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| by William J. Doherty, PhD |
 An Excerpt from Take Back your Marriage: Sticking Together in a World that Pulls Us Apart, by William J. Dougherty VIEW BOOK!  What makes it possible for some marriages to get stronger through periods of change and stress, while others fall apart for no apparent reason? I want to tell you a story of Ken and Judy, a couple I saw in therapy back when I was living in Oklahoma. They made a beautiful pair— tall, handsome, and graceful. They had met on the country-western dance floor, and they told me, with a touch of shyness, that they were really good dancers. So good that other people on the dance floor would sometimes make a circle and watch them dance. Ken and Judy had been married for three years. When I asked them when was the last time they had danced, they replied ruefully, “Three years ago.” The ritual that brought them together—that helped to define them as a couple—was something they had abandoned. Dance floors, I guess, are for singles and for couples who are falling in love, not for married couples trying to sustain their love.  We fall in love through rituals of connection and intimacy— courtship rituals like romantic dinners, long talks, riding bicycles or going skiing, going for walks, exchanging gifts, talking every night on the telephone. We mostly do these rituals alone as a couple; when people are falling in love, their family and friends know to give them some space. We gladly fill our time through rituals of connection and intimacy. We develop a common language and a common experience bank. We go to dinner at our favorite spots, and we try to sit at our favorite tables. We go dancing at our favorite places. And we don’t dance with everybody in the room; we dance mostly with the person we are falling in love with. And then we get married.  Why do we give up what made us so happy at an earlier phase in our relationship? Falling in love is the ultimate consumer fantasy, up there with a truly wonderful SUV or townhouse. Growing the new relationship and reaping personal rewards go hand in hand. When things go well, I give to you, you give to me, and we are wonderful as a couple. What’s more, our passion is fueled by anxiety about whether the relationship will last. Romance, novelty, and fear of loss—the stuff of operas and love affairs. A courtship like Ken and Judy’s, when the feelings are right, is easy to prioritize in one’s life. But it takes mindfulness and self-discipline to make the relationship a priority once we have made a permanent commitment and begun to live as a family. During courtship, and in the early months for couples who live together, the relationship is figural in our lives—front and center, if you will—and the rest of our lives are background. When we get married, and particularly after we have children, this reverses. Other things—the children, our work, our hobbies, even our religious involvement— become central or figural and the marriage recedes to the background and only gets our attention when something is wrong. An intentional marriage, unlike an intentional courtship, is a high achievement because it requires the discipline to keep connecting when natural energies and passions ebb. What do I mean by an intentional marriage? It’s one where the partners are conscious, deliberate, and planful about maintaining and building their commitment and connection over the years. They see themselves as active citizens of their marriage rather than as passive consumers of marital services. A lot goes into being intentional about marriage. I place special emphasis on three aspects: a rock-solid commitment to the marriage, a reservoir of marital rituals of connection and intimacy, and a supportive community. There are other ways to be intentional as well, such as developing good communication skills and constructive ways to argue and deal with conflict. In this era, if we are not intentional, we will become a consumer couple that has bought the boat and expects love, good intentions, and the river to do the rest. The only way to take back our marriages from their drift south is to keep paddling and have a joint navigational plan. Paddling means doing the everyday things to stay connected, to find time for each other, to go on dates, to make a big deal of anniversaries and special occasions, to work hard to reconnect after periods when we have been distracted from each other. Having a joint navigational plan means that you both are committed for keeps, with no exit strategy, and that you both take responsibility to monitor how the marriage is doing, when it needs mid-course corrections, and when it needs help in the form of marriage education or marital therapy. Intentional marriage is about everyday attention and long-range planning. One of the ironies of contemporary family life is that many people who are good at intentional parenting are lousy at intentional marriage. We evolve good parent–child rituals over the years, but we lose our marital rituals. People can be quite gifted at rituals with the whole family—family dinners, camping trips, vacations—and quite dumbfounded about what they would do as a couple. Couples who courted through long, romantic dinners are sometimes nervous about dining alone because they are not sure what they would say to each other for an hour or more. So they make sure to invite other people along for company. When it comes to long-range planning, many of us are good at thinking about our children’s future but lousy at thinking about how we will be a couple when our children are older. If we are honest, how many of us would give ourselves the same “letter grade” for effort in our marriage as for effort in our parenting? How many of us would die before putting our parenting on hold for weeks but end up putting our marriage on hold for years? Frank and Sally are a good example