This section began by speaking of the mystery of marriage, and underlying these pages has been the major theme of contingency theory-one translation being that there are no clear, fail-safe formulas or stereotypes to successfully govern organizations. Reality-in this case the mysterious reality of the organization of marriage-has a way of being disconcerting.
Many people are startled, for instance, to learn that for psychotherapists the greatest problem in treating marriages is not too much separateness but too much togetherness. When Lily and I were still in the practice of psychotherapy and working with couples, sooner or later we had to say to almost all of them, 'You're too much married.' In couples group therapy it was frequently necessary to separate the husband and wife and seat them apart from each other in the circle. When we would ask Mary, 'How do you feel about that?' John would often instantly respond, 'Oh, Mary feels this way.' We would have to instruct him, 'Hey, John, let Mary have her own feelings.' Or when we would ask John, `What do you think about that?' Mary would immediately answer for him, 'John thinks such and such.' And then we would need to jump in again: `'Mary, let John think for himself.'
The point was also made that God covenants with us as individuals, but not with organizations. Since marriage is an organization, I do not believe there is anything inherently holy about it. Nor do I believe that God calls any of us to a marital relationship with any specific individual. The popular notion that there is someone special `meant' for us in our 'stars' needs to be debunked. This is not to say there are no forces that attract one person to another. The most obvious force, however, is prosaic indeed. The stale adage, 'Birds of a feather flock together,' is still a lively principle of psychiatry. In psychiatric hospitals, for instance, one of the best ways of assessing the severity of a patient's illness is by the company he or she keeps. There is a profound tendency for the most ill patients to hang out with the others who are most ill, while the least disturbed generally associate with the other least disturbed. So it is with marriage. The personalities of marital partners are often strikingly different, but their level of maturity is usually strikingly similar. Thus, emotionally healthy individuals tend to marry other' healthy individuals, emotionally sick people to marry other sick people, and the in-betweens to marry in-betweens. This pattern of choice is as predictable as it is unconscious. A related and disconcerting fact is that the longevity or stability of a marriage is not necessarily an indicator of its organizational health. The Moorehouse marriage, for instance, was a lasting one of close 'togetherness,' but it was hardly a vibrant, creative `monastery of two.' Indeed, the very sickest marriages psychotherapists see are often the most stable. They occur between partners whose psychopathology fits together hand and glove, who may murder each other daily though they cannot be pried apart with a crowbar.
I have referred to marriage as a vocation. A vocation to what? Virtually all young couples and most older couples don't have the foggiest idea what they are doing when they get married. Certainly at the age of twenty-three I had no understanding of either the realities of marriage or of Lily. Had I not been so blind, I might never had stepped down the aisle. Thirty-three years later I'm glad I did, and I do believe I had a vocation to marriage. But that vocation was hardly marked by the clarity of my vision, and I'm not sure that Lily and I entered matrimony with a level of consciousness any higher than that of the most misbegotten of couples.
If a vocation to marriage is not a conscious calling to a state of intense togetherness with a particular person, then what in God's name is it a calling to? A part of the answer, I believe, is contained in the definition of marriage with which the section began: 'an organization of two people who have made a commitment to attempt to maintain the organization.' A vocation to marriage is a vocation to commitment.
I was so nervous at the time that afterwards I could remember literally nothing of our marriage ceremony beyond the shaking of my knees. Why was I so terrified in that little chapel, surrounded by a small group of close and supportive friends? It was because I was making a commitment. I had no idea of what kind of commitment. We didn't have the option of writing our own vows back in those days. What did it mean 'to have and to hold from this day forth'? Yet I am not,sure that our children, who chose their own vows, have any more idea than we how those vows would become fleshed out-incarnated-over the years. Indeed, being in the dark was a part of my terror. All I knew was I was making a commitment to something and that commitment was very, very serious.
