The Exceptional Seven Percent. Gregory K. Popcak
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Mars and Venus series, Gary Smalley’s Hidden Keys to a Loving, Lasting Marriage, or Deborah Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand, and programs like Promise Keepers, PAIRS, or Retrouvaille, etc., were meant for you. Take advantage of them. Also, seek individual or marriage counseling to help you be accountable for the changes you want to make.
4. Challenge your addiction to comfort. If you have a chaotic past, you may feel you are now entitled a bit of peace and quiet. Unfortunately, this may make you obstinately unwilling to give any more to your mate than you decide is necessary. You may be blatantly dismissive toward, or passively ignoring of, your mate’s requests for more time, more attention, more anything. Likewise, you may tend to nag your mate about his or her faults as a way to escape dealing with your own. Both are recipes for disaster. If you wanted comfort, you should have bought a lounge chair, not a marriage license. Get to work on fulfilling your and your mate’s destinies now.
If you are currently in a Shipwrecked marriage, I want to encourage you to do the work necessary to move to the next stage. The crisis these marriages encounter around the ten-year mark is not so much an interpersonal problem as it is an identity problem. Stop blaming your mate for your misery and begin working to find your own place in the world. Your mate may disapprove of your efforts, but in many ways, this is just the tension your psyche requires to build some identity strength. Let your spouse be the stone against which you sharpen the sword of your identity. For now, let your marriage meet your basic needs while you pursue your growth. In the meantime, try to encourage your spouse to grow as well. If he or she does, great. If not, then you can reevaluate your decision to stay in your marriage after you have achieved a position of greater personal, social, and financial strength.
The next stage on the Relationship Pathway accounts for most marriages and represents what the Shipwrecked couple will graduate to if they successfully complete the work I outlined above.
Conventional Marriages
The marital theme of a Conventional marriage is generally to support and maintain a couple’s place in the world. Once people are capable of meeting their own basic needs, they become interested in finding a group with which they can identify and they are ready for a Conventional marriage. Even though Conventional couples exhibit some of the same qualities, attitudes, and skills as those couples farther along the pathway, they have not yet mastered them. Depending upon how the couples marital theme is played out, the Conventional couples will find themselves in either a Storybook or a Star marriage. Basic requirements for admission into either type of Conventional marriage are as follows.
1. Both husband and wife must be relatively sure of their own ability to provide for at least their basic financial needs, even if they are not currently employed.
2. Both husband and wife must have found personally meaningful work or social roles to play. For example, a physician whose identity is in the Shipwrecked category enjoys medicine because of the money, power, and prestige her work affords her, while a physician whose identity is at least in the Conventional category truly enjoys the art of medicine. In a similar way, to qualify as a Conventional stay-at-home mom (as opposed to a Shipwrecked stay-at-home mom), the woman must sincerely believe that by training or experience she is qualified to do something else, but has chosen to stay home because she finds the role personally meaningful and socially valuable.
3. Both husband and wife must have at least a casual identification with, or membership in, some significant “values group”; for example, church or synagogue, professional organizations, political/community organizations, men’s/women’s groups. Such identifications are important because, as Abraham Maslow pointed out, being accepted by and belonging to the world at large is a necessary step on the road to actualization. Likewise, analyst Erik Erikson showed how identification with some form of values group (even a conflicted identification) is a necessary part of developing healthy identity strength.
The Conventional husband and wife will use their membership or identification with such groups to sharpen their self-concept, clarifying the values that are important to them (although “values” at this stage tends to mean a particular political/social agenda rather than a marital imperative or a personal mission or code). Much of the Conventional couple’s involvement in their respective groups will involve the husband or wife comparing themselves to other members in the group to see how they measure up, a kind of psychosocial “keeping up with the Joneses.” This activity plants the seeds of accountability in the marriage (“I’m at least as good a spouse as so-and-so is.”) which, if allowed to blossom, will be the most important catalyst for moving the couple to the next stage on the pathway.
4. Both the husband and wife must have negotiated at least the most basic communication differences between men and women. Conventional couples may occasionally fall into that “it’s a guy thing” or “it’s a girl thing” trap, but this is the exception, not the rule as with Shipwrecked couples.
These are the most important attributes distinguishing Conventional marriages from their Shipwrecked counterparts, who are still struggling to figure out what to do with themselves apart from their marriage, and tend to have a mildly paranoid, self-protective attitude toward the world at large, especially organized groups.
Conventional marriages are the first relationships on the pathway that are founded on love. The love here is warm and comfortable, though the degree of intimacy can be a bit shallow due to the Conventional husband and wife’s tendency to get lost in their own little worlds and do not attend enough to their marriage. In fact, the ultimate success of the Conventional marriage is dependent upon the couple’s ability to maintain their priorities and perspective. Doing this will prevent the number one threat to Conventional marriages: “growing apart.” (See chapters 5 and 7.)
Besides growing apart, the other two problems that all types of Conventional couples encounter are domestic scorekeeping (whose turn is it to do what chore or how much of a contribution is a “fair” contribution to the marriage), and a game I call marital chicken. Marital chicken is reminiscent of the old game of chicken played in cars, in which two people drive toward each other at high speeds in an attempt to see who veers off first. Marital chicken is played when a husband or wife says, “I would be more romantic/sexual/attentive/ helpful/emotional/reasonable if you would only be more romantic/ sexual/attentive/helpful/emotional/reasonable, but I know you, you’ll never change.” Marital chicken serves the dual function of excusing spouses from changing anything about themselves while allowing each to feel self-righteous at the same time. As you might guess, marital chicken can be addicting.
Conventional couples are susceptible to these games because, though they have a fair amount of identity strength, their identities can be said to be more in their adolescence. As such, Conventional husbands and wives fear “losing themselves” to the marriage and employ such games as self-protective measures. What Conventional couples must learn as they mature is that a truly strong identity cannot be lost or stolen. Such fears tend to say more about the weakness of the individual than they do about the potentially “oppressive” nature of either a marriage partner or of the institution of marriage itself. Considering all these factors, Conventional marriages tend to be moderately stable and moderately satisfactory.
Now let’s explore the two varieties of Conventional marriages: Storybook and Star marriages.
Storybook Marriages
MARITAL THEME: Finding their place in a world of conservative values.
This couples’s search for their niche will eventually lead them to seek greater involvement in groups such as community organizations or religious institutions that are considered to reflect traditional values. The marriage itself has a traditional structure to it, however. Unlike the Shipwrecked Materialistic wife who had no choice but to stay home, the Conventional Storybook wife has other options available to her but chooses to stay home because she believes that role is important. Her employment before marriage was usually thought of as something to do until she achieved her primary goal of marriage and family. (“Someday my prince will come.”) Though the Storybook wife may be publicly deferential to her husband, she definitely sees herself as the “woman behind the man” and will not hesitate to push him if she feels he is falling below his potential. The husband, for his part, is ambivalent about