The Good Marriage: How and Why Love Lasts

Chapter 1

Happy Marriages

Do They Exist?

ON A RAW SPRING MORNING in 199l, I shared my earliest thoughts about this book with a group of some one hundred professional women—all friends and colleagues—who meet each month to discuss our works in progress.

"I'm interested in learning about good marriages—about what makes a marriage succeed," I said cheerfully. "As far as our knowledge is concerned, a happy marriage might as well be the dark side of the moon. And so I've decided to study a group of long-lasting marriages that are genuinely satisfying for both husband and wife." I looked around the room at these attractive, highly educated women—women who had achieved success in our high-tech, competitive society and who appeared to have it all. "Would any of you, along with your husbands, like to volunteer as participants in the study?" I asked.

The room exploded with laughter.

I felt disturbed and puzzled by the group's reaction. Their laughter bore undertones of cynicism, nervousness, and disbelief, as if to say, "Surely you can't mean that happy marriage exists in the l990s. How could you possibly believe that?"

Many of the women in the group had been divorced. Some had remarried, but a good number remained single. Some had come to feel that marriage should not be taken all that seriously. "Happy marriage doesn't exist," protested one woman, "so I'm going to get on with my life and not worry about it." Yet when their sons and daughters decided to marry, these same women announced the marriages with great pride and accepted heartfelt rounds of congratulations from the others in the group. No one acknowledged the apparent contradictions involved.

When I pondered the meaning of their laughter later that night, I realized I had hit a raw nerve. For many, my innocent mention of a study of successful marriages seemed to strike below the well-defended surface, bringing to life buried images of love and intimacy. For a brief moment, I believe, the women had reconnected with passionate longings, only to confront again their disappointment that their wishes had not been fulfilled. And so they had laughed, dismissing their longings as illusory—vain hopes that could only lead to sorrow.

This duality of cynicism and hope is familiar to me, as it is to millions of men and women in America today. We share a profound sense of discomfort with the present state of marriage and family, even wondering sometimes if marriage as an institution can survive. At the same time, we share a deeply felt hope for our children that marriage will endure. I do not think this hope is misplaced.

We have been so preoccupied with divorce and crisis in the American family that we have failed to notice the good marriages that are all around us and from which we can learn. In today's world it's easy to become overwhelmed by problems that seem to have no solution. But we can shape our lives at home, including our relationships with our children and marriage itself. The home is the one place where we have the potential to create a world that is to our own liking; it is the last place where we should feel despair. As never before in history, men and women today are free to design the kind of marriage they want, with their own rules and expectations.

Fortunately, many young people have not yet become cynical and are still able to speak directly from the heart. After spending some wonderful hours talking to college students about their views of marriage, I received the next day a letter from Randolph Johnson, a twenty-one-year-old senior at the University of California in Santa Cruz. He wrote: "What I want in a wife is someone whom I know so well that she is a part of who I am and I of her. Someone to fill all that I am not but aspire to be. My wife is someone not just to share a life with but to build a life with. This is what marriage is to me, the sharing of two lives to complete each other. It is true that people change, but if people can change together then they need not grow apart."

Randolph speaks for a new generation that is still capable of optimism about love and marriage and "the sharing of two lives to complete each other." He also speaks for a society that is tired to death of the war on marriage, escalating divorce rates, and the search for new partners in middle age. All of us want a different world for our children. When we're honest, we want it for ourselves.

It is absurd, in fact, to suggest that the need for enduring love and intimacy in marriage is passe. The men and women I've seen in twenty-five years of studying divorce begin actively searching for a new relationship even before the divorce is final. In every study in which Americans are asked what they value most in assessing the quality of their lives, marriage comes first—ahead of friends, jobs, and money. In our fast-paced world men and women need each other more, not less. We want and need erotic love, sympathetic love, passionate love, tender, nurturing love all of our adult lives. We desire friendship, compassion, encouragement, a sense of being understood and appreciated, not only for what we do but for what we try to do and fail at. We want a relationship in which we can test our half-baked ideas without shame or pretense and give voice to our deepest fears. We want a partner who sees us as unique and irreplaceable.

A good marriage can offset the loneliness of life in crowded cities and provide a refuge from the hammering pressures of the competitive workplace. It can counter the anomie of an increasingly impersonal world, where so many people interact with machines rather than fellow workers. In a good marriage each person can find sustenance to ease the resentment we all feel about having to yield to other people's wishes and rights. Marriage provides an oasis where sex, humor, and play can flourish.

Finally, a man and woman in a good, lasting marriage with children feel connected with the past and have an interest in the future. A family makes an important link in the chain of human history. By sharing responsibility for the next generation, parents can find purpose and a strengthened sense of identity.