Yet there is a certain ambiguity inherent in commitment. The basic law of contracts is that they are binding, but the reason there are all those thick books in lawyers' offices is that most of them are filled with exceptions: contracts are binding except in the circumstances of Smith v. Jones or Harris V. Harris or Garcia v. Mendoza. The ideal of marriage is that of a covenantal relationship whereby I commit myself to stay with you regardless of what I might think or feel. When we make the marriage vows, the most conscientious of us are dimly aware that we are committing ourselves to strive for that ideal. Is the ideal attainable? Yes. Is it always attainable? No.
It feels attainable when we are in love. But it has already been indicated that the 'in love' relationship is a narcassistic I-I relationship of fantasies rather than of real human beings. Romantic love is illusionary. The reality is that two human beings cannot fulfill each other or meet all of each other's needs. Just as I had the narcissistic fantasy that Lily could be with me whenever I wanted and absent whenever I didn't want her, so she also had her own unrealistic expectations. It would have been nice for her if I could have been detached and objective whenever she needed a cool head for advice, dedicated to my work only when she was dedicated to hers, playful whenever she was playful, passionate whenever she wanted passion. But I just couldn't pull it off.
So what are we to do with our unmet needs in marriage? Suppress them? Yes, certainly, sometimes. But not always. It is one of the characteristics of a healthy marriage that both partners over the years develop a complex and evolving system for meeting some of their needs together and some of them separately. There is a balance of togetherness and separateness in the relationship. Maintaining-and, when necessary, shifting-this balance is a bit like walking a tightrope. There are no formulas for this tightrope walking, since the best balance is going to be quite different for different marriages and at different times. So we cannot commit ourselves beforehand to a specific pattern of togetherness and separateness. What the vocation to marriage is, then, is a calling to specifically commit oneself to deal with the friction of unmet needs in the manner of walking a tightrope.
There are limits to tolerable separateness. Lily and I have survived all manner of separation and friction. Yet were she to tell me she would return home by 5:00 P.M. Monday and then not show up until 10:00 A.M. Wednesday without offering any explanation, it is quite possible that by Friday morning, I would be consulting with either a lawyer or a psychiatrist in response to such incivility.
The point is that there are degrees and kinds of incivility that render walking the tightrope absolutely impossible. Some marriages, by virtue of excessive separateness or excessive togetherness, are literally killing. People would die-and often have, like Mrs Moorehouse-if they could not, for whatever reason, get out of them. As I believe that God calls some to marriage, so I also believe that God calls some people to divorce. Actually, I am quite hard-nosed about the matter. The other side of the coin is that the only valid reason to divorce is that there is very clear evidence that that is exactly what God is calling you to-and not just because you and your spouse happen to be in faintly different spiritual stages or suffering a modicum of friction that makes the grass look a bit greener on the other side of the fence. Evidence that the time has come to quit can usually be accumulated only after years of agonizing over not knowing the right thing to do.
It is secular as well as spiritual wisdom to beware of divorce. If you do not come to deeply understand and fully accept your own personal responsibility for 'irreconcilable differences' in marriage number one, it is quite probable you will discover the very same sort of insoluble problems in marriage number two. And marriage number three. Many psychiatrists, myself included, have seen a woman who divorced her husband because of his alcoholism only to marry a second man who also turns out to be an alcoholic and perhaps even a third. Divorcing one spouse to remarry another frequently means a leap from the frying pan into the fire.
Still, there is no point to a marriage where all togetherness has been lost and none is retrievable. And even less point to one where togetherness is so mandated as to be suffocating unto death. Besides our mutual capacity to keep our day-to-day promises and commitments, there are other reasons our marriage has survived. Preeminent among them has been our evolving capacity to allow each other 'space.' Gradually, I was able to stop thinking of Lily as my appendage, to respect her often independent schedules and honor her own need for privacy. Similarly, she became able to modify her natural possessiveness, allowing me sufficient freedom to be my unique and separate self. One of the most joyous moments of my life occurred in 1979 after I had delivered my first sermon. We were at the back of the church, and the real minister was introducing us to some of the parishioners. An old, retired priest turned to Lily, saying, 'So he's your man, is he?'
