So I think I might have found a FT. I am waiting speak with him on the phone to ask him about his experience with infidelity and see if he mentions Glass, Tuppy, or Spring.
I was reading some of his articles that are on the website...I posted below to get any feedback: _____________________________________________________________ A Letter to My Children on Marriage
Dear Children,
You are growing up in a society which treats marriage contemptuously. You will find that most people are cynical about marriage. Margaret Mead said everyone should marry three times: once to leave home, once to have children, and once for companionship. Mae West cracked that marriage was a great institution but she wasn’t ready for an institution yet. H.D. Mencken opined that a man could be a fool and not know it – unless he was married. Cher complained that some women get all excited about nothing – and then marry him. Micky Rooney advised that you should always marry in the morning; that way, if it doesn’t work out, you haven’t wasted the whole day. People will refer to marriage as Holy Acrimony. A 34 year-old actress, about to marry for the fourth time, professed, “I’m going to keep doing it until I get it right.” At the present time, one out of every two couples who get married will get divorced. Many people don’t even like the gender of the mate they marry: Men fear that women are out to constrain, confine, control them, and rob them of their masculinity. Women view men as unexpressive, brutish, overgrown babies (“I feel like I have an extra child to take care”). Divorce has been easy enough to obtain for enough years now, that there are many children growing up skeptical and wary, that since their parents’ marriage failed, perhaps marriage is a fragile, unworkable concept. It is difficult to find people who have marriages they enjoy. If you subscribe to these “normal” perceptions of marriage you will probably have “normal” marriages….and maybe divorces of your own. As your father, I hope I can impart a different legacy of abnormal ideas about marriage.
Pay heed to the advice, “Love thy neighbor as thy self.” The quality of the relationship you have with yourself will determine the quality of your relationship with your spouse. You must develop these capacities – to soothe yourself in the face of life’s paradoxes and in the face of your own or your partner’s anxieties, to nurture yourself because you know you deserve to be treated well; to validate yourself rather than expecting others to make you feel worthy. Do not turn your self or your esteem over to anyone else to define. Then it wouldn’t be self-esteem. We all select mates who affirm what we already believe about ourselves so it behooves you to learn to “Love thy-self.”
When you can soothe, nurture, validate, and love yourself, you will be standing on your own two feet emotionally. When you have the balance like this you can lean into your partner and know that you will never give up your stability; and you will be confident that no partner could lean so excessively on you as to push you off balance. Do not think of yourself as a half in search of a “better half” or yin in quest of yang. Never enter marriage looking for a mate to prop you up or make you complete. Marriage is not a Siamese twin relationship. You are not joined at the brain so you will not think alike. You are not joined at the heart, so you will not feel the same way. Nor are you joined at the hip: thus you will not behave similarly. When it comes to marriage, two halves do not make a whole. Two wholes comprise a marriage.
Please do not let anyone who needs you marry you. Need arises out of weakness and emptiness. These traits will not be tolerated well, or for long. Feeling desired is glorious, but we can not know we are desired when we know a partner needs us. Nor can you feel desirous toward a mate you need. Indeed, you would be likely to feel resentful because of the helplessness and dependency you feel in relation to a needed mate.
Develop a hearty disrespect for clichés like “Love conquers all”, and “With love, all things are possible.” Loving is easy. It is a mysterious and passive emotion. Nobody can teach you how to do it, how to kill it off, or how to regain it if you cease to feel it. But you can, and you had better, teach yourself the skills of marriage like maintaining (liking, soothing, nurturing, validating) yourself in physical and emotional proximity to your partner; changing the person you can change (yourself, and only yourself) instead of laboring to change your mate; getting along with in-laws; solving problems; developing a good sexual-affectionate relationship.
Know that the common wisdom, that sex is a natural function, is a shallow and unhelpful truth. Only the drive to reproduce is a natural function. If you expect the kind of eroticism that packs a wallop, the kind that few people attain, then accept that good sex is an acquired taste and a developed habit. Read about it, think about it, discuss it, and experiment with it throughout your lives. Do not wait until you experience no anxiety to introduce novelty into lovemaking. Non-anxious sex will grow boring.
If you have children you will obviously become a family. Do not stop being a couple. Your marriage will be the foundation for the family and, as such, will determine the strength or weakness of your family. Your children will learn their three most important roles – gender role, spousal role, parent role – from observing your interactions as married people. Nurture the marriage within the family and preserve boundaries around your couple.
From people you know and all the media that barrage you, you will be told that marriage is a problem to be solved, some kind of ordeal to be endured; that it is fragile; that is brings out the worst in people; that it is, at best, tolerable. Even the standard wedding ceremony refers to marriage “for better or for worse.” This overlooks the incredible potential of marriage. How about marriage “for the best?” Though I feel like a voice in the wilderness, I want you to know that marriage is a fine people-growing machine – fun, vital, surprising, exhilarating. It appreciates in value and return as it ages.
And if you craft it well you will know a powerful ache in your heart at the thought of death – yours or your spouse’s. This is the kind of exquisite and enriching pain I wish for you, for it will mean you will have succeeded elegantly at marriage.
