A Kind Of Closeness Not To Worry About

The cold drizzle that enveloped all of us during the burial service abated somewhat, and two brothers hung back to reminisce a little more about their father before turning to the many friends of the family who were maintaining their distance respectfully. Silently praying for the last time over the casket, I could not help overhearing the brothers’ speaking gently and lovingly, but also regretfully, about their parents. “I don’t know what Mom’s going to do now,” one said, “ it’s like he’s been torn right out of her.” His brother responded: “Their marriage was a terminal case of the same-old-same-old, and it died a long time ago.”

I never got a chance to talk to my parishioner’s sons about their brief interchange that day; they left for the airport before I could get to them, and I did not see them again before leaving the church the next year for a new pastoral appointment. But I have thought about them every time I bring to mind the parents of whom they spoke. Millie and Sam (not their real names) had the longest surviving marriage in the congregation at the time, and I still have a vivid memory of manning the punch bowl at their 62nd anniversary, and of being startled by two things they said to me that day. “It still scares me how much alike we are, preacher,” Sam said, “sometimes it’s so boring around her I almost go crazy.” Millie’s comment echoed Sam’s uncannily: “I’m ashamed to admit this, but Sam has never done anything different about anything in his life, and there are times when I think I’m just gonna kill him!” It helped that during each broadside, Sam and Millie were smilingly holding out their punch cups for a refill.

I was privileged to serve Millie and Sam’s small rural church long enough to learn a good bit about its views and values on a lot of things, and particularly on the subject of “suitable” marriage partners. For this community the ideal couple was a compatible couple, and the compatible couple was a couple alike in upbringing, economic status, interests, and temperament. Perhaps most importantly of all, compatibility was predicated on the mutual expectation that personal interests as a couple, save perhaps for brief interludes behind locked bedroom doors, would be subordinated to the interests and needs of their own children and their respective extended families.

In relationships like Millie’s and Sam’s, questions that haunt couples so impressively today seem only rarely to be thought of at all, e.g.: How can we continue to grow as individuals and still be a couple?; How can we make times just for ourselves, away from bosses, kids, in-laws, neighbors, and friends, and still be a family?; How can we get more and more pleasure out of more and better sex with our spouse, without greater familiarity breeding even more contempt? I came to know Millie and Sam well enough to know that while they were not utterly ignorant about questions like these, they did not take them seriously enough to think they were worth working out answers to in their own marriage. Compatibility and commitment were supposed to be enough. And for them, they were. What this couple thought every marriage should be about they also strongly believed had survived in their own. What their sons thought marriage should be about they may have strongly believed either had never been a part of or had long since died in their parents‘.

Most couples’ counselors I know tell me that they have more experience dealing with problems in opposites-attract relationships than they do in like-meets-like ones. And more than a few admit that when they do meet up with the latter kind of couple, their instinct is to try to find ways to help each member tap into the opposite side of his and her respective nature, in the hopes of spicing things up a bit. This seems to me a matter of torquing clients in the direction of the therapist’s own comfort level more than it is a matter of meeting clients on their own ground. If the strategy works, of course, there will be even more opportunities for clients to continue working on their relationships, this time for the sake of correcting the problems that oppositeness rather than sameness tends to create.

What Millie and Sam still get me to thinking about is the patience and good humor that can make a marriage work when the marriage itself is not the be-all and end-all of a couple’s coupling. I did not see their own relationship the way that one of their sons appeared to have seen it. It never would have died of boredom. But it just might have been killed from tinkering.

Loving And Cherishing Our Opposites

June has long since lost its status as the magic month for weddings --- people get married just about anytime anymore --- but I have been around long enough as an officiant to keep turning my thoughts especially at this time of the year to our society’s fantasies and hopes for marriage. And so, as I have during several previous Junes through these columns, I am focusing again on couples and on some of the things that give their lives together both problems and promise. This time around, I have especially in mind “opposites attract” kinds of relationships. In the next column, I’ll turn to “we‘re just alike” ones.

During my early years of doing and teaching pre-marital and marital counseling, one axiom about couples relationships kept getting itself confirmed in session after session with guys and gals from every kind of upbringing, no matter of what age, economic status, race, previous relationships, or just about anything else besides. The axiom was this: the most exciting and at the same time most difficult to manage couples’ relationships are those in which people marry their opposites. What makes opposite characteristics so attractive, one line of thinking posits, is the promise of completeness that they arouse in those attracted by them.

According to this widely respected Jungian way of looking at the matter, with a little help from John Sanford, the psychological traits we lack in ourselves are precisely the ones that we unconsciously strive to make up for by seeking out someone else who has them in abundance. (Analogously, perhaps, to consciously seeking out someone with a bigger and better investment portfolio than we can put together on on our own.) My own view tends to focus less on the yearning aspect of opposites-attract relationships and more on the quality of avoidance that so many such relationships exhibit: by looking for attractive character traits especially intensely in others, we all too easily evade the responsibility for cultivating at least some of them in ourselves.

In my experience, couples whose temperaments are close to the opposite ends of the spectrum inevitably must learn to deal well with two very large problems, at least if their relationships are going to remain attractive enough to survive the many temptations that present-day society hurls at all married folk constantly. One problem is the innate (yes, it’s a matter of nature far more than it is of nurture) wish and urge to re-make one’s partner in one’s own image. Instead of gratefully celebrating their differences --- e.g., introversion/extraversion, decisiveness/cautiousness, vision-orientedness/data-orientedness, idealism/practicality --- as complementary gifts and graces that can enhance the range and depth of their intimacy, they struggle to obliterate them in the other out of the wrong-headed notion that by so doing their mounting, temperament-driven conflicts will lessen.

A typical expression of this insidious process is one partner’s resentment of just how “exciting” things seem to have to be in the marriage (a little would have gone a long way), and the other’s that he/she wasn’t prepared for just how “stable” the other partner has turned out to be. As the initial excitement of the relationship turns into exhaustion for one partner, and as stability evokes a paralyzing sense of boredom in the other, each becomes increasingly a bearer to the other of problems more than of promise. The heart-felt, mutual commitment to love and to cherish with which the relationship began devolves into a gearing-up to suffer and to blame.

The other problem with which opposites-have-attracted couples must deal is the innate (there’s that word again, and in this context it is a crucial one) tendency on the part of each partner to accentuate the expression of his or her distinctive character traits to the point that they become, in their one-sidedness and inflexibility, something closer to character faults. “This is the way I am,” one husband summarily told his wife in my office one day; “I guess you’ll just have to learn to live with it.” His wife readily conceded the first part of the declaration, but she rejected the second and called a divorce lawyer. Mediation helped, but only when it took a theological turn. A very wise, seminary-trained mediator helped the husband in this case to grasp a profound spiritual truth, that when there is too much of an otherwise good thing, bad consequences can follow. A virtue run amok, in this particular case a husband’s passion for predictability, sometimes can become a vice, with vicious effects on intimacy.

Later on, when things began to settle down in their relationship, the young wife confronted constructively her own temperamentalism, first in the form of a hard-wired craving for spontaneity, on the basis of which she receives accolade after accolade for being the life of everyone’s party. What I especially remember her saying to her husband, as their work with me moved toward a happy --- and lasting --- ending, was that the self-righteousness that she allowed her husband’s criticisms to evoke in her needed to be replaced with greater humility --- and a little less spontaneity along the way.

As we will see next time, “just alike” relationships are not as different from “opposites attract” ones as we may be inclined to believe.