href="#litres_trial_promo">trigger stress hormones that get in the way of oxytocin and endorphins.
We are wired to connect and to need other people. In more than ninety countries surveyed worldwide, more than 90 percent of us are married at least once by the time we’re forty-nine. In the United States, we marry, divorce, and remarry at higher rates than in any other country, but half of American adult women over the age of eighteen are unmarried. Since 2000 that number has risen from 45 million to 56 million. First-time marriages end in divorce four out of ten times. The lowest rate, among upper-middle-class couples with college degrees, is one in three. That’s as good as it gets in America.
The Maslow hierarchy of human needs starts with the basics of food and shelter and then moves onward and upward, through safety and security to love and belonging and self-esteem, finally peaking at self-actualization. And so it’s been with the evolution of marriage, from institutional, where marriage started out as protection from violence, assuring that food and shelter were maintained, to companionate, focusing on love and sex, and finally to the self-expressive marriage. Now more than ever, we’re looking for our partnership to foster personal growth and self-discovery. The quality of a marriage helps to predict personal well-being; marital distress is associated with depression and other psychiatric complaints, while the positive effects of a strong union help to keep us healthy and strengthen over time.
You Complete Me. I Hate You.
We naturally mate with someone whose immunity is different from our own because it expands the repertoire of defenses in our children. Just as with the MHC complex and immune status, what is healthiest for our children comes from a union of two opposites. My kids like knowing that they should go to Dad for certain things and to Mom for others. We each bring opposite talents and skills to the table, and that helps to create not only a stronger, more complete team but also healthy hybrids when we procreate.
In relationships, we often want our partner to be the things that we are not. Certain behaviors in others echo long ago, deeply repressed parts of ourselves. As children, we were molded by our parents’ reactions toward us. We put away bothersome behaviors, suppressed our emotional intensity, and hid our needs in order to make their jobs easier. Down the line, we miss those abandoned facets of who we were. We would love to be reunited with our discarded selves to make an imagined whole. That’s where the magic comes in, when two people come together, igniting a spark that shines light on where those repressed parts have been hidden. You complete me. You’re everything I’m not, and we make something bigger and better than either of us alone could create.
In the early stages of love, words of endearment like sweetie and baby remind us of our very first successful love relationship, as a babe in arms. As in early childhood, our need to be securely attached to someone who loves us and cares for us is being met, and all is well. After the magic comes the power struggle, where annoying tics and habits begin to irk us. The very things that drew us to someone are the ones that now drive us crazy. We realize the person we married or otherwise committed to is nothing like us and needs to change or we’re going to need to be committed. As in mental hospital.
The former answer to our prayers becomes a living nightmare as we struggle to continue to get those early childhood needs of love and attachment fulfilled. We maneuver and manipulate, withdraw and intimidate, cry and criticize, but our partner comes up short in meeting our demands. We alternate between screaming matches and dry accountings on an emotional ledger of tit for tat. You won’t do this for me, so I’m not going to do that for you. Eventually, you both realize you can’t change the other or make the other love you the way that you need. At that point, it’s often time for an affair, or a divorce, or a détente of a sexless marriage (very common in my office population), or, hopefully, couples therapy.
Understanding why this phase happens is a crucial weapon in the armory of trying to make love work. Like magnets flipped around, attraction can turn to repulsion. We are repelled by those who remind us of what we are not. Because we were taught to detest those things that we’d hidden away at our parents’ insistence, we end up rejecting those parts of ourselves. So when someone is really getting on your nerves and you’re incensed by some of their behaviors, turn it around and look at your own. Chances are good there’s projected self-hatred fueling that burning rage.
Something else to keep in mind: we re-create our childhood environment as we project our hurts, insecurities, fears, angers, and anything else from our traumatic pasts onto our partners. If our parents were reliable and warm, we’ll be drawn to that type of relationship in adult life. If they were disengaged, neglectful, inconsistent, or self-involved, that’s the type of person we’ll pick for our mate.
The brain isn’t very good at discerning past from present social pain. Partners often unwittingly trigger each other by re-creating early scenes that were tagged as emotionally salient in the past. No matter how idyllic your childhood was, you had psychological trauma. At some point your needs weren’t met and it left you devastated. Any reminder of an early attachment failure will set off alarm bells in the stress network of the brain and body. The memory centers of the hippocampus will grade how emotional an experience is with help from the amygdala, the fear center. Frontal input gives the final yes or no on what gets expressed. This is why the more mindful and present you are, the less emotionally reactive you’ll be. Mindfulness strengthens that final frontal inhibition, the “don’t do it or you’ll be sorry” part of the brain. Higher cognitive functions are shut down by intense emotions. Cultivating mindfulness can help maintain an emotional balance within you and between you and your partner. Enhancing awareness can help to strengthen the “top-down” control, enhancing rationality and dampening emotional reactivity. Here we have the conscious marriage, using mindfulness to keep your attachment strong.
In yoga, the postures that you hate performing are the ones your body likely needs the most. That’s why they’re the hardest. They reveal your weakest, most inflexible parts. In life, the people whom you find the most challenging inevitably are the ones who have the most to teach you. Unlike codependent couples who enable unhealthy behavior, conscious couples enable positive, healthy aspects of each other’s behavior, and in the process they heal each other’s childhood wounds. The goal is for each of you to stretch toward the middle, widening your shared repertoire of behavior. As opposites, you each have the blueprint for the other’s personal growth. Individuals need to harmonize their own feminine and masculine qualities; so do couples. Balancing the yin and yang qualities that each of you brings to the table will benefit both of you.
To my patient who’s always complaining about her husband, I said something like this: “Stop fixating on how he isn’t like you. Nobody is, and you wouldn’t want to be yoked to your carbon copy anyway. The fact that he’s so many things you’re not, and vice versa, is exactly what makes your partnership work. Opposites attract for a reason. The two of you make something bigger than each of you alone ever could. An effective team.”
Division of Labor: Sex and Power
Interesting news: we’re becoming the men we wanted to marry. The number of women who are their family’s sole or primary breadwinner has soared, to 40 percent today from 11 percent in 1960. Things are switching around from where they were in the fifties,
