There are two major schools of thought on what makes a happy marriage. One that says the toxic environment is the issue and the other that says it’s the emotional immune system.

The most popular one (i.e. the one that’s easier to stomach) says that the toxic environment is the big problem and that individuals and couples must work to make their environments less chaotic and more loving. Prescriptions include having date nights, doing communication exercises, offering regular loving affirmations, and, oh yeah, doing your chores. There are also prescriptions for playing fair, being honest, and being kind. In addition, at its core, this view holds that we harm each other in marriage because of the toxic environments we grew up in.  A happy marriage (and successful marriage counseling) comes from having your partner help you heal your childhood wounds (and vice versa) by creating a more toxin free environment.

It has as its mantra: “Make me feel safe and valid and I’ll do the same for you”.

Here’s the flaw: Health cannot increase with a weak immune system. If safety is primary, immunity will not be challenged to get stronger and so the slightest exposure will make you ill. It’s the whole concept behind vaccination. In order for us to break out of our vicious cycles, we must get a little dirty.  On the whole, it’s not that we as individuals and married people and as a society have too much anxiety and “wounding”. It’s that we have too little ability to tolerate it.

This second major school of thought, and the one to which I adhere, can sometimes look the same as the first. Helping people find calm is integral – but we do it not by coddling them but by holding them more close to the fire that is their lack of integrity in crucial moments. This may sound harsh and, by all accounts, it is. But the people who go through it without running from it come out stronger, deeper, and more resilient. I can’t tell you the respect I have for my clients who show up, again and again, wanting to work through their own lesser natures to achieve something greater. It is truly a work of beauty and it inspires me to come to work everyday.

This paradigm holds that in order to have a robust mental health and a connected, meaningful relationship, individuals need to learn to hold their own, no matter what mean or disrespectful or base things our partners do.  It asks us to look straight at the ugliness of both our own and our partners’ behaviors.

It raises the question of narcissistic wounds in contrast to childhood wounds. Too often we look at our childhoods as having crippled us. But what if this is wrong? What if the theory (and yes, folks, it is a theory) of wounded children and a “shame based identity” are simply wrong? What if the bigger issue is resilience and our refusal at crucial moments to accept responsibility for ourselves and our actions?

This is not to say, by any means, that there aren’t terrible things that were said and done to us as children. Of course this happens and has a profound influence on our lives. But there are too many times that we remain stuck in the past via the very idea that was first proposed to help us – the idea that we are wounded or broken. When we focus on this, we kind of keep ourselves stuck in that mind set. We over focus on every little hurt and we lose ourselves in the process.  We start to think we are either too wounded to grow or too special to have to deal with our partners’ insults, craziness, or doubts about us. Our “wounds” actually become narcissistic rather than true.

What we also do with this idea is learn to deny the fact that what we learn most often from our parents is not how they wounded us. What we learn is exactly how to perpetuate the ugliness. It was not a fun day, as I’ve written about in other posts, when I could see my own narcissism and ability to hurt and pummel the ones closest to me. But it was the most important day of my life. I continue to learn.

I hope you found this post helpful! Let me know your thoughts! I love interacting with people here on the blog. Remember – you can respond anonymously!

The buzz word of the day in mainstream therapy circles and in the pervasive marketing of online dating companies is compatibility – it’s all about finding the right person. The magical thinking is that if you just find the right person you will be happy in marriage.  In the February 2012 edition of Psychology Today magazine is an article, entitled Are You With the Right Mate?, by Rebecca Webber, challenging this notion…well, sort of.

As I began to read I was just a little bit excited that perhaps leaders in the marriage help industry were finally going to begin to approximate what real married people struggle with and to possibly offer some clarity or solution that made sense. However, the deeper I got into the article the crazier I felt!

