The Comfort of Growing Old Together

Almost 30 years ago I wrote a book with my friend, Michael Glenn.  We called it Couples and it painted a picture of couple development in three stages.  I was 45 when I first hit on this theory and, callow youth that I was, I paid little attention to the experience of older couples.  These days my focus has unavoidably shifted.  I’m eager to share what I’ve been learning.

Then as now, the cultural narrative for couples—implicit prescriptions for success and failure—was almost impossibly demanding.  Historically, marriage was a contractual arrangement, mostly concerned with economic matters, the production of children, and the alliance of extended families.  In modern times, the narrative has grown more personal, including early romance, the need to feel loved and cared for, and a looser, and a more negotiated idea about how the common work would be shared.

In the 1960’s demands on couples, generally with women in the lead, rose exponentially.  Not only should marriage provide for security, safety, and companionship, but also sex, romance, and self actualization for each partner.  Couples should be best friends, confidants, intellectual partners, and personal cheerleaders.  Even as you clean the kitchen or the yard, you should look fetching or dashing.  Even as you change a baby’s diaper, you should concern yourself with your partner’s personal growth.

Each of the three stages of couple development is profoundly influenced by this narrative.  The first, Stage of Expansion and Promise (the honeymoon phase), for instance, hews close to the cultural ideal. Its essential quality is expansiveness: in ourselves; in our partners; in the relationship.

In the early days of relationships, “We feel more capable and more available.  In the enthusiastic gaze of our new partner, we are likely to feel more witty, more charming, and more animated than ever before.  We feel vulnerable, yet strangely strong.  We are expressive, bold, and open.  We are in touch with images and yearnings from childhood as well as with hopes and expectations for our future.  Our unfolding relationship feels encouraging, flexible.  Possibility and potentiality abound.  There is space here for being awkward, for being funny, for starting and stopping, for fumbling about, for being passionate and sexual, and for making discoveries.  Time slows down as we linger with our new partner, but it also rushes by, and we find there are never enough minutes in the day for everything we want to do.”  P 64

The Stage of Contraction and Betrayal follows when couples cannot sustain their expansive promises.  “The Stage of Contraction and Betrayal ruptures the Expansive Contract, threatening both the relationship and our sense of ourselves.  It’s essential quality is contraction: contraction into ourselves, contraction in the picture of our mate, contraction of the relationship as a whole. It is like pulling back into our skin.  We are less impressed with our partners and find them less enamored, less infatuated with us.” P 84  Where Expansion is based on a “virtuous cycle,” where one good thing leads to another, Contraction is characterized by a “vicious” and downward cycle.

In Contraction, the relationship that had opened and transformed us now closes us.  Against our will, old limitations and problems resurface. Reluctantly we conclude that we are more loving and competent with friends and colleague than with our partners.  Where once our relationship brought out our best selves, now it reveals our worst.  The loss is terrible. The contrast between the two stages is agonizing.

In Contraction, couples have three basic options: break up; remain painfully stuck in their struggles; or move into the Stage of Resolution.  Resolution is characterized by a spirit of accommodation, a capacity to see the complexity of things, and an inclination to emphasize affection and partnership over romance and passion.  This is a stage of compromise and successful conflict resolution, emphasizing perspective, balance, stability and shared responsibility.  We feel in control of our lives again.

Now the cycles.  Here’s the irony: The resolution of conflict, the escape from our worst selves, is such a relief that it precipitates another visit to the Stage of Expansion and Promise.  This return is one of life’s great highs.  It’s like falling in love again—and a personal redemption. For a moment—or a little longer—everything seems possible again.

Expansion then lasts for a while, sometimes brief, sometimes longer.  But then a challenging event—the birth of a child, the loss or the beginning of a job, an illness, a big salary raise—jars us and, often, awakens our fears again.  We pull back.  A sense of Betrayal and Contraction sets in.  It seems like we’ve never left.  This place feels like bedrock, the real relationship, while Expansion seems a frothy illusion.  For couples with the stamina and courage to withstand the fall, though, there follows a second move into Resolution. Like being pulled along by powerful ocean currents, we move, once more, into the protective waters of a coastal cove.  And so the cycle goes, never ceasing because life events almost always trigger further revolutions.

