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Learning to Kill: Why Spouses Who Keep Secrets are Desirable
Why are spouses who keep secrets more desirable?
Posted June 9, 2010
Learning to Kill: Is Your Spouse Keeping Secrets from You?
“The secret of a happy marriage is a secret.”
-Proverb
In marriage there are secrets, and then there are secrets.
I thought of this trite-but-truism while watching the movie Killers, Hollywood summer fare starring Katherine Heigl and Ashton Kutcher (with a side of the brilliant Catherine O’Hara). It’s shallow as can be (not that I have anything against that), and it is basically a rehash of a theme we saw in Mr. and Mrs. Smith and True Lies—the marriage is not what it seems, because one or both partners is leading a double life as a glamorous spy. Why does Hollywood keep circling back to this concept? Could it be because so many moviegoers long not just for action and thrills, but for a paradigm of a marriage that is not only satisfying, but also surprising and exciting? Killers, like its precursors, might be lite fare, but it poses some deep questions: Can marriage be interesting? Might our long-term partners surprise us? How? What if the person we think we know better than anyone else is keeping something from us? What if we don’t really know the person we’re married to?
“I didn’t lie!” Kutcher’s character, happily and calmly married for three years, protests when his wife confronts him about his past as a hired assassin for the U.S. government during a high-speed car chase (of course). “Did I tell you everything? No, I didn’t. That’s what married people do. They fail to tell each other everything! Like ‘No, you don’t have your mother’s upper arms!’ ” This line got a huge laugh from the audience the day I saw the movie. Everyone in the theater recognized that, though they weren’t hired assassins, they had something in common with one. They didn’t always necessarily tell the whole truth or even the truth when asked, “Does this dress make me look fat?” or “What do you think of my kids from my first marriage?” or even “What did you do today?” The movie gave them permission to acknowledge that sometimes, in a marriage, honesty and total disclosure is not the best policy.
But it’s a case of knowing and not knowing. While we all keep some things to ourselves in our healthy marriages (I’m not talking about addiction or criminality here), we have been taught to believe that transparency is a prerequisite for a successful life partnership. Laying our souls bare, we are told by many therapists, self-help books, and experts on daytime TV and the internet, leads to greater intimacy, trust, and also better, more sastifying, intimate sex.
Really? Experts including Ester Perel, a sex therapist in Manhattan, international speaker, and author of Mating in Captivity, question the presumption that if we “fix” the relationship, great sex will follow, noting that in her practice she often saw that attention to the relationship made partners feel more affectionate and secure, but didn’t necessarily help their sex life. That got Perel thinking:
"Maybe contrary to the idea that all couples therapists seem to focus on these days, which is more intimacy, more closeness, more sharing as a pathway to desire, sometimes maybe the very caring, protective elements that nurture love are the ones that can actually inhibit the unselfconsciousness and the freedom that is needed for desire."
Perel turns our presumptions about partnership on their head. We’re told to communicate, to open up, to tell all, to have no secrets. But what if that’s the worst policy of all? What if transparency extinguishes the flame of passion, an important ingredient in romantic love and in a partnership?
Perel notes that in her considerable experience, “Couples who have a spark are couples who know how to resurrect it.” And part of that is in seeing their partner as mysterious, Other. Even if it’s just watching one’s husband talk to someone at a party, or seeing one’s wife in a moment where she doesn’t know she’s being observed as she crosses the street. That moment of perceiving one’s beloved as separate and Other, Perel suggests, can rekindle the flame. Don’t presume you know your partner inside out, Perel counsels, or that he or she should not feel that there is something mysterious in you to fathom. Plain old privacy and discretion, and being open to it as a source of erotic connection, might be a route to great growth—and sexiness—in a marriage or partnership.
So might sharing novel, exciting experiences. For Heigl’s character, it is learning a new skill, one her husband knows well--killing bad guys. Thankfully for the rest of us, less extreme hobbies and activities will do just as well, according to recent research at Stony Brook University. There, it was recently reported in the New York Times, researchers discovered that couples who undertake novel activities together are happier than couples who stick to the same old same old. Experts believe that this is because new experiences activate the dopamine system, mimicking the brain chemistry of early romantic love. Bungie jumping—or even playing an exciting video game together—might create the same biochemical cocktail present in early relationship sex insanity, altering the neural activation of the brain.
Marty Babits, LCSW and co-director of the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy’s Family and Couples Treatment Program in Manhattan, says surprise isn’t just exciting. The capacity to be surprised is something of an indicator of relationship health as well. “Openness to being surprised is parallel to openness to pursuing and identifying novel (creative) solutions to difficulties,” he told me recently. “The centrality of this capacity, its importance to long-term partnerships and to marriage,” he notes, “is under-researched and under-acknowledged.’” In other words, we need to know more about the secrets that are the secret to a happy, lustful marriage.
The hope that we can make Marriage and our marriages not only nurturing and satisfying but also deeply exciting gets dressed up in the exotic, foreign and glamorous frocks of international espionage in Killers. Research on excitement in the couple dyad poses the question, What could you wear?
Sources:
Babits, Marty, The Power of the Middle Ground: a Couple’s Guide to Renewing Your Relationship (Promethus, 2008)
Tara Parker-Pope, “What Brain Scans Can Tell Us About Marriage,” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/fashion/06gore.html?scp=3&sq=tara%20parker-pope&st=cse
ABC Australia interview with Ester Perel, http://www.abc.net.au/tv/enoughrope/transcripts/s2058313.htm
Perel, Ester, Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic (Harper, 2007).
