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.