Lucky in love? - what contributes to a lasting marriage

When two people destined to spend a lifetime together meet, bow do they know they have found the one? It's easy enough to understand that you are falling in love, that you want to be with a person night and day. But how do you project these feelings into the future and say to yourself This is the person I want to wake up beside when I am 60--and be right? Psychologists and sociologists alike have been trying to answer this question for many years now. In the field of research known as "marital-adjustment studies," certain factors predicting future happiness have emerged. One of the classic texts on the subject, Ernest W. Burgess and Paul Wallin's Engagement and Marriage, published in 1953, reported that couples who were destined for happiness were:

With certain crucial exceptions, most of Burgess and Wallin's observations hold true of happy couples today. But with divorce rates at 50 percent, many young couples in the 1990's are less confident that their marriages will last than their 1950's counterparts.

It's possible to predict a couple's chances for a happy marriage because there are qualities that couples who become happily married share. It takes more than luck to make a loving, lasting union. If you and your loved one share the following principles, chances are you're off to a good start.

IF YOUR FRIENDS AND FAMILY DO NOT THINK YOU ARE MAKING THE RIGHT CHOICE, LISTEN.

But listen only to friends and family members who clearly have your best interests at heart. While rare, a few happy couples may marry against the wishes of their families.

Sonya Johnson married her husband, Michael, over the strong objections of her mother, a chronically depressed widow who was loath to lose either of her two daughters to marriage.

"I was supposed to be my mom's mom," Sonya says. "My mother told me no one could ever love me as much as she did. She hates Michael to this day." Sonya escaped into a good marriage, but her sister, who never married, still lives with their mother. Sonya was right to reject her mother's advice.

How do true friends and loving family members make their predictions? in the first place, most of us, whether we are aware of it or not, carry a checklist very similar to Burgess and Wallin's in our heads. Parents and friends invariably consider such issues as the similarity of a couple's economic and educational standing, as well as of family background. Though it goes against the grain of our democratic beliefs, couples do fare better when there is not a great disparity in terms of their financial backgrounds. This principle is far from an absolute, but it holds true so often that families are justified in applying it.

Friends and family also pay attention to how a couple feel together. Lovers who are destined to form lasting relationships typically seem at home with each other from the start--and this sense of a proper "fit" communicates itself to those around them. From the outside (and from the inside as well), the members of a newly forming happy couple go together the way different colors or textures can go together: They look good next to each other.

WHEN THEY MEET, HAPPY COUPLES FEEL IMMEDIATELY AT HOME WITH EACH OTHER.

This is not to say that happy couples never argue or fall upon hard times. The point is not that people who are destined to be happy together do not experience conflict, but rather that whatever conflict they experience is accompanied by a profound and striking rapport. They feel good together at once, contradicting the notion that "mature" love develops slowly over time as a couple get to know each other. These couples frequently feel right together before they know much about each other at all. Sometimes this sense of fit is sexual; sometimes it is emotional; frequently it is both. However it happens for a particular couple and for whatever reasons--a strong physical or emotional attraction, shared moral, religious or political values--they feel a sweeping sense of connection.

In short, love at first sight is a real phenomenon, but happy couples have more to go on than sight alone. It is more a case of love at first exchange.

Of course, when it comes to choosing the right person, half of the game is won in not choosing the wrong one. And here we arrive at our first cautionary principle.

WHEN IT COMES TO FALLING IN LOVE, DO NOT DISMISS YOUR FIRST IMPRESSIONS.

In other words, trust yourself. Far too often single people try to rationalize away the small negative moments that happen during that first meeting with the wrong person. Friends and family often help them along in this, continually urging their unmarried friends to give a new date the benefit of a doubt, not to be so critical, not to make up his or her mind so fast. it is a basic truth of single life that friends and family, wanting to see you happily settled at last, are invariably eager to make compromises on your behalf--compromises they might never make themselves.

But while loved ones mean well, the evidence from happy couples indicates that this advice is not in most people's best interests. While continuing to see someone with whom we do not immediately hit it off might indeed result in a marriage, most likely it will not result in a loving, lasting marriage. It is more about "settling" than finding a soul mate.

