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We used to have a yuppie marriage,” says Helen. “By that I mean it was very superficial. We got along okay and really loved each other, but I didn’t feel that connected to Kevin. It was like we were roommates who made love.” Helen, a “devout feminist,” had always prided herself on her independence. At first she thought it was great that she and Kevin had their own lives—separate careers, interests, and friends. But the longer they were married, and especially after they had children, the more she felt something was lacking. She didn’t want to give up her strong sense of individual identity, but she wanted more from her marriage. After attending our workshop, she realized what it was: she wanted to feel more like she and Kevin were a family.
If your marriage adheres to my first six principles, there’s a good chance that your relationship is stable and happy. But if you find yourself asking, “Is that all there is?” your situation may be similar to Helen and Kevin’s. What may be missing is a deeper sense of shared meaning. Marriage isn’t just about raising kids, splitting chores, and making love. It can also have a spiritual dimension that has to do with creating an inner life together—a culture rich with symbols and rituals, and an appreciation for your
roles and goals that link you and that lead you to understand who you are as a family.
Usually we think of
culture in terms of large ethnic groups or even countries where particular customs and cuisine prevail. But a culture can also be created by just two people who have agreed to share their lives. In essence, each couple and each family create its own microculture. And like other cultures, these small units have their customs (like Sunday dinner out), rituals (like a champagne toast after the birth of each baby), and myths—the stories the couple tell themselves (whether true, false, or embellished) that explain their sense of what their marriage is like and what it means to be part of their group.
Paula and Doug viewed themselves as the “runts” of their respective families. Both were considered the least intelligent, attractive, or likely to succeed of their siblings. But as it turned out, all of their brothers and sisters ended up unmarried or divorced, while Paula and Doug formed a happy, stable marriage; held steady jobs; and raised great kids in a loving home. Part of their marriage’s culture, the story they tell themselves about themselves, is what a great team they make, how feisty they are, how they thumbed their noses at all the naysayers and succeeded against the odds.
Developing a culture doesn’t mean a couple sees eye to eye on every aspect of their life’s philosophy. Instead there is a meshing. They find a way of honoring each other’s
dreams even if they don’t always share them. The culture that they develop together incorporates both of their dreams. And it is flexible enough to change as husband and wife grow and develop. When a marriage has this shared sense of meaning, conflict is much less intense and perpetual problems are unlikely to lead to
gridlock.
It is certainly possible to have a stable marriage without sharing a deep sense of what is meaningful about your lives together. Your marriage can “work” even if your dreams aren’t in sync. The last chapter showed you just how to navigate your way around perpetual problems so that you can live with them rather than ending up gridlocked. It is important to accept that you each will probably have some dreams that the other doesn’t share but can respect. You may, for example, adhere to different religions but have
enough respect for each other’s spiritual journey to bridge the differences in your faiths.
But it is also true that a rewarding marriage is about more than sidestepping conflict. The more you can agree about the fundamentals in life, the richer, more profound, and, in a sense, easier your marriage is likely to be. You certainly can’t force yourselves to have the same deeply held views. But some coming together on these issues is likely to occur naturally if you are open to each other’s perspective. A crucial goal of any marriage, therefore, is to create an atmosphere that encourages each person to talk honestly about his or her convictions. The more you speak candidly and respectfully with each other, the more likely there is to be a blending of your sense of meaning.
At our workshop, Helen and Kevin were able to focus on the spiritual side of their lives together by talking over some of the questions you’ll find later in this chapter. For the first time, they spoke earnestly about their own families, their family histories, values, and symbols. When they returned home, Helen took out her family’s old photo album and showed Kevin pictures of her great-grandparents who had come to America from Ireland. She told him the story she had heard countless times about her great-grandparents’ marriage—how they had become engaged before her great-grandfather left for America. He then remained true and devoted to her great-grandmother during the four long years it took to save up enough money to bring her over, too. The message of this story, she had come to understand, was that loyalty is one of the backbones of marriage and family life. Until now she had never expressed that to Kevin so directly.
He himself reminisced about some of his own family’s tales—especially about his grandmother who single-handedly ran a general store in rural Kansas and almost went broke because she was always giving away free food to poor neighbors during the Depression. The townspeople all knew that she reserved a certain amount of her goods for the town’s needy families, who would come by every Monday night at closing time. “My dad always said that we Monahans tend to be generous to the point of being foolish,” he told Helen. “But he always said it in a way that let you know
he was very proud that we were like that.” Kevin told Helen how that perspective had infused his own adulthood—from his insistence that they make large charitable contributions to the size of the Christmas tips he gave out.
