Читать книгу Staying One - Clinton W. McLemore - Страница 9

You can see them in diners and coffee shops. They rarely look at each other and have little to say, apart from, “Pass the salt.” She stares off into space, while he keeps his nose in the newspaper. Or, both are absorbed in their tablets or phones, perhaps checking e-mail.

Once in a while, one of them grunts, but this has no communicative value, other than to remind the other that a second person is sitting at the table. They may be in their twenties or thirties, but more often they will be middle-aged or even on social security. Whatever decade of life they’re in, and however long they’ve been married, they are parties in a burned out and impoverished union, representatives of the relationally dead.

They are not at all sure how their relationship devolved into the stale and lifeless thing it now is. Neither one, in fact, may have given this much thought. They are mostly aware of how they’re lonely. All that remains is a certain sense of familiarity and a shared history. There is no romance left, and they may remain in the marriage out of religious conviction or for the sake of children. It may be that the desire to avoid the embarrassment and costliness of divorce is too strong to allow them to pursue dissolution, so they remain in their diminished marriage out of habit and inertia. Each has become to the other like an old pair of jeans, easier just to put on, ignoring the rips and tears, than to mend.

One or both may remember, now and then, how they once fell in love and couldn’t wait to be with each other. They would count the days and the hours, impatiently watching the clock. But that was long ago, when they were still living what they now consider to have been immature lives in fantasy rather than the real world. They regard such memories with cynicism, as nothing but the temporary insanity that accompanies infatuation. The relationally dead no longer believe in romance, which they regard as unrealistically juvenile. They have convinced themselves that only fools subscribe to all that. For their part, they see through it.

Unless, of course, one of them meets someone else, perhaps at the office, club, or even church. Now, suddenly, he or she has another chance, a new opportunity for happiness that, until now, seemed unlikely if not impossible. Romance, he or she again decides, is as necessary as breathing, and what used to be the lifeless shell of a man or woman is emotionally resurrected. Alive! This, however, rarely turns out to be the paradise it initially seemed.

Investing in What You Have

When you read some of the statistics contained in this book, you are likely to develop a certain caution if not skepticism about second or third marriages. Remarriages do sometimes work out well, but there is no guarantee that they will, and the odds of bettering your lot through another marriage are below 50 percent.1 Even at the practical level, therefore, it makes sense to invest everything you can in your present one, whether or not it’s your first. And if you’re about to get married, to do the same thing, for the same reason.

But, how might you do this? How would you go about it? What steps should you take to ensure that the marriage you’re in, or are about to enter, will not only survive but thrive? What are the keys, if there are any, to enjoying a fulfilling and lasting conjugal relationship? These are the questions this book will address.

Co-Dependency and Enmeshment

I am going to devote considerable space to how two married people can continue to grow closer, which I take to be highly desirable. Some of my colleagues, however, have called this into question, suggesting that growing ever closer in a marriage is an unhealthy goal, one likely to be embraced only by the weak. In doing this, many of these practitioners have loosely used two terms that, like OCD and bipolar, have entered the culture and become trendy.

The first of the two is co-dependency. It originated with Alcoholics Anonymous and is properly used to describe a relationship in which two people depend on each other to perpetuate mutually dysfunctional behavior. One person might, for example, obtain satisfaction and validation from rescuing a spouse after bouts of heavy intoxication, protecting that spouse from real-world consequences. Instead of leaving him or her on the floor in a drunken stupor, possibly to wake up the next morning with constructive remorse, the enabler helps the spouse into bed and may even call that spouse’s employer the next day to lie about why he or she can’t make it to work.

Covering for a problem drinker just makes it easier for that person to avoid coming to terms with the alcohol abuse. It also makes it more likely that such abuse will continue. To feel valued, the rescuer needs the abuser, as much as the abuser needs the rescuer, even though both would be far better off refusing to meet these dysfunctional needs. Sooner or later, they both may suffer, since eventually there is likely to be loss of employment, or worse, avoidable illness and premature death.

The healthy and holy intimacy found in a genuine marriage bears no resemblance to co-dependency. Except by broadening the definition of co-dependency so that it becomes meaningless, it is difficult to see which unhealthy needs two married people are meeting by deepening their intimacy. Contrary to a psychological weakness or a personality flaw, the capacity to relate intimately is a strength, the very one this book is intended to foster. Some of my colleagues have, I fear, turned the world inside out by calling what is healthy a kind of sickness. Inter-dependence is a far cry from co-dependence. The two have little or nothing in common.

