Marriage Tag Archive
News item, courtesy of the New York Times (registration required):
Administration officials say they are planning an extensive election-year initiative to promote marriage, especially among low-income couples, and they are weighing whether President Bush should promote the plan next week in his State of the Union address.
For months, administration officials have worked with conservative groups on the proposal, which would provide at least $1.5 billion for training to help couples develop interpersonal skills that sustain “healthy marriages.”
Full disclosure: through February 19th I am employed by the Administration for Children and Families. These views are, of course, my own and do not represent those of my agency. Our agency, under the direction of Wade Horn, would be in charge of implementing a healthy marriage initiative for the government. Mr. Horn is not too worried about this $1.5B initiative, which is to be spread over five years. CNN quotes him saying:
“A billion dollars sounds like a lot of money, and it is … but you need to place that in context with the rest of the funding of a whole host of other services that will continue to be available to families,” Horn said by telephone, adding that his agency will spend $230 billion in the next five years.
I guess $1.5B is cheaper than putting a manned colony on the moon or sending a manned mission to Mars. But I suspect we’d do a more effective job establishing a base on the moon than fixing this nation’s marriage problem. $1.5B is a lot of money to flush down the drain. In terms of results, failure is the most likely outcome for this money. I would also not be surprised if most of it ends up in the pockets of “faith-based” organizations. The real agenda here might be to find a way to reward Bush’s religious friends with more taxpayer dollars.
I do agree in concept with the idea of healthy marriage. Who wouldn’t? But isn’t there perhaps just a tad bit of condescension in this proposal? It’s primarily oriented at low income couples. The implication then is that people with money, or who are God fearing Republicans, are much more likely to have healthy marriages. It’s those Andy Capp and Flo types that need to learn about healthy marriage. I guess living in those trailer parks and row houses just brings out the beast in you.
I note we won’t allow gays to marry because we insist that marriage is a “sacred” institution. Umm, yeah right. It must be hard for even Bush to say this with a straight face. Apparently marriage can be spontaneous and cheap in some places, like in Las Vegas. Britney Spears (who had to be high on something) found she could suddenly decide to marry her old boyfriend at 5:30 AM in a Las Vegas wedding chapel. Once she sobered up and less than 40 hours later she was able to arrange an annulment. While not all states are as liberal as Las Vegas in their wedding requirements, in general it doesn’t take much time or money to get legally married. Some states, like here in Virginia, don’t even require blood work.
I’ve already proposed an innovative idea that will help healthy marriages, or at least stem the divorce rate. Long time readers will recall my proposal for term limited marriages. But even my own siblings were quick to pounce on me for my creativity.
We probably won’t see this one from the Bush Administration but here’s my new innovative idea on healthy marriages: let’s make marriages a lot harder to get into. Let’s start with a mandatory and uniform six month waiting period.
But let’s go further. Let’s require all couples to undergo premarital counseling. Instead of having government-funded counseling, let’s require engaged couples to get their own marriage counseling. Considering how expensive divorce can be, a couple should be more than willing to pony up some money up front to reduce the risk of divorce later on. If couples want to get the counseling from their house of worship or a non-sectarian place that’s fine, but it should be a real premarital counseling, not something rubber stamped. Perhaps it could include discussion sessions with successful long time married couples. My hope is that these old married folk could give couples a realistic idea of what marriage is really all about. Anyhow, let’s require, say, 40 hours of counseling and course work.
During premarital counseling let us insist the proposed couple put together a plan for living together. It should include a proposed budget; discuss how they plan to raise children or whether they plan not to have children; and how they will dissolve their marriage if it doesn’t work out. Particularly if they are of child bearing age let us make sure they take classes in parenting before they tie the knot. A few weeks working in a day care center wiping snotty noses and changing poopy diapers would be a good wake up call. Couples should jointly submit all this evidence to a family judge. Once certification is complete and the six months have elapsed, they could be legally married.
My guess is that if we did this at least half of these marriages wouldn’t even start. I don’t pull that number out of a hat. About half of marriages in our country end in divorce, with the average marriage surviving about seven years. Before those starry eyed couples end up screaming at each other and keeping the neighbors awake, before they start popping out children who bear the emotional wreckage of their immaturity, let them test their mettle a bit. This is the stuff that is at the heart of marriage. Love, sex and commitment are the lures of marriage. But those of us who are old married farts know that at best these are decent foundations for a marriage. Successful marriage is really about two people learning to work through both the everyday and very tough issues together. If you can’t do that before getting married, you are likely to find marriage very daunting.
