Will Our Love Last?: A Couple's Road Map - Hardcover

Hamburg, Sam R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684864916 ISBN 13: 9780684864914

Publisher: Scribner, 2000

Synopsis

Drawing on examples from his years as a marital therapist and his own happy marriage, a psychologist explains how compatibility on three major dimensions produces the mutual understanding, respect, and affirmation that are the fuel for lifelong love.

About this title

About the Author

Sam R. Hamburg, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and marital therapist in private practice. He is a lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry of Pritzker School of Medicine, The University of Chicago, and is a member of the adjunct faculty of The Family Institute at Northwestern University. Dr. Hamburg is also on the executive committee of the Marjorie Kovler Center for the Treatment of Survivors of Torture, an agency that offers pro bono psychotherapy and rehabilitation to individuals who have been subjected to torture and other traumatic events. Dr. Hamburg, his wife, and their daughter live in Chicago.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One: The Question: What Makes Marriages Happy?

Mystified by Love

A young woman -- call her Jane -- sits on the couch in my consulting room. She is wearing a tailored wool suit and has the crisp, put-together look of the successful career woman that she is. Jane is distraught and tearful. Her long, straight hair sweeps across her face as she cries. Between her sobs, this is what she says:

I don't know if I love Bob anymore. But why shouldn't I? He's the perfect person. He's handsome, thoughtful, polite, hardworking, successful. He's from a great family. I know I loved him in the beginning...I think. But now, after being married five years, it's different. And then this guy in the office, Jim. I know he's interested in me. And I'm so attracted to him, he's getting harder and harder to resist. He's not nearly as good-looking as Bob, yet when I'm around him -- when I think of him -- I get this sexual rush. And when we talk, I feel so in tune with him. I think I love him -- but I shouldn't.

Like so many people, married or not, Jane is mystified by love. She knows how love feels, but she doesn't know what love is. She can't account for why it flowers in her heart and why it withers. Mystified as she is by love, she can't answer one crucial question -- a question whose answer will determine the future course of her life: Am I with the Right Person?

Men and women in love are haunted by this question. You may be haunted by it right now. You know that most people's marriages are not happy. You know -- we all know -- the statistics: Half of all marriages break up. As for the other half, you know that many of those people are not happy. They're trapped inside their "intact" marriages. And what spooks you most of all is knowing that many of these unhappy people were passionately in love at the start -- just as you may be right now.

But you also know that some people's marriages are happy, and stay happy for a very long time -- forever. You've seen and read true stories about happily married couples -- Paul and Linda McCartney, for example. You may even know a happily married couple or two yourself. You see that the people in these marriages seem to work together smoothly as a team. They seem to genuinely like each other and to enjoy each other's company. And if you know them well enough, they may have even confided to you that they enjoy each other in bed -- even after having been together for many years. When we get married, we hope that ours will be one of those exceptional, happy marriages. What makes the difference between a happy and an unhappy marriage?

The message of this book, a message rather different from what you will find in other books about marriage, is that the key to a happy marriage is picking the right person in the first place -- someone with whom you are deeply compatible. The aim of this book is to equip you to do that. But you cannot choose the right person without first understanding the pressures -- on you and everyone else contemplating marriage -- to choose the wrong person. And you will not be really motivated to choose the right person unless you understand exactly what compatibility is and why it is so important to the happiness of your marriage. By the time you finish the first part of this book, you won't be mystified by love anymore. You will understand exactly how love works -- where love comes from, why it disappears, and the crucial role that compatibility plays in keeping love alive. Then you'll be ready to go on to the second part and use it to evaluate whether you and your partner are compatible enough to have lasting love.

The idea that compatibility is the key to happiness in marriage may surprise and confuse you because other books have claimed that other things are the key. What does make marriage happy? Let's round up the usual suspects.

Communication? Commitment?
Hard Work? -- Guess Again

These are the usual suspects, aren't they? You've read about them in magazine articles. If you've ever read a self-help book about marriage, you've definitely read about the key importance of communication, commitment, and hard work. If you've seen the authors of self-help books on television, you've heard them speak about it. Well-meaning people may have spoken to you personally about how important communication, commitment, and hard work are to happiness in marriage.

When we hear the same reasonable-sounding message repeatedly from experts and other people we have reason to trust, we tend to assume it's true. Often that is a safe assumption, but sometimes it isn't. When we look closely and critically at something we have taken for granted -- evaluate the logic of the argument and the soundness of the facts -- we sometimes discover that it is not as true as we had thought. Let's take that kind of close and careful look at the claim that communication, commitment, and hard work are the key to happiness in marriage.

Communication

Communication has become so identified with marriage and its problems that many couples come into my office and say, "We have a communication problem," instead of just saying, "We have a marital problem." They have learned this from marital therapists.

It so happens that the pioneers of modern marital and family therapy were communication-oriented. They thought that all sorts of psychological problems could be caused by pathological communication. For example, they thought that schizophrenia could result if a mother communicated in paradoxical and confusing ways that made it impossible for her child to understand what the mother wanted. One example of such a "double bind" is the command "Disobey me." If you disobey in response to that command, you are obeying!

Contemporary marital therapists don't think that bad communication can cause quite such devastating effects as schizophrenia but they do think that bad communication contributes greatly to marital problems. Accordingly, these therapists devote a lot of time to teaching couples how to communicate better. They train their clients to express their feelings more directly and listen to each other more sensitively, and they teach them techniques for handling conflict and for negotiating and problem solving.

It's a great advantage, in marriage, to have good communication and problem-solving skills. In happy marriages, these skills help partners express their love for each other, and they help day-to-day life run more smoothly. But when marriages are in trouble, it's not necessarily because the partners lack communication skills. Most people with marriage problems are perfectly good communicators. In fact, research has shown that spouses who have problems communicating with each other have no trouble at all communicating with anybody else.1 And I have done marital therapy with scores of unhappily married lawyers, upper-level business executives, sales and marketing people, advertising and public relations people, and even writers. They all had wonderful communication skills; they were all ace problem solvers. Not being able to communicate was not the problem for these couples.

Not only did the partners in these very unhappy marriages communicate perfectly well, they got each other's meaning perfectly well. Men and women do not need translation from the "language" of one sex to that of the other. Especially if they have been partners for a while, they know what the other is trying to convey. When he thinks she's being critical of him, it's because she is being critical of him -- and they both know it. And when she thinks he's trying to avoid her, hiding down there in the basement with his computer, she's right. He's not just surfing the net. He's in the basement because he doesn't want to be anywhere near her. They both know that.

When couples in unhappy marriages do have communica

Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0684864916
• ISBN 13: 9780684864914
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240