Blog Archives

Marriage: Impossible or Crucial?

12/17/2013

(Image via Jo Christian Oterhals on flickr.)

People usually marry the person they have fallen in love with.

That works fine for people who had a happy childhood with nurturing, happily married parents. These lucky few can follow their hearts with abandon. But for most people, falling in love represents an unrealistic idealization of the beloved and a doomed wish to heal the wounds received in childhood. We choose people who turn out to be a lot like the parent who caused us the most grief.

This is partly because we are unconsciously hoping that we will be able to master our childhood traumas--that we will finally get the person who was incapable of love to love us. It is also because our earliest objects, even when they hurt us, were highly exciting and desperately needed for our very survival. Repeating those relationships again and again as adults becomes addictive and erotic.

Once married to that wrong person, marital partners tend to operate the way their own mothers and fathers did, and they unconsciously try to recreate the kind of relationship their own parents had—even if that relationship was toxic.

(Image via John C Bullas on flickr.)

Psychoanalysis is the best solution to this problem. A good analysis can literally rewire the brain in a way that can help the patient learn to make better choices in their love life. A patient of mine, who is going through a painful divorce and who has been talking about how she has chosen the wrong partners again and again, said this about it:

“My analysis has taught me how to think. All my life I have been buffeted around by my feelings. All my life I have been attracted to people who wanted to use me and treat me like a thing, not a person. But lately I've been thinking that next time, I'm going to choose and not be chosen. I'm going to think about what is good for me and go out and find it, no matter who I am attracted to.”

This woman is ready for a new kind of relationship.

For those who don't have the inclination or the money to begin a long term analysis, there are several things to keep in mind to help a troubled marriage:

Work on improving your fights with your spouse. Only one person is allowed to shout at any given time. If your mate is screaming, try to listen till he or she is finished. Then repeat what your partner has just said without screaming.

Forget being honest. I shudder when people tell me they are always scrupulously honest with their marital partner. A long term marriage is going to produce plenty of feelings that should not be communicated. You can know that you feel bored with your husband or wife, that you don't like that he or she is older or fatter than they used to be, but nothing good can be gained by being honest about it. Know what you are feeling at all times, but only communicate what will be good for the relationship.

Most importantly, don't attack yourself with your mate's shortcomings. If your spouse doesn't want to have sex, taking that on as your problem, deciding that her frigidity means you are personally unattractive, is a recipe for disaster. Understanding that your husband or wife is a separate person with his or her own problems, issues and shortcomings, that have nothing to do with you, is the beginning of empathy and mature love for another human being.

(Image via Prabhu B Doss on flickr.)

Marriage is an institution that is a challenging, frustrating, sometimes-impossible endeavor… but it is still the best solution society has created to address the problem of our existential loneliness, and to provide an environment for the care of children.

For more on marriage, see "The Capacity to Love" and "How To Get a Divorce" in Dr. Holmes's latest book, Wrestling with Destiny.

1 Comment

The Oppression of Women—From Society and From Within

12/3/2013

0 Comments

(Image via Sarah Ashley (gcoldironjr2003) on Flickr.)

Women, to quote a marketer of cigarettes, “have come a long way, baby.”

The contemporary liberated woman is no longer confined to marriage and child-rearing as her only projects. She can divorce with her reputation and fortune intact, and, thanks to modern contraception, explore her sexuality with as much imagination and pleasure as men have always enjoyed. She can have a professional career; she can head a large corporation; she can run for President of the United States.

And yet, for all her hard-won liberation, the contemporary woman is still constrained.

In the twenty-first century, female shackles are extremely subtle, and often disguised as “choices” or “control.” Today, the war on women is fought on the battlefield of the female body. And sadly, most of the combatants are women themselves.

Attacks on the female body permeate modern culture.

Fashion, that attempt to bind, control, and alter the female body, demands that women be pathologically thin. It prescribes mutilating shoes and sexually exploitive clothing. Anorexia and bulimia are almost exclusively female diseases—can anyone be surprised that they have become epidemic in today’s society?

Cosmetic surgery, the expensive, dangerous and painful elective procedure in which bodies are sliced and modified to achieve some ideal of female beauty, is falsely seen by many women as freedom and choice: an opportunity to take control of one’s life.
(Image via Simon Farnworth (dollobserver) on Flickr.)
Important milestones in female life and development—pregnancy, childbirth, menopause—have been reframed by a sexist society as “illnesses.” I have discussed elsewhere that these milestones have the potential for enormous growth—yet this potential is stolen by drugs and technology.

In Wrestling with Destiny, I explore why so many women are willing to attack their own bodies with starvation diets, elective Caesarian sections, hormone replacement therapy, and face lifts.

There is power in femininity—it contains an innate reminder of infancy, that vulnerable time when a woman had all control over food and shelter, over the line between life and death.

Because it is women who preside over our infancy, we associate women with our earliest, most primitive anxieties. This anxiety drives us to diminish and control women—even if those women are ourselves.

Female flesh reminds us all, men and women, of our vulnerability and our most primitive fears; and we all, men and women, have an unconscious need to attack and control the female body. Women must be mindful of the power embodied in their femininity, and mindful of the fact that it needs protection not only from our sexist society, but also from our own self-contempt.

Read more of Dr. Holmes's insights into female psychology in her first book, The Internal Triangle.

0 Comments

Marriage: Impossible or Crucial?

The Oppression of Women—From Society and From Within

About

Archives

Categories