We don't go out like we used to, we don't do things with friends. We don't have fun; there's no spark. It's just not the same as it used to be.”
I watched Gina closely as Chris spoke. It seemed she was uncomfortable with what he was saying, but she did not speak. Twice, she turned her head as if in deep thought and looked away from her husband. Finally, curiosity got the better of me and I asked Gina what she was thinking about. She looked a bit embarrassed and explained, “I just remembered that the kids' soccer practice was moved to the weekend.” She turned to Chris, “We're going to have to get my car back from the garage. I'll need it to take the kids tomorrow morning.” Chris didn't miss a beat. He excused himself, whipped out his phone, and dialed the repair shop to make sure they didn't close early on Friday.
Like they said, they were a great team. And I had one helluva difficult counseling case.
It turns out that one of the most challenging periods for couples occurs when children first leave the home. Why is that? On the surface, the empty nest sounds appealing: ample time to socialize, pursue recreational interests, and travel! For couples who have poured themselves into family life, however, the return to couplehood can be difficult. The shared, daily focus on children is now lost. If there is nothing to replace it, suddenly there's no shared focus. Couples who thrive during such a transition are those who define and embrace new lives for themselves. They retain deep family ties, but now within a broader context of personal and joint social, recreational, and career interests. They sustain prior commitments even as they flexibly adopt new ones.
If you were to look closely, you would see that the most successful couples had already begun aspects of their new lives during their mature parenting years. As the children became older and more self-sufficient, the spouses began doing more things together and individually. They were not threatened by the developmental change in the family. Indeed, they anticipated and embraced it. The successful couples planted the seeds for their future.
The same is true of successful businesses. Firms that thrive nurture a pipeline of new products and services while they are committed to making the most of existing offerings. An automobile manufacturer readies the next generation of electric vehicles while still selling traditional gasoline-powered and hybrid units. A pharmaceutical firm knows that best-selling drugs will eventually go off-patent and conducts the research to find the next blockbusters. A baseball club scouts new talent at the same time it does all it can to maximize its current lineup.
We can only master the future if we embrace the fact that the present is temporary. To paraphrase Ayn Rand, successful people and organizations fight for the future by living in it today. For them, change poses a stimulating challenge, not an onerous ego threat. They pour themselves into their commitments even as they flexibly build fresh ones. That is because they create bridges from the old commitments to the new ones. The parents' devotion to their children becomes a new devotion to adult children – and, eventually, to their families. A company's commitment to automotive excellence remains firm, even as the product line changes from gas-powered engines to hybrid and electric ones. Most people won't abandon a commitment to a cherished A in order to pursue a promising but uncertain B. Create a bridge between A and B, however, and suddenly what felt like discontinuous change is now a natural transition.
Bridges are the key to flexible commitment. Unfortunately, there were no bridges in Chris and Gina's marriage.
One of my favorite counseling exercises is to ask people to draw sine waves on a piece of paper, with about a dozen peaks and valleys. I then ask them to list their most positive life experiences at the peaks and their most difficult life experiences at the troughs. The sine waves run from childhood through early adulthood and the present. In a single view, the chart captures the peak and valley experiences of a person's life.
The reason the sine chart is so useful is that people, like markets, are patterned. No one life experience perfectly repeats another, just as no one market precisely replicates past ones. Still there are striking similarities: History, while not repeating, does indeed rhyme. Our lives, no less than any well-crafted novels or symphonies, express themes and motifs.
In the case of couples, we typically have multiple sine charts – and multiple themes. Each partner brings personal themes to a relationship, even as the relationship weaves fresh themes through the lives of the partners. A worthwhile exercise is to ask each member of the couple to fill out a sine chart for the marriage, identifying the high points and low points of the relationship. A comparison of the charts becomes quite instructive: It's possible to see, first hand, the degree to which the couple is on the same wavelength. Each fills out the chart without consulting the other…then we compare charts.
Of course, good psychologists not only listen for what is said, but also for how it's expressed. You can learn a great deal simply by watching people and observing their postures, facial expressions, gestures, and behaviors. One of my clinical supervisors in graduate school used to ask students to watch a videotaped therapy session with the sound turned off. We then had to describe, as the tape played, what was happening in the session. I was skeptical at first – until the supervisor recounted the essence of one of my taped sessions without listening to a single word!
In the case of the sine charts, I watch to see how a person creates the chart. Some people immediately fill out the peaks, others start with valleys. Often, people will spend particularly long periods of time filling out particular periods in their lives – and skip over others. If someone agonizes over identifying a particular peak or valley, there's usually a reason why. An informative variation of the exercise allows each person to vary the frequency and amplitude of the sine waves. It speaks volumes when people draw huge peaks and valleys at certain life junctures, or when they draw multiple peaks or valleys in succession. My own chart drew relatively modest peaks and valleys in childhood; more pronounced ones in college and graduate school; and then a pronounced valley in the early 1980s and an equally significant peak in the mid-1980s; with a return to more moderate peaks and valleys thereafter. No Rorschach test could capture my personality as well as the charting of life-event volatility and direction. Those life-event charts, it turns out, are not so different from market charts.
Watching Gina and Chris fill out the charts told me a great deal about their relationship. Both readily identified peaks and significant valleys in their childhood years, and both identified their courtship and marriage as a significant peak, followed by the big peaks of having children. There were career and health-related ups and downs along the way, but overall their charts were not so different from mine: discrete periods of volatility caused by relationship and career uncertainty followed by the stability of meaningful commitments in both spheres. For them, as for me, crisis led to opportunity: Sometimes we don't bounce higher until we hit bottom.
That, however, was where the similarities ended. After the peaks of having children, Chris and Gina stared at their charts. And they stared. They drew small peaks corresponding to family vacations, job successes, and the accomplishments of their children and small valleys corresponding to financial and job stresses. That was it. What were supposed to be charts of the marriage were anything but. Why? Neither Gina nor Chris could identify any peaks or valleys specific to their recent married lives. They were great as a team, and they did a very efficient job of figuring out when to pick up their car in order to get their kids to the next practice – but that was it. The absence of peaks and valleys had created stability in their lives, and that stability was killing their marriage.
Over years of encouraging people to draw the sine-wave charts of their lives, one observation has stood out: peaks and valleys tend to be relatively proportional to one another. Like markets, people go through high- and low-volatility periods – and it's often the high-volatility periods that precede the greatest long-term opportunities. Consider the life histories
