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Susan Page: Couples Who Thrive (Part 2)
Parts from her book The 8 Essential Traits of Couples Who Thrive.

Preface

"If you aren't happy with your marriage, why don't you do something about it?"

I began to search the literature for books about happy marriage---but they all turned out to be about how to drag your awful relationship up out of the gutter and make it more tolerable....

The major points in this book are also the result of my more than twenty years of professional involvement with couples....my colleague Roseann Packard and I founded one of the nation's first university-based human sexuality programs, at the University of California at Berkeley....In my work as a Protestant campus minister and as the director of a domestic violence prevention agency, I continued to gain experience and insights about the way some couples resign themselves to a lackluster marriage....

Much of what I learned in my workshops over the years is presented in the pages that follow. I have also drawn heavily on the experiences of the 32 couples I interviewed in depth as well as my own odyssey from an 8-year first marriage, through a painful but ultimately enlightening divorce, 6 years of singlehood, and now 12 years of experiencing life's joys and challenges together with my wonderful husband.

Introduction: A Brand-New Idea About Marriage

This book does hold secrets to happiness---but not in the forms you are used to seeing them. It will not tell you how to change your spouse. It will not give you techniques you can use to paper over limitations in your own character and to patch up your relationship. It won't give you a course of therapy that has worked for other unhappy couples. It won't tell you what to do to have a better marriage; rather, it will tell you how to be to have a better marriage.

This book is about the kinds of people who have thriving marriages. They didn't all have happy childhoods; some of their early families were quite miserable. They aren't all superachievers. They don't all have charmed, lucky lives. They don't all have "perfect" partners. What they do have in common is that they are people who are guided by deep and timeless principles....

The Old Idea

The old idea...is that there is no such thing as a really great marriage---or at least, that joyfully happy marriages are so rare that they are unattainable to most of us normal, somewhat neurotic folks....The old idea about marriage is that is is hard work....In the real world, being married involves compromise and disillusionment....All marriages go through stages, the old wisdom goes. After the honeymoon phase ends, a couple will begin to be annoyed by the very qualities that attracted them to each other in the first place....We still want marriage to be wonderful, but deep inside, we fear that happy marriage is unrealistic....

In fact, the popular statistic [that 50% of all marriages end in divorce] has recently been challenged. In a 1987 San Francisco Chronicle article entitled "Marriage Is Holding Up," pollster Louis Harris called it "one of the most specious pieces of statistical nonsense ever perpetrated in modern times." He says that government figures and his survey show that only 1 of 8 marriages will end in divorce, and that in any single year only about 2% of existing marriages will break up....Statistics about a population are irrelevant to your own individual odds. Your "odds" of staying married are what you make them...based on what you believe about your marriage and whether or not you choose to be a loving, proactive spouse....

The prevailing belief about marriage endures because it allows us to feel normal if our marriage is unexciting....it helps us to rationalize our own ho-hum marriages.

"People will not want to read about thriving couples," a friend cautioned me. "It will make them uncomfortable and anxious. People would rather read about couples who are worse off than they are so that they can feel good about themselves."...

The primary difference between thriving couples and troubled ones is that thriving couples want to thrive and believe they can be extremely happpy together....they are quietly pursuing their own reality.

The New Idea

In order to have a joyful marriage you have to change not your marriage but your mind-set....making small changes while retaining your present ideas about marriage will not result in any meaningful change. What has to shift is your entire concept of marriage....

There are some circumstances in which a marriage should be terminated...After I have presented my initial case for transforming marriage, I will explore this question thoroughly and identify those limited situations.

Thriving Marriage

This book is not a scientific study. I have interviewed at length 32 couples who describe themselves as flourishing and exceptionally happy, and I have spoken with 40 others....what I have attempted in this book is to present a gestalt, a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts....It has not been your methods that have held you back so far, I submit, but your motivation. And you can't be motivated to improve your marriage if you don't believe any improvement is possible.

The "Perfect" Marriage?

I was in a conversation in which a woman who has been married for 35 years announced that she has the perfect marriage....The woman's claim reminded me of a passage I love from a book by Soetsu Yanagi about Japanese folk pottery, called The Unknown Craftsman:

True beauty cannot lie either in the perfect or the imperfect, but must lie in a realm where such distinctions have ceased to exist....The precise and perfect carries no overtones, admits of no freedom; the perfect is static and regulated, cold and hard. We in our own human imperfections are repelled by the perfect, since everything is apparent from the start and there is no suggestion of the infinite. Beauty must have some room, must be associated with freedom. Freedom, indeed, is beauty. The love of the irregular is a sign of the basic quest for freedom.

