Some of the country's most respected relationship experts have devised an array of courses that teach couples how to manage conflict without reciprocating, retaliating, or invalidating their partner.
You and your mate have just had a fight. One of the countless minute, convoluted conversations that busy couples have every day in their push to get things done, each one part spoken word, part signal code, part mind reading, but one that suddenly flares into your own private Bosnia. A simple conversation that started out so expectantly a second before goes off like a grenade in your hands.
Couples' arguments can be so deeply mired in the minutiae of their lives that at times mates may feel like they're locked in their own special hell. But what if most times, without paying any attention, you and your spouse were sliding into a deeply carved groove, having the same argument you've had countless times before? The triggers may be different: socks on the floor, a rude remark to a father-in-law, an oversize phone bill, an unchanged diaper, a puddle of orange juice on the counter, a shrug. When the atmosphere is right, no act is too small to incite hostility.
In couples' myriad fights, despite our glorious individuality, we are all fighting exactly the same fight. Tolstoy, you see, got it wrong. Each couple may be unhappy in its own way, tripping over the particular furnishings of its own house, but every couple gets unhappy in the exact same way and for the same reasons. We use the same words. We harden into the same positions. We feel the same alienation. And the same distress. The same processes overtake love in ways that marriage researchers now find extraordinarily predictable.
Yet, it is this very fact—the ritualization of revenge—that now promises to save love. Over the past 20 years, experts have been putting our intimate relationships under the microscope, studying our private reactions by both looking at what goes on between partners and inside them: videotaping every grimace, shrug, and caress, audiotaping every expletive and sigh, and monitoring physiological reactions throughout. They've come to understand why some relationships happily endure, what can make some hellholes of unhappiness, and what, precisely, precipitates divorce, which still claims half of all first marriages, usually within the first seven years.
Psychologists have seen with their own eyes that the overwhelming majority of couples start out with true love and great expectations. But mounting evidence suggests we get into trouble for a very humbling reason. We just don't know how to handle the negative feelings that are the unavoidable by-product of the differences between two people, the very differences that attract them to each other in the first place. Think of it as the friction any two bodies would generate rubbing against each other countless times each day.
Love Survival Skills
As a result, a growing number of researchers and clinicians have come to the conclusion that most unhappy couples don't so much need therapy as they do education. Education in how relationships work, and the specific skills that make them work well. "Having a good relationship is a skill," insists Howard Markman, Ph.D., professor of psychology at the University of Denver, and a longtime marital researcher. Washington, D.C., family therapist Diane Sollee, M.S.W., agrees. "Marriage isn't a disease," she says, "you don't need therapy for it." Sollee is director of the Coalition for Marriage, Family, and Couples Education, an organization that makes people aware of the new information that can change the odds for marital success. "Couples need to learn a way to stay engaged—not withdraw or attack," adds psychologist Sherod Miller, Ph.D., another pioneer in couples education who practices in Colorado.
This thinking embodies a sea change in the mental health world. For one, it formalizes the idea that the best way to help people is to teach them crucial psychological skills, so-called "psychoeducation." "Psychoeducation is nothing more than giving knowledge to people so they can help themselves," says Sollee. In other words, courses aren't therapy—but they typically have a therapeutic effect. Psychoeducation also flatly rejects the medical model of illness—which sees problems as pathology—because it doesn't fit what are really normal problems of living, however much mental distress they may cause. In addition, it shifts value to prevention so the development of problems that are costly to men, women, and children can be averted.
"We haven't had the revolution we need about love," Sollee insists. "Couples who marry now don't do anything different despite knowing that 50 percent of them will be divorced in a few years. They think their love is so special they'll make it. They don't realize that the survival of marriage is not about love, it's about skills. It's a skill to know how not to escalate a conflict if your relationship isn't working. It's not that you picked the wrong person. You need smart love."
For all the scientifically documentable benefits of preventing marital distress before it starts, Sollee is convinced that marital education is the most romantic thing a couple can do, to stroll hand in hand into a course that will teach them how to keep their love alive. Or the best wedding present parents can give their children. Sollee has put her money where her mouth is; she has herself attended courses and given them as wedding presents to her two sons and their wives.