This brings us to the second term, enmeshment, which was coined to describe family units in which members have little autonomy or sense of self apart from identification with the family. Might it be that married people, who are deeply involved and share a great deal with each other, not only give up their freedom but also sacrifice their individual identities by being so close? Not at all. While enmeshment entails abdication of identity, deep mutual involvement balances awareness of self as an individual with awareness of self as a member of a two-person community.

There are, to be sure, marriages in which one spouse makes inordinate sacrifices for the other, has little or no sense of self apart from that other, and is unable to make even the most basic decisions without spousal direction. Clearly, these are marriages in which one person is over-dependent and enmeshed.

But healthy marriages, characterized as they are by both inter-dependence and deep mutual involvement, are hardly examples of co-dependence or enmeshment. Do we, in fact, observe either of these pathologies if two married people simply long to be with each other, obtain enormous satisfaction from spending time together, and have learned over the years to depend on each other? I think not.

As human beings, we have been created to depend on each other, especially on our spouses if we’re married. Contrary to what some suggest, it is not those who can trust and depend on others who are impaired, but those who cannot.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus prays for the disciples, that they may be one as he and the Father are one (John 17:21). He might have prayed this even more urgently if he’d been petitioning specifically for married believers. We will return in later chapters to what it means for two people in a marriage to grow closer.

The Problem with Mutual Dependence

There is, however, a cost associated with married people coming to depend on each other and enjoy true mutuality: this makes them more vulnerable to pain and suffering triggered by loss. What if your beloved spouse develops a serious health problem, so that you can no longer rely on him or her for support? The giving and receiving, which used to go both ways, is now largely one-way, with you on the giving, not the receiving, side. Or, worse, what happens when one spouse dies? Was Alfred Lord Tennyson right when he wrote, “better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all”?2

I believe that he was. Two people discovering and living in the awareness that they can count on each other for support is among the principal benefits of marriage; the other person is always there. Mutual dependence is, in fact, central to the definition of genuine marriage.

Neither my wife nor I are passive. Nor are we inclined to drift or look to others for direction. Those who know us describe us as independent and resourceful. But, in the best sense, we depend on each other and love the life we share. When we’re apart, we soon miss being together, and we long to resume the ongoing conversation that any good marriage entails. We yearn for the comfort, once again, of being with the other person, which feels like coming home.

Some people, as mentioned above, are incapable of allowing mutual dependence and involvement to develop, even though they go through the motions of getting married. Such damaged souls, incapable of giving themselves to anyone else, have little capacity to tolerate feeling vulnerable. They are insulated and guarded, and are unable to marry in any true sense. These people can take on the legal obligations of marriage, acquire the social status it sometimes affords, and legitimize their sexual activities. But the idea of becoming ever more intimate with a spouse eludes them and remains a foreign concept. Stoic individualism and rigid self-reliance are not virtues but vices.

God, I believe, wants us to be inter-dependent and mutually involved, which in their healthy forms are indicative neither of frailty nor deficiency but of strength and resilience. They reflect an emotional capacity that, in the ideal, continues to mature and develop. Being able to entrust yourself and your welfare to someone else is central to what it means to be a complete person. Without this, people remain prisoners of their limitations. This does not mean that everyone has to marry. It does mean, however, that any fully developed human being has the psychosocial capacity to do so.

The Truth About My Own Marriage

I’d like to respond to two questions that are likely to arise. The first is about the quality of my marriage. Am I saying one thing and doing another? Are Anna and I pretending a level of happiness and satisfaction that, if the curtains were pulled back, would turn out to be a lie? What is the true character of our relationship? Are we putting on false fronts?

Emphatically, the answer is no. You will find quite a bit of self-disclosure woven through these pages. But, you won’t find any spin. At the end of each chapter, you’ll read Anna’s response to what I have written. I’ve encouraged her to be candid, and as you will see, she’s had no trouble doing this.

Anna and I have been married for over thirty years. I will share what I believe about how to make a marriage work, one that in our case is between two strong people. Timid, we are not. I’ll tell you about our difficult times and even about the quality of our intimate life. And, I’ll share how we’ve learned to work out our differences so that they don’t turn corrosive and how we keep romance alive.

Superficial Answers and Trite Solutions

The second question concerns the quality of what you’re likely to find online or in a bookstore by way of marital advice. So, I’d like to make a few comments about this material and the kinds of seminars, study guides, and DVDs you may encounter at church.