The cycles continue through the lives of couples.  From a hundred feet in the air, it is the full cycles, not a single stage that may best define relationships.  Some couples zoom through the cycles.  Others take a leisurely path.  Usually time is short in Expansion and most couples find a Home Base in either Contraction or Resolution, fighting fear or finding friendship and trust.  For those who get stuck in Contraction, divorce, either legal or informal—through distance and endless struggle—is often the answer.  

Learning through the cycles.  As we pass through each stage, there is something essential to learn.  In Expansion, for example, we experience ourselves at our best.  We learn more about our capacity for love, compassion, excitement, energy, empathy, to name a few feelings or skills.  Much as our skeptical psychological culture may protest, there is nothing illusory about these feelings and our capacity to trust and amplify, then integrate them into our character is one of life’s greatest opportunities.

The passage through Contraction and Betrayal offers up a comparable classroom.  There we encounter the fears, anxiety, defensiveness, and rage that burst forth when we feel abandoned or spurned by a loved one.  These feelings are not all of who we are but when they rule, we have little access to our best, and they feel all encompassing.  The way to release their domineering grip is to acknowledge them, to deepen our knowledge of them, to grow more comfortable in our ability to withstand their attack.  There’s courage in this kind of honesty.  There’s learning in our refusal to run or hide.

In each stage of couple relationships the opportunity for greater self awareness and  the ability to transcend our limitations presents itself.  Some of us do not accept this challenge.  In our anxiety, we may choose a more narrowness and rigid path.  Some of us do accept the challenge.  Some of us learn almost in spite of ourselves.   I would say about myself, for example, that the constant cycling has broken down boundaries between what I like and what I know about myself.  I find my internal life to be more fluid.  I find myself less judgmental and more curious.

Extending the cycles into old age.  With time, many, maybe most couples learn to accept the complexity of their individual and shared lives—and make a home in Resolution.  As we move into our later years, individual development increasingly lends itself to this home base.  For instance, researchers tell us that aging people generally develop a “cognitive bias” towards positive, and away from negative, experience.  We literally structure our lives to minimize stress.  If we were to begin again, to find a new partner, we would choose a harmonious companion and avoid people and situations that create disharmony.

We seem to gravitate towards the Stage of Resolution as though drawn along some slow but powerful waterway.  The qualities of Expansion and Contraction have been absorbed into our individual identity and into the workings of the couple relationship. Resolution seems the natural place to be.  The cognitive bias towards positive experience, noted by the researchers, prevails—but without the denial of negativity.  Harmony with our companions becomes the norm, and we deal more efficiently with volcanic flair ups from Contraction.  We choose to be kind to one another, even when we recognize unkind impulses within ourselves.

And this is key: In Resolution, we become skilled practitioners of self-determination.  We understand the complexity of our inner selves and of our relationships and we get to choose—most of the time—which parts of ourselves we bring to the table.  And the sense of agency is delicious.

Here’s a second key:  the more comfortable we grow with our own and our partner’s whole selves, the more spacious the Stage of Resolution becomes.  There is room within the relationship for more of our selves.  Those who learn to nurture the stage of Resolution find deep friendship, with a romantic patina around the edges.

To achieve this space, paradoxically, we often learn to limit or omit some of who we are—there’s no need to insist that our partner accept every one of our warts—in order to create the emotional space capable of including more and more of our selves.

As we age and retire, we spend more and more time with one another, grow more dependent on one another.  At first this kind of closeness can be off-putting, at least, and frightening, at worst. This is one of those disruptive experiences that, even late in life, sets the cycle in motion.  Frequently it awakens the fire of Contraction.  A frightening moment late in life.  A moment we thought—hoped—we had transcended. But it also provides an urgency to move through that fire and back into Resolution, with yet more of ourselves intact.

