Rx For a Troubled Marriage
by Donna Jackson
New Woman, March, 1998
Imagine you're on the phone catching up
with a friend who says she can't stay in her marriage another
minute. She's even called a few attorneys and a real estate agent -
that's how bleak things are. Surely she should go, you say, as you
listen to the awful details of her unhappiness.
Months pass. You talk again. She's decided
to stay and try to work it out, she says. Oh, there are a hundred
reasons: the kids; the financial realities of divorcing; the fact
that on a good day she remembers she loved him once; and, mostly,
she hopes it will be different between them - sometime
soon.
You hang up the phone, sure of this:
She'll be just as miserable a year from now as she is today. She's
just making the best of a bad situation, poor thing.
What you expressly do not expect is the
opposite scenario: to talk to her a year later and find that she
and her husband have changed, worked things out, transformed their
marriage into something far richer - they've found, truly, a new
level of intimacy together. They are, shock of shocks, happy
together after so much marital woe.
In this country, a couple divorces every
26 seconds. But what about the couples who teeter precariously near
the brink of divorce and don't split up? Of course, we all know
that some couples who opt not to separate are miserable together
forever. And some marriages cannot and should not be saved (see
box, "Should You Fight for Your Marriage?"). But, says Michele
Weiner-Davis, author of Divorce Busting and the audiotape program
based on her couples workshop, Keeping Love Alive, "I've
seen many couples in my practice who nearly divorced - often after
feeling as if they've been locked in a living hell together for
years - and yet they're able to rebuild a marriage that is better
than they could ever have imagined. They're often happier than
other couples who never went through such a terrible close call."
According to Weiner-Davis, this kind of reconciliation happens much
more often than we as a society tend to think, and has much to
teach us about the inner workings of a good marriage.
Although every women's tale of marital
hell differs, all couples who nearly split come to the same bleak
spot in the end: miserable, depressed, feeling betrayed, in
turmoil, scared, defeated, furious, and in such pain that they feel
as if they're being torn apart inside. What, then, enables some
women to transform their marriages? What emotional tools do they
use? Exactly what is a good enough reason upon which to base such a
major life decision? To find out, we interviewed a number of women
who nearly divorced - and didn't. Most of them stayed for one or
more of the following reasons:
They See Some Good in the
Bad.
According to Weiner-Davis, many of these women have just a glimmer
of hope that their marriages can improve. Take Kathy, a 37-year-old
Hollywood producer's assistant. "My husband and I were miserable
together for years," she says. He'd been unfaithful to her before
they got married, and she couldn't forgive him. "I was constantly
jealous, and it made me bitter. Then, when we'd been married for a
few years, he went to a bachelor party and let a prostitute sit on
his lap and roam her hands all over him. I heard about it later,
and I was merciless."
Things quickly escalated to the point
where, during an argument, Kathy slapped Jack and he shoved her.
"We had a three-year-old daughter, and I didn't want her to see us
like this, so I told him to leave," says Kathy.
But something happened during their
separation that gave Kathy a shred of hope. She and Jack decided to
write letters to each other to work out the details of their
divorce. "These letters were so clearly from a very kind person,
someone very hurt, very confused - someone who was good through and
through," she explains. Reading his letters, Kathy found herself
hoping that things could be different between them. They eventually
decided that Jack would move back in. "Even though it took a lot of
sweat and tears, the really solid, good marriage we have now all
started with that feeling of hope."
Their Husbands Also Engage-to Some
Degree-in the Process.
Unfair as it seems, experts say it
is usually the woman who decides to fight for the marriage. But no
amount of dedication on her part is enough unless her husband is at
least somewhat committed to the process. According to John Gottman,
director of the Seattle Marital and Family Institute, and author of
Why Marriages Succeed or Fail...and How You Can Make Yours
Last, "Often, a marriage succeeds or fails to the extent that a
husband can accept influence from his wife." If he listens and
responds to you in a way that keeps communication moving forward,
your efforts stand a good chance of paying off. As Kathy says,
"Jack showed up for every therapy appointment, he wrote me dozens
of letters. None of what happened for us could have happened if he
hadn't been actively involved in the process of trying to rebuild
our marriage."
They Take a Leap of Faith.
Many of these women say they came to a place where they made a
decision to work towards a better marriage even as the relationship
was at its very worst. This leap of faith precipitated a cascade of
changes within the marriage.
