The Exceptional Seven Percent. Gregory K. Popcak
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and success of a marriage.
That different marriages revolve around different themes is a fairly well established fact, but to date, no one has been able to show a meaningful connection among these themes. For example, based on available research, a marriage therapist could probably identify your marriage as, let’s say, a “blue marriage” and likewise tell you that it was not as desirable as a “green marriage.” But the same therapist would be hardpressed to tell you exactly how to move from your marriage into the more desirable one except perhaps to suggest that you need to “communicate better” or, “hope for better luck the next time you marry.” Until now, there was simply no meaningful way to tell couples what specific issues they needed to address to move to the next, more satisfying, stage of their lives together.
The Relationship Pathway is a model I have developed to explain how marital themes (and, in turn, marital satisfaction) can evolve over the life of a marriage. The Relationship Pathway illustrates the skills, attitudes, and behaviors a couple must learn in order to move from one major marital type to another. Further, it suggests that most marriages are basically good and can likewise become exceptional if a couple takes the time to learn what to do and practice what they know.
The Relationship Pathway (Figure 2.1) organizes five major categories of marriage (and a few subtypes) along a continuum of identity strength. (Readers with some psychology background may note the correspondence between the Relationship Pathway and Abraham Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs.”) Each marital type on the pathway is rated as being Impoverished, Conventional, or Exceptional, and as a couple moves up the pathway, the potential for marital happiness and longevity increases. Though every couple starts out at a different point on the Relationship Pathway, they all move along it one stage at a time. There is no skipping grades because not only does each stage of the pathway represent a shift in relational attitudes and the mastery of different skills, but each stage also reflects a change in the way the couple view their whole life. As such, it often takes a major crisis—the kind that makes us say, “I don’t know anything, anymore”—to motivate us to make the personal changes necessary to move from one relationship stage to the next. A person can move up the pathway without going through such a crisis, but he would have to be seriously and consistently attentive to his psychological and marital growth. Frankly, most of us are too lazy and distracted to do this, and it takes our lives falling apart before we are willing to take the steps necessary to move toward greater identity strength and deeper intimacy with our mate.
As you search for your own marriage on the pathway, try to keep the following in mind. First of all, resist the temptation to canonize yourself while demonizing your mate. Some people try to place themselves at the top of the pathway and their mate at the bottom: This is not the way it works. We all marry people whose identities are built around similar things to our own. Chances are, if you married a rotten apple, you’re not so shiny yourself.
Also, because it takes so much energy to move from one stage to the next, and because these stages are organized along a continuum, don’t be surprised if you find yourself between two stages. Most people are. Simply choose the stage or marital theme with which you most closely identify and start working on the recommendations listed in that section first, even if all the specifics don’t apply.
In order to help you understand the progression from one stage to the next, we’ll start at the bottom and work our way up.
Impoverished Marriages
Impoverished marriages get their name from the lower levels of intimacy, satisfaction, and longevity couples in them experience. The two major marital types that fall under the Impoverished rating are Deadly marriages and Shipwrecked marriages.
Deadly Marriages
MARITAL THEME: Escape from a world that is perceived as being either too overwhelming or too uninteresting to deal with.
In the Impoverished marriage category, the first stop is the Deadly marriage. A Deadly marriage occurs when two people build their lives around a self-destructive attempt to escape the world, which they have deemed either too overwhelming or too uninteresting to deal with. Deadly marriages come in two varieties: the Chaotic marriage and the Codependent marriage.
The Chaotic marriage exists when two people, equally bent on their own self-destruction (think of the movie Leaving Las Vegas), get together and become each other’s drinking buddies, sex partners, and possibly, punching bags. This couple is content to have just enough money to numb themselves through their day. These relationships rarely last, nor should they. If they do, it is often because one person (usually the woman) fears that leaving would jeopardize her life. The only way to have a worse marriage is to marry a serial killer, but the good news is you can really only go up from here.
A Codependent marriage exists when one person (it is usually a man), bent on his own self-destruction, marries someone (usually a woman) who intends to save him from himself. “Codependent” is probably the most overused word in pop psychology, and in the popular culture it has come to mean anyone who does anything for someone else that she really doesn’t want to do. This is unfortunate because it blunts the true, insidious nature of codependence.
Perhaps an example would help explain what I mean. Some people enjoy watching soap operas because, for an hour or so, they can forget about their own problems and lose themselves in the entertainingly hopeless problems of the characters on-screen. The true codependent person lives her entire life this way. The codependent has a whole laundry list of personal problems from which she distracts herself by becoming involved with someone whose daily existence is a life-or-death drama. The logic goes like this: “I can’t solve my own problems, so I will save this unsavable person, after which, he can save me.” Perverse as this may sound to any normal person, for the codependent this logic represents a win-win opportunity. Either the crazy prophecy will come true and the unsavable person will save her (this never happens) or the unsavable person continues to be hopeless, providing endless hours of wonderful, heroic distraction from the codependent’s own problems. Codependent marriages tend to exhibit a fairly high degree of longevity (due to the codependent’s tenacity) although, understandably, they are extremely unsatisfactory for the couple.
Recommendations for Deadly Couples
Relationships in the Deadly category are the only marriages which research strongly and consistently suggests would be better off dissolved. But if a Chaotic or Codependent couple wishes to remain together, they will have to accomplish one major mental shift (besides sobriety) before they can hope to move to the next marital stage (the Shipwrecked marriage). Specifically, they will have to learn to demand at least basic safety and basic financial security from their lives and relationships. Depending upon the specifics of the couple, AA, Al-Anon, and individual psychotherapy may all be indicated. Marital therapy per se is useless at this stage because there are barely two whole, functioning people here, much less a marriage.
Now let’s examine the next marriage type on the pathway, the Shipwrecked marriage. Though this type also falls into the Impoverished category, it is a breath of fresh air compared to the relationships you just read about.
Shipwrecked Marriages
MARITAL THEME: Providing the basics (financial security; safety and quietude) needed for a “comfortable life.”
Shipwrecked marriages represent the second stage of the Relationship Pathway. Once people become convinced that they cannot escape life, they begin to learn how to meet their basic needs. This is the primary work, the marital theme, of the Shipwrecked marriage.
The identities of husbands and wives in Shipwrecked marriages are still in their infancy. Lacking a solid sense of self, they use each other and their relationship to define themselves. Essentially, Shipwrecked husbands and wives view the world as a stormy sea into which they were cast with only the driftwood of their marriage to keep