How Marriage ‘Ideal’ Can Hurt

Published December 4, 1980. It is becoming increasingly evident to me that the reason many people become discouraged in marriage is because of the unrealistic expectations we have of it.

Not long ago, a student came by who was upset at something I had said in our marriage class. I had suggested that at some time in their future marriage, the students may find they become annoyed or irritated with their spouse. On occasion, they may even become hostile or angry at their marriage partner. My student indicated his concern that husbands and wives should not feel that way toward each other in an ideal marriage.

Whether or not married couples should feel that way is one issue. The fact of life is they sometimes do.

At an annual meeting of the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapists in St. Louis Missouri, Dr. Sidney Jourard, professor of Psychology at the University of Florida in Gainesville, observed, “The image of the good marriage is perhaps one of its most destructive features. The ideal marriage is a snare, a trap, an image the worship of which destroys life. The ideal marriage is like the ideal body or any other ideal, useful only if it engenders the divine discontent which leads to questing and authenticity.” Dr. Jourard continued, “Whose image of a way to live together will guide a relationship? This is a question relevant for a president and his patient, a parent and child, a researcher and his subject, or a husband and wife.”

After hearing Dr. Jourard’s insightful comments I later read a similar observation by William George Jordan. He wrote, “Those married people who tell you, 10 or 15 years after the wedding, that there never has been one cross word spoken between them, never a moment of even irritation, never a single shadowing cloud of disagreement, belong to one of three classes. They have been mercifully endowed with a talent for forgetting, they handle truth with a certain shyness, or one of them is the overawed victim of the other’s personality.”

Jordan then made an interesting analogy. “Have you ever heard,” he asked, “an old sea captain boast that in all his experience he had never seen a squally sea, never a dull, heavy storm-laden sky, never heard the tempest shriek through the rigging, and threaten to tear away the masts? His pride is in his skill, not in his luck. The matrimonial sea never remains absolutely serene and calm, with no ruffling waves, for years at a time. The vital point is that the storms have all been weathered in safety, and the love and trust, purified by time, remained undaunted.”

An intriguing aspect of William Jordan’s quote is that it was made in 1910, nearly 70 years ago.

It has been estimated that only 50 percent of behavior in marriage is derived from reason and intellect. The other half of what we do is an outgrowth of our emotions. We often ignore or disregard the fact that we are as yet imperfect, and both husbands and wives are creatures of emotion. And by so doing we create illusionary images of what marriage is like.

And it is sometimes these false images of marriage that cause premature and often undue disillusionment. Perhaps contemporary marriage would seem less disconcerting if we re-examined some of the ideas we have about it. If we could realize that most husbands and wives do on occasion, become emotionally charged, we might be less distraught when it occurs. And then we could get on with the business of dealing with our emotions, rather than denying we have them in the first place.

Ambrose Bierce noted, “In each human heart are a tiger, a pig, an ass and a nightingale. Diversity of character is due to their unequal activity.”