For Kathy, the leap of faith came after
she'd spent time researching articles about how the kids of divorce
cope. "The information I found out was not good at all. I realized
I didn't want my child to be a child of divorce. I started
wondering: Is there a way that you can live with a person you're
having so many conflicted feelings about and let the resentments
go? Once I made the decision to give our marriage everything I had,
things began to change. Both of us seemed to have a new commitment
to working things out." They agreed to see a therapist together,
and eventually Kathy found someone who was "confrontational, but
also kind. He flat out told us we were emotionally battering each
other. He made rules: He told us we could not see each other except
in his office because we were both too immature to talk things out
on our own. He didn't want to hear about who had done what to whom.
He wanted us to learn to back down. He taught us that if you want a
good marriage, you give in when you're wrong - and when you're
right. For the first time, I learned that I could be myself and
have my strong opinions and still back off, give in. I didn't need
to batter Jack emotionally until he agreed with me or pleaded for
forgiveness."
Sometimes a new discovery or vital piece
of information motivates a woman to take a leap of faith. As
Weiner-Davis says, "Any reason for staying together is a good
reason," assuming the couple wants to stay together. Whether it's
religious faith or fear of the financial realities of divorce,
"allowing your fears to give you pause can be a very positive
survival skill," she adds.
They Issue an Ultimatum.
Peter Kramer, M.D., clinical professor of psychiatry at Brown
University and author of Should You Leave? A Psychiatrist
Explores Intimacy and Autonomy - The Nature of Advice, says
that couples who stay together despite their grievances often learn
to discern what the crucial issues are and how to stand up for
them. Sometimes the ultimatum is nonverbal, for example, refusing
to go to a company party or moving out of the bedroom.
Grace, a 54-year-old businesswomen married
39 years, tells how her marriage was saved by an ultimatum. "We
were having trouble with one of our teenagers who was suddenly
failing in school, and we went into family therapy. My husband had
a drinking problem, and our family therapist said that if therapy
was to work, he had to stop drinking. But he didn't. I told him if
he didn't stop drinking and using alcohol as an emotional crutch to
avoid the feelings that therapy was trying to help him realize, in
three months I'd be gone." Grace's bold move worked.
They Learn to Accept Each Other's
Limitations.
As important as it is that you take a stand
on issues that are unacceptable to you, it's just as important to
realize that in order to be happy with your partner, you don't
necessarily have to like every single thing about him. "There is an
illusion that either you'll be able to change all the things about
your relationship that you don't like, or else you'll eventually
feel good about the things you can't change," says Weiner-Davis.
"But that's not true. You won't eventually feel better about your
partner in every single way. You have to accept that - that's part
of marriage."
According to Gottman, such acceptance is
critical, given that most couples never resolve most of their key
problems. And if they leave, they'd most likely find different but
equally upsetting and unfixable problems with the next person.
Which means, he suggests, couples need to learn to accept each
other's limitations. According to Neil Jacobson, Ph.D., a
psychologist at the University of Washington, research bears this
out. A recent study about a new type of therapy called "integrative
couple therapy" - which seeks to help partners accept each other's
flaws and idiosyncrasies - boasts an 89 percent success rate at
helping couples in trouble significantly improve their marriage.
Advocates of integrative couple therapy say that dissimilarities
between partners can be vehicles for intimacy - opportunities for
couples to get closer once they feel fully accepted by each
other.
They Find the Right Kind of
Help.
For many women, an investment of time and money into
a marriage education workshop brings on the necessary changes in
their marriage. Georgia says she and her husband, Phil, were at the
point where they only spoke when an issue came up that had to be
addressed - with the house, or with one of their children. "If
friends wanted to invite us to diner, they knew they had to call
each of us separately because we just didn't talk." They had
already been to three different marital therapists. There was
clearly nothing left to do but divorce.
But then, as they began to call family
members to tell them their sad news, one of Georgia's sisters told
her about a marriage workshop that had turned around several
marriages she knew of. She pleaded with Georgia and Phil to go. So
Georgia and Phil attended a three-day course called
Retrouvaille(for more information, see box, "Should You Fight for
Your Marriage?"). At the end, says Georgia, "We liked the course so
much we signed up for another marriage education course a few weeks
later - and by the end of that one, we had decided we should stay
together. We felt love for each other again. Suddenly we understood
that neither of us was wrong or bad - we were just very different
people and that was okay. It helped us both to stop judging and to
accept the other person's uniqueness."
