writing

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

recommend. It's still on newstands or you can read it on-line at www.psychologytoday.com where you can subscribe. - diane

· Surveys of high school and college students 50 or 60 years ago found that most

· wanted to get married in order to have children or own a home. Now, most

· report that they plan to get married for love. This increased emphasis on

· emotional fulfillment within marriage leaves couples ill-prepared for the

· realities they will probably face.

· ³Nothing has produced more unhappiness than the concept of the soul mate,²

· says Atlanta psychiatrist Frank Pittman.

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

By Polly Shulman

Psychology Today, March/April 2004

Finding a soul mate is supposed to be the surest route to the good life. Instead, the quest for the ideal partner makes us miserable. Why an OK marriage may be a better bet than the search for perfection.

Marriage is dead! The twin vises of church and law have relaxed their grip on matrimony. We¹ve been liberated from the grim obligation to stay in a poisonous or abusive marriage for the sake of the kids or for appearances. The divorce rate has stayed constant at nearly 50 percent for the last two decades. The ease with which we enter and dissolve unions makes marriage seem like a prime-time spectator sport, whether it¹s Britney Spears in Vegas or bimbos chasing after the Bachelor.

Long live the new marriage! We once prized the institution for the practical pairing of a cash-producing father and a home-building mother. Now we want it all ‹ a partner who reflects our taste and status, who sees us for who we are, who loves us for all the ³right² reasons, who helps us become the

person we want to be. We¹ve done away with a rigid social order, adopting instead an even more onerous obligation: the mandate to find a perfect match. Anything short of this ideal prompts us to ask: Is this all there is?

1

Am I as happy as I should be? Could there be somebody out there who¹s better for me? As often as not, we answer yes to that last question and fall victim

to our own great expectations.

That somebody is, of course, our soul mate, the man or woman who will counter our weaknesses, amplify our strengths and provide the unflagging support and respect that is the essence of a contemporary relationship. The reality is that few marriages or partnerships consistently live up to this

ideal. The result is a commitment limbo, in which we care deeply for our partner but keep one stealthy foot out the door of our hearts. In so doing, we subject the relationship to constant review: Would I be happier, smarter,

a better person with someone else? It¹s a painful modern quandary. ³Nothing has produced more unhappiness than the concept of the soul mate,² says Atlanta psychiatrist Frank Pittman.

Consider Jeremy, a social worker who married a businesswoman in his early twenties. He met another woman, a psychologist, at age 29, and after two agonizing years, left his wife for her. But it didn¹t work out‹after four

years of cohabitation, and her escalating pleas to marry, he walked out on her, as well. Jeremy now realizes that the relationship with his wife was

solid and workable but thinks he couldn¹t have seen that 10 years ago, when he left her. ³There was always someone better around the corner‹and the safety and security of marriage morphed into boredom and stasis. The allure of willing and exciting females was too hard to resist,² he admits. Now 42 and still single, Jeremy acknowledges, ³I hurt others, and I hurt myself.²

Like Jeremy, many of us either dodge the decision to commit or commit without fully relinquishing the right to keep looking‹opting for an arrangement psychotherapist Terrence Real terms ³stable ambiguity.²

³You park on the border of the relationship, so you¹re in it but not of it,² he says. There are a million ways to do that: You can be in a relationship but not be sure it¹s really the right one, have an eye open for a better deal or something on the side, choose someone impossible or far away.

Yet commitment and marriage offer real physical and financial rewards. Touting the benefits of marriage may sound like conservative policy rhetoric, but nonpartisan sociological research backs it up: Committed partners have it all over singles, at least on average. Married people are more financially stable, according to Linda Waite, a sociologist at the

University of Chicago and a coauthor of The Case for Marriage: Why Married People are Happier, Healthier and Better Off. Both married men and married women have more assets on average than singles; for women, the differential is huge.

The benefits go beyond the piggy bank. Married people, particularly men, tend to live longer than people who aren¹t married. Couples also live

better: When people expect to stay together, says Waite, they pool their resources, increasing their individual standard of living. They also pool

their expertise‹in cooking, say, or financial management. In general, women improve men¹s health by putting a stop to stupid bachelor tricks and bugging their husbands to exercise and eat their vegetables. Plus, people who aren¹t comparing their partners to someone else in bed have less trouble performing and are more emotionally satisfied with sex. The relationship doesn¹t have

to be wonderful for life to get better, says Waite: The statistics hold true for mediocre marriages as well as for passionate ones.

