Foundational process for an enduring, healthy marriage
Duncan, S. F., & Zasukha McCarty, S. S. (2012). Foundational process for an enduring healthy marriage (p. 27-37).
“Don’t discard your spouse like a paper plate”
Husband and wife have responsibilities, they need to love and care for each other.
Communication processes, how conflict is managed, and how problems are addressed, relate to the needs each spouse has. But most importantly there needs to be commitment (Duncan, 2012).
- All types of commitment are important, just like epoxy glue: Mixing the two components gives married couples a super strong bond. Research shows that personally dedicated couples show a greater priority for the relationship, feel greater satisfaction with giving, and are less likely to seek greener marital pastures. (Stanley, 2005).
- Learn to resolve differences in a more healthier way, with active listening instead of impatient listening, and moderating unrealistic expectations by spending an evening alone together each week. Each spouse needs to cleave to the other. Cleaving = unity
- Be personally dedicated to improving your marriage. Emphasize virtues that benefit both of you such as: being more tolerant and accepting of imperfections, being fair, or being more patient, courteous, kind, and generous. (Hales, 1996, p. 65).
- The more a couple can agree about the fundamentals in life, the richer more meaningful and in a sense, easier your marriage is likely to be. (Gottman & Silver, 1999, p. 245).
2. Love and friendship - What can married couples do?
- Get in synch with your partners love preferences. Find out how your partner likes to receive love and then do those things often.
- Build a love map (Gottman and Silver, 1999): a love map is like a mental (or physical) notebook where we collect personal information about our spouse that we want to remember. This can include the spouse’s dreams, joys, fears, likes, dislikes, frustrations, and worries. The map helps to identify different “points” about our spouse so we know how to love him or her better. EXAMPLE: if you know your spouse’s favorite food is lasagna, you would prepare that meal during an evening together.
- Engage in “Caring Days” - Therapist Richard Stuart (1980) recommends this to married couples. Couples will need to identify sets of loving actions that they would like to receive from their partner. These need to be specific like: tell me you love me at least once a day. Positive and yet small enough to be done on a daily basis, (call me at work during lunch, just to see how I’m doing) and not related to any recent conflict. Research shows that couples engaging in Caring Days significantly enhanced their marital satisfaction. This approach encourages couples to talk openly about how they like to receive love and then agree to do those things often.
- Talk as friends
- Too often couples are only focusing on talking all about the business of life: the job, the kids, and the problems. Of course these need to be handled but it is also important to make time to simply talk as friends first. These discussions were the ones that drew you into one another in the first place! Set aside a day each week to have “friend time” and protect it from issues and conflict.
- Look at your spouse while they talk, give full attention.
- Avoid giving unsolicited advice
- Communicate understanding on occasion
- Take your spouse’s side
- Avoid interrupting or rebutting
- Express affection
- Validate emotions
- Respond to bids for connection
- Our best efforts to connect in marriage can jeopardized as a result of the failure to respond to another’s bids, also called the Fundamental unit of emotional communication (Gottman 2001). A bid can be a question, a look, a gesture, or a touch - any single expression that says “I want to feel connected to you.”
- Set goals for couple interaction
- Couples can turn toward each other in many ways every day (Gottman & Silver, 1999).
- Respond to bids for attention, affection, humor, or support. If a spouse had a rotten day, a hug and an invitation to talk more about it is sufficient for responding.
- Make an effort to do everyday activities together, like reading the mail or making the bed.
- Have a stress-reducing conversation at the end of the day. This involves reuniting at the end of a busy day to see how things went, and listening to and validating one another.
- Do something special every day to communicate affection and appreciation.
- Keep track of how well you are connecting as a couple emotionally with each other, and make enhancements often to stay connected. (You can even keep track with a journal).
3. Positive Interaction
- Positive emotions toward one’s spouse are vital to a healthy marriage. Negative emotions that occur frequently can threaten a marriage. A positive interaction would be a loving greeting to one another after returning home from work. Couples doing well show at least five times more positives than negatives and far fewer negatives than couples headed toward divorce. The important finding is that the ratio of positive to negative interaction influences marital outcomes, and that the better the ratio of positivity to negativity, the better the marriage.
- To enhance positive interaction in marriage, focus on your spouse’s positive qualities. If spouse’s decide that negativity is their dwelling place, they can become experts at identifying negative traits and minimizing or ignoring the positive ones.
- Couples can focus on positive qualities by making and sharing lists of the things they admire and appreciate about each other.
- These can be things like personal traits (intelligent, witty, funny) talents like (a good listener) something you especially like about him or her (love the way they laugh) or even a feature of your relationship that you like (like how we you finish each other’s thoughts) or something positive your spouse has done for you.
- From this list choose two or three qualities and rehearse them silently in your mind. Put them on an index card and in places where you can see them and think about them (they need to be visible places you see often). Do this daily for up to two weeks. Rotate different qualities from the list and repeat the activity. This way couples can override the temptation to be negative toward one another. Couples who nurture their fondness and admiration for one another in this way are better able to accept each other’s flaws and weaknesses and prevent them from threatening their relationship (Gottman & Silver, 1999).
4. Accepting Influence from one’s spouse
- In marriage the process of sharing the decision-making power with one’s spouse is referred to as accepting influence.This means counseling with and listening to one’s spouse, respecting and considering his or her opinions as valid as one’s own, and compromising when making decisions together (Gottman 1998).
- Share influence in all family affairs. The recipe for a happy healthy marriage is for both partners to share equal ownership and influence in all family affairs (Gottman, 1999). From his many studies he concluded that marriages, work to the extent that men accept influence from, and share power with, women. Women, are already well practiced at accepting influence from men, so it is critical for the well-being of marriage that men learn to do likewise.