Across Europe marriage is a dying institution. If a man and woman want a long term relationship they just start living together. If they have children they are both held responsible for their upbringing. In many ways I see this as a better system. It has the virtue of at least being honest. If anyone can leave a relationship at any time then both spouses have natural incentives to work on their relationship. I am not sure that is true in traditional marriage. If anything the marriage contract feels both like a ball and chain around the feet and a reason not to work on relationship issues. “He won’t leave me! He takes our marriage contract seriously!”
For those who want and value marriage I say go for it. But given that we contend we are failing as a country in the marriage department (it’s probably always been this way) let’s make marriage more difficult to start in the first place. Let’s make sure couples go in wide eyed and sober. They need to understand that even for the best and most committed of couples that the failure rate is going to be significant. A successful marriage will require a lot of luck, but it will also require tenacity, an open heart, and a lot of determination.
I don’t think marriage is an institution in need of promotion. If anything it needs to be surrounded by lots of caution signs. It is not for everyone. If we are serious about healthy marriage let’s make it more difficult.
February 2nd, 2004 at 10:44am
Posted by
Mark |
Philosophy |
no comments
As much as I dislike thinking about my own aging I like thinking about my parents’ aging even less. I know mortality is the price we pay for life but that doesn’t make it any easier to accept, particularly when it happens to people you love so intimately.
Some say that God gives life, but it is the parents of a child who fill the child with the structure, aspirations and some suggest the phobias that will form the core of the adult to be. I am truly a product of my parents, in both the biological and the spiritual sense, and I constantly find aspects of each running around inside me. Since to some extent they are an extension of me, and I of them, naturally the thought of their deaths fills me with anxiety and apprehension.
From my father I have learned many valuable life lessons. I have learned the values of hard work, of patience, of quiet love and of sticking to my decisions. Foremost I have learned to how to be an excellent father. Because, for example, he read to me as a child, I could do nothing less than do the same for my daughter. Although there were eight of us he managed to make me feel special and unique. This was no small accomplishment because in many ways my father is also acerbic and very much the linear-thinking engineer. For better or worse, because I am his son I cannot not be safe about anything. I cannot drive to the store without a safety belt. I cannot cross the street without making a risk based assessment of the probability of reaching the other side unhurt. I have always felt more bonded to my father than my mother for reasons I don’t wholly understand.
My mother is a far different creature than my father. But in many ways she is far more interesting. It is only in the last ten years or so, as my mother wrote her biography, that I began to understand her. She grew up in a large Catholic family in about the most impoverished circumstances imaginable in the midst of the Great Depression. It is clear this experience in poverty shaped who she is. It didn’t help that her mother was a mental case and would frequently walk out on her own children when the stress level got too high. I am convinced she did not get the quality of attention she needed from her mother and to some extent this shaped a self esteem problem she has always had. Somewhere along the way she developed a shyness that has kept her from having most of the close relationships, outside of family, one would expect for a woman. And yet in many ways she triumphed over adversity. Somehow she not only graduated high school, something pretty unusual in the 1930s for a woman, but completed a degree in Nursing at Catholic University where she met my father. She managed a mentally ill mother while pregnant and morning sick with my first sister, Lee Ann. Her mother died around the time her first child was born.
From my mother I learned to appreciate good cooking, a clean house, and the value of having an ex-nurse when we got sick. I could do nothing but marvel at the endless energy with which she attacked motherhood and raising a large family. She never stopped. There was no vacation for her, even on vacation. She was busy from before we got up until after we bent to bed. Evenings were quieter when we were in bed but she was still there, working on the sewing machine or darning socks. But it was also clear that it exacted a heavy price. I strongly feel that as much as she loved all of us, eight of us was at least four more than she could comfortably handle. Perhaps because she grew up in a loud and emotional household, she was a loud, emotional and controlling mother. From our perspective she was the general and we were the privates. It took me much longer to understand that she was also emotionally vulnerable, and that while my Dad is a terrific person she glorified aspects of him and denigrated aspects of herself. On some level she has never felt worthy of being married to him, and that she should be subservient to him and give him the final say on all matters. My Mom seems to equate high intelligence with being able to make the right choice, an opinion at odds with my life experiences.