'No,' Lily replied, 'he's God's man.'
Extracted from M Scott Peck's A World Waiting to Be Born
Many people are startled, for instance, to learn that for psychotherapists the greatest problem in treating marriages is not too much separateness but too much togetherness. When Lily and I were still in the practice of psychotherapy and working with couples, sooner or later we had to say to almost all of them, 'You're too much married.' In couples group therapy it was frequently necessary to separate the husband and wife and seat them apart from each other in the circle. When we would ask Mary, 'How do you feel about that?' John would often instantly respond, 'Oh, Mary feels this way.' We would have to instruct him, 'Hey, John, let Mary have her own feelings.' Or when we would ask John, `What do you think about that?' Mary would immediately answer for him, 'John thinks such and such.' And then we would need to jump in again: `'Mary, let John think for himself.'
The point was also made that God covenants with us as individuals, but not with organizations. Since marriage is an organization, I do not believe there is anything inherently holy about it. Nor do I believe that God calls any of us to a marital relationship with any specific individual. The popular notion that there is someone special `meant' for us in our 'stars' needs to be debunked. This is not to say there are no forces that attract one person to another. The most obvious force, however, is prosaic indeed. The stale adage, 'Birds of a feather flock together,' is still a lively principle of psychiatry. In psychiatric hospitals, for instance, one of the best ways of assessing the severity of a patient's illness is by the company he or she keeps. There is a profound tendency for the most ill patients to hang out with the others who are most ill, while the least disturbed generally associate with the other least disturbed. So it is with marriage. The personalities of marital partners are often strikingly different, but their level of maturity is usually strikingly similar. Thus, emotionally healthy individuals tend to marry other' healthy individuals, emotionally sick people to marry other sick people, and the in-betweens to marry in-betweens. This pattern of choice is as predictable as it is unconscious. A related and disconcerting fact is that the longevity or stability of a marriage is not necessarily an indicator of its organizational health. The Moorehouse marriage, for instance, was a lasting one of close 'togetherness,' but it was hardly a vibrant, creative `monastery of two.' Indeed, the very sickest marriages psychotherapists see are often the most stable. They occur between partners whose psychopathology fits together hand and glove, who may murder each other daily though they cannot be pried apart with a crowbar.
I have referred to marriage as a vocation. A vocation to what? Virtually all young couples and most older couples don't have the foggiest idea what they are doing when they get married. Certainly at the age of twenty-three I had no understanding of either the realities of marriage or of Lily. Had I not been so blind, I might never had stepped down the aisle. Thirty-three years later I'm glad I did, and I do believe I had a vocation to marriage. But that vocation was hardly marked by the clarity of my vision, and I'm not sure that Lily and I entered matrimony with a level of consciousness any higher than that of the most misbegotten of couples.
If a vocation to marriage is not a conscious calling to a state of intense togetherness with a particular person, then what in God's name is it a calling to? A part of the answer, I believe, is contained in the definition of marriage with which the section began: 'an organization of two people who have made a commitment to attempt to maintain the organization.' A vocation to marriage is a vocation to commitment.
I was so nervous at the time that afterwards I could remember literally nothing of our marriage ceremony beyond the shaking of my knees. Why was I so terrified in that little chapel, surrounded by a small group of close and supportive friends? It was because I was making a commitment. I had no idea of what kind of commitment. We didn't have the option of writing our own vows back in those days. What did it mean 'to have and to hold from this day forth'? Yet I am not,sure that our children, who chose their own vows, have any more idea than we how those vows would become fleshed out-incarnated-over the years. Indeed, being in the dark was a part of my terror. All I knew was I was making a commitment to something and that commitment was very, very serious.
Yet there is a certain ambiguity inherent in commitment. The basic law of contracts is that they are binding, but the reason there are all those thick books in lawyers' offices is that most of them are filled with exceptions: contracts are binding except in the circumstances of Smith v. Jones or Harris V. Harris or Garcia v. Mendoza. The ideal of marriage is that of a covenantal relationship whereby I commit myself to stay with you regardless of what I might think or feel. When we make the marriage vows, the most conscientious of us are dimly aware that we are committing ourselves to strive for that ideal. Is the ideal attainable? Yes. Is it always attainable? No.
