Thriving In Marriage

All other things being equal, individuals are mentally, emotionally and physically healthier when they are satisfactorily married, even if there is some marital dissatisfaction. The successful realization of the hopes we have when we are married is one of the most life affirming and supporting circumstances in life. Individuals who are considering divorce are more happily married on average five years later if they stay in the marriage than if they divorce. This includes those who re-marry. The dissolution of a marriage is one of the most emotionally challenging events in life.
Research on successful and satisfying marriages tends to focus heavily on three components that overlap somewhat with friendship. They are attachment, care-giving, and emotional and physical intimacy. These components are expressed in three roles: friends, partners, and lovers. There is an implied and expected exclusiveness in all three areas. Spouses invest most heavily in their attachments to each other, expecting their partners to be their primary source of emotional support. They expect to integrate their lives to a great extent, pursuing many common goals and interests as partners. They expect to share higher levels of emotional intimacy and completely exclusive sexual intimacy.
As with other areas of thriving in life, it is helpful to look at how marriage promotes emotional security, belongingness and control of life. Safety is derived from investing much of our needs for emotional support in our relationships with our spouses, and attuned responses to those needs.
Patterns of Communication
In the broadest sense, interpersonal communication is the exchange of thriving and defending emotions, especially in marital relationships. People have sophisticated automatic social-neurological processes to accomplish this through tone of voice, facial expressions, body language, physical proximity and eye contact. Our feelings toward our partners are embedded in the personal meanings they have in our life themes. Words and actions are secondary expressions of our feelings toward and consequent beliefs about our spouses. Partners continually read these personal exchanges to derive safety and intimacy in their marriages.
Decades of research with couples by John Gottman and others has shown which types of observable couple interactions can distinguish between marriages that are headed for divorce, those that will survive with marginal satisfaction and those that will thrive. Most couples that will be divorced within two years openly express contempt for each other. They have lost their dreams of unconditional romance, and are bitter about it. Their blame for each other has left them in a state of negative bias, where attention is given selectively to those things in their spouses that disappoint and irritate them. They exhibit a punishing communication style. These qualities may not apply to both spouses, but if they apply to one spouse divorce is usually imminent.
Those that are surviving in marriage mostly avoid contempt, but have low levels of emotional and physical intimacy. They make and respond to few bids for connection, and live fairly separate lives. They exhibit a business communication style, primarily communicating to negotiate for what they want. Consequently many of their true thoughts, feeling and motives are concealed from each other.
Couples that are thriving in marriage have high levels of intimacy. They make and respond positively to frequent bids for connection. Their interactions are characterized by positive emotions at least eighty-five percent of the time. They interact through a compassionate communication style, mainly to understand and be understood, and to accept and be accepted.
Personal Meaning and Beliefs
John Gottman found that thriving in marriage is only marginally dependent on skill levels for conflict management and negotiation. Good relationships do not begin with the practice of skills. They begin with positive attitudes and beliefs. Positive behaviors flow from positive beliefs. Two beliefs were identified by Aaron Beck at the University of Pennsylvania as critical to marriage success: “I am valued by my partner” and “I will always be taken care of by my partner”. Nearly everything you do is evaluated by your spouse against these two beliefs. This evaluation is what we will refer to as the personal meaning of your behavior. Nearly every statement from and action by you is appraised for this type of personal meaning by your partner.
We learned earlier in this paper that personal meaning is experienced, stored and expressed primarily as beliefs, or ideas with intense emotional content. It is the emotional content that is the main ingredient in the three communication styles. Expressions of loving kindness, neutrality and contempt are exchanged through the tone of voice, physical closeness, and facial expressions which compose the social engagement system. Partners strive to interpret the ideas that are communicated and form beliefs in ways that are consistent with the emotions communicated.
Marriage partners tend to have three sources of belief formation and personal meaning that can foster closeness or conflict. These are expectations, assumptions and attributions. Expectations arise from role models, desires and fantasies that are established during one's life prior to marriage. Assumptions are made by reading and misreading one's partner's behavior, and assuming his or her thoughts, feelings and desires in a situation.
Attributions have received the most attention in research. They are basic beliefs about the motives or reasons for one's spouse's behavior. It is easy to see that each of these areas can produce beliefs that either support or disrupt relationships. Satisfying marriages are built on compassionate beliefs and communication that foster realistic expectations, accurate assumptions and positive attributions.
Now, you don't have our spouses on your minds most of the time. Our attention is turned to other aspects of our lives much of each day. It is easy to see that maintaining and expressing appreciation for our partners is the way that we keep our beliefs about our partners’ value “active” in our minds. Also, our partners do not need our direct care much of the time. But compassion keeps our partners’ needs as high priorities, and our emotional openness to those needs “active”.