And while in theory settling may sound like a nice, cozy thing to do, in practice it may be even more difficult to settle than to hold out for what we truly want. To begin with, no one wants to be settled for: When we enter a relationship with the attitude that we are settling, most lovers are going to withdraw--and rightfully so. Worse yet, the person being settled for may exact a steep price once the marriage has taken place. People want to feel loved wholeheartedly, and when they do not, they retaliate.

Not surprisingly, men and women who actually do marry partners they "like" but do not "love" often find their marriages to be very rough sledding indeed. Such alliances are difficult to maintain because the same things that prevented the two from falling in love in the first place now begin to wear seriously upon the relationship as the months and years go by. Love and marriage may be one of the few life situations in which the "bird in the hand" maxim only tenuously applies.

When a man and a woman who are destined to have a happy marriage meet, they feel right together almost at once. They experience no dark undertones. Meeting a person you can be happy with for 50 years has nothing of the furtive or the suspicious about it; it is an experience flooded with daylight.

When Jackie and Jamal initiated their enduring alliance with a debate, despite the fact that they were spending their first meal together arguing, there was no dark moment, no shadow clouding the proceedings. Jackie felt entirely "comfortable" with Jamal--not comfortable in the asexual, companionable mode many experts describe as the "mature" way of mating, but comfortable in the sense of feeling free. Sitting there at dinner with Jamal, whom she had met for the first time only minutes before, Jackie felt perfectly at ease arguing her point of view--and listening to his.

The essential difference between an initiating conflict that foretells a happy marriage and one that foretells years of wearing, habitual conflict is that the first is most adamantly not throwing down the gauntlet.

AS THEY BEGIN THEIR RELATIONSHIP, NEITHER MEMBER OF A HAPPY COUPLE IS TRYING TO WIN.

This is precisely what goes wrong with new couples who are destined to be unhappy together: Early on in their relationships they issue each other a challenge. Knowingly or not, they set up a contest, a struggle for dominance. Jamal was all too familiar with the first-date-as-combat: "I had been separated from my first wife for about two years when I met Jackie, and during that time I had gone out a lot. I remember one date in particular, with a marketing executive who was highly intelligent. We argued all through dinner, but in that case it was a real joust; it was contentious. Rather than helping us make a connection--the way it did with Jackie and me--the arguing just showed how incompatible we were."

That is the key distinction: When an initiating argument produces a sense of competition rather than connection, trouble lies ahead.

As is apparent in the case of Jackie and Jamal, whether a new couple will be drawn together by their "difference" or pulled apart depends largely upon the extent to which each identifies with the other. In short, while opposites may attract, they do not wear well over time. It is a truism in the annals of marriage and family therapy that people are drawn to their opposites, then end up despising each other for being opposite; in time they grow to resent the very qualities that attracted them in the first place.

In her illuminating book Intimate Partners, author Maggie Scarf explains why. Diametrically opposed couples fare badly because of a phenomenon psychologists term "projective identification." When two ill-fated opposites meet and connect, each partner is projecting some unwanted part of himself onto the other in order to disavow that quality--to disclaim it, to convince himself that it is not part of his own makeup. A woman who is uncomfortable feeling angry might be drawn to openly angry men; she can then tell herself that she is not. He "carries her anger." Or a man who is uncomfortable acting aggressively in the world might choose a highly aggressive woman. She then carries his aggression. in both cases trouble follows.

Trouble ensues because when we dislike a quality in ourselves, eventually we begin to dislike it in our partners--even if we may have admired it at first. Take the common case of the distant, emotionally controlled man married to the clinging, overwrought woman. In this alliance, each person is relying upon the other to "carry" that part of himself he or she rejects. The distant man suppresses emotional vulnerability in himself and sees this quality as entirely a characteristic of his wife. The wife suppresses her own ambitious, "masculine" qualities, projecting these onto her husband. Inevitably she begins to resent his calm just as he begins to resent her emotionality.

