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Though marriages in this category are stable, they are the “worst” of the lot. In a quiet, socially respectable manner the people in this group suffer more pain, hate more profoundly, and cause more discomfort to others than do the members of the other three groups. Yet the spouses appear to be unaware of their behavior. There is a deadly virulent glue of hate that is only visible to the keen eye of the behavioral scientist or the brilliant novelist.
One of the most obvious types is the Gruesome Twosome. This consists of individuals who are growing old together in an unsatisfactory marriage which is quite stable because neither is able nor willing to acknowledge his dissatisfaction. Indeed, very often both will claim they have a wonderful marriage. They do not recognize their inability to live either with or without each other.
Such couples consult marital counselors or other therapists usually because of problems with their children. The spouses themselves would not seek help because they are not conscious of the nature of their marital relationship; but they force themselves, or are forced by their physician, to seek help for the children.
One of the common ways in which such spouses attempt to minimize their pain is by becoming cultists of some sort. The wife in a Gruesome Twosome we know attends church twice every day. She seeks the counsel of the minister on everyday matters “so that my wonderful family can live in a way that is a glory to God.” In the meanwhile, she has bullied her husband to the point of tragic passivity. She identifies her bullying as “looking after poor Tom.” The husband has developed into a helpless person unable to fry an egg, to initiate even the simplest activities, to manage his finances-and often says “My wife is the dearest person in the world, the most wonderful wife a man could be blessed with.”
Both assert as loudly as possible, at every opportunity, how much they love each other and how happy they are. But observe an incident from their life together:
Their only daughter was being married on July 4, in Buenos Aires. This event was of intense interest to the parents. On the afternoon of July 4, the husband, who was fond of baseball, went to a neighbor’s house to watch a game on television. During his absence, the daughter telephoned from South America to tell her father and mother about her marriage and to have her husband say hello.
When the father returned, the mother said, “Tom, if you hadn’t cared more about baseball than about the welfare of your daughter, you would have been here when Betsy and her husband telephoned from Buenos Aires.”
A look of shock came over the husband. Neither of them had known the daughter would telephone, and he was extremely disappointed to have missed her; now he was startled by his wife’s cruel and untrue accusation.
After a few moments he put his arms around his wife, wiped his tears off on her shoulder and said, “What would I do without you, darling? You take care of everything for me. Thank God, you were here for the call.”
“You must be tired,” said the wife. “I’ll fix you some tea and then I’ll tell you what Betsy and her husband said to me in their long-distance call from South America.”
Holding each other’s hands, they walked into the kitchen.
This Gruesome Twosome constantly repeats the game just described, regardless of the issue. But they tell everyone how happy they are. She is disappointed in her husband’s failures both as a man and as a businessman. He is disappointed in his wife’s performance as a supportive person. Yet they never admit this situation to the world, to each other, or even, consciously, to themselves. As is to be expected, their three children all have miserable marriages.
Another man and woman we met became human vegetables in the course of maintaining their union. Before marriage, the woman was aggressive and competent, and she had done very well in high school. She was unhappy at home, however, and married a muscular young marine private who was a high-school dropout and a fearful underachiever. She hoped to help him “realize his potential.” After five years of marriage, the wife weighed close to three hundred pounds and was so afraid to meet people that she locked herself in the house, with the heat up to 90 degrees and all the shades down. She spent her time watching television and knitting endlessly. Her husband remained in the Marine Corps, with a menial base job; he was always the last man in his specialty to progress in rank; but he eventually advanced enough to remain in service because he was dependable and gave no reason to be expelled.
The couple had no sexual life or outside interests, They had no children. Although their behavior appeared to be saccharine and supportive most of the time, it was punctuated on the wife’s part by occasional outbursts of anger followed by guilt and remorse. The dull, passive husband was awkward and inadequate when in his wife’s company; he would go to bed when he came home from work, sleep until supper, watch two television shows, and then return to bed. Once, in a semidrunken state, the wife revealed to one of us that she was afraid that if she lost weight, went to work, and met other people, she would leave her husband. Except for this one moment of truth, the couple always assured everyone that they were happy. The wife’s hermitlike, fearful behavior produced such uncertainty and lack of self-confidence in the husband that he felt helpless without her, and made it difficult or impossible for him fully to utilize his minimal drive and obtain advancement. In tum his inability to achieve and progress in his employment made his wife feel a need to protect him and appear more inferior by contrast, and so each pulled the other downward. The wife succeeded, at great personal expense, in appearing more helpless than he did; he, at least, was able to hold a job.