They Focus on Changing Themselves, Not
Each Other.
There are some things we want in a relationship that we will never
get from our partner. The solution, says Kramer, is "to find them -
or develop them - in yourself." Sometimes our concerns about our
partner's inadequacies might actually mask concerns about our own
inadequacies. For instance, Kramer describes one couple where the
women had initially been attracted to her husband because of his
stability, his "salt of the earth" quality. However, after several
years of marriage, she complained that he was staid, stodgy,
boring, not willing enough to take risks, "not dynamic." But in
truth, says Kramer, this particular woman was not very dynamic
herself. When she realized this, she was able to accept him as he
was. She let her anger at him go and began to work on her own
feelings of social inadequacy.
Regardless of the path the women took to
retrieve their marriages from the brink of divorce, they all shared
one thing in common: They were overwhelmingly grateful that they
had stayed. Perhaps Kathy expresses it best: "I'm finally in the
place I've always dreamt of being: We used to be the bickering
couple that might not show up at a party because we would be at
home having a blowup. And now we're the opposite of that. I'm so
glad I stayed; I'm glad for me, for Jack, for our
daughter."
Should You Fight For
Your Marriage
It's very hard to figure out whether to
stay in your marriage or leave, though some cases seem more
clear-cut than others - for example, those involving physical abuse
or chronic drug abuse. Behavior that would be intolerable for one
person might be a minor inconvenience for another, and many
negative behaviors such as chronic criticism and blaming can be
reversed. So how do you know if your marriage can be saved?
According to Diane Sollee, director of the Coalition for Marriage,
Family, and Couples Education(C.M.F.C.E.) in Washington, D.C., a
clearinghouse for information on marital education programs, you
can't know much until you're sure you have done everything you can
to save your marriage. Says Sollee: Most marriages don't break up
over big issues, but rather due to "irreconcilable disappointments.
People fall in love, and then, over time, all these little
disappointments in each other break their hearts and the marriage
breaks apart." In other words, two people simply become worn down
by layers of resentment, and they are unaware of the tools that are
available to help them. Eventually, divorce seems like an
attractive solution. But according to Sollee, few suffering couples
know about the wide range of excellent and highly successful
educational marriage programs now available to equip them with a
more realistic view of what to expect in marriage, and provide them
with more efficient ways to handle inevitable conflicts and
communication problems. Sollee's advice for couples in trouble is
to start with one of the extremely helpful couples weekend programs
around the country. Indeed, C.M.F.C.E.([202] 362-3332 or
[www.smartmarriages.com]) is based on the premise that all couples
have the ability to learn skills that will help them to create (or
re-create) and maintain successful relationships. Here is a
sampling to help get you started:
* RETROUVAILLE (French for rediscovery). Trained volunteer
couples, who nearly divorced but instead learned to rebuild their
trusting bond, teach others how to heal their own marriages.
Retrouvaille boasts an 85 percent success rate at improving
marriages - when both partners are openly willing to work at the
relationship. While the programs (one weekend plus three months of
follow-up) are run by clergy, along with three couples who've "been
there," Retrouvaille is nondenominational. Call (800) 470-2230; Web
site: www.retrouvaille.org.
* PAIRS A 120-hour educational program that provides proven
skills to sustain love. Couples attend one weekend a month and one
night a week for a period of four months. PAIRS also offers weekend
and one-day courses. Call (888) PAIRS-4U. Web site:
www.pairs.com.
If you choose joint counseling with a
therapist, bear in mind that, in the words of Frank Pittman, M.D.,
a psychiatrist and family therapist in private practice in Atlanta,
"Therapists are trained to protect people from relationships that
might hurt them." He adds that "marital therapists are also trained
to relieve pain and, therefore, they're often very squeamish about
witnessing their clients' suffering." As a result, some of them
tend to steer their patients out of difficult relationships. Find
out whether your therapist is more oriented toward helping couples
stay in their marriage. This is actually the current approach in
marital therapy. Last year the first-ever national conference was
held on "Smart Marriages," with 700 experts, marital therapists,
and policy makers in attendance. Their goal? To help teach people
that if you are unhappy in your marriage, it may be because you and
your partner don't have the necessary emotional tools.
For subscriptions or information call
(800) 627-2557 or go to www.newwoman.com.