One-night stand. Fling. Dalliance. Extramarital relationship. Affair. Adultery. Infidelity. The field of mental health, after studiously avoiding these phenomena, is finally grappling with them. Two attitudes have pervaded the field and limited our abilities to help couples cope with these crises. The first attitude has been this: affairs are normal, (“Everyone is doing it”), and they warrant no special consideration in the treatment of distressed couples. Couples and the institution of marriage should just accommodate affairs. The second attitude has been that affairs are so dangerous that we are better off to avoid confronting them (“What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her”).
Statistically speaking, affairs are “normal.” There is an intriguing shift in the incidence of extramarital relationships. Formerly, approximately 60% of married men and 40 % of women were likely to indulge. Recent evidence indicates that men are slowing-down while women are catching-up; the rates are approaching a 50% likelihood of having an affair for both men and women. Seventy percent of all marriages are likely to experience at least one affair. The high frequency, albeit, has not helped couples, or the institution of marriage, accommodate infidelity any more easily.
Extramarital relationships may be motivated by different causes, they may reflect different personality characteristics, and they can have different implications for the relationships. Understandably, then, different types of affairs have been identified. Accidental affairs are entered into by people who are not seeking extramarital involvement, who generally value the institution of marriage and appreciate their own marriages, and who are befuddled to find themselves unfaithful. They feel guilty almost immediately. Philandering is the choice of men and women who seek to avoid being controlled by the opposite gender. These are people who believe that holy acrimony is another name for marriage. Their infidelities prove that they can resist the attempts by their mates to control them, and that they can wield control over their affair partners (conquests). Philanderers have multiple affairs, and their behavior may be so habitual as to approach being addictive. People who have romantic affairs cannot tolerate too much reality in marriage and require the excitement, risk, damn-the-torpedoes-full-speed-ahead danger of being “in love” constantly. They fail to do what they think is right and instead do what feels right. Marital arrangements are for the ranks of unhappily married people who do not wish to divorce. These people find intimacy too threatening or too constraining and may prefer their closest relationships to be with children, parents, or buddies rather than spouses. Out-the-door affairs are the vehicle for spouses who intend to leave a marriage but cannot abide the loneliness and feelings of loss or failure that accompany separation. They find an aide – a getaway driver – to ease the transit out of the marriage.
While most affairs include sex (there are those that are labeled “affairs of the heart, but not of the flesh – yet”), they are not about sex. Affair partners are often no more “sexy” than spouses. Some affairs, after they become sexualized, involve more clandestine meals, furtive phone calls to discuss their guilt, or mutual complaining about their spouses who do not understand them, than actual sex. It is rarely the sex that damages the marriage – it is the secrecy and disorientation. In other words, it is not whom you are lying with that damages marriage; it is whom you are lying to. When the infidel denies the affair to the suspicious and confronting mate, (“I am appalled that you could even think such a thing about me”), the mate begins to question his/her own powers of observation and feelings. Such duplicity is what breaks the faith of the marriage and fuels the mate’s hostility when the affair is finally “discovered.”
Most discovered affairs follow through certain stages. During the first phase, reduced self-disclosure, emotional distance widens. The second phase – cold rage – occurs when the mate realizes that something is awry, but may not yet know what. Suspiciousness, jealousy, and mistrust rise during this period. The third stage, hot rage, is triggered by the discovery of the infidelity. The outpouring of fury over the betrayal and disorientation is molten. If the marriage survives, and most do, there may or may not be a final stage – forgiveness. This rarely happens as immediately or easily as both spouses would hope.
What is needed to facilitate forgiveness? Initially, the infidel must terminate the affair and mourn its loss. Terminating contact with the affair partner does not end the positive feelings that the infidel holds for the affair partner. The infidel must then stop false denials, deceit, or efforts to disorient the spouse. The spouse will go through the period of hot rage, which the infidel must be able to tolerate. The aggrieved spouse needs a certain type of apology. That is, the infidel must apologize (not for having the affair which (s)he may have enjoyed) but for having hurt and betrayed the spouse. The infidel must resist the understandable tendency to avoid talking or answering questions about the infidelity and be understanding of the spouse’s curiosity and need to know. At the same time, the spouse should censor his/her curiosity and not ask questions to which the answers might be too painful to hear. Both spouses should understand that the three most common myths about affairs are not very accurate: (1) affairs do not prove that a marriage is bad; (2) affairs do not prove that the infidel has stopped loving the spouse; (3) has affairs do not always destroy marriages. Finally, the couple will recover most fully if each works to improve the quality of the marriage so that it feels more satisfying and impervious to extramarital relationships. This outcome is not an automatic result of ending an affair, but comes from strengthening the commitment to each other and to the concept of marriage.
We are a society accustomed to taking things that don’t work (appliances, cars, lawn mowers, shoes, watches) to service people who repair or restore them and having these items returned to us functional once again. So it does not surprise me – a marital therapist – when people bring me their mates, expect me to “fix” them and return them to the marriage in good working order. When there is marital distress, spouses rarely see how they themselves have contributed to erosion of the relationship but they are very aware of what their partners have done wrong, haven’t done enough of, or don’t do at all. This is called the blame game.
