that marriage is not just a relationship; it is a covenant. It’s a moral promise to hold fast through thick and thin. Both people have vowed to create this project or cause, the marriage, that is more important than each person’s emotional weather. Of course, there are times when divorce is the right and only course, but there are other times when the sentiment that guides Parker Palmer comes in handy: “If you can’t get out of it, get into it!” If you can’t easily walk away from something, then the only way forward is to double down.
When the well of love dries up, it takes an act of will to dig a little deeper. “It is a deliberate choosing of closeness over distance, of companionship over detachment, of relationship over isolation, of love over apathy, of life over death,” Mike Mason writes.
That’s not the natural inclination. Believe me.