Environmental factors played a part here too, for the wife’s lack of formal education limited her ability to achieve in accordance with her own expectations. Also, the husband had a job which provided security and permanent employment, even though he was not doing particularly well. Had one of these or of a number of other factors changed, the balance of this relationship would have had to undergo change also if the marriage was to stay intact. At the time of our contact with this couple, the husband and wife were twenty-five years old. If they could achieve such a condition in six years of marriage, the chances of any dramatic improvement occurring in the future-barring death - are very slim.
The members of a Gruesome Twosome live in accordance with the old proverb “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” Neither spouse dares to comment on the other’s behavior or on the nature of their marriage except to forgive and offer unrequested succor. Each is afraid of what the other may do or say in response to a critical or openly attacking remark. The children are taught not to mention unpleasant matters or even notice the nature of their parents’ relationship. For by doing so they might bring distasteful or uncontrollable material to their parents’ attention, and then the children would feel the repercussions. These couples form a rigid coalition on one point only that they will not admit the condition of their marriage or of their true feelings-but that point they defend against all intruders. The children often grow up to be cautious and reserved, and unable to judge the quality of any relationship. They justify their denials and lies by insisting that “it is better to tell a small falsehood than hurt someone’s feelings.” When a child gets into difficulties (the couple whose daughter was married in Buenos Aires also had one son who drank excessively and another who was expelled from college for spending the night in a girl’s room), the parents form their usual coalition of denial and insist that nothing can be wrong with their baby. The school system is at fault, the police department is incompetent, or perhaps there is something wrong with the child’s health. A child of theirs who manifests emotional problems must, they are sure, have suffered a brain injury during childhood.
In the second subcategory of Stable-Unsatisfactory marriages are husbands and wives who exist by avoiding each other, without its being evident that they do so. Thus, in a different way from the Gruesome Twosome, they are able to dissemble a miserable relationship. The husband may be zealously involved in his business and the wife in civic activities, the church, and so forth, but their activity possesses a quality which marks them as different from the busy Unstable-Unsatisfactory couples. We call these men and women the Paranoid Predators, for they both take a stand against a world perceived as hostile and form a team to fight it. The man may practice ruthless business methods because he is obsessed by the notion that “in our society today everyone hates a poor man. To survive you have to have dough and screw the other guy before he screws you.” The wife supports this attitude. The wife may work ten hours a day for militant antiCommunist organizations “because it is our duty as good Americans to stop the Communists from destroying freedom and Christianity.” The husband agrees with her and carries this attitude also into his own activities.
The intense activity of the Paranoid Predators is motivated by their need to avoid each other by focusing on something outside themselves, which can unite them in a-common goal or attitude, and thereby keep the marriage intact. They accomplish this by seeing little of each other and by being mutually disdainful and suspicious of others. Together they may criticize other individuals or groups, support extremist organizations, and so on. In doing so they deny the misery and emptiness of their own relationship.
Paranoid Predators employ extremely destructive behavior.
Their two-against-the-world approach to life enables them to maintain the marriage, but only at tremendous cost to themselves, their children, and society as a whole.
In one such case, the husband was an alcoholic merchant seaman who was promiscuous in every port. After some years, a severe case of syphilis brought his Southern Baptist conscience to the fore–and he left the sea, returned to his wife and two children, and became a part-time minister and carpenter.
The family lived in mortal terror of offending the Lord, and spent their days working together to ferret out possible enemies of Christianity. They succeeded in organizing their small community to avoid one sixteen-year-old out-of-wedlock mother, who later committed suicide! The husband and wife had renounced sex as sinful since they had already procreated (and the husband wasn’t sure whether syphilis had rendered him sterile). Finally, the odd behavior of their oldest boy brought the parents to the school’s attention. The parents refused to cooperate and moved to a different community. We do not know what befell them, but hazard a guess that the son went to a mental hospital and the marriage survived.
