The benefit of working on your marriage
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The benefits of marriage July 21: Mark O’Connell, a clinical instructor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, discusses some of the rewards of staying in a marriage. Today show |
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Why stay married?
From Philip and Marie to Jason and Leslie, from basically good relationships struggling with the accumulated weight of compromise that occurs when two selves must find breathing room in a space that often seems to have room for only one, to relationships shredded by acrimony, grievance, hurt, and disappointment, the same advice applies: know yourself. Recognize and respect your differences. Talk to each other. Be respectful. Reinforce the positives and minimize the negatives. Don’t blame. Be honest with each other. See things from each other’s perspective. Don’t judge. As a psychologist who has tried to help many couples with their relationships, I know firsthand that implementing this advice will make a relationship better.
Sounds good, but now let’s throw a wrench in the works: Is making our relationships better good enough? For that matter, is even a “good” relationship good enough, particularly now that advances in fertility technology, changing attitudes about single parenthood, shifting moral sensibilities, and other alterations in our social and economic landscape have provided viable alternatives to traditional marriage? What if it is no longer enough to merely make one’s relationship “better”?
If marriage is to be anything more than an encumbrance, a vestigial holdover from another time and another convention, we’d best ask a question that we rarely, if ever, ask: why stay married? Well, of course we do ask this question, but usually we ask it in the spirit of a rhetorical exercise in which we already assume the answer, or else we ask it in moments of frustration and despair, lamenting the fact that we have to choose between the rock of staying in a lousy marriage and the hard place of divorce. Rarely do we really ask ourselves why we stay married. Rarely do we enter into an open-minded exploration with the intent of finding a meaningful, rather than a conventional, reason for all of the sacrifice and commitment required to make an intimate relationship last.
As it turns out, this is a terrific time to ask ourselves why we get, and stay, married. It’s a terrific time because for this baby-boom generation, at this life stage and at this moment in cultural time, there is a relevant and contemporary answer. That answer — that our long-term intimate relationships can change us, that they can make us better people — is not, as it might seem on first impression, a self-serving rationalization. It is not just another way of asking “What’s in it for me, anyway?” Indeed, the opposite is true: at their best our intimate relationships are life-enhancing crucibles in which we can learn to trade in our at times adolescent self-centeredness for more real and enduring values. These include:
Knowing ourselves: Being part of a long-lasting relationship is the best way to more deeply know ourselves.
Keeping our memories alive: Sharing a history with someone we love helps us to remember.
Aging creatively: An intimate relationship can make the time of growing older one of expanding, rather than diminishing, possibility.
Being more generous: Our intimate relationships can help us to grow into our best, and least self-centered, selves.
Accepting ourselves: Lasting intimacy can teach us to appreciate, rather than deny, our human fallibility.
Continued growth: Intimate partners can help each other to achieve the relentless renegotiation of self that is the hallmark of vitality, change, and growth.
Finding freedom through our limitations: The most direct path to freedom lies in remaining true to our commitments.
Deeper love: Love can get better over time, and really loving someone is the most important thing we do in our lives.
Reaping the rewards of our emotional investment: There is a mother lode of untapped possibility in the lives that we already have.
Appreciating the degree to which our intimate relationships can bring us these benefits will help all of us.
It will help those of us who are involved in relationships characterized by distance, acrimony, injury, and mistrust. One of the reasons for the low success rate of most marital therapies is that while we know the nuts and bolts of what to do to make things better, we don’t know why we’re doing all that hard work in the first place. Having a sense of purpose will enable us to more easily make sorely needed changes.
It will help those of us who already have good relationships. Without a sense of relevance and purpose even our “good” relationships are but a fraction of what they could be. Understanding that our relationships can be powerful forums for personal growth and real change will make even the best of our relationships better.
And it will help all of us baby boomers; those of us who have good relationships, those of us who have bad relationships, and all of us who fall in between. It will help us because a lasting, loving relationship can enable us to meet the signature challenge of growing older: that of meeting the harder, nonnegotiable edges of reality — of time, of aging, and of loss — with just the right mix of realism, vitality, and hope.
Excerpted from "The Marriage Benefit: The Surprising Rewards of Staying Together." Copyright (c) 2008 by Mark O'Connell, Ph.D. Reprinted with permission from Grand Central Publishing.
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