“Anyone have a final question for me?” I asked, wrapping up a marriage enrichment evening with fifty or so couples. Their ranks included a full spectrum, from marital rookies, to veterans of over sixty years. In the back of the room, a “Gen Z-er” raised his hand. After a whole evening together, his urgent curiosity showed up like a fresh breeze blowing a second wind into the room. He asked: “What’s the most important skill to make a marriage successful?”
His query took me back to when a similar question was posed to my maternal grandparents at their golden wedding anniversary gathering. Surprising no one, Grandpa responded first. He offered the verbal equivalent of handful of something you might grab from a candy jar. “When the Good Lord was handing out the true love,” he declared, “I took two helpings!” The crowd responded as you might imagine, “Ahhhh!,” (in a tone and timbre suggestive of the phrase, “Isn’t that sweet?!”).
Grandma, who normally said more with her eyes than her mouth, uncharacteristically stepped forward. I remembered her pivoting, to get a good look at each of her fifteen grandkids, including me. You got the feeling that, unlike the wafer thin mint her husband served up a minute ago, she was getting ready to feed her family something nutritious! With the weight of some Grade A, Blue Ribbon, Gold Medal, practical wisdom, here’s what she offered. “Don’t let, ANYTHING,” (pause) “I mean ANYTHING,” (smaller pause) “Not even the TINEST THING,” “…get in the way of your love for each other!” I’m not sure of the exact wording on the next part, but I know it had to do with letting go of anger just as soon as it shows up. Pretty good advice coming from a woman, who fifty years earlier, married a man who could be as rigid and hard-headed as the iron plow on his family’s old farm. From that little microcosm of an interchange, it was easy to see what the secret of their marital success was. In a word? Grandma!
At my marriage enrichment evening three months ago, the youngest person in the auditorium asked the best/hardest question of the evening. It made me get quiet and plumb the depths of all I’ve learned from so many couples, so many mentors, so much research over the years, and from my own marriage. Part of what I told him was that the capacity to soothe one’s heart down was the pre-requisite skill to access all the other skills necessary for resilient marital communication. There is a sister skill that goes with it.
Becoming a Student of Your Relationship
If you want a truly resilient, flourishing marriage, become an intelligent student of your one-of-a-kind relationship. My grandma knew how to do this. Like most women of her generation, she existed in a traditional marriage. No doubt about it, grandpa was the head of the family. However, by the time I came along, it was clear that grandma was the neck that moved the head this way and that. Like other people who have to exercise “one-down” power, she was very reflective and intelligent about her relationship. Most people I encounter these days are looking for an egalitarian companionate marriage. Nonetheless, my grandma’s skill of studying the unique ways that her own particular marriage worked can be put to the task of elevating a companionate relationship as well as a traditional one. My grandma knew all the ins and outs of her marriage, and she made the most of it.
Are you making the most of your marriage? Most spouses these days know enough to avoid attempting to read their spouse’s mind. Not enough spouses take the time to read their own minds. Let me explain what I mean with a metaphor that maybe shouldn’t be just a metaphor. Over the course of a marriage, each spouse ought to be compiling a manual of protocols regarding what works, and fails to work in their marriage. Imagine your relationship as a kind of lab where the both of you run experiments together. A reflective couple can regularly engage in a “step-back” process where the data of those experiments can be jointly analyzed to determine: “What works well for us…what works medium for us…what doesn’t work for us?” I have found that over time, there is a store of accumulated practical wisdom in a spouse. As a counselor, I think it’s useful to tell a spouse what research says about what works in a marriage or what doesn’t work. But a way more important role for a marital therapist, is to get a spouse to thoughtfully consult their accumulation of practical wisdom regarding their own unique relationship. So much of marital work involves soothing one’s volatile emotions enough to step back and remember what works and what doesn’t work with my unique spouse, and our one-of-a-kind marriage.
A Meditative Exercise
Take a few minutes in a meditative spot to close your eyes, and center yourselves. Go to that deep place inside where you have internalized your spouse. In this exercise you will write a letter from your spouse’s perspective to you. From your spouse’s view, tell the story of a time when he or she felt closest to you. Include, as best you can, any memories you believe that they carry from that treasured moment together. Remember, you are writing in your wife or husband’s voice to you. My spouse’s name is “Lisa.” If I were to do this exercise, I would begin my letter, “Dear Tom….” I would write in the voice of Lisa as close as I can to the sense of how she experienced things…using language the way she uses. At the end of the exercise, hand each other your letters and see how well you captured their perspective.
Dialogue
What would you say are three things that your spouse most values in the whole world? What are three aspirations he or she holds?
Can you map the characteristic ways that the two of you do your conflicts? What time of day do they occur? What is the characteristic things that make a conflict go well? What are the characteristic ways that they go poorly? When is the best time to problem solve? When is the worst?
What are the usual ways that the two of you repair after a snag? The difference between a good marriage and a bad marriage is the ability to repair.
Can you identify a way that your spouse would like to improve your relationship? What practical structure would have to be put into place to begin actualizing this goal?