Although raising a family and making a living are serious pursuits, marriage has an equally serious purpose to providing an arena for play, humor, and lively interests. Just as passion, so too can a marriage become frozen into a dull repetition of daily routines. The nemesis of a good marriage is monotony unrelieved by imagination. Over and over again, the couples in happy marriages said that shared laughter was one of the most important bonds between them. Many used the word "funny" to describe a spouse. But by humor and "funny" these couples meant something deeper than the latest jokes making the rounds. There were referring to an intimate way of relating to each other, a love key, spontaneous bantering that kept them connected. The task of using humor and laughter to replenish the relationship, lasts a lifetime. This is not something reserved for vacations and anniversaries; it is part of everyday life. A healthy, pleasurable tension between husband and wife provides a zing that keeps the marriage alive and exciting. For many couples lightness, fun and playful teasing are a treasured aspect of the relationship. Bantering brightens the day, hinting at a private world with a secret language and a tone, but more than often a couple's banter pokes fun at the ups and downs of everyday life, including everyday marriage. Teasing, flirtation, and laughter, which always carry a hint of insecurity --- not so much to create anxiety but enough to banish tedium -- are an important part of a satisfying relationship. A good marriage is not a business partnership, although it surely includes some of the same elements. Nor is a good marriage just a form of a friendship, although husbands and wives need each other as close friends. Nor is it just a support system for adversity. The distinctiveness of a good and happy marriage lies in its electricity, its power to light up the participants and enhance the excitement and pleasure of their lives. Wallerstein & Blakeslee ~ The Good Marriage |
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Part of marriage's elegance is that spouses always make ideal sparing partners. Often when couples come to treatment they focus on each others shortcomings. And like many couples getting an eyeful in treatment, they soon shift from acting 'holier than thou' to thinking they were more 'differentiated than thou.' There are two important principles that every married person should know: First, we emerge from our family of origin at about the highest level of differentiation our parents achieved. Our basic level of differentiation is pretty much established by adolescence and can remain at that level for life. In the process of regulating their own emotions, poorly differentiated parents pressure their children for togetherness or distance, which stops children from developing their ability to think, feel, and act for themselves. They learn to conduct themselves only in reaction to others. Raising our level of differentiation is not easy. We can raise it through concentrated effort (like therapy) or crisis (as commonly occurs in the course of marriage, family, friendship, and career). In general, though, the level of differentiation in a family tends to stay relatively the same from one generation to the next. It changes only when a family member is motivated to differentiate him or herself enough to rewrite the family's legacy. This reality differs from the popular belief that your spouse is supposed to pull you out of your family's grasp. Eventually, your partner's grasp seems most important to loosen. Second, we always pick a marital partner who is at the same level of differentiation as we are. If partners are not at the same level of differentiation, the relationship usually breaks up early. Sometimes one partner is a half a step farther along than the other--but it is only a half-step. The fantasy that you are "much farther along" than your spourse is just that---a fantasy. If you and your partner argue over who's healthier or more evolved, you will be interested in three important implications:
David Schnarch - Passionate Marriage Emotional Gridlock is the natural evolution of any emotionally committed relationship. There is nothing pathological necessarily involved. You do not need to have anything "wrong" with you to hit gridlock--and there is nothing going "wrong" when gridlock hits. It is part of a sequence created by the lack of differentiation that usually exists when we pick a partner: dependence on other-validated intimacy, a reflected sense of self, and regulating anxiety through relationships. So what starts the differentiation process? Typically it is marital problems caused by emotional fusion: sexual boredom, low sexual desire, lack of intimacy, fights about money, parenting, in-laws--and where to spend the next vacation. The particulars of what triggers your differentiation are personal and custom-tailored to your past, present, and anticipated future. The people growing ecosystem in an emotionally committed relationship is amazingly circular; emotional fusion creates the "problems" that push us to become sufficiently differentiated to solve those dilemmas. Here is something important to remember when your relationship seemingly grinds to a halt: when you and your partner reach gridlock neither of you can reduce anxiety through accommodation, and neither of you has any of the old kind of validation to offer the other. Truly validating your partner when you have reached gridlock means accepting that he or she is less likely to accommodate you--you will have to confront yourself. At the point of gridlock your choices are limited: 1. Push your partner to violate himself/herself by accommodating you: 2. Turn yourself over to your partner by accommodating him/her, 3. Separate emotionally or physically, 4. Confront yourself and become more differentiated. Gridlocked couples report "falling out of love." Ironically, the ability to love truly does not develop until the honeymoon is over and gridlock arrives. Gridlock drives you closer to your core as it nudges you towards differentiation. As you get more firsthand experience with your own essence, you become more accepting of everyone else, including your partner. Passionate Marriage - Schnarch There are two qualities of differentiation in a partnership, difficulty managing anxiety by yourself and dependence on validation from others ---come together to shape the course of intimacy in your marriage. The good news is these vulnerabilities form an elegant system in which they can bring about their own resolution. When you are in the early stages of becoming a couple, you focus on commonalities. As long as you and your partner agree, you feel validated and secure. But int he simple process of revealing yourself and getting to know each other, you eventually disclose sides of yourself that do not agree or fit with your partner. Although disagreement is inevitable in any relationship, your anxiety rises when it happens. To the degree you try to do it through your relationship. You and your spouse bend your psychological "shapes" to adapt to each other, reinforcing commonalities and making differences. The result temporarily lowers your anxiety and jump starts the mut6ual admiration society again. The problem is that in this natural process of anxiety regulation through accommodation you step back from your real self to adopt a position or posture that fits with your partner's. The price is misrepresenting who you are. If you are not very differentiates, you go through this process frequently. Many things make you anxious and you cannot take care of your own anxiety. You and your partner repeatedly "step back" from disclosing yourselves as you are and adopt positions and identities that keep your connection relatively quiet and stable. Some couples take turns accommodating each other; others assign the responsibility primarily to one partner. Either way, the process moves forward in two powerful ways. First, you get tired of the pretense. Accumulated experience of "accommodation" gradually erode your willingness to continue and distort who you are. You have a vague but growing sense of not being totally honest. You continue anyway, however, because it reduces your anxiety. You glorify this process by thinking of it as compromise and consideration. Eventually, however, you become less and less willing to violate your own sense of self and your integrity. Second, the process or elimination eventually leads to a critical situation. Through numerous repetitions of this shape-shifting dynamic, you create a pivotal situation that makes marriage rigid: through the process of elimination there are no more easy topics that reduce anxiety and evoke consensus. Only the hard ones are left. At this point neither you or your partner can reduce anxiety by accommodation since the fall back positions also increase anxiety. When you reach the inevitable point where you are unwilling to adapt to each other and unwilling to confront yourself, you are trapped in emotional gridlock. More on emotional gridlock on next post.... Passionate Marriage - Schnarch |
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