Getting the Love You Want, 20th An. Ed. (25 page)

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Authors: Ph.D Harville Hendrix

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Through these efforts, Anne and Greg have been able to meet enough of their needs to attain a new level of acceptance. “I am secure enough in our relationship that I can now accept
the fact that Greg is basically a self-contained person,” says Anne. “It no longer threatens me. I can wait for him to reveal his feelings. I don’t have to press him. When he’s upset, my instinct is to make him tell me right now what is bothering him. I just want to get it over with. But that always puts me in the facilitator role. The other thing I found is that, if I wait before I make demands, he usually resolves things himself in his own way. And even when he doesn’t, I can live with things the way they are. I’ve learned that I don’t have to fix everything.”
Anne and Greg are the first to admit that working to achieve a conscious partnership is not easy. In fact, Anne wants to go on record as saying, “Working things out with Greg is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” Greg voices a similar opinion. “Marriage is like growing flowers,” he says. “You always have to work on it. If you don’t, the weeds start to grow and choke out the flowers.” He makes another comparison. “When you garden, it’s important to have good tools. You can carry water by hand and dig in the dirt with your hands, but it’s much much easier to use a hose and a shovel. That’s how I feel about living with Annie. We have the right tools and skills to make the kind of marriage we want.”
The reason Anne and Greg are willing to put so much effort into their relationship is that they reap daily rewards. Greg thinks that one of the most obvious changes has been in their emotional states. “Early on in our relationship,” says Greg, “we were both volatile people, only I kept a lid on my feelings and Anne was too free with hers. Now she’s become less crazy, and I’m more emotional. Not that we’re trying to become what the other person was—we’ve just reached a balance. We tend to oscillate around a mean. Sometimes she’s more emotional than I am. Sometimes I’m more emotional than she is. But it’s like we’ve established middle ground. Which is very reassuring.”
Greg finds that what he’s learning in this relationship has helped him become a more effective manager. “I’ve gotten quite adept at spotting hidden agendas,” he says. “I know that
the issue that people are talking about is not always the real issue. I look for the underlying problems.” He also is better at putting himself in others’ shoes. “I say to myself, ‘If I were that person, what would I be wanting or needing at this moment?’ Being able to empathize with Anne has given me that skill. My marriage has also made me a better communicator and able to withstand more pressure. If someone at work has a problem or becomes angry, I am able to keep from getting defensive. I am able to get things done.”
Anne finds that her relationship with Greg has made her a more spiritual being. “The strongest force in the universe is what I would call ‘Christ in us’ or the Holy Spirit,” says Anne. “And to me that’s the same thing as the drive to completion. In my mind, our purpose on earth is to be the best that we can be in terms of loving and living and being kind to other people and developing our talents and our skills. I think the best way I can do this is to have full access to who I am. And that means being honest about who I am, the negative part of me as well as the positive. Being free to be complete. That has happened in this relationship. It’s a great paradox. Because before I thought I was feeling self-confident, but in reality it was grandiosity. Now I just feel good about myself. All of me. I like being who I am. I can be alone and be happy. I’m more comfortable in my own skin than I have ever been. I’m walking around better on a moment-to-moment basis. My anxiety level is so low. That’s a real difference. I feel truly happy and secure for the first time in my life.”
I asked Anne if she had any advice for people who would be reading this book and perhaps confronting some of these ideas for the first time. “My advice would be to focus on yourself,” she said. “And when I say that, I mean you should realize that what you are doing for your partner is what you’re doing for yourself. It’s about your own personal growth. I finally learned that, when I was stretching to meet one of Greg’s needs, I was reclaiming a part of myself. So, any time your partner asks you
to do something, say to yourself, ‘Does this make sense? Does it behoove me as an individual to do this?’ And if it makes good sense and if it behooves you to do it, then do it, regardless of how you feel about it, because in meeting the needs of your partner you will be recapturing a part of yourself.”
