Married (Happily) With Issues - The New York Times. Still, Dan was not 1. He met my ocean analogy with the veiled threat of California ranch- hand wisdom: if you. A quick bit of background: Dan and I married on July 1, 2. Olema, Calif. We vowed to have and to hold, to love and to cherish in sickness and in health, etc. We were optimistic, cocky and vague about the concept of marriage. We never discussed, or considered discussing, why we were getting married or what a good marriage would mean. It all seemed obvious. I loved Dan; I loved how I felt with him. Ergo I wanted to be his wife. During the first nine years of our marriage . Our families had set very different examples of how a marriage could be good. Dan was raised in Berkeley, Calif., by VW- bus- driving lefties who were so utterly committed to their own romance that Dan sometimes felt left out. Each meal and each sunset was the most exquisite. When girls refused to talk to Dan in high school, his mother told him they were just too intimidated by his incredible good looks. They raised their three children in Wellesley, Mass., where civic life was so tidy that kids held bake sales at the town dump. All conjugal affection took place out of sight. We assumed that our big problems would be money (or lack thereof; we. Neither turned out to be true. But Dan and I were not just economic partners, lovers, (soon enough) co- parents and best friends. We were also each other. Both working from home, our lives resembled a D- list version of Joan Didion. We lost steam 9. 5 percent of the way through our D. I. Y. What would a better marriage look like?
Nespresso USA brings luxury coffee and espresso machine straight from the caf How many online users are on my website? Many webmasters ask themselves the same question when they create their website. Official Tourism Website of the Commonwealth of Virginia; find out about lodging, activities, events, attractions, and museums. Also offers tools for vacation. A smoother partnership? More intriguing conversation? Our goal and how to reach it were strangely unclear. We all know what marriage is: a legal commitment between two people. For guidance I turned to the standard assessments. The Locke- Wallace Marital Adjustment Test instructs spouses, among other things, to rank themselves along the . This struck me as scattershot and beside the point. For all the endless talk about marriage . John Gottman, in his Love Lab in Seattle, claims that he can analyze a conversation between spouses and predict with 9. But many academics say that Gottman. Those not selling books, workshops or counseling admit to knowing surprisingly little. Harry Reis, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, likens our current understanding of . Another touches the soft, flexible ear, concluding that elephants are supple, resembling felt. A third imagines massive strength from grasping the pillar- like structure of the leg. The perspective of each person touching the elephant is valid, as far as it goes. It seemed safest to start in private, so we began our putative improving with Harville Hendrix. It seemed only sporting. I assumed he would choose . I remembered well, but not fondly, this feeling from early in our marriage, when nearly everything was still up for grabs: Where would we live? How much money was enough? What algorithm would determine who would watch the baby and who would go to the gym? Recently those questions had settled, and our marriage felt better for it. But now the competitive mind- set came roaring back, as I reasoned, unconsciously anyway, that any changes we made would either be toward Dan. Admitting too much satisfaction seemed tantamount to ceding the upper hand. I, too, failed to think of 1. Dan did that made me feel loved. Complete this sentence: . But Dan, in my view, hadn. While reromanticizing, I asked him, testily, . Now we were having a fight. Dan retreated to the bathroom to check his progress on his six- pack. This was the fear, right? You set out to improve your marriage; it implodes. What if my good marriage was not floating atop a sea of goodness, adrift but fairly stable when pushed? What if my good marriage was teetering on a precipice and any change would mean a toppling, a crashing down? Much of the commentary on modern marriage is frankly terrifying. The children do not get to vote on the direction of the relationship, on which sleep- training or discipline philosophy they like best. But with a spouse, particularly a contemporary American spouse, equality is foundational, assumed. A friend had recently told me that he thought I was the boss in my marriage. Did I really want to negotiate my marriage anew and risk losing that power? From the bathroom, Dan asked, . In academic circles, marriage education is known as a . The classes, sadly, have all the intellectual glamour of driver. Guerney Jr., a clinical psychologist, family therapist and the godfather of the marriage- education movement, wrote in his 1. A skilled conversation is an exercise in forced empathy. One person starts by describing his or her feelings. The other person then validates those feelings, repeating them back nearly verbatim. Midmorning, with the gongs of the supposedly soothing