The dynamics of each marriage are unique and as they aged they have evolved patterns that seem to be comfortable for both of them. The raising children pattern worked for much of their marriage, until we had all left the house. In 1989 my father retired from engineering and they moved to Midland, Michigan. It is clear then that a new relationship pattern emerged. This is not too surprising because my Dad was now a 24/7 inhabitor of the house, rather than someone who spent nights and weekends. The resulting retrofitting relationship seems to have been hard to reengineer but eventually they developed patterns that seemed to work for them, although it was clear that it was often grating to both of them to have each other around so much.
Now that pattern is coming to an end. Neither is in the best of health but my mother, perhaps from being 6 years older, has the more chronic health problems. She is currently in the hospital, having fallen repeatedly. It looks like when she comes home she will be using a walker, and it’s not clear whether she can move from level to level anymore. Her health is “in decline” and is unlikely to improve.
It’s clear to my siblings and I that the retirement phase of their lives is over and all of us are struggling to figure out where to go from here. Three of my sisters have been to Midland recently to help out. It is likely that I will leave this weekend to do my part to provide logistical and mental support, staying about a week.
I know the situation is scary and frustrating to both my parents. How could it be otherwise? As if death weren’t scary enough, the business of dying seems perhaps scarier. My Dad seems overwhelmed with his caretaker responsibilities and is probably holding a lot of feelings about my Mom’s decline. My Mom, of course, wants the independence she cannot have. The old relationship patterns are not working so well in the context of the new situation. We all hope of course that they will find a new pattern that works for them. But it seems likely that something will have to change soon. We don’t know if this means my mother will have to go into some sort of assisted living, or whether a nurse’s aide will be needed, or perhaps they could be persuaded both move in with one of us. Clearly my Mom will need a lot of attention, as will my Dad who has to cope with the decline of a woman he has been married to for 53 years.
What is clear is that we are all at a role reversal stage. It’s always been my parents who have catered to us. That paradigm will no longer work. Rather my siblings and I must struggle into a caretaker role for them. We will have to step in and help them make choices. My sisters report a new willingness to listen to us and to allow us to help out.
It’s a tough phase in life. But I am struck by an observation that in every phase of life, including the ending phase, there is a chance for personal growth. The role reversal is an entirely natural phase for this time in their lives and needs to be accepted with as much grace and dignity as possible. It is now our duty, our obligation but also in some ways our great privilege to be there for our parents, even in such a limited way, when they were there for us for so very long.
I likely leave for Michigan more than a little upset about the situation, but also determined to do my part to help out and to provide my parents with the physical and emotional support they need to navigate through this stage of life. In a way it is a privilege that they have made it to this stage. My siblings and I are feeling our way gingerly through this process, but somehow we are determined to make it work and to be there for our parents despite our families and our hectic lives.
October 16th, 2003 at 09:02am
Posted by
Mark |
Life 2003 |
one comment
Tomorrow is my 18th wedding anniversary. So it seemed an auspicious moment for me to jot down some of my thoughts on marriage and married life in general. Actually this is not the first time I visited this topic. Some of you may recall my suggestion for term limited marriages. To fully put down all my thoughts on marriage would require many entries. Today I give only a glimpse of what I have learned in 18 years.
My wife Terri and I were married in 1985 at the Reston Community Church (now the Unitarian Universalist Church in Reston) by the late Rev. John Wells. 18 years later finds me a member of this church; in 1985 we were just renting a hall and a minister. A UU church seemed a safe place to get married. We felt pressure from both sides of the family to have some sort of religious ceremony, even though I wasn’t religious, and this was the best this militant agnostic could come up with under the circumstances.
Rev. Wells suggested we drink from both a red and a white wine during the ceremony. The white wine was sweet and symbolized the sweetness of the marital commitment. The red wine had a slightly bitter taste and symbolized the bitter aspects that are part of any marriage. Clearly we weren’t too focused on any bitter aspects of our marriage but we understood the point: marriage wasn’t going to always be a bed of roses.
I was 28, which seemed plenty old enough to settle down. I had about ten years on my own and it was enough. Terri and I had lived together for about a year and a half prior to marriage and had known each other over two years before marriage, so I thought I had a pretty good idea what I was getting into.
