Marriage Counseling… For a Happy Marriage?
Spouses who rate their sex life as above average are ten to thirteen times happier than those who say their sex life is below average. Happily married individuals who undergo coronary bypass surgery are three times more likely to be alive after fifteen years. Married men earn 22 percent more than their bachelor counterparts.
We all know that a happy marriage is a good thing. But how, exactly, to have a happy marriage is a difficult question to answer. And how to have a happier marriage is even more vexing.
Did you know the average couple is unhappy for six years before attending therapy? One couple, Elizabeth and Dan, decided to bite the bullet and hit up counseling before problems emerged. They were happy – but could they be happier?
Elizabeth said that, one day, she realized that she viewed her stable marriage to Dan like “waves on the ocean… a fact of life” and understood how ridiculous this attitude seemed. In her New York Times piece, Married (Happily) With Issues, Elizabeth wrote:
I’ve never really believed that you just marry one day at the altar or before a justice of the peace. I believe that you become married — truly married — slowly, over time, through all the road-rage incidents and precolonoscopy enemas, all the small and large moments that you never expected to happen and certainly didn’t plan to endure. But then you do: you endure. And as I lay there, I started wondering why I wasn’t applying myself to the project of being a spouse.
As Elizabeth and Dan set out to improve their marriage – first through the help of psychology books – they soon realized that they weren’t sure what a great marriage entailed. Some guides suggested that a happy marriage meant always agreeing. As they worked through their first self-help book, it seemed like they couldn’t agree on anything. “This was the fear, right? You set out to improve your marriage; it implodes,” she observed.
Next, they attended a marriage education class, saw a psychoanalyst, and even attended a sex class. Each attempt to improve their marriage took them one step forward – and sometimes, two steps back. As intimacy grew, Elizabeth felt herself retreating. Counseling made them nitpick at each other.
Elizabeth came to the conclusion that:
In psychiatry, the term “good-enough mother” describes the parent who loves her child well enough for him to grow into an emotionally healthy adult. The goal is mental health, defined as the fortitude and flexibility to live one’s own life — not happiness. This is a crucial distinction. Similarly the “good-enough marriage” is characterized by its capacity to allow spouses to keep growing, to afford them the strength and bravery required to face the world. In the end, I settled on this vision of marriage, felt the logic of applying myself to it. Maybe the perversity we all feel in the idea of striving at marriage — the reason so few of us do it — stems from a misapprehension of the proper goal. In the early years, we take our marriages to be vehicles for wish fulfillment: we get the mate, maybe even a house, an end to loneliness, some kids. But to keep expecting our marriages to fulfill our desires — to bring us the unending happiness or passion or intimacy or stability we crave — and to measure our unions by their capacity to satisfy those longings, is naïve, even demeaning.
Elizabeth and Dan’s journey is now a book entitled No Cheating, No Dying: I Had a Good Marriage. Then I Tried To Make It Better.
Additional Source: Generous Couples Have Happier Marriages, A Happy Marriage Can Boost Health and Survivability, The Benefits of Being Married
Photo Credit RicLatham
I’ve thought about this a lot, what makes a successful marriage, as my husband and I come up (happily!) on our fifth anniversary. I think it comes down to a few things.
1. selflessness
2. communication
3. perception
4. self-esteem
5. financial compatibility
People forget sometimes that being selfless is fulfilling. I think that’s why so many marriages fail these days, because each partner sometimes looks to the other to fulfill them, to change for them, to be something they want them to be. They do that instead of looking at themselves and how they can be a better spouse to their partner regardless of what their spouse ‘deserves’. How they can serve, love and care for the other. You find that not only will your spouse respond positively but your own outlook changes.
My dad is a psychologist with his own family and marriage counseling practice that he’s had for… well forever
So feel like I’ve been in free therapy all my life. Since I’ve always been around it, I can’t vouch for what going to real therapy would be like, but I can say that long talks with my dad throughout all my trials and tribulations over the years have made me appreciate what diving deep into issues can do for my mental health and happiness. I think therapy is for everyone!
My fiance and I (we’ve been together 6 1/2 years, lived together for 6) went through couples counseling for a year–sometimes it was a week between sessions, sometimes it was 6 weeks–and we’re not necessarily “done.” Our starting therapy was spurred by a pretty significant fight, but even when we resolved that initial issue, we kept going, because it was SUCH gift to be able to say, “I’d really like to discuss this in therapy” when we had disagreements or were driving each other crazy. I know disagreements are part of any relationship, but what we found was that often, the disagreements were larger than one or the other of us realized and it brought us so much closer as a couple and, amazingly, brought so much more patience to our relationship, without even really trying, because we realized how much we love each other and stopped expecting the other to be our “perfect” mate. I’m in training to become a therapist (licensed clinical social worker) and am a big proponent of therapy for everyone, because we all have “stuff,” even if you’re happy. I suppose I don’t see being happy as the goal of life, but rather continually developing a deeper understanding of ourselves, and when you’re married, a deeper understanding of your mate.