KENNETH AND GRACE met in the 1940s, when they were both in college. Kenneth was a premed student, and Grace was studying art history. They became friends when they happened to sit next to each other on the bus going home for spring vacation. Kenneth has a clue to what attracted him to Grace. “A woman in the seat in front of us had a screaming baby and was having a tough time comforting her. Grace asked the woman if she could hold the baby. Soon after Grace got the baby, it started to settle down. I remember thinking to myself, ‘That’s the kind of woman that I would like to have as the mother of my children.’ Deeper down—although I certainly didn’t know it at the time—I was wanting some of that tenderness for myself.”
Grace had a positive first impression of Kenneth. “He seemed like such a gentle, kind man.” She was also pleased that during the long bus ride he expressed genuine interest in a paper she had written at school. “I liked the fact that he respected my intellect, something that other men hadn’t done.” She remembers telling her parents as soon as she got home that she had met a young man who was “as good as gold.”
 
UNDERLYING THESE CONSCIOUS impressions were more powerful, hidden sources of attraction. What unfinished business did Grace unwittingly bring to their romance? Grace was the oldest in a family of three children, two girls and a boy. She described her family as “a mixture of love and tumult.” They
prided themselves on being offbeat and doing unusual things. “We were all artists or musicians,” said Grace. “There was a lot of spontaneity. Dad would say, ‘Let’s take a drive after supper. Leave the dishes!’ Mother would say, ‘Let me do the dishes first.’ And Dad would say, ‘If we don’t leave now, we’ll miss the sunset.’ So we would all pile in the car and go off for a drive. We sang in the car, in harmony. We sang in church as a family, so we traditionally ended our family singing with the song ‘Blessed Be the Tie.’”
Grace has fond memories of her early childhood. She remembers being her father’s “little darling.” When she was five years old, her younger sister, Sharon, was born, and she had a rude awakening. “All of a sudden I wasn’t the center of attention anymore. I felt cast out. I remember thinking, ‘What in the world has happened? Aren’t I as cute as I used to be? Why am I not loved?’ I just couldn’t accept the fact that I was no longer the favorite.”
Grace described her mother as a confusing mixture of warmth and petulance. She and Grace rarely got along. “She was so strong that I felt that I had to fight her to maintain my own identity,” she recalls. “I think this is why I became a rebel.” Her father was warm and caring and a good listener. She remembers having a very close relationship with him. “Some would say too close,” says Grace. “I remember coming home from high school and lying down on the couch and having my dad rub my back. It felt perfectly comfortable and normal to me, but I know that it made Mother jealous.” In later years she would look back on her relationship with her father with some anxiety. “In a way, it was scary to be that close to him. When I got married, I remember that it was very hard on him. Right before my wedding, he told me, ‘I always thought you would stay home and never get married.’ He was partly kidding, but I think there was some truth to that.” Besides experiencing some discomfort over the closeness of their relationship, Grace
wished that her dad had a more forceful personality. “He was not very strong,” she said. “He would disappear when things got rough. When Mother and I got into an argument, he would go polish the car or tend to his flowers. He would never defend me.”
When Grace was about twelve or thirteen, she experienced a religious awakening. She went to a special youth service and was overwhelmed by the presence of God. She remembers feeling a confusing mixture of elation and guilt. Elation at “having God on my side, but guilt for being a wicked girl, for sassing my mother.” Around that time, she remembers a day when her family was scheduled to go on a trip, and Grace stubbornly refused to go with them. “I remember going to my room and praying and crying and carrying on. I have no idea what it was really about, but I remember an awful feeling. Some kind of emotional crisis. I remember feeling ‘bad’ or ‘wicked.’” This negative view of herself was to be a refrain in later years.
