MARRIAGE
Week of September 17, 2003

In this hour, we explore Marriage. Guests include Dr. Howard Markman, a professor of psychology at the University of Denver, whose books include the bestseller Fighting for Your Marriage; psychologist Dr. Shirley Glass, a marital and family therapist and a leading expert on infidelity; Dr. James Coyne, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, who researches the differing effects of good and bad marriages on health and mental health; historian Dr. Nancy Cott of Harvard University who is the author of Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation; Pamela Holm, author of The Toaster Broke, So We're Getting Married; and novelist Anne Bernays and her husband of 48 years, Pulitzer-Prize winning biographer Justin Kaplan. Commentary by John Hockenberry.

Host Dr. Fred Goodwin begins with an essay in which he offers his perspective on marriage, based on his own thirty-nine year marriage, his parents' sixty year marriage, and those of his siblings, children, and patients. First and foremost, he agrees with the experts on the show -- marriages are as individual and unique as the people in them. It's fair to say that happy marriages are generally stable and long-lasting, but not all long-lasting unions are happy ones. So what makes a happy couple? A number of features have been identified, but to him the most essential is mutual trust built on mutual respect. If a couple can build, maintain, and strengthen these two key elements, their bond can weather all kinds of conflicts and storms.

To begin, we turn to a couple who have stayed together through the ups and downs of a forty-eight year marriage -- while raising three children and writing seventeen books between them. Novelist Anne Bernays and biographer Justin Kaplan, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, have recently written their second book together, a memoir of their coming of age, called Back Then: Two Lives in 1950s New York. As an aside, Dr. Goodwin mentions that Anne Bernays is Sigmund Freud's grandniece.

Bernays and Kaplan exchanged vows at a time when gender roles were well defined and divorce was seen as shameful. Bernays' mother even offered her daughter the advice that in any argument, the husband is always right, and husbands always sleep with their secretaries. However, in the 1970s, Bernays was greatly influenced by the women's movement, and she decided she wanted a more equal partnership. Kaplan says this was difficult at first -- a time of "fasten your seat belt" -- but he soon realized that he much preferred living with an equal. Bernays and Kaplan both agree that people today give up on marriage too easily. Bernays cautions young women not to expect their inner lives to change just because they are getting married -- marriage will not make you happier, but it will give you a wonderful companion. With a laugh, Kaplan adds that the secret to a good marriage is patience, humor, and resignation.

To order Back Then: Two Literary Lives in 1950's click here.

Then, Dr. Goodwin interviews Dr. Howard Markman, a professor of psychology at the University of Denver, whose books include the bestseller Fighting for Your Marriage, which translates twenty years of research into practical advice, and psychologist Dr. Shirley Glass, a marital and family therapist and a leading expert on infidelity. Her new book, Not Just Friends: Protect Your Relationship from Infidelity and Heal the Trauma of Betrayal, will be coming out in January. Dr. Glass is also the mother of This American Life host and producer Ira Glass.

Dr. Markman begins by saying that over the past fifty years or so, we have essentially gone from relationships where very little was negotiable to relationships where everything is negotiable. He says almost everyone in this country has very high expectations for a good marriage, but people do not have the skills to deal with conflicts as they arise, and they do not know how to protect the fun and friendship that are at the heart of a successful marriage. Dr. Glass agrees, and adds that gender roles are no longer well-defined in marriage, and we have no role models for this kind of partnership, which makes learning these skills all the more important.

Dr. Glass then describes the phases of marriage. In the first stage, the couple idealizes, each believing the other is a perfect soul mate. In the next stage, they begin to differentiate, realizing the other is not perfect, and they actually see many things differently. Arguments and power struggles take place, and they feel somewhat disillusioned. If they survive this stage, then then achieve a reality-based love, in which they accept each other for who they really are. Dr. Glass adds that affairs are always stage one, so the person is really comparing the intensity of a stage one relationship with the warmth and companionship of a stage three relationship -- very different things.

Dr. Glass then says what she believes are the elements of a good marriage -- mutual respect, enjoying doing things together, and a balance of power between partners. Dr. Markman adds that there are many more similarities between bad marriages than between good ones. There are only four or five danger signs that indicate a marriage is heading for trouble -- invalidation or criticism (one partner lashes out at the other, often causing the other to attack back); pursuit-withdrawl (one partner, often the woman, pursues the other for greater intimacy, and the other pulls back even more); negative interpretations (seeing your partner as more negative than an outside observer would); and escalation (one negative comment or interaction follows another, ad infinitum). He says that the best way to end these troubling interactions is to take a step back and stop a fight before it can escalate or become negative. Couples should discuss issues, rather than fight over them. People generally do not need to be agreed with; they just want to be heard.