I want to add one more ironic observation about the way that relational cycles can serve as our teachers.  As the Stage of Resolution grows ever more complex and spacious, it is easier to appreciate our partners in their fullness.  By appreciating the complexity of things, we stop trying to change them.  When we stop trying to change them we can, at last, see who they are, independent of our own needs and anxieties.  This allows us to see one another with a freshness that has been unavailable since the earliest stages of Expansion and Promise.

And here’s the best part: the freshness permits a new kind of intimacy that is simultaneously gentle and intense.

 

 

Is Friendship Enough

(In this essay, I mention my sister and her depression.  She has written very candidly about her condition on Facebook, wanting to bring depression out from behind the veil of secrecy and shame.  She has read my essay and has encouraged me to publish it with her name in tact).

 

When her husband died ten years ago, my sister suffered a terrible depression.  Since then, she has tried almost every therapeutic approach—to no avail.  I just spent three days with her at the Mayo Clinic, where she is undergoing Electro Convulsive Treatment—Shock Therapy—as a kind of last resort—and that, at last, seems promising.

When she’s not depressed, and even when she is, Jackie is an extraordinary person.  She created, owns, and manages the major art gallery in Alaska, gives hundreds of thousands of dollars of its pretty modest proceeds to charity, plays a significant role in the civic life of Anchorage, and has many good and devoted friends.

During hours and hours of conversation, as we sat in Mayo’s Med-Psych unit, I asked Jackie why her friendships had not been able to nourish her, to provide enough affection and companionship to finally let the loss of her husband fade into the distance.  “They don’t fill the void,” she said.  “And Mark did?,” I asked.  “He adored me,” she responded, as though that clarified matters to me.  “It’s not the same.”

Friendship is enough for some.  Our mother, for instance, also had many close friends.  She always wanted to have a man but, late in life, she settled for friendship.  It’s like having what the British psychiatrist, Winnicott, famously called a “good enough” mother.  The sufficiency of friends also seems beautifully lived by Ronni Bennett, the wonderful author of the blog, Time Goes By.  Just three weeks ago, she had surgery for a raging pancreatic cancer.  While she regrets the absence of family (link), Ronni seems almost entirely able to depend on friends.

Why isn’t friendship enough for some, or most, of us?  Why is friendship so undervalued?  We live in a society that has greatly diminished the hold of extended families and larger clans.  Sociologists continually worry about the growing social isolation that comes as a result.  Why doesn’t friendship save us from that fate?  In fact, the opposite may be true.  Friendship may even be in decline in American society.

Most of us would agree that friendship is immensely satisfying.  It provides companionship, warmth, and reassurance without the restrictive bonds of families.  We choose our friends because they charm or intrigue or touch us.  We choose them to match our needs.  Friendship is even healthy. People with more and better social relationships, including family and friends, live longer and healthier lives.  The opposite is also true: social isolation is as much a health risk as smoking.

And yet, all of our surveys show that friends lag far behind romantic partners, children, parents in our hierarchy of relationships.  Take a look at your local bookstore and you’ll find the shelves bursting with advice about couples and families but almost nothing about friendship.  Go to a professional conference and you’ll find very few panels or seminars on friendship.

Friendship seems to have a clear developmental trajectory.  It is strong in adolescence and youth, often close to romance in its intensity.  With marriage, children, and work, it tails offs considerably, reassuring in its presence and possibility but too rare in daily experience.  Retirement and old age bring renewed energy, time, and interest in friendship.  What’s more, our friends are also available.  And not just those you have kept up with but also friends from all stages of life, some of whom you had lost touch with for decades. With retirement, it feels wonderful when a friend asks when you’re free and you can say “Any day next week works for me.”  What a relief that I have friends.  What a joy.  What a key to late life, or so it seems to me.