Positive beliefs also set the stage for the resolution of differences between partners. John Gottman and other marriage researchers now realize that few real differences between spouses are resolved with one or both individuals making significant lasting negotiated changes. Rather, differences are usually resolved through compassionate understanding and acceptance of each other. This paper cannot overemphasize the impact that deep acceptance of each other, as you are right now, will have on your relationship. Resolution of differences flows out of the fact that partners hold the well-being of each other as equally important as their own.
Points of Connection
The most satisfying partnerships are the ones that have many important points of connection, and yet acceptance of and support for the differences that still exist. Points of connection enrich and sustain marriages. They can be developed and must be nurtured through continual conscious attention. The best way for this to happen is for both individuals to consider the relationship to be of such value that it is worth sacrificing some individual interests and desires to obtain the benefits of meaningful connection and true partnership. It helps to see the relationship as a separate sensitive entity that both requires from and gives nourishment to each spouse.
An early high level of commitment to the relationship puts couples into the position of spiraling up into greater and greater levels of thriving in marriage. The principal ingredient of commitment to each other is the merging of well-being, so that each spouse holds their partner's well-being as their own. This makes it easy to enjoy sacrificing some personal desires for those of your spouse, and sharing satisfying goal orientations as partners.
Self-Disclosure, Discovery and Intimacy
Compassionate communication is important because it is part of sharing ourselves. It features a high level of what marriage specialists call self-disclosure. Intimacy and compassion are built on understanding and accepting each other. Self-disclosure involves making our thoughts, feelings, desires and intentions clear to our spouses. The more our partners know our real selves, the better our partners can respond compassionately to us. Truly revealing ourselves requires trust and courage, not skills. Self-disclosure is also an invitation to our partners to respond to us with compassionate understanding, deep acceptance and empathy.
Self-disclosure is the act of fully sharing our thoughts, feelings, goals and sexuality with our spouses. It is the fullness of authenticity, and the opposite of calculation and pretense. It is our opportunity to be seen by another as we believe ourselves to be, with the expectation of acceptance under the covenant of the relationship. It is an expression of love to both give and receive. Self disclosure is a gift we make to ourselves as well, providing an opportunity to confirm your own identities. Our identities are confirmed through validation of our differences with our spouses more so than with our similarities.
All of the qualities described in this section promote appreciation and compassion in our marriages. Each is based primarily in mutual understanding and validation. But intimacy takes our relationships to the highest level. It is the greatest source of pleasure and lasting satisfaction in our marriages.
Emotional intimacy and sexual intimacy are intertwined, but research shows that they also make separate contributions to marital satisfaction. Both types of intimacy create connection and positive personal meaning, and are considered by couples to be validation of the quality of the relationship. Persons low in emotional intimacy report higher marital satisfaction if they are high in sexual intimacy. Persons low in sexual intimacy report more satisfaction if they are high in emotional intimacy.
However in most relationships, sexual intimacy is has strong emotional components. In fact, sexual response (desire, arousal and orgasm) meets all of the somatic and psychological criteria to be considered a major emotion. Intimacy is the result of sharing feelings, thoughts, goals, activities and sexuality. Intimacy is connection, and like all connection it has intense personal meaning. This personal meaning signifies that our marriages are different emotionally and physically from any other relationship we might have. There are areas of ourselves that we share exclusively with our spouses.
At the onset, intimacy can seem very mysterious. That is because it is based in large part in something that isn't readily apparent to most people. Intimacy grows significantly in response to the excitement of discovery of our spouses, and that excitement can last a lifetime. However, the moment we believe that we have learned and experienced all that we going to, about and with our partners, our intimacy starts to decline. If we think that your partners are or should be entirely predictable, we have started growing apart rather than continuing to discover.
Even if our partners never changed, they would probably have enough complexity to last for a lifetime of discovery. But, people in the thriving mode do change. They continually engage life in new and challenging ways, often as partners. They grow personally throughout life, and relate differently over time to life and to each other. With each new change, there is new discovery about oneself and one's spouse to share. Persons who are changing in positive ways are interesting and attractive to spouses in the thriving mode.
While exploration is one side of the discovery process in our marriages, self-disclosure is the other side. We have all become experts in presenting ourselves to others in ways that we think are advantageous. We are perpetual actors in most circumstances in our lives because we do not trust others with our real selves. We are willing to say and do what we think promotes the image that is in our best interest. Intimacy is the opportunity to set this practice aside. The risk feels high, especially if we fear that it might endanger the attachment and care giving that we have with our partners. But, intimacy does not have to be equated with emotional vulnerability. The reward of intimacy is usually high when the relationship is already thriving through appreciation and compassion.
