To make the best use of these questions, focus on them one at a time. You can even write your thoughts about the question in your notebook. Then read each other’s entries and discuss the question face to face.
Talk about your differences on this issue as well as your areas of common ground, areas that you can build upon. Find ways to honor both of your values, philosophies, and dreams. Although in many areas you may have separate needs, find ways to be supportive of each other’s. Where you differ fundamentally, find ways of being respectful, of honoring the differences between you. (If this leads to an argument, work through the exercises in the chapters concerning Principles 4, 5, and 6 even if you’ve already done so.)Write out, if you like, your own family constitution, what you agree on about meaning and shared philosophy of life.
FAMILY RITUALS
It is a sad fact that less than a third of U.S. families eat dinner together regularly, and more than half of those that do have the television on during dinner. This effectively ends conversation during dinner. Creating informal rituals when you can connect emotionally is critical in a marriage.
Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, lighting Kwaanza candles or the menorah, Thanksgiving at Grandma’s, family reunions: Most of us were raised in families in which some rituals were considered important. By making them a part of your married life (or coming up with your own new ones together), they become your rituals as well and further your identity as a family.
Jesse came from a very close-knit extended family on his father’s side—the Feldmans. From the time he was a little boy, the photographer at all of their family weddings was asked to spend a few minutes rounding up all fifty or so Feldmans for the Feldman Photo. Every member of his father’s family, along with their spouses and children, would gather together, the bride and groom seated in the middle.
As a youngster, Jesse would roll his eyes and think posing for the photo was a big joke. But when he fell in love with and married Amanda, the ritual of the Feldman Photo took on a new meaning for him. Suddenly he was the groom sitting on the chair surrounded by his family. Now every time he looks at the Feldman Photo in his own wedding album, he feels a sense of pride and connection, knowing that Amanda has really joined his family. This feeling has been reinforced over the years, every time he attends another Feldman wedding and he and Amanda pose along with the rest of the clan.
Rituals don’t necessarily have to derive from your respective childhoods and family histories. You can create your own. New rituals might come from a sense of what your family lacked. If you wished your family had gone on outings together on the weekends, you may want to incorporate that into your weekly routine. Or if you wish a bigger deal had been made out of the spiritual side of Christmas, you may decide to attend Midnight Mass together every year.
Sometimes rituals that don’t seem quite so momentous can be important for a family. Nick and Halley, for example, always celebrate family birthdays by baking a cake together. This ritual started when their son, who was then a toddler, was allergic to eggs, so they were unable to buy birthday cakes at the bakery. Over the years their son got over his allergy, but the family ritual remained because it had become meaningful to them. It gave them a chance to come together and celebrate their family and the birthday in a very quiet, homey way.
Exercise 1: Rituals
In the following exercise, create your own family ritual of connection by talking about what you want. Discuss what these rituals (or lack of rituals) were like for you growing up, what the best times and the disasters were like for you. Then “script” your ritual so you will know who is expected to do what, and when. Make these rituals something you do regularly and can look forward to.
1. How do we or should we eat together at dinner? What is the meaning of dinnertime? What was dinnertime like in each of our families growing up?
2. How should we part at the beginning of each day? What was this like in our families growing up? How should our reunions be?
3. How should bedtime be? What was it like in our families growing up? How do we want this time to be?
4. What is the meaning of weekends? What were they like in our families growing up? What should they be like now?
5. What are our rituals about vacations? What were they like in our families growing up? What should they mean now?
6. Pick a meaningful holiday. What is the true meaning of this holiday to us? How should it be celebrated this year? How was it celebrated in each of our families growing up?
7. How do we each get refreshed and renewed? What is the meaning of these rituals?
8. What rituals do we have when someone is sick? What was this like in our families growing up? How should it be in our family?
Sociologist William Doherty emphasized the importance of rituals of connection in families. He and his wife, Leah, created the tradition of after-dinner coffee in which their children played or did homework while he and his wife had coffee and talked. They all cleaned up after dinner, then Bill made coffee and brought it out to Leah in the living room. It was a time of peace and connection. You can continue building in family rituals of connection you would cherish by creating the following:
• A weekly date for the two of you, away from children.
• Celebrations of triumph—ways of celebrating almost any minor or major achievement and creating a culture of pride and praise in your marriage.
• Rituals surrounding bad luck, setbacks, fatigue, or exhaustion. How can you support, heal, and renew yourselves?
• Community rituals for entertaining friends, caring for other people in your community, or opening your home to others you care about.