When they come for therapy each is struggling mightily (and futilely) to change the other, and resisting having to make any change on one’s self. In an attempt to change the other they use destructive tactics like threat, violence, guilt induction, withdrawal, withholding (money, sex) – tactics which elicit defensiveness and fight-or-flight responses. To resist having to change themselves they offer rationalizations like, “I am the way I am,” “You should love me just the way I am” You knew I was like this when you married me,” “I do this because I’m (a man, a woman Irish, like my father….),” “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” Some requests for change that a spouse may make would be simple to effect (“Keep the house cleaner”, “Help with the kids more”, “Tell me you love me”, “Call if you’ll be late”). But people resist making these changes because they resent the implications of the requests – that they are not lovable unconditionally, that they are somehow defective or inadequate the way they are. It is to avoid believing these implications and to avoid feeling controlled, manipulated, or robbed of their individuality that spouses so stubbornly resist changing themselves. They fail to see the irony in expecting the other to change while defending their own right to not change.
No couple can ever get their relationship into good shape and expect it to remain static like that forever. This would be like working out, getting physically fit, then ceasing to work out but expecting to retain your conditioning. Relationships evolve. To change is necessary and healthy. No one has more of a right to request change from us than our partner in an intimate relationship, fro whom we will certainly request changes. We lack the power to cause change or to control each other. But to the extent that there are positive foundations in a relationship like affection, trust, respect, playfulness, we can have persuasive influence in motivating a mate to change.
I keep in my office a sampler therapy I listen to their initial blaming complaints and criticisms. I reckon that they know each other better than anyone else knows them and their observations are probably fairly valid and reliable. They are likely to improve their relationships, only when they figure out that their greatest chance to get the changes they desire from their partner occurs when they can make the changes their mate seeks from them.
People are like trees. They have trunks and branches. Their core personality is the trunk. No one can change that. Intimate relationships do not deprive anyone of that core personality; you cannot chop down the trunk or change it from a birch to a spruce. But you can trim your branches and even dramatically shape them (like people work with bonsai trees) without surrendering your identity for the sake of the relationship.
Our psychology professor flashed the book title The Mirages of Marriage on the screen to our class of 1000 students, and then asked what we had read. Eighty-sex percent of us had perceived it as “The Miracles of Marriage”. Wishful thinking. We see what we want to see – not necessarily what is actually presented to us. Sometimes we subscribe to myths or perceive mirages only to find them dispelled as we approach.
“Magical love” or romantic love” in marriage is one of those mirages. George Bernard Shaw wrote, “When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part”. Clever man, Shaw. He recognized that magical love (included are equal parts of sexual passion, hunger for approval, fear of rejection, intrigue, the excitement of discovery, and fantasized projections of what you want to perceive) is an emotion that charges us to such an emotionally frenzied high – that it cannot sustain itself. It is characteristic of the beginnings of relationships. It is present in most new marriages. Many people getting married have never remained in any intimate relationship long enough to have seen magical love ebb. Not having experienced the waning of magical love, many young couples have been lulled into believing that it endures throughout a relationship.
So, when magical love ends – and it will – spouses often hear a resounding “THUD”. Looking at each other, the mates begin thinking, “There’s something wrong with you”. (Or in their more insightful and charitable moments – “There’s something wrong with me”). “There’s something wrong with this marriage”. This period of magical love will typically last six to eighteen months into a marriage, and never longer than three years. Because extramarital affairs do not breed the familiarity and intimacy which come with living together, this romantic love may last for longer in an affair.
The fact that one can find magical love in the beginning of a new relationship, like an affair, further deludes many people into thinking they should always be able to sustain such a feeling – and that perhaps it is worth dissolving a marriage to obtain the magical love with someone new. But the only way to sustain this kind of excitement and passion is to constantly be in the beginning phases of relationships.
At the outset of marriage, romantic love seems to be a kind of momentum that carries the relationship along, effortlessly. The spouses feel no need to be working at nurturing the marriage. By the time the mates realizes “the honeymoon is over”, they should have already been hard at work to build the type of marriage they can sustain once the “momentum” ebbs.
As a marital therapist, I fantasize about teaching a course on relationships. I would like to teach it to 12-14 year olds who are old enough to be concerned about relationships, but are still relatively inexperienced. The understanding of magical love and expectation of its eventual dissipation should be planted early. Then, when they form new intimate relationships they would know to begin working at developing them from the onset, and when magical love wans, the mates will not be surprised and will not suspect that they have failed at marriage.
When I discuss this concept of romantic love with clients, they often mistakenly assume that the work involved in nurturing a marriage is drudgery. But the work is by no means unpleasant and the payoff is immense. Nor is the kind of marital love that survives the end of magical love in any way pallid. It is rich, rewarding, and most of all, enduring. Of all chances for success, I believe our greatest opportunity for fulfillment comes not from being successful at a job or a career but from success at developing a good marriage.
Me: 28 H: 32 1st marriage 4 both 1 1/2 year married 2gether for 9 1S: 6months 1stepson: 2yo