Joyous as it is, however, it does not have the weight of family, certainly not the importance of husbands, wives, and children.  Given the availability and renewed pleasure, I thought it worthwhile to speculate about the limited value we accord to friendship, even when it serves as our daily bread.

First, and most obviously, the cultural imagery that we grow up with lends much more weight to family.  “Blood is thicker than….. “ … you name it.  We are trained to be deeply loyal to family and only modestly so to friends.  This isn’t just internalized imagery.  It is enforced day after day by people around us.  How could you not visit your mother in the assisted living facility, loan money to your brother, and, most of all, take care of your children.

Family is bound by ritual in ways that friendship isn’t.  Weddings, christenings, bar mitzvahs.  Birthday and Christmas parties, Passover seders and Easter hunts.  Year after year, they signal a bond.  Friends may create ritualistic events—annual Fourth of July parties and the like, but, like everything else, those ‘rituals’ primarily populated by friends feel voluntary, less weighty.  That may be why we love them but they’re not as important.

Second, there is something paradoxical about friendship.  It is freely chosen but it is also freely departed.  It’s as though the freedom reduces its emotional hold on us.  Similarly, the informality of friendship—“Just call when you want to get together”—is a balm and somehow minimizes its weight.

Talk about paradoxical.  I keep using words like “weight” and “bound by,” indicateing a strong valence, and using it in a mostly positive way.  But I wonder if the comparative “lightness” and unbounded quality of friendship robs it of its importance.

In families, the issue of control is ever present.  Parents and children struggle over control throughout their relationships.  Couples regularly struggle for control.  These struggles begin at marriage and birth—finding names; determining rituals; deciding whether to buy a house—and last beyond death—what should our will should say; how shall we should be buried and by whom.

Friendship is virtually defined by its lack of control, its informality.  Strange that this may be why we value it less?  Control issues enter friendship, as they do any relationships, but are managed much more simply, much more lightly.  “Where should we meet for coffee?  I guess we met near my place last time.  I’ll come to you.”  At the hint of struggle, a friend might back off for a while, then ease back.  It works so well.

Third, I think we “invest” less of ourselves in our friendships, less of our self confidence and identity.  They don’t define us the way family does.  Again, we come to the idea that the freedom of friendship somehow lessens its value.

Finally, there’s the question of stress.  We bond with far greater intensity with people with whom we’ve shared intense, often stressful experience.  Families are like army units who, when facing enemy fire, depend absolutely on one another.  The connection becomes profound.  Families become like Spielberg’s and Hank’s “Band of Brothers,” whose characters touched us so deeply.  The usually peaceful culture of friendship, however relaxing and reassuring, doesn’t seem to measure up.

Ultimately, I am raising this question because I would like to find a way to bring the nourishment of friendship more deeply into my heart, into our hearts.  Friends matter to me.  Day by day, they give my life much of its color and flavor.  Every time, I look forward to coffee at 11:00 and drinks at 5:00. I am particularly candid with some and they are with me.  We know each other.  We learn and hold the stories of each other’s lives.

I don’t know if friends would be enough if I lost my wife and dread even the possibility of finding out.  What about you?

The Stages of a Couple’s Life

About twenty-five years ago, my friend Michael Glenn and I wrote a book called Couples. The divorce rate had reached historical highs among both formally married and just-living-together couples.  We wanted to know why.  More important, we wanted to understand how people could both solve their problems and live through their doubts and difficulties in order to sustain and enhance their commitments.

It was a hot topic, of course.  Self help books filled the shelves of bookstores—which still figured prominently in American society.  Everyone wanted to tell everyone else how to be happy.  Almost no one wanted to talk about the complexity of relationships, particularly relationships in a world where prescribed gender roles and proper marital behavior had begun to crumble.  We chose complexity and offered no easy solutions.

Even though Michael and I turned our back on the self-help style, our book was taken up by HarperCollins and launched by a national marketing tour.  On Valentine’s Day, Couples was displayed in the front of most of the major bookstore in the country.  We spoke on radio and TV shows, at book stores and book shows galore.  The book was translated into German and Japanese.