There is no area in intimate relationships where personal meaning is more important than in sharing sexuality. Research shows that careful nurturance of the sexual aspect of marriage is as important to thriving in the relationship as any other area. In fact, research indicated that satisfaction with the sexual area of the relationship is often taken by both partners as the major indication of the quality of the marriage. The main reason given for persons of all ages and both genders for having a thriving sexual relationship is to express love.
Research has shown that sexual relations for insecurely attached individuals tend to have unsatisfying personal meanings. For individuals who avoid intimacy as a means of self-defense, the personal meaning of sex is not usually to foster the relationship but to get personal gratification and one's way in other aspects of the partnership. For individuals who are continually anxious about the relationship, the personal meaning of sex is mainly to get continuous reassurance from their spouses. Therefore, person's that have not reached a sense of security in the relationship tend to find their sexual relationships dissatisfying, and base their evaluation of the quality of their marriages largely on this dissatisfaction.
However, research has also shown that frequent satisfying sex can mitigate the vulnerabilities experienced by anxiously attached spouses. Apparently satisfying sex can meet much of the need for reassurance required by anxiously attached individuals. When it does, it elevates the moods of both partners, and results in a general expressed state of satisfaction with the relationship.
Validation and Marital Satisfaction
Validation is a major source of long-lasting satisfaction in marriages. Much of the validation that takes place is experienced in the agreements that are reached in dialogs, and the supportive actions that follow. Validation comes in two main forms: acceptance and enhancement. Each contributes to the well-being of the recipient, and to the well-being of the relationship. Deep acceptance of both desired and undesired qualities in one’s spouse is an important form of validation.
Another form of validation, called enhancement, has been discovered to be even more beneficial to our partners and to our relationships. This is when a person’s views of and responses to his or her partner are closer to that partner’s ideal self than actual self. This happens when we know our partner’s ideal self, and choose to respond to it. It is as if we believe that our partner’s heart and intentions are really more aligned with his or her ideal than actual self. The extra benefit from enhancement validation to our partners and the relationship is that it helps our partners move more toward their ideal selves.
What we validate may be just as important as how frequently we validate our partners. We have seen that validating the qualities that our partner values in themselves enhances those qualities over time. Research shows that validating qualities because they are commonly or culturally valued does not have this effect. Validating our ideal for our spouses has a detrimental effect on our spouse’s identities and our relationships.
The ways to achieve thriving in marriage don't seem to be intuitive to most people. To really learn these principles, I will direct you to a workshop I developed called Thriving in Marriage. If you might be interested in attending the workshop or having it in your community or faith congregation free of charge, email me at: gh.stanford@yahoo.com. An overview which explains the marriage skills and perspectives learned in the course are described below.
Successfully expressing appreciation for your partner.
Appreciation for your partner is best expressed when it if felt, given, and received. All three are required. There are various words and actions that will help express appreciation for your spouse. Those that are the most effective are the ones that carry a great deal of positive personal meaning for him or her. Because receiving certain specific kinds of expressions has great meaning for us personally, we tend to gift those same expressions to our partners. Successful expression requires that we give what our partners treasure, and not what we treasure for ourselves. A husband may value words of affirmation from his wife, while she values acts of service much more. His continual words of affirmation for her, though well intended, are not the “currency” she is using to feel appreciated. A wife may guess that attention is her husband's currency, and not realize that he is craving affection.
Asking your partner for what you want.
We each need to feel safe to ask for what we want, trusting that our desires will be treated with real consideration. In return, we need to accept that we might not get exactly what we ask for. The best requests are direct clear requests. But just stating what you want does not give your spouse the full opportunity to respond compassionately to your desires. When you reveal your emotional needs as the underlying basis for your request, your partner can respond to it with deeper, more personal consideration.
Asking differs significantly from demanding. During times when you are not able to trust, you may rely on demands and manipulations that tend to reinforce distrust. It is important to be aware of the distinction between asking and demanding. Most times when both partners ask and act from compassion, they work out a solution that is desirable to both. This practice prepares you to share all of your dreams and aspirations with each other, with the expectation of receiving support.
Responding to your partner with compassionate thoughts and actions
How we respond to our partners begins with how well we keep our positive beliefs about them “active”. Viewing our partners in spiritual light focuses our responses on their goodness. You extend your compassion by thinking and speaking in the language of compassion: emotional needs. Wives need to understand their husbands' needs for respect, and husbands need to understand their wives' needs for emotional closeness. The skills of trusting self-disclosure and compassionate listening help you uncover, understand and consider the many emotional needs that underlie the ways you and your partner respond to each other. Understanding and acceptance are the first level of compassion, preparing you for the deeper level of empathy and caring.
