5
Let’s turn again to Dr. Rory, the husband whose love map was the size of a postage stamp and who couldn’t even remember the name of the family dog. For years, his wife, Lisa, put up with his workaholism. But a turning point in their relationship occurred one year on Christmas Day, when Rory was, of course, working. Lisa decided to pack a Christmas picnic and, kids in tow, surprise her husband at the hospital.
As they ate together in the waiting room, Rory turned on Lisa, his face like an angry mask. He told her he resented being surprised with a picnic. “Why did you do this? It is really embarrassing.” Just then, a resident called and as Rory answered his phone, his face softened and his voice became helpful, warm, and friendly. When he hung up, he turned back to Lisa, his face again full of anger. Something snapped inside Lisa. Clearly her husband was capable of kindness—just not toward her. She packed up the picnic and took the kids home.
Soon afterward she began going out in the evenings without him. After a while Rory asked her for a divorce. But in a last-ditch effort to work out their differences, they decided to try marital counseling. At first they got nowhere. When Lisa tried to be
conciliatory toward Rory during their first session with a marital therapist, he was unable to respond in kind to her repair attempts.
But their marriage’s hidden hope was discovered when the couple agreed to be taped in my lab for a segment of a TV news show. The interviewer asked Rory and Lisa about their early years together. As Rory began to describe their first date, his face lit up. Here’s a little of what they recalled:
RORY: I think she was very nervous, and I had some background about why she was nervous, some cultural things that she was trying to live with. And because of this, I knew this was going to take a long, long time. So I wasn’t nervous at all. I figured this was stage one of a five-year marathon.…
LISA: You mean you had a five-year plan on our first date?
RORY: Maybe that’s exaggerating, but I knew it would take more than one lunch.
LISA: Wow.
Rory and Lisa actually held hands while they discussed this. Lisa was beaming—he had never before recounted his campaign to win her heart. This little vignette may not sound very dramatic (in fact, the TV show edited Rory and Lisa down to a snippet of airtime), but to a trained observer there was much in this couple’s interaction that offered hope for their marriage. Rory and Lisa’s fond memories of their early days were evidence that underneath the antagonism there were still glimmerings of what I call a fondness and admiration system. This means that they each retained some fundamental sense that the other was worthy of being respected and even liked.
If a couple still have a functioning fondness and admiration system, their marriage is salvageable. I’m not suggesting that the road to reviving a marriage as troubled as Rory and Lisa’s is easy. But it can be done. In two years, everything changed for this couple. With the help of their therapist,
Lois Abrams, Rory and Lisa used techniques like those you’ll find in the pages ahead to unearth more of their positive feelings and put them to work to save their marriage. Rory revised his work schedule. He trained a resident to
take over much of the hospital work that he had been doing single-handedly. He began to eat dinner every night with Lisa and the children. He and Lisa also went out together in the evenings, especially to folk dance. Despite the agony they had put each other through, Rory and Lisa saved their marriage.
Fondness and admiration are two of the most crucial elements in a rewarding and long-lasting romance. Although happily married couples may feel driven to distraction at times by their partner’s personality flaws, they still feel that the person they married is worthy of honor and respect. They cherish each other, which is critical to keeping their Sound Relationship House intact and preventing betrayal. If fondness and admiration are completely missing, reviving the relationship is impossible.
As with Rory and Lisa, the best test of whether a couple still have a functioning fondness and admiration system is usually how they view their past. If a marriage is troubled, asking the couple about the current state of affairs is not likely to elicit much mutual praise. But query them about the past and you can often detect embers of positive feelings.
Of course, some marriages do come up empty. In these relationships, the antagonism has metastasized like a virulent cancer, actually spreading backward in time and destroying the couple’s positive memories. We see that sad result in the marriage of Peter and Cynthia. They can remember very little about the beginning of their relationship. Asked what they used to do when they were dating, they give each other a brief “help me out here” glance and then sit silently, racking their brains. Peter can’t remember a single quality he admired about Cynthia back then. Their marriage could not be resuscitated.
94 percent of the time, couples who put a positive spin on their marriage’s history and their partner’s character are likely to have a happy future as well. When happy memories are distorted, it’s a sign that the marriage needs help.
In contrast, when another couple in my newlywed study, Michael and Justine, are asked about their history, they glow. Their wedding was “perfect,” the honeymoon was “fabulous.” What is telling isn’t just their positive feelings about their early years, but how vivid those memories are. Justine recalls that they had gone to the same high school, he a few years ahead of her. He was a big sports hero. She had such a crush on him that she had clipped his picture from the newspaper and kept it in a scrapbook. (She confessed and showed him the scrapbook on their fourth date.) They met formally a few years later, when she tagged along with his foster sister (a friend of hers), who was going to visit him at college for the weekend.
Michael sensed right away that Justine was the one, but he worried that she wouldn’t like him. She recounts with a giggle discovering the letter admitting his feelings that he slipped under her purse at the end of that weekend. “I was never very aggressive about chasing women,” he says. “She was the first girl I ever actually pursued. That’s how I knew something was different about this one.”