To contact Dr. Markman, please write to: Dr. Howard Markman, Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Denver, 2199 S. University Blvd., Denver, CO 80208. Or visit: http://www.du.edu/.

To order Fighting for Your Marriage, click here.

To contact Dr. Glass, please write to: Dr. Shirley Glass, 4 Caveswood Lane, Owings Mills, MD 21117 or send an email to: drsglass@aol.com

To order Not Just Friends: Protect Your Relationship from Infidelity and Heal the Trauma of Betrayal, click here.

After a short break, The Infinite Mind's Marit Haahr interviews writer Pamela Holm. Holm is not the kind of woman you would imagine falling prey to the so-called wedding industrial complex. She's a writer and artist in San Francisco, and her first marriage took place when she was 22 -- and six months pregnant. But, twelve years after a divorce she decided to walk down the aisle again. She wrote about her unexpected tumble into the world of white gowns and flower arrangements in a new memoir called, The Toaster Broke, So We're Getting Married.

She reads two selections from the book. In one, she describes trying on a real wedding dress for the first time, "I look as if I've escaped from a Renaissance painting. I am Audrey Hepburn. I am Grace Kelly and Princess Diana. I am the Barbie Dream Bride... My rebellion against white-bread America comes to a screeching halt." In the other, she describes the process of writing vows -- which she and her fiancé put off until the last possible moment, "It suddenly seems obvious that all this activity, all the noise and chaos of planning a wedding, exists to camouflage the anxiety of actually getting married."

To contact Ms. Holm, please email her at bumbleb1@mindspring.com.

To order The Toaster Broke, So We're Getting Married, click here.

These days, we tend to think of marriage as a private ceremony - a commitment made between two people. But marriage is also a public ritual, and the history of the institution is as political as it is romantic. Next, Dr. Goodwin speaks Dr. Nancy Cott, a professor of history at Harvard University and the author of Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation.

Dr. Cott explains that when the United States was founded, Christian monogamous marriage was a minority practice in the world. Most societies practiced some form of polygamy, serial monogamy with easy self-divorce, or heterosexual marriage based on the matrilineal line (rather than the patriarchal model). Only with the crusading evangelism of the Europeans and Americans did the Christian, monogamous vision of marriage spread around the globe. She says that in the 1850s, when the Church of Latter Day Saints announced it was practicing polygamy in the U.S., many Americans were shocked. People wanted to eradicate polygamy not only for sexual or marital reasons, but because they saw it as a political threat. In their minds, they allied monogamy with our form of representative government, and polygamy with despotism and tyranny. Polygamy was seen, by definition, as non-consensual, while monogamy, like our form of government, was seen as based on consent.

Dr. Cott also discusses other political and legal aspects of marriage, including the original marriage contract, which, among other things, obligated women to obey their husbands. When the country was founded, the crime of adultery was defined as sex with a married woman. If a married man had sex with an unmarried woman, it was not adultery but fornication, a lesser crime.

She concludes by saying that she believes same-sex marriages are the next step in the expansion of the right of marriage. Although some argue same-sex marriages would undermine the institution of marriage, she believes these unions are actually quite conservative, diverging in the sex of the partners, but not upsetting the basic structure of marriage. She thinks they would actually increase the stability of households in the U.S.

To contact, Dr. Cott, please write to: Dr. Nancy Cott, Professor of American History, Harvard University, Robinson L-15, Cambridge, MA 02138. Or visit: http://www.harvard.edu/.

To order Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation, click here.

Is marriage good for us? The going wisdom says yes, but recent research shows the real story may be more complex. To discuss this, Dr. Goodwin is joined by Dr. James Coyne, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. In his work, he looks at the differing effects of good and bad marriages on health and mental health.

Dr. Coyne begins by saying that a good marriage is quite good for your health -- on average, men and women (especially men) benefit from marriage in terms of health and mortality. However, it is beginning to look like a bad marriage is actually worse for your health than being divorced or single. He did a study looking at survival rates for congestive heart failure and found that the quality of a patient's marriage was as good a predictor of survival as cardiological factors.

He believes good marriage offer several benefits, including a good organization of health habits and a commitment to staying well for the sake of your partner, even when your commitment to yourself fails. Also, marriage can protect people from depression, in part because events related to marriage, such as divorce or the death of a spouse, are some of the most devastating in their effects on mental health. Finally, a good quality marriage, where there is true intimacy and partners are really able to discuss issues with one other, can act as a buffer against events both inside and outside the marriage.

To contact Dr. Coyne, please write to: Dr. James Coyne, Co-Director, Behavioral Sciences and Health Services Research, Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania Health System, 11 Gates, 3400 Spruce St., Philadelphia, PA 19104. Or visit: http://www.uphs.upenn.edu/.

Finally, we hear from commentator John Hockenberry, who recalls a conversation with his wife...about divorce.

- Marit Haahr

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