Grace often worried about being “dumb.” She got this idea from her parents, who would criticize her for doing “stupid” things. “It wasn’t that I was really dumb,” she says in self-defense. “I would just be thinking about something else and do dumb things.” Perhaps another reason Grace developed this idea about herself is that she is by nature a “doer rather than a thinker.” As a young girl she had an assertive, take-charge personality and could be counted on to get things done with little wasted effort. After a minimum amount of planning and organizing, she would plunge right in. Sometimes Grace would pride herself on her ability to get the job done, but at other times she would agonize about not being as deliberate and contemplative as others.
One of Grace’s strengths is that she is very artistic, something that was important to her as a young adult. When she was in high school, she was an assistant to the art teacher at summer camp and enjoyed helping children express themselves through
art. In following years she won prizes for her free-form designs and surrealistic paintings, and art gradually became a primary focus in her life.
 
KNOWING THESE FACTS about Grace, let’s take a look at Kenneth’s early years. Kenneth has had extensive counseling throughout his life. During our initial interview, he told me that he could “tell my life story with one hand tied behind my back.” True to his word, in just a few minutes he was able to give a comprehensive synopsis of his upbringing. “My mother was an intense, energetic, passionate woman,” he began, “who wanted a lot from life and wanted a lot from my father, who was a passive, quiet, gentle man. My father was a model for me. I learned to be passive and quiet from him. My mother also wanted a lot from me. I experienced her as being hungry with me. Now, as an adult looking back on my childhood, I can see it was because she wasn’t being nourished by my father. She had a sharp tongue that could cut, and she was often critical and angry at me. I didn’t understand why, and often thought she was being unfair. I can remember as a kid wishing that I had a different mother. We would have some warm times, but I couldn’t trust myself to get too close to her; I was afraid she would eat me for breakfast. I didn’t even want to share my achievements with her, because I thought she would take them as a feather in her cap. And I wasn’t going to let her do that.”
There appears to be a basic similarity between Grace’s and Kenneth’s upbringing. Both had fathers who were passive and withdrawn and mothers who were aggressive and dominant. Kenneth, however, was not close to either parent. Though he greatly admired his father, his father remained at a distance. “We had some nice times together, but he was shy about talking about feelings. I wanted him to like me and be proud of me, but he never told me that he loved me. I learned from other people that he respected me, not from him.” His father was especially wary of anger. “If I was ever angry, he would back
away. He used the same technique with my mother. When she was angry at him, he would just withdraw. When my mother was angry at me, I tried to copy his evasive maneuver, but I could never back away far enough.” Because of this early indoctrination, Kenneth learned to be afraid of his own anger: anger got him in trouble with his mother and alienated him from his father. “I decided at a young age to be nice,” he says. But this persona, this “false self,” was covering a desperate longing for, in his words, “some tender mothering and some firm and affirming fathering.” And underneath this longing was a reservoir of anger at being denied those needs.
Kenneth and Grace exemplify a principle that I talked about earlier, which is that husbands and wives are often injured in the same way but develop opposite defenses. Kenneth and Grace both felt that they had to carve out a separate identity from an overbearing parent. This suggests that their key developmental struggle was in the stage that child psychologists would label “the stage of individuation and autonomy.” Kenneth created his psychic space by being passive and “nice,” hoping to sidestep his mother’s anger; Grace established her identity by being rebellious and angry, trying to counter her mother’s invasiveness. Because of their opposite solutions, it makes sense that they would be attracted to each other. Grace admired Kenneth’s gentleness and goodness; Kenneth admired Grace’s strength and aggressiveness. They saw in each other parts of their own essential nature that were poorly developed. What they didn’t realize was that these opposite character traits were an effort to heal the very same wound.
From a vantage point of thirty-five years of marriage, Kenneth and Grace have some astute observations on why they were initially attracted to each other. “I made arrangements to take care of myself,” says Kenneth. “I picked up Grace to remother me. She was full of warmth and vitality and tenderness.” Grace has an equally succinct explanation for marrying Kenneth: “I was a ‘bad,’ ‘dumb’ girl looking for a ‘good,’
‘bright’ boy. Kenneth was exactly what I needed.” While these undoubtedly were some of their positive reasons for marrying each other, there were some negative ones as well. The most obvious one is that they had each chosen a mate who would perpetuate their struggle with the opposite-sex parent. Grace was dominant and aggressive—like Kenneth’s mother—and Kenneth was passive and gentle—like Grace’s father. They had chosen partners who had character traits that had caused them a great deal of anguish in childhood.
