Marriage as a healing relationship
Today, in my marriage to Christine, I am happier than I ever dreamed possible. We both feel deeply loved and accepted by each other. We are, after fifteen years, still madly, passionately in love with each other. Sharing experiences and talking with each other about our thoughts and feelings continue to enliven us. Each time we make love we are astonished by the heights of ecstasy to which we are transported.
Getting to this point was not always easy or enjoyable. Although we felt an immediate connection to each other, there were many obstacles to be overcome. When we met, in our thirties, we were both single parents and had both been deeply hurt in our previous marriages, bearing wounds that could easily be reopened. During the early years of our relationship Christine and I fought a lot and wounded each other, yet we never stopped loving each other. We were both oldest children and had been running households on our own; we both knew the "right" way to do things. Gradually, we learned that we could not change each other through intimidation, criticism or threats. Gradually, we noticed that our love was changing us together.
We developed a deep and abiding trust in each other through three vital practices: fighting, loving and daily service. Christine and I seldom backed away from a fight with each other, and it was a joy to have someone who didn’t leave or go numb in the face of anxiety but was willing to grapple with it. We began to see our willingness to fight with each other as an expression of our love and commitment. We fought whenever we refused to surrender our hardened self-images to our love. As Norman Lear observed, intimate relationships involve "real people in real conflict, with all their fear rubbing against their love for one another." The important thing is whether a couple learns to use that "rubbing" constructively. By getting our anxiety and our love to work together, Christine and I allowed our conflict to serve as a kind of psychic sandpaper that smoothed our rough edges. Gradually our defenses became worn away and we learned to surrender more gracefully.
Without love, fighting can become destructive. But our fighting was transformed by the coexistence of love. We both began to use conflict to bring our own anxiety into sharper relief and to take responsibility for it instead of projecting it. In the past I had tried to solve relationship problems by focusing my magnifying glass on the other person; now I was discovering that a mirror was a much more effective tool.
I realized that all conflict between people arises from personal anxiety and is an attempt to reduce that anxiety by changing the other person’s behavior. The other person naturally resists and counterattacks, resulting in an escalation, not a reduction, of the anxiety. I learned that although my wife might trigger my anxiety, its roots lay much deeper, within myself and my past. Once I accepted this I was able to retrain myself to avoid letting my anxiety follow old patterns of blame, such as making Christine wrong, criticizing her or feeling that I was an innocent victim. By my not allowing my anxiety easy release through unconscious behaviors, my anxiety took me deeper inside my own psyche. There I discovered my basic anxieties, the ones that lay underneath every conflict, every judgment.
What I found there was a dread of abandonment, that if I were truly myself then my lover would leave me, or that I would leave her. I was also afraid of fusion, afraid that if I surrendered to love I would lose my essential selfhood. Every relationship problem is nothing but a variation on those two themes.
Throughout our conflicts, our daily service to each other and our children continued. Christine never stopped cooking dinner and I never stopped making breakfast. Daily service — often denigrated as the "routine" or the "daily grind" — constitutes by far the largest portion of intimate relationships. Although thoroughly unspectacular, it provides daily affirmation of love’s presence. The daily liturgy of laundering, sweeping, driving, working, cooking, mowing, mending and tucking in brings love down to earth. Romance is the poetry of love; daily service is its prose. Intimacy requires profuse quantities of both. Christine and I began to experience each other’s service as a kind of lovemaking.
© Finding Serenity in the Age of Anxiety, Robert Gerzon, 1997.
Find out more about Robert Gerzon’s highly acclaimed book Finding Serenity in the Age of Anxiety.
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