Happy Marriages, Do They Exist? Part 2

The Good Marriage: How and Why Love Lasts
by Judith S. Wallerstein, Sandra Blakeslee

(Page 2 of 3)

An acquaintance of mine-a highly regarded psychologist who has done extensive marriage counseling-called me when she became engaged. She said, “I want to spend several hours with you, drawing on your experience. My fiancé is several years older than I am and has been through one divorce. He's afraid of another failure. I'm thirty-eight years old and have for many years been frightened of marriage. What wisdom do you have for me based on your own marriage, which has always looked so ideal to me, and also based on your many years of work with divorce? Help me anticipate what lies ahead for Jim and me, so I can be prepared.” Her request intrigued me. What wisdom did she seek? She did not want shortcuts or hints but a realistic vision that could guide their efforts in building a successful marriage.

Not long after her call I decided to design a qualitative study of fifty couples who had built lasting, happy marriages, couples who had confronted the same obstacles, crises, and temptations as everyone else and had overcome them. As I began setting up the study, I drew up a list of questions that would guide my inquiry. Are the people in good marriages different from the men and women whose marriages fall apart? Are there common ideas, ways of dealing with the inevitable crises? What can we learn about selecting a partner, about sex, the stresses of the workplace, infidelity, the arrival of a baby or of adolescence, coping with midlife, aging, and retirement? What is happy in a marriage when people are in their twenties, thirties, forties, or fifties, or when they reach retirement? What are the central themes at each life stage? What makes men happy? What makes women happy? What does each spouse value in one another? What do they regard as the glue of the marriage?

From the beginning I was aware of the limitations of this kind of research, including the risk that it would attract vulnerable couples seeking a stamp of approval on their marriage, as well as the risks of selection bias, reliance on volunteers, and the small size of the sample. But I felt that these limitations were far outweighed by the potential understanding to be gained from exploring subjectively defined happiness in marriage. I planned to interview all of the individuals separately and each couple together over a two-year period.

Although fifty couples may seem too small a number from which to make sweeping conclusions about marriage, my conclusions are not meant to explain all there is to know about this subject. My intentions are much more modest. I have looked for commonalities as well as individual differences, hoping to find patterns on which to build general hypotheses. To me this is a fertile method of inquiry, but I should emphasize that I regard this as a pilot study. Further investigation would include more subjects and greater ethnic, geographic, and economic diversity, as well as homosexual couples.

The couples I studied, all of whom lived in northern California, were predominantly white, middle-class, and well educated. They do not represent the entire country and were not selected as typical. In a Country as heterogeneous as ours, finding “typical” couples has limited value; the payoff comes from understanding different subgroups within the whole. The fifty couples represent a “first cut” within a particular socioeconomic group-but a group that is influential in setting social and cultural trends for the nation. Californians, who make up a sixth of the country's population, are more likely than other Americans to be distant from their families of origin and regions of birth-circumstances that are increasingly the norm in our highly mobile society.

The sample divided almost evenly among people who had married in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. This provided a panoramic look at the changes that have overtaken marriage in the last four decades: the sexual revolution, the women's movement, the rise of dual-career couples.

I recruited the fifty couples by casting a wide net into the community, starting with the group of women who had heard my earliest thoughts on the study. For a while, whenever I spoke to professional groups, schools, social clubs, or other organizations, I requested as my fee the names of couples willing to participate in the marriage project. I found others with the help of my graduate students in the Department of Social Welfare at the University of California at Berkeley. These couples were younger and less affluent than the others in the study, and they had young children.

My criteria were straightforward. Both husband and wife had to consider their marriage a happy one. They had to have been married at least nine years, because the number of divorces peaks in the early years, and I wanted my subjects to be past that danger point. The shortest marriage studied was ten years, the longest forty years. The participants had to agree to lengthy interviews. I asked to see each spouse separately and then together in interviews that often lasted up to three hours each. Most people were interviewed at home, and a few at their place of work. I wanted to observe them in the surroundings they had created.

Although I had hoped to study only first marriages, it soon became clear that that was too limiting, so I included second marriages with children. The couple had to have produced children by the marriage, except in remarriages in which each partner brought at least one child from a previous marriage. I included children because all of my professional work has focused on families and because married couples without children either by choice or incapacity are psychologically and socially very different from those with children over the course of their lives. In some cases I met the children, and in a few instances I interviewed or played with them.

All of the participants understood that the questions and answers were on the record, that I could use all dialogue and family histories in this book, but that I would fully disguise their identities-not simply their names but their occupations and aspects of their surroundings No one was paid; their only reward was in helping other people learn about good marriages. I was pleased at how open these people were-at how completely they trusted me. Because I promised full confidentiality, I was often privy to information that even the person's spouse did not have.

One very important goal of the study was to find out what people in these marriages meant by “happy.” To what did they attribute their happiness? Were they happy from the start, and if not, what made the difference? I've always believed firmly that in a great many areas of life, especially in the realm of human relationships, ordinary people know a lot more than the experts. One of the major mistakes of my field is that we don't learn from people's expertise: we ask questions, but we don't listen to their wisdom.