We had touched a nerve, though not always a happy one.  While many people felt recognized, even affirmed by our portraits, others were furious that the picture wasn’t rosy enough, that it under-estimated the difference between men and women, or that it didn’t mention God.  I was chastised unmercifully by one fellow in Calgary, Canada for my Godless thinking.

Couples is long out of print but the ideas still seem fresh to me and they seem to have portended trends that I now see reflected in current research.  For instance, we believed that marriage satisfaction was made more difficult by outrageous expectations.  Nothing in actual relationships could compare to the images people brought to the alter.

In 2014, for example, Eli Finkel and colleagues found precisely what we had found in 1990.  Historically, they wrote, we “expected our spouses to help satisfy our needs for resources (income, putting food on the table, etc.), safety and security, and our need to feel loved and cared for.”  In the current “self-expressive” marriage, we “expect that our spouses facilitate not only our needs for closeness and connection, but also our needs for personal growth and fulfillment….self-esteem and self actualization.” Our spouses are “not only partners in the daily task of providing for and managing a household, they are also expected to be our best friends, caring confidants, passionate and adventurous lovers, intellectual challengers, and biggest cheerleaders.”

We called the sum of expectations that shaped marital expectations, the Cultural Narrative.  The narrative was to be found in movies, books and magazines, in advice columns, in feminist empowerment groups, and the offices of psychotherapists.  They told us what constitutes success, how to work out problems, how to change our spouses to meet our needs.  And the ideas were presented mostly by women, who represented the vanguard in the rebellion against traditional marital forms, in which men led and women followed, in which difficulties were kept to ourselves or whispered only to dear friends.

Within this powerful Cultural Narrative, we observed that couples passed through three recognizable stages in their development.

• The Stage of Expansion and Promise (the honeymoon phase).  During this stage, each of us expands into what we might call our ego ideal, the selves we have always wanted to be.  Our expansion catalyzes our mate’s expansion, which, in turn, buoys us, creating a “virtuous cycle” for both individuals and relationships. We feel larger than our usual selves.  The experience is so compelling that we convince ourselves that it represents a promise for the foreseeable future.
• The Stage of Contraction and Betrayal.  During this stage, we contract.  We are play out our worst selves and worry that this is all there is to us, individually and collectively.  The contraction begins with small things: a nervous moment pushes one member back; a careless comment is hurtful.  These small acts lead to reactions from the other, which leads to a correspondingly defensive move by the first—and so it goes.  A “vicious cycle” has been created that makes the relationship small and unhappy.
• The Stage of Resolution.  This is a stage of compromise, negotiation, accommodation, and integration. The partners struggle to be reasonable and maintain perspective, to affirm complexity and to handle difficult situations with competence and maturity.  By simultaneously holding both sides of ourselves at once, the relationship is stabilized, feelings are calmed, and peace prevails.

Marital life doesn’t end with the first Resolution.  Often, the resolution of conflict is such a relief that it rapidly turns to exhilaration, which sets in motion a renewal of the initial honeymoon phase.  Honeymoons don’t last, though and couples, once again plunge into difficulties which seemed to betray the promise of romance and new beginnings.  Then, if the relationship holds together, couples find a way to a longer stay in the stage of Resolution.  Over the years, couples keep cycling through these three stages.

The character of couples is shaped as much by the rhythm of the cycles as by the content of their stages. In this, couples vary greatly. Some couples, for example, move through wild swings: everything’s great, then everything’s awful; then there is a brief moment of reconciliation, after which everything’s better (or worse) than ever. For others, the stages move more subtly from one to another, and the cycles are relatively smooth. Some couples remain for long periods in one stage or another; others cycle all the time.

