In 1962 Joe and Edith Platt, a Quaker couple who helped run a retreat
center called Kirkridge, invited us to conduct a weekend for married
couples. We were at that time joint Executive Directors of the American
Association of Marriage Counselors, so this was a challenge we could
hardly evade. Although we had been involved in many lectures and
conferences about marriage, and plenty of marriage counseling, a retreat
for married couples was a new venture. However, we accepted the
invitation, conducted the retreat to the best of our ability, and
learned a great deal in the process. There is no need at this point to
go into detail about the procedures we followed for we improved on them
considerably later as we gained further experience.
The first Kirkridge retreat was successful enough to encourage the
Platts to ask us to come again and again. We then began to receive other
requests as it became known that we were available for this kind of
leadership, most of them being under religious auspices. The retreats
generally began on Friday evening and ended with Sunday lunch. One, for
Methodist ministers and their wives, lasted five days, and proved to be
the inauguration of a nation-wide program now being run by the United
Methodist Church under the title "marriage communication labs."
These experiences brought us into close touch with many "normal" married
couples. Our practice was to insist that the retreats were _not_ for
couples with problems, but for those who considered they had
satisfactory marriages and wanted to explore their potential for further
growth. As counselors, we had previously dealt only with marriages in
trouble. Now we found that many of these "normal" couples were settling
for relationships that were far short of their inherent potential. Some
exhibited the same self-defeating interaction patterns which we were
accustomed to finding in couples with "problems"--but either they had
accepted these poor patterns as inevitable, or the conflicts they caused
had not yet reached crisis proportions.
Matching our observation of these couples with some of the research
findings on marital interaction, we arrived at four important
conclusions:
1. Only a small proportion of marriages came anywhere near to realizing
their full potential. Lederer and Jackson[C] suggest that the proportion
of "stable-satisfactory" marriages in our culture does not exceed 5-10
percent.
2. Most married couples desire, and hope for, the achievement we have
called "relationship-in-depth." Early in their married life, however,
they find their growth together blocked by interpersonal conflicts which
they either cannot understand or are not prepared to make the effort to
resolve. They settle for a series of compromises, resulting in a
superficial relationship.
3. As time passes, the couple either accepts this unsatisfactory
situation, or it becomes progressively intolerable. They are usually so
"locked into" their self-defeating interaction pattern that they are
quite unable to change it by their own unaided efforts. Some seek
marriage counseling, but often too late for it to be effective.
4. This tragedy of undeveloped potential could be avoided in many
instances if married couples had a clearer concept of the task of
marriage and did not have to struggle in almost total isolation from
other couples going through the same experiences. The potential of
married couples for giving each other mutual help and support is very
great; but it is unable to function because of an unrecognized taboo in
our culture.
This taboo, hitherto unrecognized as such, prevents married couples from
sharing their intramarital experiences with other couples. In many
settings married couples form friendships with each other, enjoy social
contacts, even work together on projects; but there is always a tacit
understanding that they do not reveal to each other, further than is
unavoidable, what is going on in their husband-wife relationships.
Complex mechanisms for evasion and mutual defense exist. Some of these
are familiar, strong hostility in one partner when the other appears to
be revealing too much; making jokes to relieve tension when some inner
secret of the marriage accidently breaks to the surface; silence or
withdrawal when "outsiders" appear to be probing too deeply. These
defense systems work so well that it is not unusual when a couple begins
divorce proceedings for others in their circle of acquaintance to
express astonishment in such terms as "We are amazed! We had no idea
that they were having trouble!"
We could speculate about the reasons for this taboo: a protection
against public humiliation, since we all want others to feel that we can
manage competently such a basic undertaking as marriage; a safeguard
against exploitation, since a discontented marriage partner offers fair
game to a predatory third person; a link with our sexual taboos, since
difficulties in marital adjustment often have a sexual component, and
any suggestion of sexual incompetence is deeply wounding to our pride.
It could reflect the traditional tendency to regard the family as a
closed "in-group"--an attitude not without advantages for its strength
and stability.
What we are concerned about, however, is that this taboo is being
maintained with a strictness that goes far beyond its usefulness in our
changing society. It is depriving married couples of help and support
from each other, at a time when marriage has become much more difficult
and demanding than it was in the past. Indeed, we believe that with the
emergence of the nuclear family as the norm in our Western culture, the
individual marriage has been deprived of the supports derived from the
extended family of the past precisely at a time when our rising
expectations of highly rewarding interpersonal relationships are
subjecting it to demands it is often unable to meet. In the larger
family groupings of the Orient, despite their hierarchical structure, a
great deal of help and support can become available to the individual
couple in times of trouble from those with whom they share a common
corporate life.
It may well be that the new "life styles" being experimented with
today--mate-swapping, multilateral marriages, and group marriages, for
example--represent attempts to enable the individual marriage to break
out of its isolation and to gain better communication, interaction and
needed support from other marital units.
A striking illustration of this trend toward deep sharing between
married couples has come to our notice from an unexpected quarter. Two
married couples from a conservative Christian background decided to meet
and talk together, with complete detailed frankness, about their sexual
experiences. A series of such meetings was held, the conversations
taped, and subsequently published in book form.[D] The couples, after
careful consideration, decided not to hide behind a cloak of anonymity,
but to use their real names and disclose their identity.
Confronted with this new trend, we take the view that the taboo against
the sharing of husband-wife experiences between one married couple and
other married couples can with impunity be relaxed in appropriate
situations with benefit to all concerned. Between such couples the
development of great warmth, empathy, mutual understanding and support,
can contribute significantly to the enrichment and growth of the
individual marriages involved. This is essentially what happens in
marriage enrichment retreats.