THE STAGES OF MARRIAGE: TRULY ACCEPTING EACH OTHER
Whenever a couple voices to me the fear that they may have married for more wrong reasons than right reasons, my reply is, "Of course you did. Most of us did. What did we know about the realities of marriage when we started out? The fact that you had a bunch of vague, rather unrealistic hopes about each other and about what marriage would be does not mean you made a mistake, or that you have a bad marriage. What happens next will determine whether you have a good marriage."
For healthy couples, what happens next is called differentiation. They begin to grapple with the awareness that the marriage can soothe pains or fulfill needs only to a certain extent. They become aware that we all have certain feelings of aloneness or emptiness that cannot be soothed by our mates, no matter how healthy the marriage becomes.
Further, they become truly aware of the limits on how much each of us is capable of changing another person. For cardiac couples, this is a particularly painful point. They need to confront openly the fact that the spouse cannot rehabilitate the heart patient. No matter how much loving, preaching, role modeling, or reading the spouse does, it is up to the heart patient to decide whether to adjust to the illness in healthy ways. This awareness often leaves both partners feeling alone as they struggle with the truth—that the marriage can help, but it cannot heal all their individual wounds and worries.
Once the couple has differentiated in this way, the challenge becomes one of understanding the emptiness felt within. They must learn to distinguish between emptiness that is caused by the other spouse and emptiness that is simply part of being human and being aware of the accumulated pains of life. The challenge at this juncture is to block the tendency to run from this pain. Some people try to numb themselves with drugs or food. Others try to distract themselves from their pain by pursuing other relationships or compulsions. Neither of these responses results in further growth or satisfaction.
Enduring this pain rather than running from it takes couples through a stage of despair when each of them becomes truly aware of the limits on what will come from the marriage. Fortunately, this stage, the stage of marital growing pain, is often relatively brief. Partners who do not run from each other begin rather quickly to develop a new, more mature, and less dream-come-true understanding of the goodness of their marriage. Unhealthy couples tend to disintegrate at this point, refusing to accept that no marriage can perfectly soothe both partner's pains all the time. Healthy couples begin to mature by psychologically differentiating; they become more accepting of their individual differences, and they begin to calm the power struggles that by now have grown tiresome and frightening for both of them. A new kind of peace and loving acceptance of each other begins to develop.
In this period of growth, each partner continues the process of differentiation by becoming more familiar with himself or herself. Each becomes more honest and realistic in identifying his or her own underlying emotional needs. And each begins to find more effective and healthy ways to request and accept soothing responses from his or her mate.
These new ways of perceiving oneself lead each partner to form new impressions of the other. The couple then enters a smoother stage in the marriage, in which each partner begins to truly understand the emotional wounds that the other brought into the marriage and begins to understand both the limits and the power of the marriage to heal these wounds. Moments of defensiveness and anger are more lovingly resolved as each spouse learns to respond with increased gentleness to signs that the other is feeling afraid or vulnerable. In addition, when their internal anxieties are not adequately soothed by their partners, they now begin to implement appropriate self-nurturing strategies rather than pout and wallow in pain. Rather than stay stuck in the conscious or unconscious modes of self-centeredness that characterized many of the previous stages of the marriage, they now begin to view each other in more calming and loving ways. They begin to discover or rediscover the endearing aspects of each other's personalities and of their partnership.
Each partner now begins to appreciate the other in new ways. A renewed appreciation blossoms. But now this loving impression of the other is not viewed through the rose-colored glasses of immature and unrealistic expectations about love and marriage. Rather, couples consciously begin to examine the basic questions that underlie marriage: Do we accept the limits on how much our marriage can soothe our internal psychological struggling? Do we still choose to face the challenge of living as two separate people who work lovingly to be healing partners in this complicated but worthwhile experience of being married?
For couples who choose to continue the journey, marriage now becomes a quest to learn how to relate in ways that are healing for each other. In so doing, they begin the final stage of the marital journey by entering what might be called Good Enough Territory. Each partner in a thriving couple settles into this territory of Good Enough, accepting the other's lack of perfection and focusing energies on being as good a mate and as nurturing a partner as possible.
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