There is a lack of high-quality resources available for Christians who want to ensure that their marriages will be satisfying, resilient, and enduring. People are astonishingly complex. What they bring to a marriage is not easy to understand, certainly not by the simplistic and formulaic application of clichés or truisms. Human behavior is multi-layered and, even in the best of us, fraught with psychospiritual baggage.

Part of what makes this so is that when people marry, it’s not long before they begin to perceive each other in ways that are distorted. I will go into detail about why this happens in a later chapter, where I discuss the psychology of transference. Here, I merely want to suggest that helping people with their marriages, whether through counseling or educational activities, requires in-depth savvy. It’s not a job for those with only a superficial understanding of interpersonal dynamics—how person-to-person behavior actually works.

I once sat through several sessions of a recorded marriage conference. The speaker was entertaining and engaging, and he had no trouble holding the attention of his audience. Some of what he said was well worth listening to, but I couldn’t see how most of it could help anybody. A lot of the advice he dispensed merely restated what God intends for marriages, not what to do to help them move in that direction, how to make them actually work. Or, if they’re not working, how to fix them. It was all should and little how.

There are, however, a number of excellent books on marriage, including those by Cameron Lee and by Les and Leslie Parrott. All three know what they’re talking about. Cameron is a well-known family life educator, minister, and the author of a fine book published in 2015 by the Fuller Institute for Relationship Education: Marriage PATH: Peacemaking at Home for Christian Couples. Les is a clinical psychologist and his wife Leslie is a marriage and family therapist. Of particular interest is their recent, Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts: Seven Questions to Ask Before—and After—You Marry.3 They have also produced companion workbooks, one for men and the other for women, and developed a widely used online questionnaire.4

Tim Keller, in collaboration with his wife Kathy, wrote the best theological treatment of marriage: The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God.5 They are unwavering in their understanding of marriage as having been instituted by God, and, like this book, theirs contains a good deal of self-disclosure. It is also practical. He was the founding pastor in 1989 of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City; its weekly attendance now exceeds 5,000. His books and sermons are impressively intelligent and filled with penetrating insights into the nature of Christian faith.

Developing the Necessary Skills

Successful marriage requires specific skills, and these skills are acquired through appropriate and earnest practice. You may be born with a certain aptitude, the capacity to acquire a particular ability, but without diligently undertaking the right kind of practice you will rarely if ever develop it. And—here’s the kicker—whatever baggage you and your spouse bring into your marriage is invariably going to get in the way of developing the very skills you both most need to make it fulfilling. Under the negative influence of this baggage, you’ll engage in the wrong kind of practice and only strengthen behaviors that will often be the opposite of those that would enrich your marriage. Such practice merely reinforces bad habits.

Concert pianists practice precisely. They play the right notes and only the right notes for any piece they are trying to master, even if this requires moving through its measures at glacial speed. Not until they have acquired the desired habits will they pick up the pace. Why? Because they do not want to program themselves to play the wrong notes, ones they might be inclined to play during a performance when they feel under pressure.

The challenge in marriage becomes how to prevent your baggage or your spouse’s baggage from getting you to say or do what you shouldn’t and, so, further solidify bad habits. This requires you to learn how to work through that baggage, which is what, in large part, I will try to show you how to do.

Some people have so much baggage—from childhood, their families of origin, past relationships—that they rarely perceive what their spouses do objectivity. Their vision is distorted, as if what they see passes through a set of lenses that alters their perspective. Innocent comments are interpreted as slights. Suggestions are heard as correctives. Compliments are taken as insults.

Guess what? To one degree or another, we all have perceptual distortions, and we are most prone to them in the heat of conflict.

No book or workshop is going to fix all the distortion. We are flawed—every one of us—and our flawed nature is the breeding ground for misperception. The best we can do is to decrease and perhaps minimize our distortions.

As I will show, there are ways to do this. There are also ways, within limits, to reduce your spouse’s tendency to distort. I will share them in the service of helping you and your spouse avoid joining the relationally dead.

The Nature of Christian Marriage

Christian marriage, at its core, is a covenant. Because the identity of a Christian is ultimately defined by a personal relationship with God through Christ, a spouse who’s a Christian symbolizes and reflects Christ in that covenant. This doesn’t change simply because a spouse, in some way or other, falls short of being God’s ideal representative. We all do, and we redefine ourselves as in Christ every time we fall on our spiritual faces, get up, dust ourselves off, and start over again. If we are married, this means continuing to honor the marital covenant into which we’ve entered. Here’s the difference between a contract and a covenant:

A contract, at its simplest, is an exchange of promises supported by what attorneys call consideration, something of value. You promise to fix my roof and I promise to pay you a thousand dollars. Contracts, to be enforceable, must be concrete. They have to specify in detail what is being exchanged for what, and by when. There’s always explicit accounting. Both parties, however polite they may act on the surface, are more or less aware of their relative positions in the transaction, and therefore of who’s ahead and who’s behind. A large number of contractual marriages take place every weekend between people who see nothing spiritual in them. Regardless of the glow that may surround their marriages, such unions are rooted in the secular and are likely, therefore, to remain contractual.