Our wedding was very unique. Ask anyone who attended; it was one they will never forget. (We still get comments on it, after all these years!) It had the usual disasters (one of Terri’s bridesmaids showed up in an off color dress) and a couple of surprises. Terri’s friend Paul came down from Michigan partly to move out of Michigan and partly to cater our wedding. Paul is a fabulous cook and for the first three months of our marriage he lived with us. Many years later I discovered that Paul, also one of my best men, was gay. The wedding was small with just immediate family, but people don’t remember the wedding. They only remember the reception. One of the things that attracted Terri and I to each other was our love for Grade Z movies. One of the lowest rated Grade Z movies of all time was a flick called “Robot Monster”, which adorned our engagement announcement cards. The surprise was our wedding cake was not a pasty white wedding cake with a bride and groom on it, a notion Terri despised, but a full size carrot cake with cream cheese frosting adorned with a gorilla clutching a groom in its hands. Except for Terri’s Mom (whom I suspect still hasn’t forgiven us) everyone laughed silly and had a great time. (My niece Cheryl actually had to bring in a picture to show and tell when her teacher accused her of making things up!)
So I was more than a little surprised to find out that once we were “legal” (to the great relief of both our mothers, who were more than a little scandalized by our “living in sin” arrangement) that being married actually changed things quite a bit. Right up until we were married I assumed and planned for us having separate accounts. Once I was married I didn’t see the point in it. Either our lives were tied together or they weren’t. So we created joint accounts and have happily pooled our money since that time.
We started our marriage financially challenged. We had one car (mine, a 81 Chevette), an apartment, an inherited cat, two sets of furniture that didn’t match and two jobs that didn’t pay very much. Terri worked as a receptionist; I worked as a production controller for the Defense Mapping Agency. Our combined income didn’t top $30,000 a year.
The road to prosperity was a challenging one. I accepted a demotion to get into a computer programmer slot and learned COBOL. Terri went through lots of jobs before settling down, about the time our daughter Rosie was born, to a secretarial job at USAA. I’m not sure how we did it (an FHA loan helped) but within a year of marriage we had enough money to buy a cheap and very run down townhouse. Fortunately my skills at computer programming were good. Once working for the Air Force I continued to rise steadily and was steadily promoted to what seemed at the time an impossible quest: a GS-13 position. Once in that position we had the money and opportunity to do the unimaginable: buy a single-family house.
I was perhaps a bit move naive than I should have been about marriage. I did not expect it to be a bed of roses for I had seen my parents struggle through their own marriage and had the notion that it was a lot more about work and struggling through things together than it was about romance and frequent sex. Our marriage is probably pretty typical. Let’s just say it’s been frequently challenging, had lovely euphoric moments and more pits of deep despair than I care to remember. I have avoided roller coasters at amusement parks yet the longer I stayed married the more it felt like an endless roller coaster ride. I liked predictability but there is nothing predictable about an institution that tries to keep two people together while life around them is undergoing constant change. Not surprisingly these factors affect the dynamics of the marriage, and consequently there were lots of relationship issues between us that did not appear prior to marriage that had to be haggled and negotiated.
And if this were not enough there were also major financial challenges, like a house that was falling apart, and our daughter arriving somewhat unexpectedly and before we felt we were quite ready. Through it all we wrestled with tough medical issues and a lot of angst. For both of us the angst was centered around wanting more from life, and we found balm in going back to school. Terri completed a B.S. degree at night over six years. I completed a M.S. degree over three years. Our education overlapped for a couple years, and that made life very hectic with a child just starting elementary school. But somehow we got through those days.
We’ve grown and changed as people too. We are not the same people we were when we were married. Our interests have changed quite a bit (I hardly ever watch a bad movie anymore). Sometimes it seems like we were married so long ago that 18 years later I am married to a different woman.
Marriage is thought of by society as a permanent relationship, but it is not. A piece of paper carries some legal weight but little beyond that. A marriage is only real as long as both parties consent to it. If they don’t then the piece of paper may say they are married, but the marriage is over. Consequently to truly be married it is critically important to keep the lines of communications open and to work hard through problems. Marriages that depend on the law to work are built on sand. I know a couple cases of people who are technically married but live apart and haven’t seen their spouses in years. They keep filing “Married, Filing Separate Returns” to the government each year. Perhaps if one dies and the other finds out about it, they can collect some insurance money or government benefits. But this is not a marriage. It’s a legal agreement both parties walked away from.