Many years of working with divorcing couples have taught me how little one can tell about a marriage from the outside. Consider how surprised everyone is when the picture-book couple next door files for divorce. The interior does not match the facade. “Our family represents to some people a Camelot, when they view it from the outside,” one woman told me. “Even those who know us don't see the nitty-gritty that every marriage goes through. But he and I know it. And our children do, now that they're grown.” The problem, then, is how to gain entry into the inner sanctum of a marriage and not be misled by the front door.

I began each interview by asking “Tell me what's good about this marriage.” My second question was “What's disappointing about your marriage?” This opening allowed each person to start wherever she or he was comfortable. More important, it gave my subjects no clues about what I might want to hear, and it anchored the discussion to the reality that all relationships are a mixture of good and less good elements.

I asked many questions about each person's parents, siblings, and other significant figures and about the major events of early life. I was interested in their view of the parents' marriage and their own relationship with each parent. I asked about experiences in adolescence and young adult life, including early sexual relationships, the steps that led to the marriage, and any misgivings they had had. I tried to elicit a full history of all domains of the marriage, including conflict, sex, extramarital relationships, household routines, work experience, friends, extended family, crises, including deaths, and, of course, the children. My intent was to understand their life experience prior to the marriage, the factors that had brought them together, and the changes that had occurred during the marriage. I was also interested in fantasies, roads not taken, and wishes that remained unfulfilled. Finally, I wanted to know their perspective on their past and any advice they had for others.

These couples spoke of their love for and friendship with each other and of the pleasures and frustrations of parenting. They talked about sex and passion, commitment and shared values. They described stormy conflicts and long-standing differences. They recounted their childhood histories and the relationships in their original families. They talked about their first reactions to each other and to each other's family and about their decision to marry. They made it clear that they were not happy all the time. Many admitted that at times they wanted out. Some confessed that on occasion they felt they had made a mistake. But each person felt strongly that on balance their marriage had a goodness of fit in needs, wishes, and expectations. Although everyone was reluctant to define love, they spoke movingly, often Iyrically, about how much they valued, respected, and enjoyed the other person and how appreciative they were of the other's responsiveness to their needs.

They stressed different aspects of the relationship. Some said that their marriage had given them a sense of continuity and of hope for the future. One thirty-eight-year-old man said, “We share a vision about how our lives will unfold-like when we're seventy, our kids will be good and responsible people who care about the world and other people.”

Others emphasized the security that marriage afforded. One woman said, “I feel safer in this marriage than I have ever felt in any other place in my life.” Another said, “I knew we would go through forty years of ups and downs, but it would be absolutely inconceivable to me that we wouldn't make it to the end of our lives. And I think that he feels that way too. It gives you this incredible feeling of safety and comfort, so that you don't have to ask those wrenching questions over and over again. And I know that is at the core of our sense of security in an insecure world.”

Happy marriages are not carefree. There are good times and bad times, and certainly partners may face serious crises together or separately. Happily married husbands and wives get depressed, fight, lose jobs, struggle with the demands of the workplace and the crises of infants and teenagers, and confront sexual problems. They cry and yell and get frustrated. They come from sad, abusive, neglectful backgrounds as well as from more stable families; all marriages are haunted by ghosts from the past.

Every good marriage must adapt to developmental changes in each partner, bending and yielding to the redefinitions that all men and women go through. It must expand to accommodate children, close ranks when the children leave home, and metamorphose at retirement. But somehow, for reasons that are critically important and that I explore here, these people have stayed married despite the Sturm und Drang of modern life. They feel, and say with conviction, that the marriage will last. After ten, twenty, thirty, or more years of being together, they regard the marriage with contentment and feel confident about its survival.

By observing these couples, I learned how much marriage has changed over the past decades. The changes are reflected in the different expectations and experiences of the men and women who married in each of the decades from the fifties to the early eighties. A particularly striking change is in the sexual experiences of women prior to marriage and in the woman's role within the marriage. All of the women who married in the fifties were either virgins or pregnant at the wedding, whereas none of those who married during the early eighties were virgins. Some had had sexual experiences with many lovers, beginning when they were fifteen. The rise of dual-career families and the increased anxiety about divorce are also seen in the experiences of these couples.

Marriage is an ever-changing relationship, and it must be examined at several points along the way. A snapshot cannot substitute for a portrait of a marriage over time. Two years after the first interview with each couple, I contacted them again, and everyone agreed to a second interview In that short time, a period of economic recession, all kinds of changes had occurred. People were really worried about making ends meet. Some middle-aged husbands had lost jobs that they could never hope to match. One man got the job he'd wanted his whole life and had moved his family to London.

The shock waves of adolescence had rocked many families. Some children won prizes; one boy was expelled from school for smoking marijuana. In one family the child of a former marriage turned up without warning. There had been unexpected promotions, accidents (including one head-on collision on the Golden Gate Bridge in which three family members were seriously hurt), and life-threatening illnesses. Several grandparents had died. In short, a lot of life had happened. But no couple had divorced.

Copyright © 1995 by Judith S. Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee.