This entry was posted on Sunday, September 2nd, 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Marriage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
This relationship is almost hypothetical. Such a harmonious and collaborative union has seldom been directly observed by the authors, and then only between elderly men and women who have been married for thirty or more years-or who have remarried late in life some years after being widowed-and who either have had no children, or have grown-up children living in homes of their own. We have never observed a generally constant collaborative union between spouses during the period when they are raising children. This raises some interesting speculation-but to resolve them into valid conclusions would demand extensive research and a separate book.
Having observed the Stable-Satisfactory relationship among some older people who are living alone without children, we shall attempt to show, by extension and deductive reasoning, what it would be like within the framework of a young marriage.
The Stable-Satisfactory marriage represents the ultimate in collaboration. When it occurs, it is made possible by the hand-inglove fit of the two spouses. Their backgrounds must be similar enough so that each partner clearly reads the other’s signals, and in turn, responds with unambiguous messages. This effective communication makes possible the establishment of trust.
With trust, comes the acceptance of each other’s differences.
They are regarded as indications of varying”tastes or values, not as symbols of a hostile relationship. Mary knows her way will be cheerfully accepted a good part of the time by her husband, John. Therefore, it is not difficult for her to do the same for him. The spouses’ ready acceptance of each other’s differences makes it possible for them to be “creative”-to develop and project their own identities. The recognition of basic equality gives partners the self-assurance and courage to exercise their individuality with respect to outsiders and to the world in general.
The collaboration of the Stable-Satisfactory couple, based on mutual trust, allows them time, energy, interest, and confidence to engage in activities and avocations outside of the marital milieu. They become free to enjoy not only each other, but everyone and everything else which may interest them mutually or individually. They can work together when discipline or decisions regarding a child are involved; and they are able, as individuals, to enjoy and share the children without jealousy. They can form coalitions and make joint decisions-whether the issue involves work, play, friends, relatives, or organizations-and on occasion they may act as autonomous individuals. In contrast, the spouse who isn’t sure of the other’s love or trust or devotion may be unable to let the other out of his sight. Sometimes, the marital novice will mistake the watchful wariness of an untrusting and suspicious partner for love and devotion. The partner’s C.I.A.type sleuthing or oleaginous protectiveness and feigned interest usually disguise serious problems in the relationship.
In a collaborative relationship the man and woman may not always agree, but when they do not, they accept the disagreement comfortably and seek a team solution permitting recognition of both parties. If an impasse is reached, they resort to flipping coins or taking turns, in the recognition that neither is right nor wrong but a decision must be made. Their noncompetitive relationship makes possible close interaction with almost all people and situations.
As the years of marriage pass, the trust continues to reinforce itself and strengthen the spouses. Anyone who mows an older couple in this marital category is familiar with the serenity and certitude which these rare couples radiate.
Within the Stable-Satisfactory group there are two subcategories-the Heavenly Twins and the Collaborative Geniuses.
The Heavenly Twins are spouses who appear to have been “born for each other.” We recall an elderly man and woman who seemed to be totally collaborative, who loved and were loved. They told us that they had been this way since they were first married forty-three years ago.
Both were second-generation Armenians whose fathers had been doctors and whose mothers had been nurses. Both came from large, happy families, which had lived on the same block in the same city. Both families had been in the same income group. Every member of both families had married someone of Armenian extraction. Husband and wife had the same tastes, the same values, the same background. Following the familial pattern, the husband in this couple was a doctor, and the wife was a nurse, and had worked in her husband’s office for four years, until she became pregnant. They had been engaged for two years before they were married.
Such couples are extremely rare. In this era of geographical, economic, social, and vocational mobility, of family disintegration, the probability of finding such a match is exceedingly slim.
This type of couple is most frequent in those geographical areas where the divorce rate is lowest. These are also the areas where spouses are apt to come from similar backgrounds. The. divorce rate is lowest in Midwestern farm communities, where spouses are likely to share the same values concerning almost everything from food to religion. In some agricultural communities, such as the Amish and the Mormon, where religion is a dominant influence and hard work is the accepted ethic, divorce is almost unmown. However, we do not assume that a low divorce rate means that all the intact marriages are happy or even working well.
The Collaborative Geniuses are spouses who did not have extremely similar backgrounds, yet still developed a Stable-Satisfactory union early in the marriage. We assume that this breed of marriage must occasionally exist, but we have not observed such a couple, perhaps because these people do not seek marital therapy, or because they tend to be engrossed in creative team endeavors which keep them somewhat outside the areas of conventional living.
But even the Collaborative Geniuses probably begin marriage with a greater-than-average similarity in basic tastes, values, and background, and an unusual degree of flexibility. One major key to “love” (the life spirit of a highly collaborative marriage) is the ability to agree on important ways of behaving with respect to one another. To “know someone well” means to be free to meet new situations or novel contingencies knowing that one will function with one’s partner together, as a team. This is possible because the couple has largely reduced the red tape of ritual and formality, and the strain of trying to make predictions about each other’s behavior. Shared experience with one’s spouse may result in a highly functional relationship after years of effort and compromise. But the Stable-Satisfactory relationship, the extraordinarily collaborative one, usually results not only from experiences occurring solely within the limits of married life, but also from similarities in background, parental and family experiences, interests, ethnic lines, subcultures, and so forth-in other words, important basic shared experiences occurring before the marriage begins. It also seems probable that those who develop the Collaborative-Genius relationship have experienced and observed some basic rules of cooperation in their parental homes, acquiring the fundamental ability to give and take without great rigidity or fear. Learning the basic rules of cooperation from their own parents, they have a beginning from which they can develop the art further and become collaborators rather than just cooperators.
People who are about to get married dream of being Heavenly Twins or Collaborative Geniuses, but the cards are stacked against them. In today’s world of big cities, fast transport, and instant communication, almost everyone has more to do with strangers than with “the boy next door.” Therefore, in almost all marriages the partners begin with foundations of dissimilar experiences, backgrounds, values, and tastes. These differences eliminate the possibility of easy communications and shared assumptions. Consequently, almost all marriages require that the spouses work hard to keep the union functional, expending much time, energy, and vitality in trying to stay together. Change and compromise by both partners are required from day to day. The result is tension and conflict, and a determined commitment is needed to keep the relationship going. The majority cannot enjoy the easy collaboration, the swift, merry communication, the trusting individualism, with which the Heavenly Twins and the Collaborative Geniuses are blessed. They burn up most of their energies in the everyday battle for marital survival.
Average spouses, dissimilar people who stay married by diligent effort and application, may feel that they have a relatively functional and satisfactory marriage-and they may. But they rarely achieve the gracious stability of the Heavenly Twins or the Collaborative Geniuses. Quarrels and “games” in the initial period make wounds which are often reopened later on, frequently by children who suffered through the early years of the marriage. What had appeared to be a stable relationship may again become unstable-until by work and compromise, the couple bring it back to another period of equilibrium. If the “happiness” factor of this type of oscillatory marriage were graphed over the years, it probably would resemble a sine curve. Marriages of this sort are grouped in the second category; they are Unstable-Satisfactory marriages.