spa music crashing in the background, Dan and I retreated to a couch with a template for having a skilled conversation about a . Shortly after our first child, Hannah, was born, Dan and I started having the same conversation every night: do you want to cook dinner or look after the kid? He always picked cook, I always picked kid, and now, seven years later, Dan was an excellent, compulsive and profligate chef. We spent far more money on food than we did on our mortgage. Our refrigerator held, depending on the season: homemade gravlax, Strauss organic milk, salt- packed anchovies, little gem lettuces, preserved Meyer lemons, imported Parmesan, mozzarella and goat cheese, baby leeks, green garlic, Blue Bottle coffee ($1. On a ho- hum weeknight Dan might make me pan- roasted salmon with truffled polenta in a Madeira shallot reduction. But this was only a partial joy. During this time I was left to attend to our increasingly hungry, tired and frantic children and to worry about money. That was our division of labor: Dan cooked, I tended finances. Because of the cooking, in part, we saved little for retirement and nothing for our children. Dan, meanwhile, entrenched and retaliated, slipping crispy fried pigs. Without an outlet, Dan tended toward depression, and his depression vented as anger. In his early 2. 0s, he learned the trick of focusing and applying himself, at nearly all times, so his energy would not, as he put it, . But I struggled with the specifics. Dan cooked, because he needed to cook, blitzing through one cookbook after another, putting little check marks next to every recipe. He was not cooking for me, not for the girls. Yet now in our marriage class, following the skilled- conversation template, the emotional distance between us on this issue seemed to collapse. I said, then Dan mirrored back to me, . According to a widely accepted model, intimacy begins when one person expresses revealing feelings, builds when the listener responds with support and empathy and is achieved when the discloser hears these things and feels understood, validated and cared for. Offering a married couple this model is like informing an obese person that he should eat less and move more. But in the days and nights that followed that course, our intimacy grew. We had never considered our verbal jousting to be protecting uncomfortable feelings. Back home, that first irony- free evening, I found myself telling Dan a raft of antiheroic stories about my childhood, stories I. They were tales about suburban bat mitzvahs and the pedal pushers I wore to them, anecdotes from a conventional East Coast world our marriage eschewed. Without the ironclad guarantee of empathy, I had felt that they might go over poorly, especially alongside Dan. Then I found myself recoiling. As if I were obeying Newton. I loved the idea of digging out of my emotional bunker and going over to Dan. And I liked being there, for a while. But Dan has a bigger, flashier personality than I do. I feared, in our intimacy, I might be subsumed. As many women had, I read in fascinated horror, a few years back, about a Buddhist couple who took vows never to be parted by more than 1. They inhaled and exhaled in unison while doing yoga, walked each other to writing desks when inspiration struck in the middle of the night. That vision of intimacy as a chain- link leash filled me with dread. Yes, I loved the emotional security of knowing that if I said, . Dan would caress the small of my back. I knew older couples who slept in separate bedrooms, an arrangement that unsettled me as a newlywed but now struck me as a sound approach to running the chute between intimacy and autonomy over the course of 5. So while working to improve our marriage, I found myself pushing my husband away. I had started our project assuming the more closeness, the better. En route we discussed not shaking the bushes of our union too hard. Dan had just flown home from London where he was working on a story about Fergus Henderson, a chef who defines half a pig. Even those who are tolerant, wise and giving are often short and rude to their mates. I had always winced at the opening of Chekov. Why turn over the rocks of your history just to see what? In marriage therapy, this fear makes particular sense, because the therapy carries not only the threat of learning things about yourself that you might prefer not to know but also the hazard of saying things to your spouse that are better left unsaid, as well as hearing things from your spouse that you might prefer not to hear. Some in the field are outwardly critical of most marriage therapy; among them is William J. Doherty, a psychologist and the director of the Marriage and Family Therapy Program at the University of Minnesota, who writes, . In clinical trials, among the most effective protocols is Integrative Behavioral Couple Therapy, an unabashed mash- up of two schools of thought. So we settled into airing some well- rehearsed gripes . I was also still stung, I later realized, by critical comments Dan had made about my kissing style before we were engaged.) These were many- times- told tales, and as such we both felt inured to their dark content.
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