They recall the long walks and talks they had, the letters they wrote every day while he was at school. The only bad part of those days, says Michael, was “being away from Justine. Just missing her a lot.” You can hear Justine’s fondness and admiration for Michael when she says, “I thought, ‘God, if I don’t marry this guy, someone else will. I’d better get him while I can.’ ” Michael says, “I would look at other girls, and I didn’t want to be with them. I just wanted to be with her. I wanted to become a legal couple and let everybody know how special she is to me.” Justine recalls the unity they felt in dealing with one of his buddies who resented that Justine
was taking so much of Michael’s time. “He didn’t get it that I was
giving her my time,” Michael says.
It won’t come as much of a surprise to hear that Michael and Justine continue to be happily married. Having a fundamentally positive view of your spouse and your marriage is a powerful buffer when bad times hit. Because they have this reserve of good feeling, Justine and Michael do not have cataclysmic thoughts about separation and divorce each time they have an argument.
At first, this may all seem obvious to the point of being ridiculous: People who are happily married like each other. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be happily married. But fondness and admiration can be fragile unless you remain aware of how crucial they are to the friendship that is at the core of any good marriage. By simply reminding yourself of your spouse’s positive qualities—even as you grapple with each other’s flaws—you can prevent a happy marriage from deteriorating. The simple reason is that fondness and admiration are antidotes for contempt. If you maintain a sense of respect for your spouse, you are less likely to act disgusted with him or her when you disagree. So fondness and admiration prevent you from being trounced by the four horsemen.
If your mutual fondness and admiration have been completely extinguished, your marriage is in dire trouble. Without the fundamental belief that your spouse is worthy of honor and respect, where is the basis for any kind of rewarding relationship? Yet it is possible for your fondness and admiration to recede to barely detectable levels and still be revivable. In such a case, the key to reinvigorating fondness and admiration is to get in the habit of scanning for qualities and actions that you can appreciate. And then, let your partner know what you’ve observed and are grateful for. These everyday thank-yous don’t have to be about momentous acts on your spouse’s part. Search for the small, everyday moments. Catch your partner doing some little thing right and then offer a genuine appreciation like “I love the way you handled the
teacher conference yesterday” or “Thanks for making my sister feel welcome here” or even “You look so hot in that outfit, I’m having all kinds of bad thoughts.”
Sometimes couples resist searching for and expressing gratitude for their spouse’s positive behavior because, they tell me, doing so feels “phony” to them. But developing a positive habit doesn’t “sugarcoat” a relationship. Instead it resets it to a
more realistic perspective. Just knowing this can make all the difference for couples who are feeling pessimistic about their partner and marriage. Research by
Elizabeth Robinson and
Gail Price brings home this happy truth. They had objective, trained observers count how many positive acts they witnessed between a couple during the course of an evening. They then asked the spouses themselves to tally their positive interactions. When the researchers compared the scores the couple gave themselves with those of the objective observers, they discovered that couples who described themselves as unhappily married only noticed
half of the positive interactions that actually occurred. Because they were so used to tuning in to their partner’s mistakes, they each missed a full 50 percent of their partner’s positive actions.
If your fondness and admiration are being chipped away, the route to bringing them back always begins with realizing how valuable they are. Remember that they are crucial to the long-term happiness of a relationship because they prevent contempt—one
of the marriage-killing four horsemen—from becoming an overwhelming presence in your life. Contempt is a corrosive that, over time, breaks down the bond between husband and wife. The better in touch you are with your deep-seated positive feelings for each other, the less likely that you will act with contempt toward your spouse when you have a difference of opinion.
There’s nothing complicated about reviving or enhancing your
fondness and admiration. Even long-buried positive feelings can be exhumed simply by thinking and talking about them. You can do this by meditating a bit on your partner and what makes you treasure him or her. If you’re feeling out of practice or have too much stress or anger to do this “free form,” the following
exercises will guide you. As simple as these exercises may seem to be, they have enormous power. When you acknowledge and openly discuss positive aspects of your partner and your marriage, your bond is strengthened. This makes it much easier to address the problem areas in your marriage and initiate positive changes. Feel free to work through these exercises as often as you wish. They are not intended only for troubled relationships. If your marriage is stable and happy, these exercises are an excellent way to heighten the romance.
How often do you think happily about your partner when you’re
apart? Do you reflect with pride on his or her many wonderful traits? Such thoughts comprise
cherishing, which is a critical component of a couple’s fondness-and-admiration system. Cherishing is a habit of mind in which, when you are separated during the course of the day, you maximize thoughts of your partner’s positive
qualities and minimize thoughts of negative ones. This active focusing on your partner’s merits allows you to nurture gratefulness for what you have instead of resenting what is missing. Many couples do not realize they are neglecting to cherish each other. Fortunately, this is easily corrected. The following exercises can help you get into this crucial habit.
By the end of the seven weeks, you’re likely to find that your perspective on your partner and your marriage is far sunnier.
Singing each other’s praises can only benefit your marriage. But in order to ensure that the gains continue, you need to put your respect and affection to work. In the next chapter you’ll do just that, by using them as the foundation for revamping—or reviving—your marriage’s sense of romance.