I just found an article on MSN.com called "New Rules for a Good Marriage" and you know it had to be particularly clueless to get me to blog about it. The article seeks to "debunk" five marriage myths in favor of "new rules," which is already a weird substitution (rules for myths?), but it gets better. The myths are as follows, paraphrased for convenience and brevity:
1. Never go to bed angry
2. You'll eventually grow out of love
3. Sex will become less important w/ age
4. Empty-nests breed divorce
5. Your spouse will leave you in a mid-life crisis
I suppose I've heard all of these, but I don't know if I'd accept that they were full-fledged myths. We sometimes practice the first, and I know we wondered about the second before we got married, as have some of my friends. And I can say I've thought about #4 with respect to my own parents, who seem to be adopting at least 2 animals for each child who moves out of the house. #3 and #5 have never really bothered me.
But what's more interesting are the "new" rules. The author develops most of these through the writings of John Gottman, a researcher of marriage at U of Washington (whose work is certainly valuable - more on that later). Here are the rules, which each correspond to the myths above:
1. Sleep on it
2. Marriages require work, not feelings
3. Sexual connection can grow w/ age
4. New freedom means new flourishing
5. It's healthy for both genders to reevaluate their lives "midway"
Item 1 is particularly simple-minded, to me. Just like its corresponding "myth" oversteps its usefulness by the absolute "never," this seems to suggest an equally absolute alternative. But the problem is in thinking about rules rather than, say, principles, or goals. If a couple shares the principle of communication or the goal of actually working out a problem, then they will be able to decide, in media res, whether they should work a fight to the end or sleep on it. In fact, if the couple agree to "sleep on it," then they know they are not letting things fester and can therefore calm down, and so are not, in fact, going to bed angry, anyway.
But #2 particularly blew my mind: it is apparently a "new" "rule" that marriages require work, not feelings. In fairness, I understand where this comes from, and, as admitted, we experienced the power of the "myth" ourselves while still engaged, but we never really doubted that marriage required work. Dating required work, for crying out loud; why should a binding legal, social and moral union be any easier?
I would argue that the work marriage requires more or less obviates the need for any of the other "rules" as well as dispels the power of the myths. The author herself begins with a reflection about how couples work through child-raising and career-changes - these are all the things that go into building the intimacy and connection that make empty nests, mid-life re-evaluations and old-people sex less a problem.
Of course, my bigger problem is with the rhetoric of the article, the idea of structuring our thinking about marriage according to myths and rules. I think I've established the weaknesses of that method. One thing it does positively is to normalize anxiety about the "myths" which do to some degree circulate in our cultural air. Though it offers scientific research as a means of deflating said myths, thereby ignoring our religious and cultural traditions of marriage wisdom (which are not by any means flawless) and overly schematizing things, it at least tries to offer some positive reorientations of one's thoughts.
Gottman (as a last thought) is an interesting source, too. He started by studying divorce, and now he's been studying healthy and successful marriages and has more or less gotten into the business of "marriage preservation." Interpreted sensibly, his work more or less supports the kind of values-orientation I've been arguing for here, which makes me like him all right.
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