Every couple has a Home Base, a stage in which they generally reside. This habitual stage represents both its public persona and its evolved self-image, but not its full character. Those who reside in Contraction, for instance, think of themselves as conflicted and troubled, even though they have authentic moments in Expansion and in Resolution. Once a couple has settled into a stage as its Home Base, its cycles tend to begin and end there. The couple in Contraction might climb out through one compromise or another, relax momentarily in Resolution, which feels good enough to revive some old romantic feelings reminiscent of Expansion. But with its first minor disappointment, fall back to their familiar Home Base in Contraction.

As I wrote a while back, with age, couples tend towards calm and greater acceptance, and they reside primarily in the Stage of Resolution.

This is the briefest of summaries of our theory.  Each of the stages and each of the full cycles presents a rich brew of feelings, thoughts, and activities.  Over the course of the next several weeks, I will devote a post to each stage and to the cycles, themselves, and to the subject of how all of these play out with both young and old couples.

I’m pretty sure you will find yourself in these portraits, and I will be looking forward to learning your responses.

How to Change Relationships

Sometimes I marvel at how little I let what I know interfere with what I want to achieve.  There are two small areas where the gap is most pronounced: relationships and politics.  For instance, I know that you can’t convince people to do what they don’t want to do, no matter how ‘right’ you are; but I have spent over forty years trying to convince my wife of certain obvious truths about her nature and mine with absolutely no noticeable effect—and no let up in my efforts.  If only the liberal world would put me in charge of persuading coal miners that their interests really rest in voting for progressive Democrats, I’m sure that my much ballyhooed run would continue unabated.

I spent my entire adult life laboring in the change business.  I worked with individuals, couples, families, organizations, and communities.  Not always, but often, I helped them succeed. Emboldened by my success, I gathered students and taught them about the mysteries of change, then garnished my hubris by writing books and articles on the subject.  That did not in the slightest alter my approach to political conversation: announcing the right approach, developing convincing arguments to prove I was right, and trying to pound opponents into submission.

At the ripe old age of (almost) seventy-five, I would like to offer a mea culpa and try to articulate some of the lessons I learned as a therapist.  Normally, I hate when psychotherapists grossly oversimplify the challenges of political change, but like the fool who goes where angels fear to tread, I’m going to try to defy the odds. Hence, Seven Principles to improve your chances of changing others.  If you follow them faithfully, you may well succeed.

(In the following, I will focus on changing individuals and trust my readers to apply the principles to families, organizations, and politics.)

Principle one: Meet people where they are.  Begin an encounter by understanding how the other person thinks and feels.  If people don’t feel understood—in a respectful way—they will close off any attempt you have to share new, no less uncomfortable information and ideas.  If they do feel understood, the sharing of ideas can begin.

By way of example, the only two people who really met working class White constituents where they were during the recent presidential campaign were Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.  They met anger with anger.  Candidates and constituents were hurt and furious at what they felt—not just thought—were the snobby, dismissive, and corrupt people who were running the country.  Because of this initial meeting of minds, Sanders and Trump gained credibility and had room to articulate their visions.

Principle two: Do not repeat the same old, failed solution.  We all do this.  When we are unsuccessful in solving a problem, we try again in pretty much the same way.  We may try a slightly new angle, use new words, but the “new” approaches are variations on the same damn theme we began with.  The people we’re trying to “help” or to change know what we’re doing.  By the fourth or fifth time, they have developed powerful defenses against any brilliant new variations we might try.  We are closed out.

At that point, the solution becomes the problem.  You say “here’s a better way to look at things” and they hear “you’re a dope” or “you’re bad” or “I want to control you.”  They don’t hear the actual words you say.  They hear the subtext—what they take to be your real intentions.  Now your ability to change them activates strong opposition—what we experience as closed minds.

Ask yourself: is your solution working.  If your honest answer is no, then get off that train.  Even when you feel yourself tempted to try another variation on a theme, like an addict yearning for a fix, don’t do it.  That leads to the next, radical principle.

Principle three: Give up.  Stop trying to change the other.  Once you have entered a control struggle of the sort that usually emerges when one person tries to change another, the only way out is to give up—really give up.  This will confuse your “opponent,” make him suspicious.  He will respond as if you had continued your normal argument, which generally brings you back into the fray.  Don’t take the bait.