• Rituals surrounding lovemaking and talking about it. These are important events that get left till the very end of the day when everyone is exhausted. Couples often think that lovemaking should be spontaneous and don’t want to plan for it. But if you think about when sex was at its best, usually it’s during courtship. Those romantic dates were planned, down to what to wear, what perfume or cologne to use, where to go, the music and wine after dinner, and so on. So you need to plan for romance and sex. A ritual that makes you feel emotionally safe in talking about what is good and what needs improvement in lovemaking can be very helpful.
• Rituals for keeping in touch with relatives and friends. Family events and reunions can be planned.
• Birthdays and special events that recur. Examples are holidays of importance to you, religious celebration cycles, and anniversaries.
There are also important rites of passage that can be discussed, such as confirmations, bat mitzvahs, graduations, and weddings.
YOUR ROLES IN LIFE
Our sense of our place in the world is based to a great extent on the various roles we play—we are spouses, children, perhaps parents, and workers of one kind or another. From the standpoint of marriage, our perspective on our own roles and our mate’s can either add to the meaningfulness and harmony between us or create tension.
Your marriage will feel deeper to the degree that your expectations of each other—what you feel your wife’s or husband’s place in your family ought to be—are similar. We’re not talking here about seemingly superficial issues like who washes the dishes; we’re talking about deeper feelings about what you expect of yourself and your spouse. For example, both Ian and Hilary believed that a husband should be a protector and provider and the wife more of a nurturer. Chloe and Evan believed in an egalitarian marriage in which the spouses supported each other emotionally and financially. Because in both of these marriages husband and wife had a similar philosophy about their roles, their marriages worked. Of course, were Ian married to Chloe and Hilary to Evan, there’d be more cause for friction.
Having similar views about parenting—for example, the values you consider important to pass on to your children—also adds to a marriage’s meaning. So do questions about the kind of interaction you should now have with your parents and siblings. (Do you consider them part of your family, or o
utsiders you keep your distance from?) Even your views of what it means to work—and the meaning you attach to your own work—can deepen your sense of connection with your spouse. In other words, to the extent that you feel similarly about these issues, your marriage will be strengthened.
None of this means that you should (or, for that matter, could) see eye to eye on every philosophical or spiritual aspect of life. For example, couples who are in the same line of work may draw different meanings from it. Johnny is passionate about being a scientist. His work as a geologist forms a significant part of his identity and colors how he sees the world. He feels personally inspired by the scientific approach with its emphasis on objectivity and analysis, and he takes great pride in being a geologist. If you ask him what he is, he will say he is a geologist first. His wife, Molly, is also a geologist, but she doesn’t identify quite so deeply with her profession. She sees herself as a woman first, rather than as a scientist. But this poses no difficulty in their marriage. They connect deeply in so many other areas of their lives together that this difference is never a sticking point.
Exercise 2: Roles
The more you can talk to each other frankly about your deeply held views about your roles in life, the more likely you are to reach a consensus that makes sense and comes naturally to your family. Musing over these questions separately and then together can help.
1. How do you feel about your role as a husband or wife? What does this role mean to you in your life? How did your father or mother view this role? How are you similar and different? How would you like to change this role?
2. How do you feel about your role as a father or mother? What does this role mean to you in your life? How did your father or mother view this role? How are you similar and different? How would you like to change this role?
3. How do you feel about your role as a son or daughter? What does this role mean to you in your life? How did your father or mother view this role? How are you similar and different? How would you like to change this role?
4. How do you feel about your role as a worker (your occupation)? What does this role mean to you in your life? How did your father or mother view this role? How are you similar and different? How would you like to change this role?
5. How do you feel about your role as a friend to others? What does this role mean to you in your life? How did your father or mother view this role? How are you similar and different? How would you like to change this role?
6. How do you feel about your role in your community? What does this role mean to you in your life? How did your father or mother view this role? How are you similar and different? How would you like to change this role?
7. How do you balance these roles in your life?
PERSONAL GOALS
Part of what makes life meaningful are the goals we strive to achieve. While we all have some very practical goals—like earning a certain income—we also have deeper, more spiritual goals. For one person, the goal may be to find peace and healing after a tumultuous, abusive childhood. For another it may be to raise children who are good-hearted and generous. Many times we don’t talk about our deepest goals. Sometimes we haven’t even asked ourselves these questions. But when we start, it gives us the opportunity to explore something that can have a profound impact on ourselves and our marriage.
Not only will you increase the intimacy of your marriage by sharing your deepest goals with your spouse, but to the extent that you work together to achieve shared goals, they can be a path toward making your union even richer. For example, both Emilie and Alex were committed to doing volunteer work for their church. Once their kids were grown, they decided they wanted to leave a spiritual legacy to their community. So he joined the board of directors of the religious school, and she started an adult education program at the church for people who wanted to become reacquainted with their faith. “I would have done this on my own,” says Emilie. “But feeling in partnership with Alex about the importance of giving something back to my community and my church has made it an even more rewarding experience. I feel renewed not just in my faith but in my marriage as well.”