Sometimes our partners respond to us with negative emotions and words that are completely out of proportion to the situation. They are usually responding to fears remaining from past hurts. When we “stand in love” we respond to our partners' distresses rather than their negative behaviors toward us, avoiding the natural tendencies to attack, withdraw, or defend ourselves. This provides an opportunity to begin healing hurts still lingering from past experiences. This is one of the most beautiful gifts that one person can give another.
Challenging and negotiating expectations about your life together
We enter marriage with a multitude of expectations about our relationships, our various roles, and our lives together. Many conscious expectations are left unstated. Many other expectations remain unconscious until we become distressed because they are unmet. Much of the conflict in marriage arises from the need to deal with unmet expectations. How we deal with these conflicts determines much of the quality of our marriages. Some expectations are non-negotiable; most are negotiable; many are unnecessary. When you move as many expectations as possible from the non-negotiable to the negotiable category you make inevitable conflict manageable. When you move as many expectations as possible from the negotiable to the unnecessary category you make conflict avoidable.
While unmet expectations create conflict, unchecked assumptions inflame it. When we don't know what our partners are thinking and feeling, we fill in the blanks with our assumptions. Then we respond to our spouses as if our assumptions are true. Our partners can become confused and feel hurt by this lack of understanding. So, it is important to respectfully check out our assumptions about important issues before acting on them.
Developing and nurturing points of connection as a couple
Intimate partners are “one” in many areas of their lives, and they become increasingly more so with time. They share values, goals, interests and activities. In these areas they are connected, while in some other areas they are very separate individuals. The most satisfying partnerships are the ones that have many important points of connection, and yet acceptance of and support for the differences that still exist. Points of connection enrich and sustain the partnership. They can be developed and must be nurtured through continual conscious attention. The best way for this to happen is for the individuals to consider the relationship to be of such value that it is worth sacrificing some individual interests and desires to obtain the benefits of the connection.
Supporting your partner's program for happiness
Each individual enters marriage with a program for happiness, or what he or she wants to do, have, and become. These programs change over time. Hopefully, your program for happiness coincides with your partner's in the most important areas of your lives, and together you are developing many important points of connection. But it is unlikely that you and your spouse share all the same desires and interests. You can choose to focus on the disappointments that arise from this, or choose to honor and support your spouse in his or her differences.
It is common for individuals to keep some secret wishes and desires, rather than face the rejection or disappointment they fear might result from sharing them with their partners. Sharing all of your desires, even those that seem unrealistic, fosters trust and intimacy and gives your partner the choice to emotionally support your program for happiness. It is important that each partner respond in a realistic and supportive manner when their spouses reveal their desires. Affirmation of differences is as important as points of connection.
Making and keeping proactive agreements (or articles of partnership)
Many issues that arise in our marriages can be managed with minimal conflict. Proactive agreements allow for a lot of negotiation to be accomplished in advance, surfacing expectations before they go unmet. Anticipating and responding to those areas where agreements are needed fosters unity and trust in the marriage. Most successful business partnerships start with written articles of partnership that are sets of proactive agreements. Potential partners anticipate areas in which agreements are needed to guide the actions of the individuals involved.
When clarity is needed to determine if the partnership is operating as intended, the persons involved can refer to the articles for guidance. This works because the workable agreements that compose the article of partnership are made at a time and way in which the partners can extend good will toward each other and anticipate individual sacrifices that will need to be met for the good of the partnership. A similar process can be applied to marriages when partners have the foresight to craft proactive agreements to cover important areas of their lives together.
Remaining emotionally available to your partner
Emotional availability tunes you in to opportunities for intimate engagement, and intimacy just flows out of responses to those opportunities. Emotional availability is the practice of watching for important opportunities for authentic connection, and switching attention to your spouse to respond to those opportunities. Each time you come together you are on different life rhythms, engaged in different thoughts, feelings and situations. Focus on these things maintains your separateness, and prolongs your re-acquaintance. You must literally recalibrate your nervous systems to be in tune with each other. This is very difficult to do through dialog, no matter how well-meaning. The best way to achieve this is by prolonged hugging.
When you are together, touch your partner often to create connection. Stop what you are doing if you can, and attend to your partner when spoken to. Make eye contact, and orient your body toward your partner. Be aware of his or her presence in the same space or household, and enjoy the proximity. Periodically make some type of contact for the purpose of maintaining connection. Intimacy is also fostered by companionship. Plan times to be alone with each other at home and elsewhere. Make time for and be emotionally present for good dialogs.