These rewards take root in the soil of a strong, stable marriage. But, surprisingly, we know very little about what makes such a marriage.

As a psychologist who has been studying the American family for most of my professional life, I have observed many changes in relationships between men and women and in society's attitudes about marriage and children. In 1980 I founded a large research and clinical center in the San Francisco Bay Area, where my colleagues and I have seen thousands of men, women, and children from families going through first or second divorces. Presently I am conducting a twenty-five-year follow-up of sixty couples who underwent divorce in 1971, with an emphasis on the lives of their 131 children, who are now grown and involved in their own marriages and divorces.

These young men and women, whom I have been interviewing at regular intervals as part of the longest study ever done on divorce, provide unique insights into its long-term effects on the American family. I have seen a great many children who, ten and fifteen years after their parents' divorce, are still struggling with unhappiness. On the threshold of adulthood, they are still in the shadow of that event. I am poignantly aware of how unfamiliar these children are with the kinds of relationships that exist in a happy family. Many tell me that they have never seen a good marriage.

I'm also concerned about the many men and women who remain lonely and sad years after a divorce. I'm doubly worried about the high divorce rate in second marriages with children, which compounds the suffering for everyone. I am sometimes criticized for being overly pessimistic about the long-term effects of divorce, but my observations are drawn from the real world. Only if you see the children and parents of divorce day in and day out can you understand what the statistics mean in human terms.

I want to make it clear that I am not against divorce. I am deeply aware of how wretched a bad marriage can be and of the need for the remedy of divorce. But divorce by itself does not improve the institution of marriage. Some people learn from sad experience to choose more carefully the second time around. Others do not. Many never get a true second chance.

In the past twenty years, marriage in America has undergone a profound, irrevocable transformation, driven by changes in women's roles and the heightened expectations of both men and women. Without realizing it, we have crossed a marital Rubicon. For the first time in our history, the decision to stay married is purely voluntary. Anyone can choose to leave at any time—and everyone knows it, including the children. There used to be only two legal routes out of marriage —adultery and abandonment. Today one partner simply has to say,

for whatever reason, I want out." Divorce is as simple as a trip to the nearest courthouse

Each year two million adults and a million children in this country are newly affected by divorce. One in two American marriages ends in divorce, and one in three children can expect to experience their parents' divorce. This situation has powerful ripple effects that touch us all. The sense that relationships are unstable affects the family next door, the people down the block, the other children in the classroom. Feelings of intense anxiety about marriage permeate the consciousness of all young men and women on the threshold of adulthood. At every wedding the guests wonder, privately, will this marriage last? The bride and groom themselves may question why they should marry, since it's likely to break up.

To understand how our social fabric has been transformed, think of marriage as an institution acted upon by centripetal forces pulling inward and centrifugal forces pulling outward. In times past the centripetal forces—law, tradition, religion, parental influence—exceeded those that could pull a marriage apart, such as infidelity, abuse, financial disaster, failed expectations, or the lure of the frontier. Nowadays the balance has changed. The weakened centripetal forces no longer exceed those that tug marriages apart.

In today's marriages, in which people work long hours, travel extensively, and juggle careers with family, more forces tug at the relationship than ever before. Modern marriages are battered by the demands of her workplace as well as his, by changing community values, by anxiety about making ends meet each month, by geographical moves, by unemployment and recession, by the vicissitudes of child care, and by a host of other issues.

Marriage counselors like to tell their clients that there are at least six people in every marital bed—the couple and both sets of parents. I'm here to say that a crazy quilt of conflicting personal values and shifting social attitudes is also in that bed. The confusion over roles and the indifference of the community to long-term conjugal relationships are there, as are the legacies of a self-absorbed, me-first, feminist-do-or-die' male-backlash society. The ease of divorce and changing attitudes about the permanence of marriage have themselves become centrifugal forces.

Our great unacknowledged fear is that these potent outside forces will overwhelm the human commitment that marriage demands and that marriage as a lasting institution will cease for most people. We are left with a crushing anxiety about the future of marriage and about the men and women within it.

My study of divorce has inevitably led me to think deeply about marriage. Just as people who work with the dying worry about death, those of us who work with troubled marriages are constantly forced to look at our own relationships. So I have carefully taken note of my marriage and those of my three grown children. As our fiftieth wedding anniversary approaches, I have thought long and hard about what my husband and I have done to protect our marriage. Why have we been able to love each other for so many years? Did we begin differently from those who divorced? Did we handle crises differently? Or were we just lucky? What have I learned that I can pass on to my children and my grandchildren?

I certainly have not been happy all through each year of my marriage. There have been good times and bad, angry and joyful moments, times of ecstasy and times of quiet contentment. But I would never trade my husband, Robert, for another man. I would not swap my marriage for any other. This does not mean that I find other men unattractive, but there is all the difference in the world between a passing fancy and a life plan. For me, there has always been only one life plan, the one I have lived with my husband. But why is this so? What makes some marriages work while others fail?