A "perfect" marriage is not a marriage without challenges, but a marriage that has the strength to manage the challenges that arise....

We must learn to judge our marriages on their own merits. The perfect marriage is not one that conforms to a set of standards set by anyone else, but rather a marriage that both partners experience as fulfilling....resist the tempation to compare your own relationship to others....The question should not be "What is a perfect marriage?," but what is your perfect marriage?"...Like a Japanese tea bowl, casually glazed and warped by the fire, his marriage, with all its idiosyncrasies, is perfectly beautiful, richly satisfying to behold in its irregularity.

Chapter 1. Trait 1: Desire, Belief, and Commitment

Exactly how happy would you like your marriage to be? On a scale of 1 to 100,...what number would you like to strive for?...If you knew you could achieve 100 on the scale, would you do whatever was required to get there? Your answers to these questions will be a strong indication of your potential to thrive as a couple. Let me explain.

It has become a cliche in these times to say that the vast majority of marital problems result from poor communication. In fact, there is a much deeper cause of marital unhappiness....It is this: though they may not realize it, many couples are deeply ambivalent about each other---and about their relationship.

Couples who thrive show no evidence of ambivalence. Their happiness and all the other beautiful qualities in their relationship derive from their unmitigated desire to be together, their total belief in the rightness of their relationship, and their absolute commitment to their life together. They are not driving through their marriage with their brakes on....

Couples who thrive are happy together because they choose to drive without their brakes on. They throw themselves fully into their marriage and embrace what they have together....

Most of us think that happy couples are just more compatible than the rest of us. But happy couples have stresses on their marriage...they start with the same raw ingredients the rest of us have. But they don't let these potential roadblocks to happiness dominate their whole relationship. They are always aware of a bigger picture: their desire to be happy, their belief that they can be happy, and their unswerving commitment to each other.

And their happiness flows naturally out of their desire, belief, and commitment. If these are present...the couple is likely to thrive even if they don't have a lot of other relationship skills....For example, it is true that couples who thrive communicate very well with each other. But they communicate well not because they were born with "good communication skills"...[It's] because of their deep, unambivalent desire to do so.

Desire

In order to achieve any worthy goal, you have to want it with a burning passion. Otherwise, you will probably let yourself be defeated by the many obstacles that will almost certainly present themselves.

Couples who thrive do not ask themselves, "Is this worth it?" They are not beset with questions like, "Do I really love being in this relationship? Do I really want to be in any relationship at all? Is this really the person I should be with?" Because they already have the answer.

They want each other and they want their relationship with a passion. They are excited to be together. They often say things like "How did we get so lucky? Where would I be without you?"...Couples who thrive say these things to each other, not just in the first year after they meet, but for decades.

I interviewed a woman who had fallen in love with a man just two months previously and was already looking forward to her wedding...I asked her, "How do you know this is the right person?"...she told me:

A big part of the ecstasy we feel is the mutuality of our love. We both know beyond any doubt that we want to be married, and we are both very excited about each other. I realize only now that we have met that what I was dreaming of and hoping for all these years was precisely this: that I would find someone I felt no hesitation about who felt exactly the same way about me. I mean that mutual desire, that total lack of pulling back or caution---that is the pleasure!

The opposite of a clear, burning desire to be together is ambivalence---doubts, hesitations, fears.

I love David, but I feel too lonely too much of the time in this marriage.

I love Bill, but I can't stand the way he yells at the kids. I just hate that.

Remaining ambivalent has many apparent advantages: You get to keep all your options open. You never have to give up fantasies about other relationships or other lives you might be leading. You never have to feel that you have made a final decision.

If you just don't have [enthusiasm], what can you do?...You have to learn to act in the presence of ambivalence. Acknowledge your ambivalence, but don't be governed by it. Turn down the volume.

You have to modify your behavior. Even if you don't feel like it, act as if you have a passionate desire to be with your spouse and to have a wonderful relationship together. Find some small way to behave the way an enthusiastic spouse would behave. Very often, new feelings will follow new behavior....

Let's say that your main problem with your spouse is that he or she is simply a workaholic. The two of your virtually never spend any time together....You are right about this analysis. It's obvious to everyone.

But look. You are paying a heavy price for clinging to your analysis. You get to be right about what the problem is, but you don't get to be loving. You don't get to be forgiving....understanding...appreicated for your patience. You don't get to see how your partner would respond if you let go of your judgments, if you shifted to a more open attitude. You don't get to experiment with different potential solutions to the problem because if anything changed, you might have egg on your face.

