The Perfect Marriage

There seems to be some myth in our society – long perpetuated by Disney or some TV channel – that the perfect marriage would be one of bliss and pure harmony. This myth would have us believe that two opposites perfectly complement each other and that the dynamic tension of yin and yang results in a complete whole that is perfect, stable and wondrous.

Poppycock!

As far as we can tell, there are two flaws with this myth:

1. That when two come together in an effort to find their “completion” in the other, it is flawed to begin with. The only chance we have at having a healthy marriage is first to be complete and wholly self-sufficient from the start. Trying to build a marriage on the hopes that your other half will be all that you should be in the first place will place an unrealistic and most likely an impossible demand on your partner. We need to strive to be whole and complete and bring our best effort at that to the relationship. Any gaps and missing elements of your development you still need to work on after you marry (assuming that some or many of us actually make this fatal mistake) you need to work on with your men, with your therapist or on your own – but NOT with your wife. That is not only unfair but a sure fire formula for disaster!
2. That any two people – even if they were identical twins with the same history and experiential upbringing – would see everything the same way and have no blips, bumps and upsets, is not only illogical but purely ludicrous. Hey, we most often marry our opposites – that’s what we like about them – they are not only the OPPOSITE gender, they are often opposite on many dimensions of experience, thought and beliefs. That is what makes this adventure exciting and adventurous.

So, we actually have to start with that assumption. The perfect marriage will always be a joining of opposites – man and woman – and therefore is one fraught with differences: differences in opinion, decision-making styles, emotions, processes, biology, brain chemistry… the list is probably infinite. That is the spice – that is what makes it juicy and challenging and absolutely, positively wonderful. As men we delight in challenges. As we have said before, we even challenge ourselves tossing a wad of paper into the wastebasket. Were our wives not a challenge, I am certain that we would all eventually get bored and seek the challenge – or the chase – somewhere else (have you ever seen that happen? – Only a thousand times or more!). We thrive under these conditions and we wither up and become impotent without them. So stop complaining and start embracing the differences. But that is just the starting point.

The perfect marriage is one that develops a methodology of resolving and dealing with these differences. My wife and I call it “workability.” The perfect marriage is more committed to working things out than to being right. Fall in love with the differences your woman presents you with. My wife and I are nearly dead opposites on one popular personality test we once took. And when that works, it is spectacular. For example, my wife is a details person – I am a big picture person. When traveling, she has the new city’s subway transit flat in a matter of seconds, while I will emerge from the underground look for the sun and key landmarks and know where we are instantly. It is a great combination. However those same differences are often the source of our disagreements where she has noticed some small (to me almost unnoticeable) fact or spec of minutia and I have seen a theme of which she has no awareness. Fundamentally we approach logic in completely opposite directions – she from how things differ one from the other, and me from how things are similar. But these differences are not the only problems we encounter. Working out these differences and disagreements has been the success formula for our marriage. Like I said, she is a woman. She thinks like one, has abandonment issues like other women, has body image concerns that invariably affect our relationship and intimacy potential – all of that. It is not a problem, but rather the source of our differences. We needed to find a way to live with each other’s difference and support those differences and allow each other to grow and develop in different ways and in different directions, if necessary.

All of those differing needs and directions must be worked out and worked on (not ignored or dismissed) in order to have a successful and vibrant marriage. Beyond that, however, we needed to find a way to call the argument into being – to start the arguments. We also needed to find a way to intervene within arguments in ways that either granted a time-out or called attention to when one or the other of us was getting overly ego-positioned. With these two additional tools we found that we could disagree more productively.

In the beginning I was afraid (having painfully failed at arguments and marriages before) that getting into an argument would lead to certain disaster. But when approached from commitment (to each other and the marriage itself) and “workability,” the disagreement and differences can be dealt with and can result in enhancing the relationship. But the discovery was that just the opposite happened.

The bottom line in this discussion is that when couples can enter into heated, positioned arguments and successfully resolve those problems and differences, they begin to build up a pile of evidence that the relationship can survive such threats and assaults. We have now over 19 years of evidence that our loving and our relationship is bigger than any disagreement we can have. We have tons of concrete evidence that we can work through any problem we encounter. And with that, I no longer cringe when she says, “we’ve gotta talk!”

That is the perfect marriage!