Temporary compromise: They will both take responsibility for keeping bathrooms and kitchens clean. She will not bug him about his clutter more than once a week. But if he doesn’t deal with it by then, she will pile it up and put it all on the floor of his home office.
Ongoing conflict: She will always hate clutter, he will always hate orderliness.
Couple 2
Gridlocked problem: Very different comfort levels with expressing emotions
The dream(s) within the conflict:
Hers: Being emotional is part of her self-identity and part of what gives meaning to her life.
His: He sees being emotional as a weakness.
Nonnegotiable areas:
Hers: She cannot stop reacting with great passion to life.
His: He cannot become a highly emotional person just to please her.
Areas of flexibility: They both accept that their spouse cannot change a basic personality trait.
Temporary compromise: They will be respectful of each other’s difference in this area. He will be receptive to her need to talk about and share feelings. She will accept when he cannot do this.
Ongoing conflict: They will continue to have very different approaches to expressing emotion.
Couple 3
Gridlocked problem: He enjoys spending time with other people at parties, while she wants him to stay with her.
The dream(s) within the conflict:
His: To feel free and be able to explore by meeting new people at social events
Hers: To be the center of his attention
Nonnegotiable areas:
His: He must have the freedom to enjoy himself and meet new people.
Hers: She cannot abide her husband dancing with other women or touching them, even in a friendly way.
Areas of flexibility:
His: He doesn’t have to be completely separate from his wife at parties.
Hers: She can tolerate her husband talking with other women for a few minutes.
Temporary compromise: They will stay together at parties for about half the time. The other half he can go off and mingle by himself. But he will not dance with or touch other women—and if she tells him she’s upset by his behavior, he’ll stop.
Ongoing conflict: He will always want to socialize, she will always wish he would pay attention to just her.
Now see if you can outline your own problem in the same way. First write a clear statement of what the problem is and which dream(s) of each of yours is fueling it. Then note which areas are nonnegotiable for each of you and which you are able to be flexible about. Finally, write out a temporary compromise that you agree to try for a brief period of time. It will be helpful if you also write a brief description of your ongoing conflict to confirm that you both understand it remains unresolved but can be lived with.
STEP 5: SAY THANK YOU
It may take more than one session to overcome gridlock on issues that have been deeply troubling to your marriage. These sessions can be stressful, no matter how diligently you attempt to accept each other’s viewpoint without judgment.
This exercise lets you finish on a positive note. The goal here is to try to re-create the spirit of thanksgiving, in which you count your blessings and look inward to express gratitude for all you have. This may be particularly difficult to do after talking about gridlocked marital conflict, but that’s all the more reason to try.
Exercise 2: Say Thank You
Select from the following list three things you really appreciate about your spouse. (Of course, you can add items not on the list.) Then tell your spouse what these three things are. This can be as simple as a statement like “I really like the way you are sensitive to my moods.”
Your energy
Your strength
The way you are commanding
The way you let me direct things
How sensitive you are to me
How you support me and respond to my moods
Your ability to read me
The way you are when we make decisions
The way you let me be myself
Your skin
Your face
Your warmth
Your enthusiasm
Your hair
The way you touch me
How safe I feel with you
Your tenderness
Your imagination
Your eyes
The way I trust you
Your passion
How well you know me
Your gracefulness
The way you move
The way you kiss me
Your affection
Your playfulness
Your humor
How you look in clothes
Your loyalty to me
Your competence as a spouse
Your competence as a parent
What you are like as a friend
Your sense of style
Follow these five steps, and you’ll be able to move out of gridlock on your perpetual problems. Be patient with the process and each other. By their very nature, these problems are tenacious. To loosen their grip on your marriage will take commitment and faith on both your parts. You’ll know you’re making progress when the issue in question feels less loaded to you both—when you can discuss it with your sense of humor intact, and it no longer looms so large that it crowds out the love and joy in your relationship.
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Principle 7:
Create Shared Meaning
We used to have a yuppie marriage,” says Helen. “By that I mean it was very superficial. We got along okay and really loved each other, but I didn’t feel that connected to Kevin. It was like we were roommates who made love.” Helen, who calls herself a “devout feminist,” had always prided herself on her independence. At first she thought it was great that she and Kevin had their own lives—their own careers, interests, and friends. But the longer they were married, and especially after they had children, the more she felt something was lacking. She didn’t want to give up her strong sense of individual identity, but she wanted more from her marriage. After attending our workshop, she realized what it was: She wanted to feel more like she and Kevin were a family.
