Marriage on Fire

My wife and I were flying back from nine degree Minneapolis this past week when it struck me.  It was a slap to my own forehead moment.  Something I already knew.  I had just given a speech to about 300 businessmen and women for the Masters Forum.  It was Renewal Day, an end-of-year meeting to consider the 2007-year and look forward to 2008.  They asked me to speak on work/life balance.  So I gave them “Lifeology: How to Change the World and Still be Home for Dinner.”  It turns out that the “how to by home for dinner” part of this speech gets a lot of people sitting up in their seats.  Whenever I speak on this topic to business audiences, it’s often the most personal topics that peak the most interest.

The core message of Lifeology is for us to integrate career, lifestyle, and relationships into a seamless life that nurtures all three arenas.  The topic that gets the most comments is relationships, particularly marriage and romance.  That’s because most marriages are “on fire.”  Either they are ignited by constant loving energy or they are burning down consumed by their own toxic smoke.  That’s because many, many marriages are the story of the 3 ways of thinking: analytical (reason), practical (common sense), and intrinsic (intuition).  When we fall in love we are using intrinsic thinking.  It is non-judgmental.  It focuses on the uniqueness of the other.  It idealizes that uniqueness.  A nasty mole is a distinctive “beauty mark.”  A baldhead is sexy.  We simply can’t imagine anything undesirable about the other.  If this blind euphoria of intrinsic thinking is surrounded by planned positive experiences found in courtship, this “unreal” way of thinking lasts about two years.  This is about as long as a “Hollywood” marriage.  It seems that the romantic feelings caused by our intrinsic thinking about the unique value of the person we love causes positive brain chemicals to host a three-ring circus in our brains.  Every day is a good day.  Every look, touch, and kiss is a high.

When this feeling dies it’s because practical thinking takes over.  When we use practical thinking we ask, “Am I getting what I want?”  Feelings of “we” give way to the feeling of “me.”  When practical thinking dominates, we begin to focus on our own needs.  Things we once delighted in doing for the other, like running errands or cooking a meal, become resented drudgery.  We start to negotiate.  We demand our relationship be “fair”.  Conflict becomes more frequent.  Often couples fall into roles of dominance or peacemaking.  The person who cares the least has all the power.  Bullying, manipulating, guilt tripping become practical (although damaging) strategies to get what we want.  When couples’ relationships are ruled by practical thinking, romance evaporates.  Loyalty, duty, and habit keep it together.  But it’s work.  When people say marriages are work, this is what they mean.  It doesn’t have to be work.  It only is because of how we are choosing to think.

Marriages get really troubled when analytical, black and white thinking becomes the voice that narrates our experience.  We cling to rigid definitions of what a husband or wife should be or do.  We’ve picked up these definitions from our parents, our religions, or worst, our popular culture.  Our judgments become sever.  Our spouses are either fair or unfair, mean or kind, strong or weak, pretty or ugly, good or bad.  These either/or judgments justify our contempt, our whining, our separation, and our emotional intimacy with others. Marriage becomes a prison we endure.  No relationship can thrive when people are primarily using judgmental thinking toward the other.  All of us are flawed.  When we fall in love, the flaws contribute to our uniqueness.  They make us interesting.  Using analytical thinking, our flaws make us intolerable.

Today about 10% of existing marriages are mutually viewed as “highly fulfilling.”  Intrinsic thinking plays a large part in these marriages.  It turns out that romance and even positive brain chemistry can be rekindled in a nearly constant healthy fire when two mature people remain focused and even idealistic about the most positive aspects of the other.  There is little effort to fix each other’s flaws because the flaws are viewed as irrelevant.  In these marriages, courtship never totally ends.  There are plenty of planned positive experiences: thoughtful dates, fun trips, and regular authentic communication.  Turns out that for highly satisfying love to thrive there is no substitute for time spent focused on each other.  The exact thing we did when we fell in love in the first place.

If all this seems “impractical” that’s exactly what it is.  It’s intrinsic.

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