Maybe you really are right. But who cares? As long as you remain invested in proving you are right about your spouse's faults (or your own limitations)...you preclude the possibility of changing those things....

Being right keeps you safe. It keeps you from having to risk making any change in yourself....See if you can let go of your position...

Carolyn had been divorced for 7 years after an 18 year marriage when I spoke with her.

I really didn't love my husband. I'm not sure I ever did. I was in a hurry to get married so I could start my family, and I didn't have very high self-esteem back then. He seemed like a good provider and a nice guy. But I was critical of him from the very start. He had a temper. He was very controlling and ordered me around....I used to go on for hours with my friends about all the awful things he did. People agreed he had some difficult qualities, but some of my friends liked him a lot. What I see now is that I blamed him for everything, but the truth is, I was not a loving wife! I thought I was not a loving wife because he was such a jerk, but I now think that if I had been loving toward him, he might have been willing to work on some of the problems. Why should he have given anything to me? I was so cold to him. I didn't see his good qualities, and I never asked him to change the ones I didn't like. I was stuck in proving that he was awful. I saw no other alternatives.

...Suppose she had been able to make a shift...If even for only one hour, she had suspended all her judgments, and had behaved in a loving manner toward her partner, something might have begun to shift....

Striving to make a change in your feelings and deliberately experimenting by acting as if you feel the new way is quite different from wittingly or unwittingly deceiving yourself or another person. When you act as if you are enthusiastic about this marriage and this person, you are creating an experiment, not an illusion or deception....

Let's say you pretend for one week that you are genuinely enthusiastic about your marriage. Maybe you will discover that some part of you really is. Maybe you will feel sad....who knows?...Very often people who do these experiments end up experiencing something they could neer have imagined before they did them....

Relating to your partner with enthusiasm will result in new behavior. New behavior will bring new results. New results may bring new feelings or new insights.

Couples who want to thrive---or who want to want to thrive but are deeply ambivalent---can move toward happiness simply by behaving as though they want to be happy together...Pretend....

In my personal life, whenever I find myself at an impasse, I devise an experiment as a way to move beyond this block and get a new perspective.

Belief

[Have high expectations of your relationship!] You need to believe only that you and your partner have the potential to be happy. And not just reasonably happy---extremely happy to be together and very much in love.

If you can change your belief, you can change your experience....

Since people behave in a manner consistent with what they believe, Barbara unwittingly undermined her marriage by focusing on her husband's faults. If she had believed she could have a good marriage and that she could make a man happy, she might have been more accepting and tolerant of her husband's shortcomings, and this would have made a world of difference in their marriage.

By contrast, couples who have beautiful relationships make allowances for each other's shortcomings:

Craig: David is so absentminded. The other day I found a coffee mug in the refrigerator! I used to get so annoyed with him. But now I realize he is just being David. If he's late getting home, I've learned now, I just need to call him. I know he gets so absorbed, he forgets to call. I don't take it personally. If he weren't spaced out half the time, he wouldn't be David. And his absentmindedness has a real up side, too. He gets an enormous amount done when he gets so absorbed.

...So how do you change your beliefs?

First you have to figure out exactly what is is you believe and where you got your beliefs. Some of them...may be the result of experiences in your family....

Second, you have to get some distance from your beliefs....It is very difficult to change a belief when you are in the middle of the consequences of believing it...

Third, you must feel the pain of your negative beliefs....If you can associate pain with your negative beliefs, you may be more highly motivated to change them.

Fourth, you must suspend your old beliefs and try some behaviro that results from a new belief. Then observe your experience....For if you can change your experience, your beliefs will change automatically.

Experiment: Changing Beliefs

1. Make a list of beliefs you have about your marriage that limit what you marriage can be. Consider them carefully.
2. For each of them, write an opposite statement to that belief. For example, if your limiting belief is "I will never feel good about my spouse's behavior toward the children," you might write as a new belief "If we work together, my spouse can alter the behavior toward the children, and I can feel great about this effort and the resulting behavior."

Example: "I can't be intimate because I grew up in a dysfunctional family. I am not limited by my past. With perseverance and support, I can learn to be intimate....Couples who thrive believe that they can be wonderful for each other, and that they can have a charmed marriage.

Commitment

Couples who thrive are unswervingly committed to each other and to their relationship. They have joyfully cast their lot with each other, and they don't spend time looking back, wondering if they did the right thing, or casting about for an escape route....