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 <I>Sturm und Drang</I> 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.

Many therapists seem to think that the people in a faltering marriage are made of real flesh and blood, struggling with tangible problems, while those in a good marriage are something like Balinese shadow puppets. But the people who describe the inner workings of their marriages in this book are fully dimensional human beings.

It's important to stress that I am not writing about lasting marriages per se. People can be held together for decades by lethargy, fear, mutual helplessness, or economic dependency, in marriages that are, to my mind, empty shells. This is a book about marriages in which both husband and wife agree that the relationship is satisfying. With justification, these men and women consider their marriages to be personal triumphs.

I should also say that this is not a how-to book. It will not tell you how to fight with your husband so that you can strengthen your marriage, how to have a better sex life with new techniques, or what to do if a guy at the office keeps telling you that his wife doesn't understand him. It will not give you ten easy steps to happiness or a vaccine against family strife. I believe in my heart not only that these approaches do not help but that they trivialize and demean the central relationship of adult life. Instead, what I have tried to write is a book about the intimate interiors of some successful marriages. To my mind this book offers an opportunity to look behind closed doors, to see in detail how people struggle with the central journey of adulthood. By getting to know these couples, by sharing their disappointments and triumphs, the reader will be able to use the insights they provide. I hope every part of this book will be helpful to young people contemplating marriage, to convey the enormous pleasures that await them and to tell them where the mines are hidden. I especially want them to learn that romance does not have to end when the honeymoon is over.

Early in this century Carl Jung told us that marriage is the most complex of human relationships. Today marriage is more fragile than ever. But I am committed to the view that if a man and woman begin their marriage with a healthy respect for its complexity, they stand a much greater chance of success. If they can grasp the richly nuanced, subtle needs that people bring from their childhood experiences and can understand how the past connects with the present, they can build mutual understanding and love based on true intimacy. If they can see how each domain of marriage connects with every other—especially how their sex life affects every aspect of their relationship—and if they can acknowledge the central conflicts in all marriages and the importance of friendship and nurturance in muting those conflicts, they will be well on their way toward building an enduring relationship. Finally, if they can appreciate the myriad ways that people grow and change through the years and realize that a happy, lasting marriage is challenged and rebuilt every day, then they will have acquired the only map there is for a successful lifetime journey together.

Many conservatives say we should go back to the days of that ideal couple, Ozzie and Harriet; but in fact, the children raised in the days of that television show grew up to become pioneers in the new landscape of marriage. Only five of the hundred spouses I interviewed wanted a marriage like their parents' even though many genuinely loved (or at least felt compassion for) their parents. The men consciously rejected the role models provided by their fathers. The women said that they could never be happy living as their mothers did. Clearly, few people really do want to turn back the clock.

Some therapists advocate teaching people to reduce their expectations of marriage, so that disappointment will not ensue—as if divorce occurs because of a gap between people's high expectations and the realities they confront after marriage. But what kind of response would you get if you told your son or daughter not to expect very much from marriage? Would cynicism and lower expectations make for better marriages and happier families? For better or worse, Americans have high expectations of marriage and show no signs of backing down from the pursuit of individual happiness.

I am convinced that the kind of society we have in the future will depend on how we address relationships within the family. As the external forces keeping modern marriages together weaken, the forces holding them together from within grow ever more important. To understand these forces, we need a whole new body of knowledge. We need guidelines that will enable men and women to fulfill their deep longings for love and friendship. We know a great deal about marriages that fail, for many couples seek counseling when their relationships are unable to weather the inevitable crises of life. But while studies of marital problems and divorce now overflow many library shelves, the entire body of research on happy marriage would fill less than half a shelf.

It has always been easier to identify the dark forces that spell misery than to understand what contributes to happiness. Illness and anger are more easily explored than health and love. Research on happy marriage is in its infancy. Considering the importance of the subject, it's astonishing how little work has been done. I found only a handful of studies—and only one that relied on individual interviews with happily married couples. Beyond this one study, which involved only twelve families from a religious community, I could find no other qualitative studies, which are fundamental to understanding complex social issues and human behavior. The case-study method, which is central to clinical work in medicine, psychology, psychoanalysis, and ethnology, is a major tool in qualitative research. It is the method of choice in building psychological theory.

Reviewing the recent quantitative research—studies in which large data sets are analyzed statistically—on the general subject of marriage, the distinguished sociologist Norval Glenn expressed disappointment. He noted that for several decades researchers have tended to test simple propositions that don't advance our understanding of marriage. He concluded that we need more qualitative research to generate new ideas.

