COMMITMENTS : Relationships Can’t <i> Always </i> Be Smooth Sailing : Couples: Hitting a rough spot? Two words: Cycles happen. It’s not the end of the road if things aren’t going well--there are keys to handling these crises.
We’re familiar with the idea that all marriages will have their ups and downs. So why does it shock us and shake us so badly when we hit a tough spot?
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We really do lack perspective, in the opinion of therapist Barry Dym, a historian and clinical psychologist in Cambridge, Mass. While couples may see themselves miserably lurching along from one disappointment and problem to another, Dym sees something else: cycles.
“It’s important to know about cycles, partly to anticipate them, partly to be less judgmental and less hard on yourself,” Dym says.
When Dym began his work as a therapist about 25 years ago, he was surprised to see the depth of disillusionment in couples. “Why is marriage so disappointing?” he asked himself. Answer: Because marriage is inherently disappointing. “The issue is not how you can avoid being disappointed but how, after you’ve been disappointed, resolution takes place.”
As years passed, Dym developed his theory of cycles in intimate relationships. He has lectured on it to the American Assn. for Marriage and Family Therapy, among others, and co-wrote “Couples” with Michael Glenn.
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Dym says we tend to think of relationships as moving in one direction, be it good or bad. “People have such an ideology of progress that there’s the sense things will keep getting better if only you try hard enough. There’s very little awareness that effort is not the only issue. No matter how good things are, we cycle into difficult times. And when couples do that, they have no culturally sanctioned way to say, ‘This is OK.’ They become extra critical with each other.”
Dym sees three stages:
* Expansion and promise, the fabulous state of first being in love. It’s “a time of excitement and great promise,” Dym and Glenn write. “Its promises are so compelling that they take on the character of a contract between the partners and become the standards against which the couple will measure all their future experience.”
* Contraction and betrayal soon follow. Both partners’ negative attributes, which were not seen in the first stage, begin to spill out. People begin to act more like themselves again. This stage’s “essential quality is contraction: contraction into ourselves, contraction in the picture of our mate, contraction of the relationship as a whole.”
At this point, there are three options for couples, Dym and Glenn say--breaking up, staying stuck or moving on to resolution and finding ways to work out problems.
* Resolution is “characterized by a new spirit: a feel for accommodation, a capacity for seeing the complexity of things, and a tendency to elevate affection and partnership over romance and passion.” Compromise and negotiation come in at this point.
A relationship will have one of two home bases, Dym says: contraction and betrayal, or resolution. Couples who divorce or seek therapy are almost invariably in the former; the more successful marriages are in the latter.
In marriage, “there are situational and developmental crises--a parent dies, someone loses a job, you have a baby--very stressful, good things as well as bad. They disrupt whatever resolution there was and throw people into another cycle. That should be expected,” Dym says.
What attitude would be useful then?
“To the extent possible, curiosity would be wonderful,” Dym says. Being interested in what’s going to happen helps us handle things better and keep perspective. Failing that, it helps to accept the fact that change brings struggle, and that couples who have resolved things in the past can do so again. Also, “patience--that’s not a modern word. It’s vital.”