Lack of commitment inhibits intimacy, and prevents the full flowering of a relationship.

If I'm not fully committed...I am telling you: "I have hesitations about whether I can be truly happy with you." "I don't love you quite enough." "I sometimes think other options might be better."...

These hesitations, doubts, and fears construct limitations for us. It is dangerous for you to become completely vulnerable and honest with me if you know that at some point I might disappear---emotionally or physically....

People...have to spend part of their energy protecting themselves from hurt and preparing for the part of their lives that does not include the other partner. There can be no complete release into a full intimate bond. Lack of commitment is withholding, and withholding is antithetical to intimacy.

Lack of commitment also makes it difficult for couples to fight because every time they do, the relationship itself is at stake. They have no safe context within which they can work out their conflicts. This means they will be less likely to work them out and more likely to withhold things that are bothering them. And withholding erodes closeness. Moreover, couples who are not committed are not highly motivated to work out problems since they may eventually break up anyway. They will spare themselves the hassle and live with what annoys them. But this undercurrent of annoyance creates distance and inhibits intimacy.

Living in a relationship where the commitment is tentative or intermittent is like living in a rented house....It's just not worth the investment....These relationships suffer from a vicious cycle: the lack of commitment causes stress and problems, and then the stress and problems reduce the likelihood of commitment....

When commitment happens, a shift takes place---a shift in the energy of both partners and in their whole psychological system. They are no longer driving with their brakes on....

For several years I had a running debate with a friend....Her postion was this:

I am not going to make a commitment to Karl until I feel totally ready. And when I do, then the commitment won't make any difference; the relationshp will already be what it is. In other words, commitment is useless. By the time you are ready to make it, it beccomes academic.

Then my friend got a job in a distant city, and Karl had to decide whether to move there with her. After they had decided to move and were making their plans, my friend told me,

Susan, you were right. I never dreamed how much closer we could be. This commitment has made a big difference. There is a whole new quality to our relationship. I didn't realize it before, but I didn't quite believe that Karl loved me. Now that he is committed enough to move with me, I "got it" that he does! But I didn't realize that this quality was mising until it wasn't missing any more! We didn't know that we were holding back, but suddenly now we have relaxed in a way that lets a lot more energy flow between us. It's not just that we know we won't leave each other. It's that we've let go of our struggle and we are just totally there for each other. There has been a big shift, and I love it.

...[It's] a shift from conditional to unconditional love. If I make a commitment to you, I am making a statement that I am not going to disappear the first time something that I don't like happens. I love you for who you are---not for what I wish you were.

Another shift that occurs with commitment is a shift in a couple's sense of time.

Closeness and realness require time to develop....There is simply no substitute for time and the depth of closeness if can bring. Commitment lets two people know that they will have the time to let their intimacy deepen. They can relax into a leisurely rhythm with each other, knowing they will have the pleasure of time together, and the opportunities for knowing each other that only time can make available. In this way, a commitment makes a relationship more likely to last....

A widespread misconception about commitment is that it means you can't ever change your mind. "What if things change?" people say....

A commitment is a statement about the quality of the relationship now, not about how long the relationship will last. Commitment means "Right now I am fully and totally with you. Right now I want to build my life with you and right now my intention and desire is to stay with you forever."...

Recognizing that a commitment might change some day is no reason to avoid making one now....every commitment requires a leap of faith.

A second misconception people have about commitment is that it is a way of tying oneself down.

Quite the contrary: commitment is a way of letting go. Commitment requires a willingness to...let go of total control. Rather than holding the horse back to a walk, you commit yourself to the ride, let go of the reins, and let the horse gallop freely.

Commitment has two pleasurable aspects to it. One is the joy of loving the other person. The other is the joy of giving up your ambivalence....The feeling of complete certainty is...a great pleasure to experience---especially when it is shared with another who is equally certain....

When you commit yourself to something, it does not stop changing. What two people commit themselves to is a process of discovery, a journey, the adventure of exploring life's road together. They may discover lions on the road, but..."the lions never get out of the road of the person who waits to see the way clear before starting to walk."
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Summary of Chapter 1:

1. Desire: act as if you have a passionate desire to be with your spouse and to have a wonderful relationship together. Find some small way to behave the way an enthusiastic spouse would behave. Very often, new feelings will follow new behavior.
2. Belief: believe that you both can have a thriving marriage and act accordingly. Believe that you can work or deal with your disagreements.
3. Commitment: unswervingly commit to each other and to improving the relationship. This will increase intimacy and trust.