It feels attainable when we are in love. But it has already been indicated that the 'in love' relationship is a narcassistic I-I relationship of fantasies rather than of real human beings. Romantic love is illusionary. The reality is that two human beings cannot fulfill each other or meet all of each other's needs. Just as I had the narcissistic fantasy that Lily could be with me whenever I wanted and absent whenever I didn't want her, so she also had her own unrealistic expectations. It would have been nice for her if I could have been detached and objective whenever she needed a cool head for advice, dedicated to my work only when she was dedicated to hers, playful whenever she was playful, passionate whenever she wanted passion. But I just couldn't pull it off.
So what are we to do with our unmet needs in marriage? Suppress them? Yes, certainly, sometimes. But not always. It is one of the characteristics of a healthy marriage that both partners over the years develop a complex and evolving system for meeting some of their needs together and some of them separately. There is a balance of togetherness and separateness in the relationship. Maintaining-and, when necessary, shifting-this balance is a bit like walking a tightrope. There are no formulas for this tightrope walking, since the best balance is going to be quite different for different marriages and at different times. So we cannot commit ourselves beforehand to a specific pattern of togetherness and separateness. What the vocation to marriage is, then, is a calling to specifically commit oneself to deal with the friction of unmet needs in the manner of walking a tightrope.
There are limits to tolerable separateness. Lily and I have survived all manner of separation and friction. Yet were she to tell me she would return home by 5:00 P.M. Monday and then not show up until 10:00 A.M. Wednesday without offering any explanation, it is quite possible that by Friday morning, I would be consulting with either a lawyer or a psychiatrist in response to such incivility.
The point is that there are degrees and kinds of incivility that render walking the tightrope absolutely impossible. Some marriages, by virtue of excessive separateness or excessive togetherness, are literally killing. People would die-and often have, like Mrs Moorehouse-if they could not, for whatever reason, get out of them. As I believe that God calls some to marriage, so I also believe that God calls some people to divorce. Actually, I am quite hard-nosed about the matter. The other side of the coin is that the only valid reason to divorce is that there is very clear evidence that that is exactly what God is calling you to-and not just because you and your spouse happen to be in faintly different spiritual stages or suffering a modicum of friction that makes the grass look a bit greener on the other side of the fence. Evidence that the time has come to quit can usually be accumulated only after years of agonizing over not knowing the right thing to do.
It is secular as well as spiritual wisdom to beware of divorce. If you do not come to deeply understand and fully accept your own personal responsibility for 'irreconcilable differences' in marriage number one, it is quite probable you will discover the very same sort of insoluble problems in marriage number two. And marriage number three. Many psychiatrists, myself included, have seen a woman who divorced her husband because of his alcoholism only to marry a second man who also turns out to be an alcoholic and perhaps even a third. Divorcing one spouse to remarry another frequently means a leap from the frying pan into the fire.
Still, there is no point to a marriage where all togetherness has been lost and none is retrievable. And even less point to one where togetherness is so mandated as to be suffocating unto death. Besides our mutual capacity to keep our day-to-day promises and commitments, there are other reasons our marriage has survived. Preeminent among them has been our evolving capacity to allow each other 'space.' Gradually, I was able to stop thinking of Lily as my appendage, to respect her often independent schedules and honor her own need for privacy. Similarly, she became able to modify her natural possessiveness, allowing me sufficient freedom to be my unique and separate self. One of the most joyous moments of my life occurred in 1979 after I had delivered my first sermon. We were at the back of the church, and the real minister was introducing us to some of the parishioners. An old, retired priest turned to Lily, saying, 'So he's your man, is he?'
'No,' Lily replied, 'he's God's man.'
Extracted from M Scott Peck's A World Waiting to Be Born
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