The article starts out OK in acknowledging the normalcy of disenchantment in marriage. Terry Real, Boston family therapist, is quoted as saying “It’s an open secret of American culture that disillusionment exists. I go around the country speaking about ‘normal marital hatred’. Not one person has ever asked what I mean by that.” Good so far…

William Doherty, head of the marriage and family program at University of Minnesota, says that when we look to our spouses to make us happy, we engage in this compatibility (who’s the “right” person for me) based thought processes that make our differences “tragic and intolerable”. The point being that we shouldn’t look to our spouses to be the same as us in order to make us happy. We need to be responsible for our own happiness regardless of our differences.

Great…so how do we do that?

Here’s where I started feeling crazy. As a solution, Doherty suggests the following: “We tend not to think , ‘Maybe I’m not giving her what she needs.’ ‘Maybe he’s disgruntled because I’m not opening up to him’. Or, ‘Maybe he’s struggling in his relationship with other people.’ The more sophisticated question,” says Doherty, “is ‘In what ways are we failing to make one another happy?’”

Wait. I thought he just said that when we look to our spouses to make us happy we make our differences or incompatibilities tragic and intolerable. Now, he’s saying that it’s not about them making us happy but rather it’s about us making them happy. So the key to having a successful marriage is martyrdom.

What Doherty is saying can sound like good logic but in practice, when you’ve got a spouse who couldn’t be any less interested in “making you happy” you’re in a real bind.

In answer to this, Doherty concedes that spouses who aren’t interested in the least in making their partners happy are not great mate material. He says that “these are things that nobody should have to put up with in life.”

Wait…I thought this whole article was about how it’s not about having the right partner. But then he says it really is.

Well, Doherty says, these folks who don’t want to try are in a “completely different category”.

What category exactly is that?

I would put them in the category of folks who would really rather have their spouse change than themselves – which, in my experience, is every couple I’ve worked with in 14 years, every friend I’ve had, every family member, and, oh yeah, me too! Isn’t it the very nature of the beast that humans, by nature, kind of like homeostasis? We like change about as much as we like going to the dentist.

What category? Married human. So, who is this article written for?

I’ve worked with 100’s of couples where one spouse works to accommodate the “needs” of the other – very often for decades – and they are no closer to warming up their marriages than humans are to stopping the ice from melting in Antarctica.

What Doherty and the others are saying that makes sense is the fact that we are responsible for our own happiness. But the way they are suggesting we get there is fundamentally flawed and recreates the very problem they are trying to help solve. We do don’t become responsible for our own happiness in our marriages by asking what can we do or who can we become to make our spouses happy. Nor do we become responsible for our own happiness by “standing up for” what we want and need our partners to do as Terry Real suggests later in the article. We become responsible for our own happiness in marriage by…well…taking responsibility for ourselves.

What Growth in Marriage Looks Like

Taking responsibility for ourselves in marriage can be:

• Looking straight at our own dark sides without distorting them by saying we didn’t really mean to hurt our partners or by saying we may have been acting badly but it was all unconscious. (‘I didn’t really mean to not get treatment for my rapid ejaculation problem for the last 25 years. It was unconscious,’ is an example of a distortion.)
• Taking responsibility for ourselves can look like giving an ultimatum – this is what I mean by taking a firm stand regardless of whether your partner likes it – and doing it not because you’re angry or exhausted – but because you’re finally waking up. Things like: ‘That’s the last time I’m having sex with you because you ‘need’ it.’ Or ‘That’s the last time you are going to cheat on me and still be married to me.’ Or ‘That’s the last time I’m going to sit by quietly while you yell at the kids.’ There’s a great misconception about giving ultimatums. We think they are about doing something to our partners but really, they are about our own growth because for an ultimatum to mean anything at all the giver has to follow through. The most meaningful ultimatums in marriage are calm.

Doherty and the others propose that marriage is fundamentally an institution that is for meeting each others needs and achieving unconditional acceptance, etc. This idea is what sells.