That conversation marked a turning point in Kevin and Helen’s marriage. From then on they talked frequently about values like loyalty and generosity that had been instilled in them by hearing
family stories as children. Over time, as they heard each other’s family chronicles and passed them on to their children, these tales wove together into the ongoing story of the new family they were creating. Helen accepted and incorporated the stories and values of the Monahans that were important to Kevin into her own life, and he did the same for her heritage.
As I said, the more shared meaning you can find, the deeper, richer, and more rewarding your relationship will be. Along the way you’ll also be strengthening your marital friendship. This in turn will make it even easier to cope with any conflicts that crop up. That’s the beauty of the Seven Principles. They form a feedback loop that ensures that as you work on each principle, it becomes easier to work on the others.
In my work with couples, I’ve come to identify four critical mainstays of shared meaning. When couples build these together, they enrich their relationship and family life.
It is a sad fact that less than a third of U.S. families eat dinner together regularly, and more than half of those that do have the television on. This effectively ends conversation during dinner. Creating rituals in your marriage (and with your children) can be a powerful antidote to this tendency to disconnect. A ritual is a structured event or routine that you each enjoy and depend on and that both reflects and reinforces your sense of togetherness. Most
of us are familiar with rituals from our childhood, whether going to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, lighting Kwanzaa candles or the menorah, sharing pumpkin pie at Grandma’s Thanksgiving, attending family reunions, etc. However, it’s common for people not to discuss what these traditions symbolize to them. In his book
The Intentional Family, sociologist
William Doherty highlighted the importance of couples creating rituals that are intentional and meaningful. By recognizing the ongoing value and significance of the rituals you each bring to your relationship, and the new ones you create together, you further your identity as a family.
Rituals don’t necessarily have to derive from your respective childhoods and family histories. You can create your own. If you wished your family had gone on outings together on the weekends, you may want to incorporate that into your weekly routine. Or if you wish a bigger deal had been made out of the spiritual side of Christmas, you may decide to attend Midnight Mass together every year. New rituals are likely to develop naturally as you go through life together as a couple. For example, at the Thanksgiving dinner that Julie and I have been sharing with a small, core group of friends for thirteen years, we always go around the table and each of us recounts what we are grateful for in the past year. These stories have grown longer and more personal over the years, and Julie and I look forward to this heartwarming ritual of connection.
Baking family birthday cakes together became an important ritual for Nick and Halley and their children. As a toddler, their son developed an allergy to eggs, so they could not buy him a birthday cake at any of the local bakeries. Instead, for every family member’s birthday, Nick and Halley would bake an egg-free cake. Eventually their son outgrew his egg allergy, but the family ritual of home-baked birthday cakes remained. The ritual gave them a chance to come together and celebrate birthdays in a warm, home-based way.
The hallmark of rituals of connection is that they are not haphazard. They are structured, scripted traditions that you can depend on. You know how events will play out and that you will have each other’s attention and connect in a manner you both find meaningful. For example, Julie and I are very proud of a ritual of
connection we call our “annual honeymoon.” Once a week for the past fifteen years we have stayed in the same room at the same bed-and-breakfast in a beautiful area one hundred miles from our home. We bring along our kayak, visit art galleries and artists’ studios, and hike the trails. We spend the week catching up, dreaming together, and, yes, sometimes fighting and clearing the air over any issues we had ignored due to busy-ness. It is always romantic, magical, and special.
Many couples could also benefit from developing rituals around lovemaking and talking about it. People often think that sex should be spontaneous and is best if it isn’t planned. But if you ask couples when sex was best, they usually say it was early in their relationship, during courtship. Back then, romantic dates were planned, thought was devoted to what to wear, what perfume or cologne to use, the music and wine, etc. Returning to those rituals of planning for romance
and sex can heighten the experience for both partners.
To get a sense of how well you create a sense of shared meaning through rituals, answer the following questions. If you find that you don’t see things the same way, consider this discovery an opportunity to create a ritual of connection that will be deeply meaningful to both of you.
Our sense of our place in the world is based to a great extent on the various roles we play—we are spouses, perhaps children and/or parents, and workers of one kind or another. From the standpoint of marriage, our perspective on our own roles and our mate’s can either add to the meaningfulness and harmony between us or create tension.
Your marriage will feel more profound to the degree that your expectations of each other—what you feel your partner’s place in your family ought to be—are similar. We’re not talking here about seemingly superficial issues like who washes the dishes; we’re talking about your deep expectations of yourself and your spouse. For example, both Ian and Hilary believed that a husband should be a protector and provider and the wife more of a nurturer. Chloe and
Evan believed in an egalitarian marriage in which the spouses supported each other emotionally and financially. Because in both of these marriages husband and wife had a similar philosophy about their roles, their marriages worked. Of course, were Ian married to Chloe and Hilary to Evan, there’d be enormous friction.