of a couple who started out devoted to each other and then transferred this devotion to their children. Always active people who used to bike and camp together as a couple, they now are highly engaged in their children’s sports, music, and other activities. They do as many of these activities together as possible, so it’s not like they go in separate directions all the time. They have friends they do things with, including family camping events. But the spark of emotional intimacy has gradually faded from their marriage. They never go out on dates. They go to bed at different times because Frank likes to stay up later. Sex has become infrequent. They celebrate their anniversary by going out with another couple. They still love each other and are fully committed to their marriage and family life. And they have the seeds of good companionship and good will toward each other. But when they allow themselves to reflect on their early dreams for their marriage, they feel some sadness—a sadness quickly countered by the thought that this is how marriage is after you have children and a busy life. I am not saying that Frank and Sally have chosen the wrong path in life; there are many ways to be married and few of us achieve all of our initial life goals. But a couple that does not have an intentional marriage place themselves at risk for the infiltration of consumer marriage. One day either Frank or Sally might start to think, “Is this all that life offers me? Am I really happy in this marriage? Could somebody give me more intimacy in my life?” I have seen too many people turn a critical eye on their spouse when they start feeling twinges of sadness about the marriage that might have been. After all, if they’re not happy, as good consumers they must assume it’s because their mate is a poor marital service provider or that the original “purchase” was a mistake. In that case, the only thing to do is to find a new canoe mate to start the journey all over again, leaving the wreckage of children’s and adults’ lives on the water. But the Mississippi will play no favorite with the next marriage either. The main way to resist the forces that pull us apart—the natural drift of marriage over time and the insidious pull of the consumer culture—is to be a couple who carefully cultivates our commitment and ways to connect over the years. Simply stated, the intentional couple thinks about their relationship, plans for their relationship, and acts for their relationship, mostly in simple, everyday ways and occasionally in big, splashy ways. Two Kinds of Marital Commitment Commitment is the starter motor of a marriage. It not only launches us when we marry, but we crank it every day. We especially call on it when things are not going well. I want to talk about two kinds of commitment—a tentative one and a permanent one. Janna and Sebastian, a couple we discussed earlier, are taking the more tentative approach to commitment that is increasingly popular among couples who live together—and even among those who get married. They are committed as long as they make each other happy, as long as they get along, as long as their individual life goals line up, as long as neither betrays the other’s trust by having an affair, as long as they don’t fight too much, as long as the sex is good, as long as the relationship meets their needs and helps them grow as people. I call this “commitment-as-long-as.” The bottom line is to stay together, not as long as we both shall live, but as long as things are working out for me. Every important cultural trend and every form of commitment that many couples embrace has something to teach us and that we should not lose sight of. “Commitment-as-long-as” has something to teach us. It stresses that commitment is a choice, not just a cultural mandate. It embraces the importance of spouses advocating for their needs and rights in the relationship. It stresses that people should not sit still while being taken advantage of by their spouses. It promotes self-advocacy in marriage for both women and men. But while this kind of commitment works well for courting or cohabiting couples who are exploring whether to make a permanent commitment, it lacks the staying power for the long haul of a marriage. It’s a starter motor designed to be used for months or years but not decades, and for good weather conditions but not for bad ones. The other kind of commitment is not tentative. I call it “commitment-no-matter-what.” This is the long view of marriage in which you don’t balance the ledgers every month to see if you are getting an adequate return on your investment. You have signed citizenship papers in a new country, which is now your country, and you don’t have a plan for how to expatriate if the nation’s economy goes sour or the political winds blow in directions you don’t like. You are here to stay. Commitment-no-matter-what combines elements of traditional religious and moral commitment with newer elements that recognize that marriage must be an intentional process of shared maintenance and renewal. This modern form of permanent commitment puts together the traditional ideal of an unbreakable marital covenant with the modern notions of gender equality, psychological intimacy, and focused work on growing a relationship. Also, let me be clear that it is possible for a spouse to lose a just claim on the commitment of the partner by a consistent pattern of misconduct and abuse of the marital vows. There are tragic exceptions when modern commitment-no-matter-what must be withdrawn. But that does not deter us from making the commitment anyway. That’s what makes it so scary, and the potential rewards so extraordinary. Take Back Your Marriage Sticking Together in a World that Pulls Us Apart By William J. Doherty, PhD Reprinted with permission of Guilford Press www.guilford.com |
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