Another observation is that every marriage is unique because each spouse is unique. There are principles for a successful marriage but no guarantees in this business. Each couple has to work things out for themselves. Whatever agreements they come to about the boundaries of their marriage is fine. Those who want to pledge monogamy: more power to you. Those who want open marriages, I give you A’s for honesty, courage and bravery.
For myself I keep hanging in there. I find a lot to love and admire about my wife, and I also find things that are troubling. Sometimes the troubling things end up pointing back to me and I realize that what troubles me are often inadequacies in myself.
I know I have learned a lot about myself by being married. I have grown in unexpected directions and taken many paths unanticipated. I traded in comfort and security of singleness for the wild jungle that is marriage. I take some comfort in knowing that I have survived 18 years in the jungle. My heart is still racing at times, sometimes in terror, sometimes in overwhelming love and euphoria: this is the yin and yang that is marriage.
October 11th, 2003 at 08:10pm
Posted by
Mark |
Life 2003 |
no comments
The gods must be highly amused.
News items: At a press conference yesterday President Bush said in one breath “I am mindful that we’re all sinners, and I caution those who may try to take the speck out of the neighbor’s eye when they got a log in their own”. Then in the next breath he said, “I believe in the sanctity of marriage. I believe a marriage is between a man and a woman, and I think we ought to codify that one way or the other.” He and his aides are working hard to figure out a way to figure out a way to make sure those pesky, immoral homosexuals stay deep in the closet by outlawing gay marriages permanently through a constitutional amendment.
Not to be outdone, the Catholic Church, an institution rife with homosexual priests, significant numbers of whom are apparently also pedophiles, and whose leadership has spent the last 2000 years detached from anything resembling reality, had the gall to state on the very same day: “Homosexual relationships are immoral and deviant, and only traditional marriages can fulfill God’s plan for the reproduction of the human race.” As if, of course, the point of marriage is to make babies only. If that were the case my wife and I, who are both sterilized, should now be divorced. Clearly our marriage is now a moot point in the eyes of the Catholic Church, not that we were married there. (God forbid!)
Metaphorically I’d like to do the Monty Python fish slapping dance on both the President and the Pope. What can I say? When it comes to government or religion, apparently you have to abandon all common sense or you can’t get in the game.
Let’s examine our constitution which promises equal rights and justice for all. Just in case we didn’t get it from first reading, we subsequently ratified the 14th amendment to the constitution in 1868 known as the “equal protection” amendment which states: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
In short the intent of our constitution is to treat all citizens equally. It obviously hasn’t always worked out that way, but that was the intent. Gradually though, as was clear from the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on state sodomy laws, states trying to discriminate against one class of people are finding they have no constitutional grounds to do so. And this just freaks our politicians out. That’s apparently their mission in life: to provide favors to one class of people at the expense of another class.
I’m trying real hard to understand what is so immoral about homosexuality. In particular I am trying to figure out why the government should care. I can understand why a backward, xenophobic religion like the Catholic Church would be up in arms against gay marriage. This is an institution which sees refusing to evolve as a virtue. No matter how wacky its thinking was 2,000 years ago, it needs to be faithful to it, is what passes for reasoning in this institution. But the government? Why wouldn’t it want to encourage gay marriages or gay unions?
What are the consequences if we have no civil unions or marriages for gays? One might be the myopic belief that by scorning gays for their sexual orientation they will see the light, the good fairy will come down, fill them with some sort of grace, and they will magically convert into happy, healthy heterosexuals. Soon they are living in the burbs like Ward and June Cleaver and raising little Wallies and Beaves. Fortunately, not one in a hundred homophobes believe this crap anymore.
So law by itself apparently can’t make homosexuals become heterosexuals. So homosexuals are going to keep being homosexuals even though it ticks off the anally repressed majority. We “moral” people can pray that all homosexuals will lead lives of celibacy and quiet contemplation instead of acting on their completely natural urges. This is one way for them not to be immoral and thus give us no offense. One could look at the Catholic priesthood as a positive example but apparently all that repression just makes the longing worse and encourages the sorts of deviations we seem to fear the most. Eventually human nature wins out and people couple with the gender or genders that turn them on.
By not allowing gay marriages and civil unions society in effect encourages homosexuals to sleep around. From a public health standpoint that encourages the spread of disease. One would think it would be intuitive that government would want to encourage people to have long term, monogamous and healthy relationships instead of lots of short term, sexual relationships. So I would think gay marriages or gay unions would be seen as a logical and moral response by society to encourage everyone to live in peace and respect the rule of law.