The pragmatic benefits of partnership used to be foremost in our minds. The idea of marriage as a vehicle for self-fulfillment and happiness is

relatively new, says Paul Amato, professor of sociology, demography and family studies at Penn State University. Surveys of high school and college students 50 or 60 years ago found that most wanted to get married in order to have children or own a home. Now, most report that they plan to get married for love. This increased emphasis on emotional fulfillment within marriage leaves couples ill-prepared for the realities they will probably face.

Because the early phase of a relationship is marked by excitement and idealization, ³many romantic, passionate couples expect to have that excitement forever,² says Barry McCarthy, a clinical psychologist and coauthor‹with his wife, Emily McCarthy‹of Getting It Right the First Time:

How to Build a Healthy Marriage. Longing for the charged energy of the early days, people look elsewhere or split up.

Flagging passion is often interpreted as the death knell of a relationship. You begin to wonder whether you¹re really right for each other after all. You¹re comfortable together, but you don¹t really connect the way you used to. Wouldn¹t it be more honest‹and braver‹to just admit that it¹s not

working and call it off? ³People are made to feel that remaining in a marriage that doesn¹t make you blissfully happy is an act of existential cowardice,² says Joshua Coleman, a San Francisco psychologist.

Coleman says that the constant cultural pressure to have it all ‹ a great sex life, a wonderful family‹has made people ashamed of their

less-than-perfect relationships and question whether such unions are worth hanging on to. Feelings of dissatisfaction or disappointment are natural, but they can seem intolerable when standards are sky-high. ³It¹s a recent historical event that people expect to get so much from individual

partners,² says Coleman, author of Imperfect Harmony, in which he advises couples in lackluster marriages to stick it out‹especially if they have

kids. ³There¹s an enormous amount of pressure on marriages to live up to an unrealistic ideal.²

Michaela, 28, was drawn to Bernardo, 30, in part because of their differences: She¹d grown up in European boarding schools, he fought his way out of a New York City ghetto. ³Our backgrounds made us more interesting to each other,² says Michaela. ³I was a spoiled brat, and he¹d been supporting himself from the age of 14, which I admired.² Their first two years of

marriage were rewarding, but their fights took a toll. ³I felt that because he hadn¹t grown up in a normal family, he didn¹t grasp basic issues of courtesy and accountability,² says Michaela. They were temperamental

opposites: He was a screamer, and she was a sulker. She recalls, ³After we fought, I needed to be drawn out of my corner, but he took that to mean that I was a cold bitch.² Michaela reluctantly concluded that the two were incompatible.

In fact, argue psychologists and marital advocates, there¹s no such thing as true compatibility. ³Marriage is a disagreement machine,² says Diane Sollee, founder of the Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education. ³All couples disagree about all the same things. We have a highly romanticized notion that if we were with the right person, we wouldn¹t fight.² Discord springs eternal over money, kids, sex and leisure time, but psychologist John Gottman has shown that long-term, happily married couples disagree about these things just as much as couples who divorce.

³There is a mythology of Œthe wrong person,¹² agrees Pittman. ³All marriages are incompatible. All marriages are between people from different families, people who have a different view of things. The magic is to develop

binocular vision, to see life through your partner¹s eyes as well as through your own.²

The realization that we¹re not going to get everything we want from a partner is not just sobering, it¹s downright miserable. But it is also a necessary step in building a mature relationship, according to Real, who has written about the subject in How Can I Get Through to You: Closing the

Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women. ³The paradox of intimacy is that our ability to stay close rests on our ability to tolerate solitude inside a relationship,² he says. ³A central aspect of grown-up love is grief. All of

us long for‹and think we deserve‹perfection.²

We can hardly be blamed for striving for bliss and self-fulfillment in our romantic lives‹our inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness is guaranteed in the first blueprint of American society.

This same respect for our own needs spurred the divorce-law reforms of the 1960s and 1970s. During that era, ³The culture shifted to emphasize individual satisfaction, and marriage was part of that,² explains Paul

Amato, who has followed more than 2,000 families for 20 years in a long-term study of marriage and divorce. Amato says that this shift did some good by

freeing people from abusive and intolerable marriages. But it had an unintended side effect: encouraging people to abandon relationships that may be worth salvaging.

In a society hell-bent on individual achievement and autonomy, working on a difficult relationship may get short shrift, says psychiatrist Peter Kramer, author of Should You Leave?

