HOW TO HAVE A HAPPY MARRIAGE

Lots of people will give you advice on how to have a happy marriage. Some of their advice might work, some of it might just do the opposite and lead you toward a miserable marriage and even to divorce. One thing is very very important when you are looking at what makes for a happy marriage. What works for one person does not necessarily work for another. You ultimately have to discover, often through trial and error, what will work for you in building a happy marriage.

If you are serious about developing a happy marriage, then one of the things that you should do is examine the research that their is about happy marriages. Whenever you are trying to understand any problem, you are smart to look at the research that exists in that field. Unfortunately, almost no research exists that will give you any significant insights into what makes for happy marriages. Tragically, much of the research that exists about human behavior focuses on the problems that people have, rather than on the successes that people experience.

One of the few researchers into how to create a happy marriage is Dr. Judith S. Wallerstein, who is a social worker. Dr. Wallerstein has taken 100 people, or fifty married couples, and researched what they have done to make their marriages happy ones. She deliberately sought out couples that reported that their marriages were happy ones and then interviewed them in-depth to try to ascertain what they were doing that helped create their happy marriages. In order to be part of her study the couple had to be legally married for at least nine years and have had at least one child from that marriage and both partners had to feel that theirs was a happy marriage. All of these couples were living in the San Francisco Bay area. Therefore, as Dr. Wallerstein acknowledges, this is a very limited or narrow slice of the human population and we need more study of such happy couples in order to come to any final conclusions. However, her preliminary findings are well worth our study. Also, it is my opinion that all of the things that she discovered are consistent with the knowledge that we have about human behavior and happiness in general, so that her findings appear to make sense, and I would suggest that until we have better knowledge, we should take what she has learned and start to apply it---and the sooner the better because happiness in marriage is one of the most important things that can happen in any person's life.

So, just what did she discover? Perhaps the most important thing that she learned is that you don't have to have had a happy childhood in order to be happy. So much is said about how your childhood impacts your adult life that we begin to think that you can't be happy as an adult if you were not happy as a child. This simply is not true. You can have a terrible childhood, one in which your parents treated you miserably, and still you can grow up to be a very healthy and happy adult and have a happy marriage. Keeping that important idea in mind, then what is it that does help you have a happy marriage?

"As perceived by the couples (in Dr. Wallerstein's study), happy marriage is the shared sense of a couple that they have found or achieved a special 'good fit' between their individual needs, wishes, and expectations, a fit that they regard as unique and probably irreplaceable. This sense of fitting together is created and recreated, again and again, by the couple themselves within the fluid, ever-changing interaction of the marriage. The fit has many sources. It draws on shared values about the importance of the marriage and the kind of marriage that both desire. It draws on childhood and adolescent experiences and especially on the powerful unconscious transferences, hopes, fears, and fantasies that each person brings to the marriage. It draws on the realities of the present and the past, within the marriage as well as in the social surround. It draws as well on the capacity for emotional maturation and an expanding conscience, and the capacity for ever-deepening understanding and empathy" (J.S. Wallerstein, "The Psychological Tasks of Marriage: Part 2" AMERICAN JOURNAL OF ORTHOPSYCHIATRY, 1996, p. 221).

That last one is one of the most important words in all of creation. EMPATHY. Empathy is the ability to understand how another person can make mistakes and not hold their fallibility against them. Empathy is at the heart of any solid lasting form of love. Empathy, more than any other feeling, is what makes it possible for us to follow God's admonition to treat others as you would treat yourself.

Dr. Wallerstein identifies nine specific psychological tasks of marriage. If we are good at these tasks, then we tend to develop a happy marriage. These nine tasks are:

1. To be independent of your roots at the same time that you appreciate those roots. You have to separate from your family of origin but that does not mean that you reject your parents, only that you invest fully in the marriage. This means that you have to redefine the way you relate with your family after you get married.

2. You build togetherness based on mutual identification, shared intimacy, and an expanded conscience that includes both partners, while at the same time setting boundaries to protect each partner's autonomy. You become a couple at the same time that you respect the individual needs that each of you continue to have.

3. You make room in your life for a rich and pleasurable sexual relationship.

4. You take on the role of parenting, which is a very demanding job, without having that new task undermine the other eight psychological tasks.

5. When hard times come, and they always do, you confront and master them as a couple, never letting them undermine the other eight tasks.

6. You create a safe zone within the marriage for the expression and resolution of differences, anger, and conflict.

7. You use laughter and humor to keep things in perspective and to avoid boredom and isolation.

8. You provide nurture and comfort to each other---you encourage each other and give support to one another.

9. You keep alive the early romantic elements of your marriage.

If you read over and think about the nine tasks you will come away realizing that they are very inter-dependent. That it is a synthesis of the nine that leads to a happy marriage. Now remember, if you are involved in a marriage currently, don't despair if you are not being able to realize all nine of these psychological tasks. However, you should set them down as your nine goals and work toward improving your relationship in all nine of these very important areas. Also, if you see one area that is particularly weak, then you should make a special effort as a married couple to improve in this area.

The bottom line is that you are trying your best to move away from the sense of being two separate "I"s and moving ever more closely toward a state of "we-ness" in your relationship.

For those who want to learn more about how to build a happy marriage, you might want to read the book written by Wallerstein and Blakeslee entitled THE GOOD MARRIAGE: HOW AND WHY LOVE LASTS (1995, New York: Houghton Mifflin).

Exercise: Take each of the 9 areas and state what you could specifically do to make that a successful area in your life.