A Key to Happiness? : Long-Term Marriage Alive and Well, Author Reports

Marriage is an institution, but who wants to live in an institution?

--Groucho Marx

People who are truly happy in their marriages don’t broadcast the fact. They don’t have to. They’re onto one of life’s best-kept secrets. The best, most satisfying, most liberating and most exciting state in which to live one’s life is in a happy long-term marriage. At least, so says Nina Fields, a psychotherapist and author of a new book, “The Well Seasoned Marriage” (Gardner Press).

Precisely because happy couples don’t talk about their marriages, a vacuum is created, Fields said, which gets quickly filled by everyone else’s idea of marriages that last--that they’re stultifying, predictable, bland, enduring only because the people in them are too lazy, too scared or too economically dependent to do anything about it.

Subject of Thesis

Fields, whose practice in Encino is often concentrated on those whose marriages are failing, decided to examine the long-term marriage, to see if and how it works and if it deserves its dubious reputation.

Married 35 years to a San Fernando Valley pediatrician and with three grown children, she began her exploration of marriages of 18 to 30 years as a Ph.D. thesis in 1979, studying 300 couples in the Valley.

“When I began the study,” said Fields, who married at 20 and never regretted it, “my colleagues questioned whether there were enough good long-term marriages for the subject to be relevant. I knew a lot of people who were having such a good time in their marriages, but my associates just thought I had a very peculiar social circle.”

Her initial study, however, showed her that more than three-quarters of the couples she studied were indeed in mutually satisfying relationships that had weathered crises and storms and had survived not only intact but stronger and more enjoyable.

“These people’s lives debunked all the myths about long marriages. (For example) that they were no longer interested in each other sexually. In fact both partners reported that sex was better as the marriage progressed than it had been early in the marriage. (Or) that in order to remain married for years one must somehow idealize one’s spouse, ignoring faults, creating a fantasy creature. In fact each of the partners had a thorough knowledge of the other and a pretty accurate picture of themselves as well.”

The public perception of long marriages, Fields said, is that the pair become indistinguishable from each other, so interdependent that they can only function as a twosome. In fact the study showed that people in long-term marriages today tend to be extremely independent--whole people with lives and interests of their own. While both felt the death of their spouse would be devastating, they would, they felt sure, eventually recover from the loss and continue to lead a full life.

Long-term marriage partners, Fields found, share real intimacy.”Traditionally, women are more seeking of intimacy than men,” she said, “but these couples prove that quality can be learned by men too. Real intimacy is one of the perks of well-seasoned marriages.”

So is trust, which Fields rates as one of the fundamentals of the marriage that lasts.

If you don’t have such a marriage, can you get it? Fields said she wrote her book to show that with work and a genuine willingness to try, such marriages are not only possible but infinitely desirable in our society where AIDS and herpes and other proliferating social diseases make a permanent commitment to one person almost mandatory.

Second Chance

Fields points out if you didn’t manage a long-term marriage the first time, there’s always a second chance.

“My own mother,” she explained, “was divorced at a time when no one divorced. Her second marriage was long and happy.”

The well-seasoned marriage today, Fields said, has weathered one of the major social upheavals of our time, the Women’s Movement, which she thinks had a good and bad effect on the institution.

“It tended to make some women combative in a negative way and made them regard men with hostility. In many ways, however, it was healthy. It gave women a license to become effective whole persons--it enhanced their imaginations to think of themselves in ways they never thought of.”

Some women, Fields said, left homes and marriages when they felt themselves independent for the first time, “But,” she said, “if the Movement broke up the marriage, it wasn’t much of a marriage in the first place.”

One of the things that surprised her in her investigations, Fields said, was that even in very traditional marriages where the man has been dominant since the beginning, the relationship tended to become more equal as the years went on.

“The quality changed subtly. The man began to enjoy his wife’s equality. They learned to listen to each other.”

Parents’ Influence

The influence of the partners’ parents’ lives, both positive and negative, is one of the strongest forces influencing marriages, Fields said, and the hardest to overcome.

“Long after they have died,” she wrote, “strong parents with a heavy influence over their offspring can assume the form of an internal voice inhabiting a prominent position inside their childrens’ heads and participating in--often interfering in--their daily lives and decisions.”

The well-seasoned couple has learned to separate from parental influence and evolve a personal style of relating to each other, preferably without breaking the bonds that exist with their families and without running up against loyalty conflicts between spouse and parent.

If all this sounds like hard work, more people in our society are willing to make the effort, Fields said. She sees a return of interest in our society in good marriages and what makes them possible.

“I think people have ridden the crest of the wave of self-seeking and doing your own thing,” she said. “We’re seeing the reaction--a harking back to the familiar and the comfortable.

“Even television is now willing to portray a good marriage. ‘The Cosby Show,’ for example, speaks of the values of a good relationship, and people are responding to it because they want to know those things again.”