If your marriage adheres to my first six principles, there’s a good chance that your relationship is stable and happy. But if you find yourself asking, “Is that all there is?” your situation may be similar to Helen and Kevin’s. What may be missing is a deeper sense of shared meaning. Marriage isn’t just about raising kids, splitting chores, and making love. It can also have a spiritual dimension that has to do with creating an inner life together—a culture rich with symbols and rituals, and an appreciation for your roles and goals that link you, that lead you to understand what it means to be a part of the family you have become.
Usually when we think of culture, we think in terms of large ethnic groups or even countries where particular customs and cuisine prevail. But a culture can also be created by just two people who have agreed to share their lives. In essence, each couple and each family create its own microculture. And like other cultures these small units have their customs (like Sunday dinner out), rituals (like a champagne toast after the birth of each baby), and myths—the stories the couple tell themselves (whether true, false, or embellished) that explain their sense of what their marriage is like, what it means to be part of their group.
Paula and Doug viewed themselves as the “runts” of their respective families. Both were considered the least intelligent, attractive, or likely to succeed of their siblings. But as it turned out, all of their brothers and sisters ended up unmarried or divorced, while Paula and Doug formed a happy, stable marriage, held steady jobs, and raised great kids in a nice home. Part of their marriage’s culture, the story they tell themselves about themselves, is what a great team they make, how feisty they are, how they thumbed their noses at all the naysayers and succeeded against the odds.
Developing a culture doesn’t mean a couple sees eye to eye on every
aspect of their life’s philosophy. Instead there is a meshing. They find a way of honoring each other’s dreams even if they don’t always share them. The culture that they develop together incorporates both of their dreams. And it is flexible enough to change as husband and wife grow and develop. When a marriage has this shared sense of meaning, conflict is much less intense and perpetual problems are unlikely to lead to gridlock.
It is certainly possible to have a stable marriage without sharing a deep sense of what is meaningful about your lives together. Your marriage can “work” even if your dreams aren’t in sync. The last chapter showed you just how to navigate your way around perpetual problems so that you can live with them rather than ending up gridlocked. It is important to accept that you each will probably have some dreams that the other doesn’t share but can respect. You may, for example, adhere to different religions but have enough respect for each other’s spiritual journey to bridge the differences in your faiths.
But it is also true that a rewarding marriage is about more than sidestepping conflict. The more you can agree about the fundamentals in life, the richer, more meaningful, and in a sense easier your marriage is likely to be. You certainly can’t force yourselves to have the same deeply held views. But some coming together on these issues is likely to occur naturally if you are open to each other’s perspectives. A crucial goal of any marriage,therefore, is to create an atmosphere that encourages each person to talk honestly about his or her convictions. The more you speak candidly and respectfully with each other, the more likely there is to be a blending of your sense of meaning.
At our workshop Helen and Kevin were able to focus on the spiritual side of their lives together by talking over some of the questions you’ll find later in this chapter. For the first time they spoke earnestly about their own families, their family histories, values, and symbols. When they returned home, Helen took out her family’s old photo album and showed Kevin pictures of her great-grandparents who had come to America from Ireland. She told him the story she had heard countless times about her great-grandparents’ marriage—how they had become engaged before her great-grandfather left for America. He then remained true and devoted to her great-grandmother during the four long years it took to save up enough money to bring her over, too. The message of this story, she had come to understand, was that loyalty is one of the backbones of marriage and family life. Until now she had never expressed that to Kevin so directly.
He himself reminisced about some of his own family’s tales—especially about his grandmother who single-handedly ran a general store in rural Kansas and almost went broke because she was always giving away free food to poor neighbors during the Depression. The townspeople all knew that she reserved a certain amount of her goods for the town’s needy families, who would come by every Monday night at closing time. “My dad always said that we Monahans tend to be generous to the point of being foolish,” he told Helen. “But he always said it in a way that let you know he was very proud that we were like that.” Kevin told Helen how that perspective had infused his own adulthood—from his insistence that they make large charitable contributions to the size of the Christmas tips he gave out.
That conversation marked a turning point in Kevin and Helen’s marriage. From then on they talked frequently about values like loyalty and generosity that had been instilled in them by hearing family stories as children. Over time, as they heard each other’s family stories and passed them on to their children, each other’s stories became their stories, too—the stories of the new family that they had created. Helen accepted and incorporated the stories and values of the Monahans that were important to Kevin into her own life, and he did the same for her heritage.
As I said, the more shared meaning you can find, the deeper, richer, and more rewarding your relationship will be. Along the way you’ll also be strengthening your marital friendship—as emphasized in my first three principles of a happy marriage. This in turn will make it even easier to cope with any conflicts that crop up. That’s the beauty of the Seven Principles. They form a feedback loop that ensures that as you work on each principle, it becomes easier to work on the others.
Shared Meaning Questionnaire
To get a sense of how well you and your partner create a sense of shared meaning in your lives together, answer the following questions.
Your Rituals of Connection
1. We see eye to eye about the rituals that involve family dinnertimes in our home. T F
2. Holiday meals (like Thanksgiving, Christmas, Passover) are very special and happy times for us (or we both hate them). T F
3. End-of-the-day reunions in our home are generally special times. T F
4. We see eye to eye about the role of TV in our home. T F
5. Bedtimes are generally good times for being close. T F
6. During the weekends we do a lot of things together that we enjoy and value. T F
7. We have the same values about entertaining in our home (having friends over, parties, and so on). T F
8. We both value, or both dislike, special celebrations (like birthdays, anniversaries, family reunions). T F
9. When I become sick, I feel taken care of and loved by my spouse. T F
10. I really look forward to and enjoy our vacations and the travel we do together. T F
11. Spending our morning time together is special to us. T F
12. When we do errands together, we generally have a good time. T F
13. We have ways of becoming renewed and refreshed when we are burned out or fatigued. T F
Scoring: Give yourself one point for each “true” answer. If you score below three, your marriage could stand some improvement in this area. Be sure to work together on Exercise 1, which follows this questionnaire.
Your Roles
14. We share many similar values in our roles as husband and wife. T F
15. We share many similar values in our roles as mother and father. T F
16. We have many similar views about what it means to be a good friend to others. T F
17. My partner and I have compatible views about the role of work in one’s life. T F
18. My partner and I have similar philosophies about balancing work and family life. T F
19. My partner supports what I would see as my basic mission in my life. T F
20. My partner shares my views on the importance of family and kin (sisters, brothers, moms, dads) in our life together. T F
Scoring: Give yourself one point for each “true” answer. If you score below three, your marriage could stand some improvement in this area. Be sure to work together on Exercise 2, which follows this questionnaire.
Your Goals
21. We share many of the same goals in our life together. T F
22. If I were to look back on my life in very old age, I think I would see that our paths had meshed very well. T F
23. My partner values my accomplishments. T F
24. My partner honors the personal goals I have that are unrelated to our marriage. T F
25. We share many of the same goals for others who are important to us (children, kin, friends, and community). T F
26. We have very similar financial goals. T F
27. We tend to have compatible worries about potential financial disasters. T F
28. Our hopes and aspirations, as individuals and together, for our children, for our life in general, and for our old age are quite compatible. T F
29. Our life dreams tend to be similar or compatible. T F
30. Even when different, we have been able to find a way to honor our life dreams. T F
Scoring: Give yourself one point for each “true” answer. If you score below three, your marriage could stand some improvement in this area. Be sure to work together on Exercise 3, which follows this questionnaire.
Your Symbols
31. We see eye to eye about what home means. T F
32. Our philosophies of what love ought to be are quite compatible. T F<
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33. We have similar values about the importance of peacefulness in our lives. T F
34. We have similar values about the meaning of family. T F
35. We have similar views about the role of sex in our lives. T F
36. We have similar views about the role of love and affection in our lives. T F
37. We have similar values about the meaning of being married. T F
38. We have similar values about the importance and meaning of money in our lives. T F
39. We have similar values about the importance of education in our lives. T F
40. We have similar values about the importance of fun and play in our lives. T F
41. We have similar values about the significance of adventure. T F
42. We have similar values about trust. T F
43. We have similar values about personal freedom. T F
44. We have similar values about autonomy and independence. T F
45. We have similar values about sharing power in our marriage. T F
46. We have similar values about being interdependent, being a “we.” T F
47. We have similar values about the meaning of having possessions, of owning things (like cars, nice clothes, books, music, a house, and land). T F
48. We have similar values about the meaning of nature and of our relationship to the seasons. T F
49. We are both sentimental and tend to reminisce about things in our past. T F
50. We have similar views about what we want in retirement and old age. T F
Scoring: Give yourself one point for each “true” answer. If you score below three, your marriage could stand some improvement in this area. Be sure to work together on Exercise 4, which follows this questionnaire.
The exercises below are really just a list of questions for you both to answer and discuss. They are divided into the four categories that usually form the bases of shared meaning between husband and wife: rituals, roles, goals, and symbols. These questionnaires are not designed to be completed in an evening or even a month. Consider them starting-off points for many future discussions and fireside chats.
The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work Page 25