If we are hung up on the word “marriage” let’s purge it from the law. Traditionally marriage has been a religious ritual, not a governmental function. In a way by the government sanctioning marriage, it is violating the separation of church and state. In medieval times you didn’t need the government’s permission to get married, just your local cleric’s permission. Let’s have civil unions if people want the legal protections of marriage. Let religions sanctify these relationships in marriage ceremonies for those with religious inclinations.
Clearly I will never be a politician because this is plain common sense.
August 1st, 2003 at 08:18am
Posted by
Mark |
Politics 2003 |
3 comments
At first glance this is probably going to sound nuts. To say the least this idea goes against our traditional view of society that a marriage should be “for better or for worse” and should last “as long as you both shall live”. But given that the average marriage lasts seven years and the divorce rate in this country is about 50 percent, it may be that most couples don’t take the commitment with the needed sobriety. Or it may also be that the system of marriage itself is wacked and needs some major adjustments.
Let’s just hypothetically say that when a couple went to the courthouse to get a marriage license they could check off the terms: 1 year, 5 years, 10 years or life. There could also be a checkbox: renew automatically or expire after term.
As an incentive to keep the marriage together, there would be legal penalties if the marriage ended early in divorce. Any attempt to leave the marriage prior to the expiration of the contract would require a penalty of some sort. But perhaps since healthy marriage is considered to be of a benefit to society, maybe there should also be government rewards for renewing contracts, say a $100 tax credit per year, payable upon renewal of the marriage contract.
If divorce occurs before the contract is up and one party is found at fault then the one “at fault” should perhaps pay a penalty of some sort to the government. As a working number let’s make it a civil penalty of $1000. If the marriage is dissolved by joint agreement with no “at fault” finding then both parties would pay the penalty equally, in addition to any regular fees required by divorce courts to process paperwork. Given the current divorce statistics this would mean a nice revenue stream for state and local governments.
So what is the upside? From my perspective it encourages spouses to actively work on their marriage and to address issues that might be causing a marriage to flounder. If marriage is for life then there is little incentive to work on relationship issues until some sort of crisis occurs. Then, if the behavior is not too egregious, perhaps it can be worked out in counseling or therapy. But knowing there is a deadline coming up when a marriage can terminate, both parties have reason to address their relationship issues seriously.
Admittedly children raise a layer of complication and I haven’t thought out those issues in any detail. Perhaps the law would state that if children result from the marriage then marriage contracts would renew by default, or that both parties would agree to binding arbitration on the matter of child custody. Clearly we want to encourage healthy marriages with children and discourage broken homes. (Hmm, suggesting that children of broken marriages must be go into orphanages might be quite an inducement to work on marital problems! This is just a wild idea; not one to seriously contemplate.)
Another upside is that if a marriage is just not working out it allows both parties to get out of it with a minimum of feelings hurt and no penalties when the term expires. “Well, we tried and gave it our best and it just didn’t work.” Both parties would then feel free to move on with life and grow in a direction they need to grow.
Admittedly I am a real “think outside the box” sort of person and I suspect if this idea were entertained seriously I’d be having bricks coming through my windows on a regular basis. But the idea holds some appeal to me. I notice in myself I want to continually dodge relationship issues with my wife; if nothing else something like this would force me to concentrate on the matter rather than let problems fester.
Your thoughts?
July 13th, 2003 at 02:55pm
Posted by
Mark |
Best of Occam's Razor, Sociology |
2 comments
Maybe this is a “no duh!” but this observation snuck up on me today when I least expected it. But it seems that we grow as a person by how well we manage the relationships in our lives.
For many people there is not much to manage. Maybe they have great social skills, or are highly compatible with those people in life they come in contact with on a daily basis. Then there are the rest of us for whom every relationship is a challenge and a potential minefield.
For me a good example is my spouse. In a couple months I will have had her in my life for twenty years. Yes, it does boggle my mind - where did all that time go? Soon for half of my life she will have been there. Not surprisingly we complement each other and in other ways we are polar opposites. It is not the things we share in common that are ever the problem. We can talk about computers, or the virtues of certain classical music and we rarely disagree. Even when we do disagree we are always respectful toward each other. There are no hurt feelings if she prefers Bach and I prefer Beethoven. During those times life and our relationship are serene and we are filled with a pleasant and happy glow from finding such joy in each other.