Having similar views about parenting—for example, the values you consider important to pass on to your children—also adds to a marriage’s meaning. So do questions about the kind of interaction you should now have with your parents and siblings. Do you consider them part of your family or outsiders you keep your distance from? Even your views of what it means to work—and the significance you attach to your own work—can deepen your sense of connection with your spouse. In other words, to the extent that you feel similarly about these issues, your marriage will be strengthened.
None of this means that you should (or, for that matter, could) see eye to eye on every philosophical or spiritual aspect of life. For example, couples who are in the same line of work may draw different meanings from it. Johnny is passionate about being a scientist. His work as a geologist forms a significant part of his identity and colors how he sees the world. He feels personally inspired by the scientific approach with its emphasis on objectivity and analysis, and he takes great pride in being a geologist. If you ask him what he is, he will say he is a geologist first. His wife, Molly, is also a geologist, but she doesn’t identify quite so profoundly with her profession. She sees herself as a woman first, rather than as a scientist. Yet they connect in so many other areas that this difference is not a sticking point.
Part of what makes life meaningful are the goals we strive to achieve. While we all have some very practical ambitions—like earning a certain income—we also have deeper, more spiritual aspirations. For one person, the goal may be to find peace and healing after a tumultuous, abusive childhood. For another, it may be to raise children who are good-hearted and generous. Many times, we don’t talk about our deepest goals. Sometimes, we haven’t even asked ourselves these questions. But when we start, it gives us the opportunity to explore something that can have a profound impact on ourselves and our marriage.
Not only will you increase the intimacy of your marriage by sharing your deepest objectives with your spouse, but to the extent that you work together to achieve shared goals, they can be a path toward making your union even richer. For example, both Emilie and Alex were committed to volunteer work for their church. Once their kids were grown, they decided they wanted to leave a spiritual legacy to their community. So he joined the board of directors of the religious school, and she started an adult education
program at the church for people who wanted to become reacquainted with their faith. “I would have done this on my own,” says Emilie. “But feeling in partnership with Alex about the importance of giving something back to my community and my church has made it an even more rewarding experience. I feel renewed not just in my faith but in my marriage as well.”
Values and beliefs form the final pillar of shared meaning in a marriage. These are philosophical tenets that guide how you wish to conduct your lives. For some people, values are deeply rooted in religious conviction. But couples who are not religious may also have a belief system that determines their perspective on life and informs the choices they make.
Often, a couple’s shared values and beliefs are represented by symbols, which can be actual objects or intangible. Religious icons like a crucifix or mezuzah are obvious symbols of faith a couple may display in their home. They represent values if their meaning is discussed, made personal, and agreed upon. But there are more personalized symbols as well. For Jenna and Spencer, their dining room table held special significance. They had saved up for many years to have it custom made by a local carpenter who was an expert carver. Every time they set it for
family celebrations, its charm and strength spoke to them of the beauty and stability of their own marriage. Another family kept a statuette of a baby angel on the mantel in memory of their first baby, who was stillborn. The angel commemorated the baby but also represented their own resilience and deep love and support for each other, which had gotten them through this tragedy and allowed them to go on to have a large, happy family.
Abstract symbols are no less significant to a marriage. Even a home itself can be of great symbolic meaning to a couple. They may view it not only as the place where they eat and sleep but as the spiritual center of their lives together—the place where they consummate their love, where their children were conceived and grew, and so on. Family stories also tend to be richly symbolic and reflect deeply entrenched values. Helen’s story about her great-grandparents who kept their love alive even when separated by an ocean symbolized the family’s deep sense of loyalty. Every time that story was retold (and almost by definition, family stories do get told over and over again through the years), it was symbolic of the great value they place on loyalty.
In my own home, we have a wall covered with pictures of our
ancestors. The family stories associated with these relatives embody values we share as a couple. For example, there is a picture of my great-grandfather, a kosher butcher who was known for his generosity. Every week he would give away 10 percent of his meat to needy families of all religions, including gypsies. He actually had a spy network that alerted him to which families were hungry, and the meat would then magically appear on their doorstep. I often would tell our daughter that he embodied the kind of caring and giving that we value and aspire to emulate.
Feeling a sense of unity with your spouse on the deepest issues is unlikely to occur overnight. Exploring together is really an ongoing, lifelong process. The goal shouldn’t be to agree on every aspect of what is profoundly meaningful to you, but to have a marriage where you are both open to each other’s most dearly held beliefs. The more you create a marriage where these convictions can be readily divulged, the more joyous will be the life that you share.