This Marriage Can Be Saved if Pair Is Motivated, Experts Say : Relationships: Many troubled unions can be fixed if couples remember a few things, therapists say: Communicate, and agree how to handle conflicts.
Their problems seem overwhelming; the marriage, hopeless. Still, they wish they could make it work.
It’s really quite striking, given how miserable they’ve been, how easily the problems of many such couples can be solved.
That’s the hopeful message from psychology professors and marital therapists Clifford Notarius and Howard Markman, who have made careers of studying what it is that makes marriages work.
Notarius, of the Catholic University of America, and Markman, of the University of Denver, are authors of “We Can Work It Out: Making Sense of Marital Conflict” (Putnam, $21.95).
“Once you figure out what’s gone wrong, it’s not too difficult, if you’re motivated, to fix it,” Markman says. “We try to provide a road map on how to do that.”
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The book is an effort “to convey to people why marriages work, why they don’t work--really give people an understanding of the research.
“It’s kind of nice,” he says, “because what the science is showing” is not that marriages fail because of personality factors, or such things as age differences. “It’s not things that are hard to change that seem to be at the heart of marital problems,” Markman says.
Rather, the critical factors are how well couples communicate, and whether they can agree on ways to handle the conflicts that are inevitable in any intimate relationship.
Markman and Notarius find “six simple truths of marriage”:
* Each relationship contains a reservoir of hope. “We find that most partners retain their wish for relationship improvement even when the going is toughest”--a source of great potential. The problem is that people’s attempts to improve things often have destructive effects.
* One “zinger” will erase 20 acts of kindness. “Our research has shown that it takes one put-down to undo hours of kindness you give to your partner. . . . Intimate partners must learn how to manage their anger and control the exchange of negative behavior.”
* Little changes in you can lead to huge changes in the relationship. “Add to your relationship acts of thoughtful kindness--compliment your partner on how he or she looks, touch your partner’s back when you walk by--and subtract from your relationship acts of thoughtless nastiness--ignoring your partner when you are angry, calling your partner names.
“As you live and breathe this formula, you can rediscover and preserve feelings of love, attraction and satisfaction in your relationship.”
* It’s not the differences between partners that cause problems but how the differences are handled when they arise. “Rather than focusing on areas of agreement and disagreement, partners in happy relationships develop good listening skills . . . (which) involve understanding and acceptance of differences in personality and taste. Having a good listener is having a good friend. In a happy relationship, a partner can count on his or her mate’s being a good friend and never a judge or counselor.”
* Men and women fight using different weapons but suffer similar wounds. For various reasons, men often have a harder time handling conflict, and women have a harder time tolerating emotional distance, Markman and Notarius write. When couples learn to monitor and contain their responses, they learn to work together to achieve the closeness that both partners want.
* Partners need to practice relationship skills to become good at them. “Partners enter into relationships with no agreed-upon rules or skills for handling the strong negative feelings that are an inevitable part of all relationships. Without rules, in the face of conflict, partners often resort to forms of guerrilla warfare with random sniping that can seriously wound their mates. Instead of taking control of conflict, partners let conflict take control of them.”
“We find that many people are motivated to work on their relationship,” Markman says. “They just don’t know exactly what to do.”