These two initially passionate lovers make their pact--caretaking husband to vulnerable wife--and then they seek to live with it. But by the very nature of a projective identification, they cannot. He reaches a point at which her emotional needs grow to be profoundly draining; she comes to experience his calm reserve as abandonment. Stymied, the two polarize and become even more radically opposite, more decisively opposed. As he withdraws, he becomes ever more reserved and bloodless; as she reacts to his withdrawal, she becomes ever more hysterical and desperate.

POLAR OPPOSITES ARE NOT LIKELY TO REMAIN HAPPY TOGETHER FOR LONG.

Like unhappy opposites, the happy couple may also see themselves as opposites, but with a difference. Happy couples do not feel themselves to be opposite in any way that really matters. One wife offered an interesting and in many cases accurate explanation of the way marriage works best: "Happy marriages," she told me, "come from two people who are opposite in personality but identical in background." While she herself was a lifelong pessimist married to an incurable optimist, because she and her husband were identical in ethnic and religious background, they rarely disagreed. They agreed on values; they differed in emotional makeup. And neither was engaging in projective identification; neither was projecting a quality he did not like in himself onto his partner.

HAPPY COUPLES OFTEN EXPERIENCE THEMSELVES AS BEING THE SAME AND DIFFERENT.

The delicate balance between sameness and difference allows a happy couple to realize that elusive combination of friendship (based on sameness) and passion (based on difference) that creates and sustains the good marriage. In many happy marriages couples manage to be friends and lovers at once, an impressive achievement given that the conditions for friendship are often diametrically opposed to the conditions that promote desire.

Many long-married couples will tell you that it is difficult to be passionate lovers when partners are as alike as two peas in a pod. Screenwriters and novelists know this instinctively; the "chemistry" between on-screen lovers is almost always generated by creating fictional characters who are dramatically opposite in important respects.

In many ways Michael and Sonya Johnson embody this dilemma. in their early 40s now, they have always been very much alike in personality as well as values: Both have long tended to avoid conflict and each was the classic "good" child growing up; both were now becoming a bit more assertive, and so on. To an outsider they are very similar in tone and manner--so much so that they could be brother and sister.

But unfortunately the problem with all this sameness is that it is not very sexy. It is not that the two are not happy together; they are. Theirs is an excellent marriage. it is simply that when two people are so alike that they could be siblings, the possibilities for unbridled passion diminish. "If we wanted excitement," Michael concludes humorously, "we shouldn't have married each other."

If too much sameness dampens desire, by the same token it is difficult for two people to be friends when they are diametrically opposed in every respect. Constant conflict makes friendship between spouses impossible. Happy marriages need both sameness and difference. Many happy couples have both.

The truth is that most of us do not yearn for a total absence of conflict in our attachments. Some time ago a friend told me a story that perfectly captured the delicate balance between opposition and connection in a happy marriage. He had just come from the second wedding of a college friend. It was a marriage of which his friend's mother did not approve. The first wife, the mother confided to my friend, had been perfectly compatible with her son; they had always gotten along, she lamented. But this new daughter-in-law, she said, was a far more difficult person and she could not for the life of her comprehend why her son would prefer this prickly second wife to the first. "I don't know," the mother said with a sigh. "I guess this time around he wants someone he can fight with."

Finding someone we can fight with is hardly a recipe for success in marriage, but this story still tells us something about the nature of life and love. People, most people, need something more than comfort and reliability from their life's mate; we need stability, yes, but we also need excitement and stimulation--we need a sense of possibility. When we marry, we need to feel that the future is ours.

* Similar in family background.

* Blessed with happy childhoods.

* Blessed with parents who were themselves happily married.

* Between 22 and 30 years of age at marriage.

* Associated with each other, whether romantically or as friends, for a significant period of time before marriage.

* Socially active with friends of both sexs.

* Well educated.

* Securely and stably employed. (Interestingly, stability of employment was more important than the actual amount of money a married couple had to live on. More than one study found that the happiest marriages were those in which family income was only moderate.)

* Similar in perception of intelligence. In other words, married couples did not have to be equally intelligent to be happy; they just had to think they were. It was especially important for the man not to see himself as smarter than his wife, even if he was!

* Perceived as "most likely to succeed" by friends and family.

* United in confidence about their future together.

* United in a strong desire to have children.

COPYRIGHT 1992 Essence Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group