But what happily married folks know more than anything is this: Marriage is not about making someone else happy or getting one’s needs met. Marriage is about growth and integrity and doing the right thing regardless of whether your spouse likes it. Very often, breaking the vicious cycle you are in requires just that – upsetting your spouse for the sake of your own integrity.

This approach includes the married couples that Doherty’s approach excludes. You can still be (or be married to) an addict, a cheater, a gambler, and whatever else and still have hope for your marriage.

Have you set any New Year’s resolutions for your marriage yet? What might you want to do differently in 2012 with your mate?

Notice I’m not asking what you want your mate to do differently in 2012. I’m asking about you!

Those of you who are regular readers know that this blog is not your everyday marriage blog and so any kind of resolutions I might suggest will be a far cry from “5 Things You Can Do Right Now to Butter Your Husband’s Turkey” or “The Top 10 Things You Can Do to Get Your Woman Into Bed NOW”.   You can find that kind of junk in any Glamor or Cosmo magazines. (By the way, why do you think they have to keep essentially reprinting the same articles every month? Because the advice doesn’t work! More on that kind of advice later!) The hope people have is that, when seeking help for their marriages, they will find something more than what they can read about for $4.95 at the grocery check out line.

So what kind of resolutions am I talking about? I’m talking about the kind that require the depth and unstoppable force of a winter season – the kind that change the entire landscape – the kind that really have your attention and whole heart – the winter, spring, summer, and fall of it. I’m talking about the kind of change that is you standing up and saying I’m not going play house any more. I’m going to be real, honest, and brave in my marriage, in my parenting, in my family, or with my friends.

To that end, we must consider the winter side of things – that side that changes the entire landscape – we must consider the dark side. (Cue Vader breathing.)

Seriously, the more we avoid the uglier parts of our lives the more they seem to take charge. We are obsessed, especially now, in our culture with positivity at the cost of being honest about the pain we either inflict on others or others inflict on us. Make no mistake, folks. The institution of marriage – and the marriage help industry – have helped us to perfect our ability to hurt another and make it look like we care. (Cue Vader breathing)

Think of these common scenarios:

• Mercy-sex – it looks like the lower desire partner is trying to “have mercy” on the higher desire partner by “giving him” what he wants – but what he really wants is to be desired, not pacified. Not a kind move, but a controlling one.
• Other variations of saying yes to pacify your partner when really you’d like to say no in the name of what the latest self help book calls “compromise”. It makes it actually look like you’re doing your spouse a favor!
• Telling your partner you respect her but really you don’t – really you think she is a little nuts. You’re just going through the motions waiting and hoping that she will change so you don’t have to.
• Acting like the crimes your partner has committed are way worse than your own when what you have done – various psychological forms of “Chinese water torture” you can think of – would curl the toes of hardened street urchins.
• Telling your partner you agree with him on what he thinks your shortcomings are and telling him you are working hard at changing them – but really you have no intention of doing so. You have mastered the apology (delay and distraction).
• Relentless criticism – spoken or unspoken.

If you read these and can relate and if you think that these are simple problems that a few communication techniques, date nights, or kind words would fix, then there’s no need to read further.

If you believe something more is called for then continue.

That something more is courage. If you want to free yourself from the trouble your marriage is in, then you must speak the truth.

In the recent movie The Help, the character Aibileen has something to say about loving people who are hard to love. She says, “God says we should love our enemies. That’s hard to do. But we can start by telling the truth.” If you’d like to say that your spouse is not your enemy or that you never play dirty games, then you are a better human than I am. Most of us fall short of living our ideals and we give in to our desires for revenge or greed or the wish to control. The truth is harder to tell than we often think. Can you tell the truth about your marriage? It might be painful but it’s the most important place to start.

Maybe that is a good Become-A-Better-You Year resolution. Start with knowing what you know. Stop making excuses for either you or your partner – or your parents, your friends, your kids, or your in-laws for that matter. Start with the truth – even if it’s just with yourself. It will set you free.