A covenant, by contrast, is not an exchange of promises but the establishment of a relationship. It is not, “I will do something for you, and you will do something for me,” but rather, “I will be something to you, and you will be something to me.”

Many marriages between Christians unfortunately begin as covenants but deteriorate into contracts. This can happen quickly or be the result of a slow erosion of the psychospiritual soil in which the marriage was initially planted. Other marriages take place between Christians who do not grasp the covenantal significance of marriage. These begin as contractual arrangements and never manage to take on the character of a covenant.

Within any marriage, there’s always going to be some accounting. Frail as we are, we lack the ability to be perfectly covenantal, which is why the Old Testament is filled with human failure. God is faithful. We are not. Always, to some extent we’re going to lapse into keeping score, but within a marriage that’s more covenantal than contractual, such score keeping will remain rough and approximate. In thriving marriages, husbands and wives do things for each other all the time, so often that it would be impossible to keep accounts.

How many times would I have to bring Anna coffee in the morning to equal her making me an omelette? I’ve never asked myself that question, and I’m sure neither has she.

When two people marry, it’s as if they agree to merge two companies, or better yet, to combine two worlds, two planets. Each world is characterized by unique thoughts, feelings, beliefs, values, and attitudes. In some mystical sense that is profoundly biblical, the two have the opportunity to create a third world, an idea we’ll return to in chapter 12. This new world will never completely engulf their individual ones, nor should it, since they will always remain distinct persons. Yet, to the extent that the world they jointly create is ever expanding and continually evolving, their marriage will be rich and fulfilling. If it fails to expand and evolve, the marriage will be impoverished.

The principal aim of Staying One is to help you and your spouse move increasingly in the direction of living out a covenant, of together creating and continuing to create a rich conjoint world, one that because of its emerging nuances will prove endlessly interesting and rewarding. To get everything out of this book, and in the process strengthen your marital covenant, I ask that you engage actively with the material by carrying out the prescribed activities. This will require you to write things down. The publisher produces a separate workbook for this purpose.

Actively Participating

When you read the chapters, try to imagine that we’re chatting by a fireplace in a living room. Often, reading a book is like listening to its author talk. And, to the extent that you actively engage with the book, it also comes to resemble a conversation. This is precisely what I’m striving for, a dialogue that takes place in your mind between us.

Staying One is intended to resemble a workshop more than a seminar. The difference is that, in a seminar, you can sit passively and merely take in information. But you may not remember, much less internalize, all of it. Nor might you recall the most important parts, since your attention may drift when the speaker is sharing his or her best insights.

In a workshop, you generally remain involved because you actually have to do some work, to participate, with the goal of acquiring new skills or expanding ones you already have. I want to help you expand your interpersonal skills because I firmly believe that doing so is often the road to a better marriage, one that might become so joyful as to leave you breathless.

You will find hands-on exercises in chapters 4, 7, 9, 10, 11, and 16. Please do them diligently. They are worth your time, and if you undertake them with your spouse, your marriage is almost certain to benefit. I’ve tried to design everything I ask you to do so that it’s loving, non-threatening, and unlikely to paint either of you into a corner.

As you work your way through the chapters that follow, I pray that you and your husband or wife will be abundantly blessed.

1. “In the United States, the divorce rate for second marriages is estimated [to be] between 60 and 67 percent. Third marriages fare considerably worse, with the divorce rate estimated between 73 and 74 percent.” https://www.reference.com/math/divorce-rates-second-third-marriages-c128700ae0302ef6. Also see the post by psychiatrist Mark Banschick, who in “The High Failure Rate of Second and Third Marriages” writes, “Past statistics have shown that in the U.S. . . . 67% of second and 73% of third marriages end in divorce.”

2. This line is from Tennyson’s poem, “In Memoriam A.H.H.”

3. Parrott and Parrott, Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts.

4. Their assessment tools can be found at symbisassessment.com.

5. Keller and Keller, The Meaning of Marriage.