To glean insights about human feelings, motivations, and emotions, the researcher must meet people face to face. Telephone surveys or mailed questionnaires do not penetrate to the subtleties and nuances of life. A survey asking "How often do you see your father?" will not reveal how a woman feels about her father. The question "How often have you been unfaithful?" doesn't touch the emotional impact of infidelity. A researcher can ask for a yes-or-no response to "Have you ever considered divorce?" but a questionnaire cannot provide an adequate answer to the potent question "What would break your marriage?" During a face-to-face interview expressions often tell more than any words could—as when a mature man breaks into tears when asked "What would happen if you lost your wife?" or when a woman crosses her legs and smiles like the Cheshire cat when asked "How faithful have you been?" Experimental psychologists say that in predicting divorce a husbands body language is more useful than his words. And what people don't say can be more important than what they do say.

To study the visceral questions of life, one needs to do case studies, working with individuals or small groups in intimate settings, asking open-ended questions and listening carefully to the answers that flow spontaneously, giving each person time to describe his or her feelings in words and gestures. In my studies I have tried to get to know each individual as intimately as possible. I listen to and absorb not just people's life stories but the sequence in which they tell them, as well as their casual remarks, smiles and tears, dreams and fantasies. They open their hearts to me and, in a figurative sense, the very doors to their bedrooms.

While designing my own study of good marriages, I did come across a few interesting recent studies by others. John Gottman and his colleagues have researched different styles of marital conflict and their physiological concomitants in men and women. They distinguish the kind of conflict that can destroy a marriage from conflict that occurs within its bounds. They also propose that a good marriage is best maintained by striking a balance between positive and negative interactions They suggest that the "magic number" of five positive interactions will undo the impact of one negative interaction. Gottman has also worked on the prediction of divorce according to patterns of detachment observed in men experiencing conflict with their wives.

In 1981 Arlene Skolnick examined marriages selected from a large longitudinal study of adult lives. Comparing data from two interviews ten years apart, without any observations about the couple's interactions, she concluded that marital relationships have a high potential for change and do not necessarily decline over the years. She proposed that situational factors such as money, health, and career success were of major importance in marital contentment or unhappiness.

Two recent studies of long-lasting marriages, by Robert and Jeanette Lauer in 1987 and Florence Kaslow and Helga Hammerschmidt in 1992, were based largely on data from mailed questionnaires. Both studies reported the importance of friendship, commitment, and shared values, and both found many long-lasting marriages that were unhappy.

Plans are under way for replicating the Kaslow and Hammerschmidt study in other countries and different cultures.

I could find only one study of healthy families. Jerry M. Lewis and his colleagues, in 1976, assessed twelve families who belonged to a Protestant church in Texas and who were selected by church staff, from a group of volunteers, as functioning well. The researchers concluded that there was "no single thread" to healthy family functioning. These families were characterized by mutual affection and trust in one another and in the community, respect for individual differences in perception and feelings, the ability to communicate, the ability to accept loss, and clear-cut boundaries between parents and children. Although the study was small, it has been influential in family therapy. It provides one of the few examples of good family functioning that therapists can use to compare with the troubled families in their care.

I could find no research in which happy marriage, as subjectively defined by both partners, was the specific focus of an in-depth inquiry.

After completing the first round of interviews with the men and women in my study, I spent some time thinking about why these couples had stepped forward. Some clearly felt that what they had achieved together was a triumph. Others were intrigued by the notion of examining their marriage. Still others were flattered to be included in a "happy" sample. But I think the main reason for their participation was that I gave them an opportunity to tell their story. Marriage in America is a private affair. When people divorce, they may broadcast their difficulties to the world, but those who are quietly and happily married don't discuss it openly—not even with their children or dose friends. It isn't dinner table conversation, nor is it grist for the television talk shows or movie scripts.

And this is precisely why we have so much to learn from these quiet successes. The erotic excitement and voyeurism of the television shows do not prepare us for life because they don't teach us how to solve real problems.

This book, then, is an attempt to map new territory: the internal life of good marriages in a culture of divorce. Like other early cartographers, I have probably missed major oceans or inadvertently combined continents. Undoubtedly there are more kinds of happy marriages than are reported in these pages. But this is an exploration, a pilot effort, with all the caveats and strengths of such a study. I hope that many other studies will follow.

Copyright © 1995 by Judith S. Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee. Reprinted by permission of Ticknor & Fields/Houghton Mifflin Co. All rights reserved.
Excerpt posted with permission from http://www.twbookmark.com

Many thanks to Time Warner Bookmark (Little, Brown & Company, Warner Books, A Time Warner Company) at: www.twbookmark.com. We appreciate their cooperation with OfSpirit.com to share this chapter of their book with our visitors for education, entertainment and empowerment.