It was a full year, however, before these negative factors became evident. “The first year was pretty idyllic,” says Grace. Problems developed in the second year of their marriage, shortly after the birth of their daughter. Kenneth was a physician at a struggling family-practice clinic. Grace was concerned that he wasn’t aggressive enough about attracting new patients. “I kept seeing all of these ways that he could help the clinic,” recalls Grace, “but he was content with things the way they were. I kept seeing all these possibilities that he was not seeing.”
They had their first real fight when Grace realized that the clinic was losing patients. “For two years Kenneth had ignored all the signs that the clinic was going downhill. Now it was getting too late to do anything about it. Two of his colleagues left to find more lucrative employment. One night I finally blew up.” Kenneth remembers the fight and recalls that he appreciated Grace’s concern for the clinic but resented her intrusion. “On the one hand, I kind of looked to her for leadership,” he says. “But, on the other hand, I was furious with her for being so demanding. She seemed to think that she knew what I should be doing and that she had a right to tell me. I felt like she was my mother, making heavy demands on me.”
Looking back on the episode, Grace, too, recalls having mixed emotions. “I was concerned about being too strong, too willful. I wondered whether downplaying my personality would make him more dominant. But I couldn’t let things lie.” The very factors that had been the key to their mutual
attraction—Grace’s assertive, outgoing nature and Kenneth’s passive, gentle nature—were becoming the basis for a thirty-year power struggle.
Kenneth began to have some additional misgivings about Grace. “I was becoming aware of some things that I wished were different in Grace. For one thing, she didn’t have the same intellectual interests that I did. I wanted her to read more and be able to discuss issues.” Once again Grace was getting the message that she wasn’t “smart” enough. The young man who had once seemed so interested in her academic work was now criticizing her for not being intellectual.
When their daughter was in the first grade, Grace began teaching art part-time at a local high school. In the winter of that year, Kenneth’s mother came to visit, and Kenneth and Grace had another significant confrontation. At the time Grace was very involved in the school and was putting out a newsletter at their church as well. She was pleasant with her mother-in-law, but went about her business as usual. “I was too busy to be a good hostess,” she recalls. Furthermore, she refused to live up to her mother-in-law’s expectation that she be a traditional homemaker and spend all her hours after work “cooking, cleaning, and mending.” Kenneth’s mother had to entertain herself during most of her visit and was so irate at this treatment that she left two days early, complaining bitterly to Kenneth as he drove her to the train. Being trapped in the car with his angry mother made Kenneth extremely anxious. “There I was, listening to my mother attack Grace and not daring to defend her. I didn’t have the nerve to stand up for my own wife.”
For Grace this visit was an unpleasant replay of her childhood. Once again she was relying on an ineffective, passive male to defend her against a critical, hostile mother figure. “I wanted Kenneth to stand up for me,” she says, “to explain to his mother how busy I was. But he was afraid to ruffle her feathers, and then he had the nerve to be angry at me for failing to placate her!”
As Grace was recounting this episode to me, she remarked on the resemblance between Kenneth and her father. “My dad was a very kind, loving man, but he was not strong. I wanted him to be protective of me, to take leadership—the very same things I wanted from Kenneth.” Interestingly, when she was angry with Kenneth, she treated him the same way her mother treated her father. “I would rant and rave, cry and yell, generally terrorize him with my anger. Kenneth would do his best to placate me. But the ‘nicer’ he got, the angrier I got. It all became quite poisonous.” Unknowingly, Grace had introjected her mother’s negative traits, the very ones that had plagued her as a child.

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