INTENTIONAL MARRIAGE: YOUR RITUALS WILL SET YOU FREE WILLLIAM DOHERTY University of Minnesota Banquet Keynote/Annual Smart Marriages Conference Denver, Colorado I had a fascinating conversation with the taxi driver on the way from the airport to this conference. When he mentioned his wife, I asked him how long he had been married. "Forty-seven years married," he said, "and I’m 68 years old." He was an African-American gentleman who seemed to be in great physical shape. I asked him about his secret of his marital longevity. Without hesitation, he replied: "Get things out in the open. No secrets. When you have a fight, you have to make up afterwards. Which means someone has to apologize first." He added that he always apologizes first. This guy’s been reading the marriage research, or maybe he doesn’t have to. He then ventured into the domain of gender roles. He recounted the time that one of his ten grandchildren asked him, "Grandpa, are you the head of the family?" He answered slowly and carefully, "Yes, I guess I am, but if I’m the head, Grandma’s the neck, and you know, the head never moves without the neck moving first." I felt like I had already attended the most interesting talk of the conference, before I even got to the hotel. I’m here to talk about intentional marriage and rituals that will set us free. We fall in love through rituals of connection and intimacy--courtship rituals like romantic dinners, long talks, riding bicycles or going skiing, going for walks, exchanging gifts, talking every night on the telephone. We mostly do these rituals alone as a couple - when people are falling in love, their family and friends know to give them some space. We gladly fill our time through rituals of connection and intimacy. We develop a common language and a common experience bank. We go to dinner at our favorite spots, and we try to sit at our favorite tables. We go dancing at our favorite places. And we don’t dance with everybody in the room; we dance mostly with the person we are falling in love with. I want to tell you a story of Ken and Judy who are a couple I saw in therapy back when I was living in Oklahoma. They were a beautiful couple, tall, handsome and graceful. They had met on the country-western dance floor, and they told me, with a bit of shyness, that they were really good dancers. So good that other people on the dance floor would sometimes make a circle and watch them dance. Ken and Judy had been married for three years. When I asked them when was the last time they had danced, they replied ruefully, "Three years ago." The ritual that brought them together ? that helped to define them as a couple ? was something they had abandoned. Dance floors, I guess, are for singles and for couples who are falling in love, not for married couples trying to sustain their love. What is Intentional Marriage? An intentional marriage is one where the partners are conscious, deliberate, and planful about maintaining and building a sense of connection over the years. My emphasis here is on rituals, but a lot else goes into being intentional about marriage: attending marriage education experiences, building a community of support for one’s marriage, setting boundaries with children. In some ways ours is a movement to promote being intentional about marriage, to promote mindful marriage. Because in this era, if we are not intentional, we will become an automatic pilot couple. What I mean is that the natural flow of marriage relationships in contemporary life, with our crammed schedules, endless tasks, kids to care for, and ever-present television and other media is towards less focus on the couple relationship over time, and therefore towards less connection, less spark, and less intimacy. This is not being dysfunctional, this is being normal. I work in St. Paul, Minnesota, which is right near the Mississippi, the farthest north where big ships can navigate the river. I like to use Mississippi analogies when I talk to couples. Getting married, I say, is like getting into a canoe in the Mississippi River at St. Paul. If you don’t paddle you go south. Not that I have anything against the south, but if you don’t want to go there, you’ve got a problem. If you want to stay at St. Paul ? it’s a pretty powerful river ? you’ve got to paddle. And if you want to go north you have to have a plan. To grow closer over the years, you have to be mindful and intentional not only because of the pace and distractions of life, but also because of what research has shown is the loss of intensity that occurs from daily living over many months and years, from sleeping beside the same person every night and having sex 3.25 times a week in the first five years and then 2.5 in the next five years. (I never knew what those decimals meant in the studies. False starts, perhaps?) Let’s see, where was I? I was saying that going on automatic pilot is not about being dysfunctional; it’s about focusing on other things. That’s even before we have kids. But after we have children, the current gets really swift. With new babies, our first priority is naturally the care of a creature that nature has programmed to get our attention. And our second priority is self-care. We tradeoff child care so that we can get some individual down time. We end up borrowing on our marriages, not just for a short time but for a long time. We borrow on each other’s good will and time and energy in order to do our job as parent and in order to have down time for self-care. We evolve good parent-child rituals, but we lose our marital rituals. People can be quite gifted at family rituals with the whole family, and quite dumbfounded about what they would do as a couple. Couples who courted through having long, romantic dinners are sometimes nervous about dining alone because they are not sure what they would say to for an hour or more. So they make sure they invite other people along for company. And so, our marriages