³So much of what we learn has to do with the self, the ego, rather than giving over the self to things like a relationship,² Kramer says. In our competitive world, we¹re rewarded for our individual achievements rather than for how we help others. We value independence over cooperation, and sacrifices for values like loyalty and continuity seem foolish. ³I think we

get the divorce rate that we deserve as a culture.²

The steadfast focus on our own potential may turn a partner into an accessory in the quest for self-actualization, says Maggie Robbins, a therapist in New York City. ³We think that this person should reflect the beauty and perfection that is the inner me‹or, more often, that this person should compensate for the yuckiness and mess that is the inner me,² says Robbins. ³This is what makes you tell your wife, ŒLose some weight‹you¹re making me look bad,¹ not ŒLose some weight, you¹re at risk for diabetes.¹²

Michaela was consistently embarrassed by Bernardo¹s behavior when they were among friends. ³He¹d become sullen and withdrawn‹he had a shifty way of looking off to the side when he didn¹t want to talk. I felt like it

reflected badly on me,² she admits. Michaela left him and is now dating a wealthy entrepreneur. ³I just thought there had to be someone else out there for me.²

The urge to find a soul mate is not fueled just by notions of romantic manifest destiny. Trends in the workforce and in the media create a sense of limitless romantic possibility. According to Scott South, a demographer at SUNY-Albany, proximity to potential partners has a powerful effect on relationships. South and his colleagues found higher divorce rates among people living in communities or working in professions where they encounter lots of potential partners‹people who match them in age, race and education level. ³These results hold true not just for unhappy marriages but also for happy ones,² says South.

The temptations aren¹t always living, breathing people. According to research by psychologists Sara Gutierres and Douglas Kenrick, both of Arizona State University, we find reasonably attractive people less

appealing when we¹ve just seen a hunk or a hottie‹and we¹re bombarded daily by images of gorgeous models and actors. When we watch Lord of the Rings, Viggo Mortensen¹s kingly mien and Liv Tyler¹s elfin charm can make our

husbands and wives look all too schlumpy.

Kramer sees a similar pull in the narratives that surround us. ³The number of stories that tell us about other lives we could lead‹in magazine

articles, television shows, books‹has increased enormously. We have an enormous reservoir of possibilities,² says Kramer.

And these possibilities can drive us to despair. Too many choices have been shown to stymie consumers, and an array of alternative mates is no exception. In an era when marriages were difficult to dissolve, couples

rated their marriages as more satisfying than do today¹s couples, for whom divorce is a clear option, according to the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

While we expect marriage to be ³happily ever after,² the truth is that for

most people, neither marriage nor divorce seem to have a decisive impact on happiness. Although Waite¹s research shows that married people are happier than their single counterparts, other studies have found that after a couple years of marriage, people are just about as happy (or unhappy) as they were before settling down. And assuming that marriage will automatically provide contentment is itself a surefire recipe for misery.

³Marriage is not supposed to make you happy. It is supposed to make you married,² says Pittman. ³When you are all the way in your marriage, you are free to do useful things, become a better person.² A committed relationship allows you to drop pretenses and seductions, expose your weaknesses, be yourself‹and know that you will be loved, warts and all. ³A real

relationship is the collision of my humanity and yours, in all its joy and limitations,² says Real. ³How partners handle that collision is what determines the quality of their relationship.²

Such a down-to-earth view of marriage is hardly romantic, but that doesn¹t mean it¹s not profound: An authentic relationship with another person, says Pittman, is ³one of the first steps toward connecting with the human condition ‹ which is necessary if you¹re going to become fulfilled as a human being.² If we accept these humble terms, the quest for a soul mate might just be a noble pursuit after all.

Polly Shulman is a freelance writer in New York City.

**************************

To SUBSCRIBE or UNSUBSCRIBE, or Change your subscription address, use the form on our website ( http://www.smartmarriages.com ). Click Newsletter - right under the puzzle piece.

This newslist shares information on marriage, divorce and educational approaches. Opinions expressed are not necessarily shared by members of the Coalition.

This is a moderated list. Replies are read by Diane Sollee, editor. Please indicate if your response is NOT to be shared with the list. PLEASE include your email address in with your signature.

To read ALL past posts to the newsletter, visit the Archive at: http://archives.his.com/smartmarriages/

8th Annual Smart Marriages Conference, Adam's Mark Dallas, TX July 8 - 11, 2004. Pre and Post Conference Training Institutes July 6 - 14, 2004 Subscribe to the free e-newslist at www.smartmarriages.com

List your program in the Directory of Classes at www.smartmarriages.com

Order conference audio and video tapes at 800-241-7785 or at playbacknow.com

Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education, LLC (CMFCE) Diane Sollee, Director

5310 Belt Rd NW, Washington, DC 20015-1961 www.smartmarriages.com 202-362-3332