Say the truth aloud: it’s clear that I can’t convince you.  You will have to say this a few times.  Then: “May I try to say what I think you believe?  Just to see if I understand you?”  If the answer is yes, then you articulate the other’s point of view and—here’s the key—ask the person to elaborate, so that you really understand, and so the other person feels in control of herself.  After his first tentative beginning, literally say “Say more.”  “I’m not sure I understand.”  “What do you mean by…”  Learning more and ending the control struggle is essential.

Inevitably, you will find inconsistencies and confusion in the other person’s perspective.  Have the good grace not to point them out.  Just ask about them.  Sincerely ask how he works out his confusion, because, lord knows, you have your own.  If he does explain, you know that you have met him at his home base and a real conversation can begin.

Principle four:  Identify the other person’s own efforts to change.  Every one of us tries to change all of the time.  Smokers swear off cigarettes almost every day.  Husbands and wives promise themselves to be kinder, more attentive, or more patient and try for a while—until they fail.  It is a truth of nature that all beings must adapt to changes in their environment—often in the service of staying the same.  Even though these change efforts are frequently unsuccessful, they do represent genuine purpose.  They do represent an internal imperative, every bit as much as a response to outside pressure.

Trying to change a person who hasn’t agreed to it is like trying to push over a sumo wrestler who set in his stance.  When people lack an expected stimulus, something new must replace it.  Joining the new thought or action in a person’s repertoire gives it greater weight.  Now you are encouraging change.

Principle five: Support the other person’s change efforts.  Once you have learned to identify a persons own, authentic efforts to change, support them. Say things like: I see; that’s great; may I elaborate your point.  Here’s an example:  some people almost always says no to suggestions but rarely (not never) offer alternatives.  We think of them as oppositional.   Suppose that person happens to say “Let’s go to the movies” or “Let’s talk.”  Such initiatives are out of character in the relationship.  Your job is to say yes.  Not “yes but”.  There should be no attempt to “improve” the proposal.

Just support what is new and see where it goes.  This is partly a matter of letting go, not being in charge each moment.  It may not improve your relationship right away but it will get you out of the rut, out of your ritual fights.  It will be different. Now, you are on the way to genuine change.

Principle six: Build on the change.  Once you are on your way, you need to be alert: don’t return to old behavior; carefully observe differences in the other—and in yourself; continue to support both.  Each new behavior is likely to give rise to yet another.  The reactive person who awakens to initiating, for example, might become bolder, more outgoing.  The person who is seemingly addicted to controlling the action, might grow more vulnerable.  In each case, it is up to you to recognize and embrace these changes.

Principle seven: Change yourself.  Here’s the irony: the only way to really change others is to change yourself.  As new behaviors multiply, and as you keep pace by changing yourself in response, you will find that a very new relationship has emerged.  Still not perfect but at least free from the struggle that had limited your ability to come together. Your are still the same people but with other parts of yourself in the foreground; and that transforms the relationship.  As the Vietnamese people like to say, “Same, same, but different,” and it’s the difference that counts.

The Wisdom of Aging Couples

For several months now, I’ve been wanting to write about aging couples.  It’s relatively recent that I’ve been part of one.  I was a couple therapist and taught clinical practice for about thirty years.  In 1993, with my friend, Michael Glenn, I published a book called Couples; a few years later I published a book on the practice of therapy, Readiness and Change in Couple Therapy. The work was so absorbing and I was so well known to others as “the couple therapist” that it virtually defined me in those days.  This is a homecoming of sorts.

As I began to think about aging couples, though, I realized that my knowledge is a tad dated.  I had mostly worked with young and middle-aged couples.  So I began to talk with and read about couples in their sixties, seventies, and eighties.  They are different. But before I turn to older couples in my next essay, I want to tell you what I learned about the general social habits of old coots like me.