- Ways to accept influence include:
- We can accept influence by turning to our spouse for advice
- Being open to his or her ideas
- Listening to and considering their opinions
- Learning from our spouse
- Showing respect
- Recognizing points they can can both agree on
- Compromising
- Showing trust in your spouse
- Being sensitive to their feelings
- Try these talking points:
- “What are your feelings about this issue?
- Please tell me why this is so important to you?
- Tell me how you would solve the problem?
- What are your goals in regard to this issue?
- The kind of tone you use is important, and questions need to be framed in accepting the other’s influence. Be understanding, compromising, and work towards unity, which create goals married couples can achieve.
5. Respectfully handle differences and solve problems
- Couples may enter into marriage expecting to to be idyllic, but the experience of differences and resolving them are the conditions needed in a healthy stable relationship. Disagreements crop up in even the best marriages, how differences are handled is an important key to marital success of failure (Markman, 2001).
- Couples need to know how to resolve them, this is all apart of the process of making a good marriage better.
- In one study done money and children were the issues couples were most likely to report arguing about. It is the number one cause for marital disharmony. Work through the challenges brought on by differences and conflict. Acquire these skills:
- Prevention
- Eliminating destructive patterns
- Becoming calm
- Discussing issues softly, gently, and privately
- Making and accepting repair attempts (Gottman)
- Soothing one’s self and each other
- And reaching a consensus
- Prevention. Some issues may not need to be raised. Having charity, may even prevent some things from ever becoming an issue. EX: Let go of our deep concerns about trivial matters, such as the stereotypical uncapped toothpaste, and focus on the things that matter most.
- Hold regular couple council meetings. This provides couples with the opportunity to discuss issues directly related to their marriage relationship. Couples who regularly visit together about their relationship are more likely to nip marriage problems in the bud (Markman, 2001).
- Eliminate destructive interaction patterns. (Gottman, 1994) has identified these as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, as they progressively lead to the downfall of a relationship:
- Criticism - attack on one’s personality
- Contempt - criticism mixed with sarcasm, name calling, eye rolling
- Defensiveness - not taking responsibility for change
- Stonewalling - unwillingness to discuss/communicate or complete withdrawal from an issue.
- Calm yourself first. When issues arise couples need calm, respectful discussion. Before approaching your on an issue, try asking yourself: “Am I in control of myself?” Avoid contention and any hurt feelings that can seriously harm relationships. Do whatever it is that can calm you down.
- Bring up the concern softly, gently, and privately. Set the stage for discussion by bringing up issues softly, gently, and calmly, remembering that a soft answer is the best - this is called a soft start up that is needed for communicating effectively. Use “I” statements to communicate your feelings. Don’t make your problems public, save it for later and talk later with your spouse about the issues concerning you.
- Learn to make and receive repair attempts. When a discussion on an issue gets off on the wrong foot, put the brakes on before disaster strikes and things get contentious (Gottman 1999). Take a 10 minute time out to cool off and then try repairing by re-discussing in a more calm manner. These time outs help a couple to attempt at working hard at receiving more positivity rather than just rejecting coldly.
- Soothe yourself and each other. Taking breaks may be essential if repair attempts are unsuccessful or if you begin to feel out of control (“flooded”) physically and emotionally. Even if you calmed yourself prior to discussing an issue, you may need to continue to do so during the discussion, and use self-relaxation techniques. After spending 20 minutes to calm down you can help soothe each other by talking about what produced the “flood” and what you can continue to do to calm one another.
- Reach a consensus about a solution. Most issues only need to be discussed and not solved (Markman, 2001). And many issues are not solvable. Let your spouse influence you as you arrive at a mutually agreeable solution. Steps to reaching agreement might include:
- Brainstorming possibilities
- Evaluating alternatives
- Choosing one you feel good about
- Putting the solution into action (goal) and following up with it.
6. Continuing courtship through the years
- In the enriching of marriage, the big things are the little things. There must be constant appreciation for each other and a thoughtful demonstrations of gratitude. A couple must engage and help each other grow. Marriage is a join quest for all the good things.
- Be Intentional about doing things every day to enrich the marriage. Couples who are continuing to date have special activities they purposefully engage in to continue to build and maintain their relationship. These can be rituals that are special to the couple and keep their love strong. If you need suggestions try these three things:
- Connection rituals - to maintain the bond between two people (Time set aside for a couple’s validating conversations)
- Celebration rituals - to show honor, love, and respect for each other (An annual private getaway for the couple’s wedding anniversary)
- Love rituals - to keep the romance alive in marriage (An exciting and creative gift each spouse gives the other on birthdays every year)
- Spend at least five hours a week strengthening your relationship. In Gottman’s studies, he found that couples spending at least five hours a week together on their relationship fared the best over time. In order to succeed it is important for the couple to accomplish four things during those five hours:
- Learn one thing that happened in your spouse’s life each day for that week
- Have a stress-reducing conversation at the end of each day that week
- Do something special every day to show affection and appreciation
- Have a weekly date
Robert L. Simpson (1982) understood the importance couple councils:
- Every couple whether in the first or the twenty-first year of marriage, should discover the value of pillow-talk time at the end of the day - the perfect time to take inventory, to talk about tomorrow. And best of all, it’s a time when love and appreciation for one another can be reconfirmed. The end of another is also the perfect setting to say, “I’m sorry about what happened today, please forgive me.” We are all imperfect, and these unresolved differences allowed to accumulate day after day, add up to a possible breakdown in the marital relationship - all for the want of better communication.
