I think about marriage a lot. I have been married twice, both times to women who grew up in divorced families that were high in conflict. I know now that people who grow up in divorced families where there is a high degree of conflict statistically trend toward divorce also. The same is true for children of intact families with high conflict, but to a lesser degree.
I think about marriage because I have two children that I love dearly and I want them to have their best chance of being happy in life. I think, and studies show, that marriage can make people happier. My concern is that my children won’t grow up with a good idea of what makes a good marriage or what makes a marriage good. I have been married twice, and the mother of my children has been married four times.
Barry Grosskopf, author of “Forgive Your Parents”, talks about the stages of life and a marriage. He talks about a “healing marriage” as an instrument to unearthing the long buried ills of childhood, processing them, and finally putting them to proper rest. According to Grosskopf, things happen in our lives as children, and we don’t understand them because we haven’t lived enough yet. We bury these events until we are old enough, have lived enough to understand them. This is one of the reasons that I never, or try not to, ask a child to assess things. I try to not ask “Did you have a good day?” because they have to figure out if it was a good day. Instead, I ask “What happened today?” “What did you think about that?” without trying to lead them to an answer.
I try to get my kids to verbalize events. There is a part of human congition that is driven by verbalization. I don’t understand it completely. I discovered this when I was an undergraduate. I took the first quarter of physics and was failing it. I had mastered three quarters of calculus, but was failing physics. I dropped the class and took it again the next year. Again I found myself in trouble in the class. I started to verbalize my way through problems and I found that I understood them better. Rather than look at some collection of symbols on the page, I started to say aloud, “the coefficient of friction with respect to the x direction’ and then I got it.
I have thought about this verbalization a lot. I wonder if that is the reason that therapy works, when it works. I think that when people verbalize things, they become part of the fabric of ‘truth’, the things that form a matrix of understand and are used to interpret new events. What therapy can do is to cause the patient to speak truths, and strip away the half-truths. Incidentally, I think this is how Scientology works, when it works. They use a skin galvanometer called an e-meter. If the subject is lying, there will probably be some indication and the half-truths are shed faster.
Being self-honest is hard. In a recent communication with someone, I talked about this and how our references, our means of measurement, is based on the self. So long as some form of internal consistency is maintained and our behavior is consistent the mores of our society, we accept our perceptions as valid. An outside observer may have a different view, but our perception will remain intact. I think of it as perceptive inertia.
One problem with this truth that arises from verbalization, is that if something is verbalized often enough, it seen as true, even if it is plainly false. I and my ex wife, when we were trying to figure out what to do with our marriage, took a quiz about emotional needs. One of the ‘needs’ she penciled in, was the need to be alone for some amount of time each day. By doing the math, it became apparent that it was roughly equal to the amount of time that we had together after the kids were in bed. But she clung to the idea, that being alone was a one of her emotional needs, even after I pointed out that it meant that we would have no time together.
I didn’t know then what I know now about my ex wife, where she had been and what she had done. I was still trying to save the marriage. In “Can This Marriage Be Saved“, Laurie Abraham writes about Philadelphia psychologist named Judith Coché and her approach to working with couples. She works with couples in a group environment for a year, meeting six hours a day, once a month, and for two weekends during the year. People sign a contract to signify this commitment.
When Coché lists the virtues of the group over other forms of therapy, she cites the “Greek chorus” effect, a term that captures how members begin to harass one another, if politely, about the habits corroding their marriages. “In a group, there’s an experience of being held accountable for one’s own behavior,” Coché told me, adding that it’s more powerful to be called out — or cared for — by a civilian than by a professional. “I’m a paid consultant. I’m a nonperson.” Other benefits she cites are the often-silent products of group dynamics. No matter how ultimately prosaic their woes, members are startled to see reflections of themselves in the other marriages — My God, I do that, too — and if one person musters the strength or resolve to make a change, somebody else may consciously or unconsciously follow. The principle of isomorphism also comes into play, she said, meaning that as people forge intimate connections within the group, the enriching encounter in that system may spread to the other system: the marriage.
Finally, Coché extols the “community” in which the group envelops couples. As panoramically documented by historians like Stephanie Coontz, marriage used to exist in a web of extended-family obligations. For the upper classes, its purpose was to magnify wealth and power; for the lower, to choose a spouse who could contribute sweat or material goods to the small business that was each household. Gradually, with industrialization and the movement of jobs outside the home, love replaced communal economic imperatives as the glue between husbands and wives, striking two blows to the institution. First, romantic love isn’t known for its long-lasting adhesive properties; and second, no one is as deeply invested in a marriage as the two people in it.
I have thought about this a lot. I saw a movie, Stardust, yesterday. It is a wonderful movie, long on the wonders of love and short on the mechanics of what to do after the blush is off the rose. I was thinking about taking my kids to see it. What would they take away from it about love and relationships? Yes, love, the willingness to sacrifice, is important, but making a relationship where only one loves is a recipe for heartbreak. That was shown in the movie, but trying to take life lessons from two hours in the dark is fraught with error. And my children don’t have good role models to watch.
The article is pretty good. The article focuses on Marie, a wife of 22 years to Clem during the year of the contract. She has an MBA and Clem didn’t complete college. He is more laid back and she negotiates. She doesn’t seem invested in the marriage. She has history. Her father ran power games on her as a child. One of the things that many studies show is that people are attracted to members of the opposite sex that are very much like the parent of the opposite sex. Marie is completely like that, but she seems to project the unresolved relationship with her father on Clem. I could relate to all of that. Marie wants to negotiate. But what she really wants to do is establish the limits of choices for Clem. Marie is interested in Civil War history and Clem is not. She clearly thinks that Clem is her inferior. She is trying to manage her marriage, not live it. I can relate to all of that.
I don’t know the answers to some of these questions. I have found it hard to date. I have discovered a very low tolerance for narcissistic women. It seems that all of the good women are married. Are they married because they are good, or good because they are married? I don’t know.