Sara decides to marry Matt within an hour of meeting him, because she likes the way he smells. Martin admires Tina for the way she screams at him when she's angry. Nick loves Maureen, because she never confronts him. Helen thinks marrying Keith will save her from being promiscuous like her mother was.
Each of these dysfunctional-sounding couples actually exists. Psychologist Judith Wallerstein met and interviewed them in the course of doing research for her new book. But if you assume she got their names from the records of the divorce courts, you'd be wrong. She got their names by asking her friends and co-workers, "Who are the most happily married people you know?"Wallerstein and her coauthor, Sandra Blakeslee, just published "The Good Marriage: How and Why Love Lasts." It is a surprising book, an affirmative book. It is based on Wallerstein's interviews with 50 couples, each married at least 10 years. "The Good Marriage" proves this: Even though one out of two marriages ends in divorce, and some of those that last are unhappy, there are people in this world who can do it. There are people who intuitively know how to nurture a marriage.
Wallerstein was the scientist and Blakeslee helped with the writing of "The Good Marriage." The two gained fame in 1989 when they published their first book together. Called "Second Chances," it was based on a series of interviews with 60 divorcing couples.
Wallerstein is currently conducting 25-year follow-up interviews with those couples and their grown children. At first Wallerstein was criticized for "Second Chances," for the dismal portrait it painted of divorce and for her research, which consisted of collecting anecdotes from a relatively small sample of the population. But her research is gaining respect. She says, "The anecdotes are absolutely supported by fact, by the census. Children of divorce continue to have a terrible time." Time magazine recently named Wallerstein "the godmother" of divorce research.
As sad as her findings were, Wallerstein says "Second Chances" was easier to write than "The Good Marriage." In a telephone interview from her home in California Wallerstein says happy people are harder to describe. " `The Good Marriage' could have been sugary, and untrue, and also boring."
"Second Chances" was also easier to write, she says, because all bad marriages are pretty much alike. On the other hand, good marriages are unique. Each is a civilization unto itself. Wallerstein's dilemma was to find patterns among vastly different styles so that her readers could learn something about how happy marriages work. She decided to write about good marriages, she says, in order to change the climate of marriage research.
She says she has long believed that ordinary people know more than experts. Marriage counselors don't know many happily married people because such couples don't seek help. Thus the professionals have spent a lot of time figuring out how to fix marriages instead of looking at what is already working.
Wallerstein's happily married couples told her this: A good marriage doesn't follow any one formula. A good marriage heals the hurts of the past. A good marriage has the power to transform the soul.
Take the story of the couple Wallerstein calls Sara and Matt. Neither had ideal childhoods. Sara's mother hadn't liked her much. Matt was often lonely. Eventually, Matt and Sara were able to form a marriage warmer and more stable than any relationship they'd known before.
Theirs was a love-at-first-sight romance. Movies are made of such fantasy. But all the experts agree that fantasy never lasts.
Yet Wallerstein says, "My observations showed clearly that idealization and fantasy are not necessarily doomed to end when the honeymoon is over."
Like every other happy couple Wallerstein describes, Sara and Matt's marriage went through hard times. They even separated once, early on. Like every other couple, they had to grow and change. But their romance has lasted 40 years. In separate interviews, they both used the word "magic" to describe how they felt when they were together.
Says Sara, "We learned to listen to each other. That's what I learned during that first couple of years. We have loved each other our whole lives. When I got fat he said he loved fat women. And when I lost weight he said he loved thin women. Finally I understood that he loved me and that I pleased him all the time. . . .
"I learned that marriage doesn't happen all at once. You see, I had this notion - I know it sounds quaint, but a lot of young women had it - that once you got married it filled every space, every moment of your time.
"Of course, I learned otherwise."
Says Matt, "In the early years I didn't know how to express my feelings. She used to threaten me with leaving, and it would absolutely panic me. It took me a long time to learn she didn't really mean it. And it took me a long time to understand that there was often a discrepancy between what she said and what she meant. Then things became easier."