Here’s the headline: “Aging people experience more satisfaction and less conflict in relationships.”  They “report better quality ties with their children, more positive marriages, closer friendships, and an overall greater proportion of positive versus problem-ridden relationships than do middle-aged or young adults (1)”  For me, this conclusion defies expectations and stereotypes about grumpy, cantankerous old people.

According to researchers (2), as people age, they develop a “cognitive bias,” leading them to attend mostly to positive experiences while avoiding the negative.  That bias leads older people to structure their lives in ways that minimize stress.  They choose harmonious companions and avoid both people and situations that create difficulties.  What’s more, their judgment, their ability to determine who will be good for them and who won’ improves with the years.

When in contact with difficult people, elders are more adept at regulating what happens.  If discussions become stressful, for instance, they know how to deflect and defuse matters.   They ask and receive more and better support  than young people do from friends and spouses.(3).   “In sum, …, [they] learn how to…regulate their social and emotional experiences.” (4)

The natural course of life also lends itself to greater harmony.  After mid-life, for example, many people begin to shed their adolescent—and post-adolescent–children.  It turns out that the empty nest presents more of a sentimental than a real crisis.  For many couples, whose fights often revolved around their children, the departure is a great relief.  Then, too, leaving the tensions and pretensions of work also brings relief.

Not only are there fewer tensions, but older people interpret stressful experience in a calmer way.  For example, “When recalling…conflict discussions, older adults rate the behavior of their spouses more positively than do objective coders. By contrast, middle-aged spouses rate their spouses’ behavior similarly to the ratings of the objective viewers (5).  Long experience has taught older people that the pain won’t last, things that are said in anger do not represent the final or definitive word.  They are better able to re-interpret conflict, then defuse its longer term impact.

With age, people  say, they find greater support from friends and mates That calming support is often freely offered by friends but it is also actively sought.  Older people both receive and “express more sentimental and positive messages” than they did when younger.  The more they support others, the more the support is returned.  This creates what couple therapists call a “virtuous cycle.”  In other words, the calming of their social world is an active achievement.

What I have reported on so far tells us that older people, in general, have calmer, more satisfying relationships with both peers.  .  It doesn’t tell us why.  Several researchers do. They emphasize the “short horizon” in the lives of aging people.  “When perceived time grows shorter, individuals place a greater priority on present-oriented goals, such as regulating social experiences to maximize relationship satisfaction.”  Another researcher tells us that “Foreshortened time perspective in relationships with older adults also may lead to greater forgiveness for social grievances (2)”. “In addition to perceiving time remaining in their own lives, individuals perceive the time left within any given relationship. As the time left to spend with a social partner narrows, people may recognize this diminished horizon and focus increasingly on emotional harmony as opposed to other non-emotional goals (e.g., seeking information) in the relationship.”  The very fact of the relationship becomes more important than making it fuller or better.

People eventually learn what is pliable and what is not with friends and spouses.  After years and decades of trying to change one another, making the other more responsive or responsible, for example, we recognize the futility of our efforts.  It hasn’t worked.  We yield to what is and then we accept it.  Then there are two possibilities.   We can walk away or we can simply stop what has been a failing and dispiriting effort.  The very act of no longer failing is a relief; and a considerable calm comes over us.

There is a kind of death in the decision to accept people as they are, a sense that you will never fully achieve what you have been trying to do for a long, long time, and you will never fully have what you have so long wanted.  We have also put so much of ourselves into changing others, and that part of ourselves dies, too.  But it is that death that compels us to treasure who our friends and mates are and to savor the beauty of what is.   As the poet, Wallace Stevens, says,

“Death is the mother of beauty;  Hence from her,

Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams

And our Desires.”

 

1. Fingerman, Hay, & Birditt, 2004; Rook, 1984; 2003
2. Charles, Mather & Carstensen, 2003
3. Field & Minkler, 1988; Schnittker, 2007
4. Hess, Osowski, & LeClerc, 2005
5. Story et al., 2007
6. Field & Minkler, 1988; Schnittker, 2007