Exercise 3: Goals
To explore with your spouse the meaning of goals in your individual lives and your marriage, ask yourselves the following questions.
1. Write a “mission statement” of what your mission in life is. Write your own obituary. What would you like it to say?
2. What goals do you have in life, for yourself, for your spouse, for your children? What do you want to accomplish in the next five to ten years?
3. What is one life dream that you want to fulfill before you die?
4. We often fill our time with things that demand our immediate attention—putting out fires, so to speak. But what are the truly important things in your life that are great sources of energy and pleasure that you really need to block out time for, the important things that keep getting postponed or crowded out?
5. What is the role of spirituality in your lives? What was this role in your families growing up? How should this be in your family?
SHARED SYMBOLS
Another sign of shared meaning in a marriage is that your lives are surrounded by things that represent the values and beliefs you share. Often, these “things” are literally objects. Religious icons like a crucifix or mezuzah are the most obvious symbols of faith a couple may display in their home. But there are other, more personalized ones as well. For Jenna and Michael, their dining room table held special significance. They had saved up for many years to have it custom made by a local carpenter who was an expert carver. Every time they opened it up for family celebrations, its beauty and strength spoke to them of the beauty and stability of their own marriage. Another family kept a little statuette of a baby angel on the mantel in memory of their first baby, who was stillborn. The angel commemorated the baby but also represented their own resilience and deep love and support for each other, which had gotten them through this tragedy and allowed them to go on to have a large, happy family.
Some symbols are abstract but no less significant to a marriage. Family stories, for example, can be symbolic of a whole set of values. In that sense, Helen’s story about her great-grandparents who kept their love alive even when separated by an ocean symbolized the family’s deep sense of loyalty. Every time that story was retold (and almost by definition, family stories do get told over and over again through the years), it was symbolic of the great value they place on loyalty. Her husband Kevin’s story of his great-grandmother’s general store and her gracious generosity toward the poor was also a metaphor for another deeply held family value—that money is not as important as being connected to your community. Even a home itself can be of great symbolic meaning to a couple. They may view it not only as the place they eat and sleep but as the spiritual center of their lives together—the place where they consummate their love, where their children were conceived and grew, and so on.
Exercise 4: Symbols
The following questions will help you talk to each other about the significance of symbols in your marriage.
1. What symbols (such as photos or objects) show who our family is in the world, what we value about being _______________________ (supply your last names)?
2. Family stories are also symbols—they often stand for and teach a whole set of values. What are some stories about your family that go way back in history, stories you are proud of and want to be a part of the tradition your family continues?
3. What does a home mean to you? What qualities must it have for you? What was a home like in your families growing up?
4. What in your life is symbolic of your philosophy of how to lead a meaningful, good life? For example, giving to charity, or wearing a crucifix, or lighting a candle for dead ancestors may be symbolic of your sense of meaning. Do you feel that you are failing to do this to the degree you’d like?
Feeling a sense of unity with your spouse on most of the deep, burning issues is unlikely to occur overnight. E
xploring these issues together is really an ongoing, lifelong process. The goal shouldn’t be to agree on every aspect of what is profoundly meaningful to you, but to have a marriage where you are both open to each other’s most dearly held beliefs. The more you create a marriage where these convictions can be readily divulged, the more joyous will be the journey through life that you share.
Afterword: What Now?
No book (or therapist) can solve all of your marital problems. But by incorporating these Seven Principles into your marriage, you really can change the course of your relationship. Even making just a small and gentle change in the trajectory of your marriage can have a dramatic, positive effect over time. The catch, of course, is that you have to build on the change and keep it going. Improving your marriage is a kind of journey. Like all journeys it begins by suspending disbelief, taking one small step, and then seeing where you are and taking the next step. If you get stuck or take a few missteps, reread portions of this book with an eye toward charting where your marriage is now. Then you’ll be able to figure how to help it along in the right direction.
Once you feel your marriage is “on course,” here are some ideas to help you maintain momentum.
THE MAGIC FIVE HOURS
When we followed up on couples who attended our Seattle workshops, we wondered what would distinguish those couples whose marriages continued to improve from those whose marriages did not. Would we find that the successful group had dramatically overhauled their lives? Far from it. To our surprise, we discovered that they were devoting only an extra five hours a week to their marriage. Although each couple had their own style of spending these extra five hours, some clear patterns emerged. In general, what these couples were doing was giving their marriage a concentrated refresher course in the Seven Principles. The approach works so phenomenally well that I’ve come to call it the Magic Five Hours. Here’s how you can do it, too:
The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work Page 26
