Marriage Rules – Part One
I grew up in a dysfunctional family. I will spare my deceased parents the embarrassment of sharing details. The result was that I never learned how a healthy, functional family behaved.
I started therapy in my 20s (it was the 70’s) and began gaining insight on why I was taking Valium on a daily basis and suffering with the aftermath of a divorce involving a 6-month old child after a 3-4 year marriage. I later became a divorce lawyer and a mediator.
For many years, I studied why every marriage started as such a happy event with such optimism and promise and often ended too soon thereafter in bitterness and disappointment.
I developed various theories about why marriages fail (more about that later), but what about the ones that don’t? What is a “healthy relationship”?
One of the better books I have found to provide guidance is “Marriage Rules” by Harriet Lerner, psychologist and prolific author. An easy, and often humorous book, consisting of 106 brief “rules.” Allow me to share a few excerpts here and in subsequent blogs.
“To paraphrase the novelist, Mary Karr, a dysfunctional marriage is any marriage that has more than one person in it.”
“I always remind my readers that even the best marriages get stuck in too much distance, too much intensity, and too much pain. Our automatic tendency to flight of fight is hardwired, and marriage is a lightning rod that absorbs anxiety and intensity from every source.”
“Marriage requires a profound respect for differences.”
A dog and a cat are in bed together. The dog is reading a book called Dogs Who Love Too Much. The cat says, “I’m not distancing. I’m a cat, damn it!”
“it is an act of maturity to recognize that differences don’t mean that one person is right and the other is wrong.”
“Intimacy requires that we do not …
get too nervous about differences.
operate as if we have the truth about the universe.
equate closeness with sameness.”
“Work on staying emotionally connected to a partner who thinks or feels differently than you do without needing to convince or otherwise fix her.”
To be continued