Then there are the differences. There’s the rub all right. I am a classic introvert in the sense that I keep my feelings largely bottled up. Terri says she is an introvert and no doubt she gets a lot of her pleasure inward rather than outward. But when it comes to expressing feelings, she must express them. For example, when we drive anywhere she will make loud and rude (sorry dear) comments about every act of bad or inconsiderate driving she encounters. Those of you who drive in the DC area know that this is about one every 15 seconds. If she tries to shut up, she gets upset and develops headaches. Expressing her feelings RIGHT NOW is her safety valve because her inner teakettle is always close to boil.
It is true I don’t usually want to hear her observations since I have heard them ad nauseum for nearly 20 years. But she could no more stop expressing her feelings than the Niagara River could reverse its flow. It is a pull like gravity. So whether I want to hear it or not I will and I am left to either try to cope with it or stuff cotton in my ears. Maybe this is why we don’t go on cross-country car trips. No, to me life is much more serene when I refuse to get upset about every transgression on the road. There are too many of them anyhow and getting upset about them wouldn’t improve my day. But that’s how I think and that’s how I deal with this little daily annoyance. But Terri cannot NOT get upset.
So it’s a good thing we mostly drive separately I guess. What matters though is how I (and she) cope with behavior from each other that tends to drive us crazy. Yelling at each other is one solution. I’m not good in that department since I am an internalizer, but it works for lots of couples. Their tactic: get out those angry feelings, kiss and make up, then go through the cycle again the next time. I am really good at keeping it all bottled up. But eventually there comes a time when I can’t keep it bottled up anymore. I don’t usually start yelling at her, but I might opt to hide in another part of the house, or take a sudden trip by myself, or sometimes I even say “Can you PLEASE stop shouting at your computer! It can’t hear you and you are driving me CRAZY.” (BTW, this doesn’t work. It just makes her more upset.)
Allegorically we are two bulls thrown into a tight pen together. We can’t often get out of the pen. We have to learn to live with each other or we have to give up and get divorced. I am sure the latter option has crossed both our minds on numerous occasions.
In my family divorce is something we don’t usually do. We don’t tend to be quitters when the going gets tough. We figure we’re supposed to hang in there, although we don’t know why and yeah, maybe it is kind of stupid come to think about it. Why be miserable? Curiously in Terri’s family divorce is the modus operandi. It’s because her parents got divorced, her aunts and uncles have been through strings of marriages, and her own brother has shuffled through a number of wives that Terri doesn’t want to go down that route. If we can stay married to each other, I think she thinks, then she can prove she’s got the “right stuff” and they don’t. Or maybe she really does love me enough to put up with all my eccentricities. Who would have thunk?
Every relationship is unique, but a common thread among my friends is that they both love and loathe their spouses at the same time. And while they are at it they have similar mixed feelings about neighbors, coworkers, bosses, friends and acquaintances.
My recurring fantasy is that somehow, magically, my wife is transformed of these habits of hers that sometimes drive me crazy. Twenty years have been full of ups and downs and I’ve enjoyed a lot of those years with her, and some years drove me up the wall. Wouldn’t it be great if she were up ALL the time? If we complemented each other perfectly? Yes, life would be perfect. Or maybe not.
Because life is about change. If things aren’t moving, alive and vital is it life at all? I recall my teenage years (1972-1975) when we lived in Ormond Beach, Florida. Every day was pretty much the same: sunny and hot, afternoon thunderstorms. The Spanish moss hung limply from the trees every day. There was not much to do and no place to go. It felt like creeping death. I was so glad to grow up and move out of that town, not because I don’t like my parents but because it was so terminally dull and so always the same. One could look forward to death living there.
So maybe challenging relationships are all about inner growth. Maybe it is about spiritual growth. And maybe that’s why it’s so hard and can be so rewarding, because you learn your true character through adversity. Of all the challenges in my life though, including child rearing and getting a midlife graduate degree, none come close to the challenge I have fully loving and accepting my wife for who she despite differences that often drive me to distraction.
Variety is the spice of life, but spice adds flavor and is not food. It is the daily relationships that are the foods that truly nourish our souls, although it may not seem that way. Like the cat eating the same cat food every day, it’s not much to look forward to. Learning to fully love and appreciate those we take for granted is, for me anyhow, the most challenging problem in life.
Hillary escaped by climbing Everest. That was easy.
May 15th, 2003 at 03:47pm
Posted by
Mark |
Philosophy |
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