go on automatic pilot. During courtship the marriage is figural in our lives—front and center, if you will—and the rest of our lives are ground. When we get married, and particularly after we have children, this reverses: other things—the children, our work, our hobbies, our religious involvement—become figural and the marriage moves to the background and only gets our attention when there’s something wrong. The antidote to becoming an automatic pilot couple, I am saying, is to be an intentional couple who cultivates rituals over the years. As I talk about marriage rituals, I invite those of you who are married, or have been married, to think about your own rituals. I’m going to talk about some from my marriage, about some from couples I have worked with, and before we leave tonight I am going to hear from you all as well. What are Marital Rituals? Rituals are social interactions that are repeated, coordinated, and significant. This is the classical, anthropological definition going back to van Gennep’s work in 1908. Rituals can be everyday interactions, or they could be once a year, but they’re repeated. They’re also coordinated. You have to know what is expected of you in a ritual; you can’t have a meal ritual together if you don’t know when to show up for it, and you can’t dance together if you don’t know what kind of dance you are going to do. You’re not going to have much of a sexual life if you don’t end up in the same space at the same time. Rituals are not only repeated and coordinated, they are significant. A ritual is something that has positive emotional meaning to both parties. This matter of significance is what distinguishes a ritual from a routine. A marriage routine is something that you do over and over in a coordinated way, but that does not have much emotional meaning. You can have dinner together as a couple every night, while one of you watches television and the other reads the paper. This is probably a routine because it lacks emotional significance. Of course, one couple’s routine might be another’s ritual. I have a friend who is very busy, as is her husband (their kids are grown). She told me about the mundane activity she and her husband do every Saturday that helps her feel close to him: they do errands. For them, this is a ritual of connection. You see, if they did their shopping efficiently, they would divide up, right? Rituals are not efficient; they are about connection. So my friend and her husband do errands together and talk along the way. I bash TV all the time, but I know a couple who, when they watch a favorite TV show, sometimes take turns giving each other a shoulder rub, with one sitting on the floor and the other on the couch. Almost anything can be turned into a ritual of connection, if the focus is on the relationship. Some couples check in with each other by phone a couple of times a day. It’s only a ritual, though, if both of them know it’s a connection time. If just one person likes to call and the other person says, "Yep, yep, busy, busy, I’ll talk to you later," this is not a ritual, because it is not coordinated--and it’s probably not emotionally significant either. In fact, the demand-withdrawal cycle ruins rituals; both people have to be into it. I divide marriage rituals into rituals of connection, rituals of intimacy, and rituals of community. Examples of a connection rituals include good-byes in the morning, greetings in the evening, and going out for coffee and conversation. I talked to a woman who said she and her husband always say "I love you" when they part in the morning, because they never know that they will see each other again. Working in the garden together can be a connection ritual. I’ll have more to say later about greeting rituals. Intimacy rituals include dates where you’re going out to have some special time together, patterns of sexual intimacy, and special occasions such as anniversaries or Valentine’s Day. By the way, I think anniversaries are the least intentionally celebrated ritual in the American family. You ask most people about their anniversaries, and they respond sheepishly that they don’t do much for it. Anniversaries they tend to occur on days like Tuesday, most of the rest of the world doesn’t know about it, and there are kid events to go to. But anniversaries are really the birthday of our marriage, and we tend to let them go without much ritual. Community rituals are couple activities where the partners give and receive support in their larger world, such as joint involvement in a religious community, neighborhood activities, joint friendship activities, and joint community action. I have become aware recently through an initiative I have been working on, called Family Life 1st (FamilyLife1st.org), that faith communities tend to offer opportunities and committee involvement mainly for individuals, not for couples. Few couples seem to have a couple identity as members of their faith community. Why not have couples who co-chair activities, for example? Faith communities create rituals of community for couples only at the time of the wedding, then drop them, unless someone in the family plans a community rituals 25 or 50 years later. It’s shameful, really, how little the ritual life of most faith communities has touched the life trajectory of marriage beyond the launching stage. Rituals have been an invisible and neglected area of marriage, even if our own field. We have tended to focus on communication skills and conflict skills, which of course are crucial, but my view is that often it’s the rituals of connection and intimacy and community that provide the foundation upon which we build when we try to engage conflict management skills. To switch metaphors, the rituals put the water in the well, the water we drawn on during times of conflict and struggle. More... http://www.smartmarriages.com/intentionalmarriage.html
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