Says Wallerstein, "The happily married partners I interviewed not only learned the other person's life story, they kept it in mind at all times. . . . Although few of these people had any training in psychology, most were remarkably tuned in - not only to each other's history but to each other's body language. . . . Moreover, they tried to modify their demands according to what the other could tolerate rather than insisting on something the other could not do."
In her research, Wallerstein met a woman whose husband couldn't help care for their child who had cancer. "We came through it," the woman said. "I was too frightened to ask for help for myself. My husband couldn't hear about it or function with it. It was a daily fear. I dreamt about it for years. But we did it." Says Wallerstein, "Note her protectiveness of her husband, combined with the use of the word `we.' "
A husband told of protecting his wife from the details of his business bankruptcy. He didn't want her to know creditors were calling. He said, "She just got too frightened. It reminded her of her crazy childhood and her dad never paying child support." He, too, used the phrase, "We got through it." Says Wallerstein, "It is not true that in every good marriage both partners help equally to deal with every crisis. Rather, each does what he or she can."
The marriage-can-be-healing idea is rather new in popular psychology. Until recently, the emphasis was on how to make yourself a whole person, first, before you attempt to hook up with someone else.
We are only beginning to appreciate how relationships change each partner. Therapist Louis Leveen goes so far as to say, "We do not have the capacity to heal on our own." Leveen was in Utah last week to promote a book he wrote with David Priver, "Intimacy: Our Quest for Completeness."
His book begins with this definition: Intimacy is a growth-producing, self-esteem building process. Leveen talks about the fluctuating levels of intimacy, the natural need for distance within a relationship, the difficulty of being flexible enough to allow each person his or her own identity.
As he travels the country, Leveen hears skepticism. People ask him, "Is a good marriage really possible?"
Leveen says it is. And, in fact, our imperfections deepen the relationship. He says, "It is our blemishes, our wounds, that allow us to share."
"Why Do We Fall in Love?" is another new book about the psychology of choosing a partner to heal some wound. Author Cathy Troup says we make our choice unconsciously, actually trying to bring out some repressed part of our own personality. Thus a nurturing, quiet man marries a loud and bold woman and their friends wonder why. Each is secretly hoping to become a little more like the other, a little more complete.
Some people are cynical about marriage. But others know good marriages are possible, because they have one. Wallerstein says we are, in one sense, experiencing the best of times for marriage, here in the Western world. Men and women have never been more free to create the kind of marriage they want.
Sara and Matt have a romantic marriage. Nick and Maureen have a traditional marriage. He earns the money. She makes the home. Their communication is marked by restraint and tact.
Others in Wallerstein's study have companion marriages. Both bring in a paycheck. Both help raise the children.
The most amazing couples Wallerstein found, however, were involved in what she calls "rescue" marriages. Martin's father beat his mother. Tina's father was incestuous. They married to escape their families, and their early years together were stormy. But unlike so many couples, Wallerstein says, Martin and Tina knew whatever they were arguing about was not the real problem, that they were actually still angry about their childhood horrors. They hung on. Eventually they healed.
It doesn't happen every time. The divorce statistics prove that. Social work professor Audean Cowley says the couples Wallerstein interviewed were unusually mature. For every unsung happy couple that has stayed together, Cowley fears there are even more couples who have stayed together unhappily, out of fear or inertia. Cowley is associate dean of the Graduate School of Social Work at the University of Utah. She also teaches a class, to undergraduates, about how to achieve a happy marriage.
The first thing she tells her students, every quarter, is this: "People marry too young and for the wrong reasons."
Even if a couple have been married for 20 years and say they will be married forever, they might not make it, Cowley cautions. Statistics show that a huge number of marriages break up during the 27th year. When children are raised and gone, a couple look at each other and find no reason to go on together.
Cowley takes a reasoned, practical approach to the subject of marriage. But if you chance to ask her about her own marriage, her voice will soften. She'll say she is celebrating her 44th anniversary this month. She and her husband are flaunting the statistics. They've made it past 27, past 37 years. She'll smile if you ask her how old they were when they married. She'll say, "I was 20. He was only 19." She'll laugh.