This material has been included so that spouses may identify their own marital type in general terms, so that they may have some frame of reference in which to locate themselves-simply to aid them in their own discussions. There is no undeviating classificatory description of marriage, and the categories are given in broad strokes only.
In reviewing the various categories into which marriages can be divided, it is important to remember that no one knows for sure what a normal marriage is. Surveys do reveal those qualities that seem to be related to workable marriages, but there have been no in-depth studies-let alone longitudinal studies-of marriages which are actually happy and collaborative, or the opposite.
Therefore, a person who becomes envious when a friend or neighbor describes how ecstatic his marriage is, or feels depressed after reading about the joys of certain wedded Hollywood stars, is probably trying to apply to his own marriage some sort of standard or gauge which does not really exist. Most of us have some kind of fairy-story image of the ideal marriage because our parents weren’t frank with us about their own marital problems and because our culture is so loaded with movies, television programs, magazine articles, and books about marital bliss.
We have attempted to offer a kind of classification of marriage, based not on ideals of “happiness” or “perfection” (which everyone defines differently), but on the exchanges of behavior between spouses which result in a more or less workable relationship. A marriage is regarded as “workable” when it is sustained without great personal loss of mental or physical health by either spouse.
The categories we have presented in semi-anecdotal form could also be distinguished in terms of the clarity of communication between spouses. Communication is clear when the amount of explicit information exchanged is great compared to the amount of noise (or meaningless communication, as when a code is heard that cannot be deciphered).
Defined in terms of communication, the Stable-Unsatisfactory marriage is one in which virtually no relationship information is exchanged between the spouses. Their lives together are usually quiet, separate, and distant, and the manifold problems in the marriage are represented nonverbally by the emotionally sick children, who are usually regarded by their parents as having organic disorders rather than severe emotional problems.
The Unstable-Unsatisfactory marriage does include some exchange of information between the spouses, but it is limited, frequently inappropriate or out of context, and new information introduced into the system (often by the children) causes upheaval. The spouses have difficulty exchanging information without precipitating serious battling or psychosomatic flareups, but they may nevertheless actually be able to exchange information during times of upheaval. The children often suffer from being scapegoated or from getting caught in the middle and becoming wise old diplomats before their time. This quality often separates them from their peers, leaving them feeling lonely, “different,” and vaguely inadequate.
The partners in an Unstable-Satisfactory marriage can exchange some information and can occasionally collaborate. New information, new problems or challenges, initially may cause dissension, but this will usually quiet down, be denied, or be handled by edict. Thereafter, it seems to be forgotten; but it is filed away in the unconscious and the reason that many of these marriages slowly become Unstable-Unsatisfactory is often that what was supposed to be forgiven and forgotten has accumulated underground, until one spouse suddenly finds that he is “out of love” and can’t live the rest of his life that way. He abruptly walks out, to the amazement of the other, who wails that “there was so much good in our marriage!” The mental health of the children of such couples can be relatively good despite a considerable amount of disagreement between the parents because the conflict is overt often enough for the children to see what is really going on. Frequently the best communication between the UnstableSatisfactory married spouses occurs after an upheaval, when they are in the process of making up and are willing to listen to each other.
The Stable-Satisfactory spouses are able to exchange information easily, often in part because of similarities in their backgrounds. They know each other so well that long dissertations or lengthy harangues are unnecessary; a smile, a nod of the head, or a disapproving glance is sufficient. Such husbands and wives are able to collaborate, but they are also able clearly to distinguish the circumstances in which it is important to them to be autonomous. The children of such marriages are fortunate and look forward to getting married themselves. Because the parents are able to collaborate, they do not fear intervention by the children (i.e., they do not fear that their coalition will be split apart) and thus the children can be taken seriously and their opinions can be given whatever consideration is suitable. The most important single element observable in such marriages is the operation of trust.
