Revisting Marriage and Loving Kindness

In September I took a trip to Houston (post-storm Harvey) and attended a workshop on Gottman-style relationship therapy.   This is something I have had a growing interest in;  the wealth of ultra-useful data grows by leaps and bounds.  This week, I am also teaching my undergraduates about marital therapy which has caused me to update my lecture materials and contemplate again, about what we know and do not know about long term romantic partnerships.

As an introduction to what I hope will be short series on couples, I will say this:  what we know about how to keep a partnership together is simple.  Even though John Gottman (among others) has an intricate and complex data set about what makes marriages work, much of it boils down to something akin to the 'Golden Rule' or 'do unto others...'

Just because something is simple however, does not make it easy.  I, like most people, know that to stay fit I basically have to engage in some amount of cardiovascular  training every day and eat in an reasonable way.  That does NOT make that task, easy, however.  Staying mindful and making deliberately healthy choices requires focus, energy and will.  Similarly, staying married requires daily attention to your spouse, and to your emotional state.  It requires being willing to sustain habits both on your own and with your partner that will keep you all in emotional equilibrium.  It requires that you try (and succeed, on occasion) to NOT say that critical thing about your spouse, just because it pops into your mind.  It requires loving kindness and treating your spouse like a valued friend.

I think that some couples decide, ultimately, that it is too much work to turn things around for their relationship.  I do not think this should be judged or that is a morally 'wrong' decision in some way.  For some, ultimately the will decide to cut their losses and try to forge ahead to a new relationship and attempt to learn, with a new partner, from past mistakes.  This is, and should be a valid choice.

Here is the news article that inspired me to write, today:

CNN: The latest on marriage

from the Gottman's

I have always been drawn to the Gottmans' work.  When I was in graduate school, I noticed that a lot of practitioners hung a shingle out by their practice and advertised that they were a 'couples therapist' without having any real training in couples therapy.  At the time, there wasn't as much research about couples work as there was about work with individuals.  But the Gottmans changed that in some of their revolutionary work on couples, in the 'love lab'. They were real pioneers who offered a data-based way to think about couples interactions.

Here is one of their latest posts about anger.  https://www.gottman.com/blog/the-anger-iceberg/   I find it very relevant in the treating of couples because often, if the angry member of the couple can get better in tune with the vulnerability underneath their anger, it makes it much easier for their partner to have empathy.  Enjoy.

Maintaining relationships with aging parents on another continent

It has become clear to me over the last few years that being an expat means having your heart in two different (at least) places.  For me, I have my family, including my oldest son, and parents and sisters, in the States and my spouse and newer friends here.   Skype works relatively well, but I always feel I am dividing myself between two different continents in the connections I am trying to form and maintain. 

To add complication to this, my parents are aging.  They are both in good health, but they are becoming less mobile.  I have, in the back of my head, the magic number of ‘at least once per year’ as the number of times that I will see my U.S. family.  That feels woefully little, when one considers that this is a lifetime decision, not just a temporary one.  When one makes the decision of how often they will see their family, then one must save up the funds and vacation time to make that happen. Originally, I thought that I would fly my family here since that was cheaper than all of us travelling to the U.S., but it became clear that that wasn’t entirely feasible for various reasons.  Also, my father has announced that he does not think he will be making any more trips to Europe in his lifetime.  He has the money to do so, but travel seems physically harder and harder on him and his wife.  This pull to be on two continents at once creates a kind of a conflict inside.  Complicating this is the fact that my family in Denmark does not really want to spend all of our vacations in the U.S. (and particularly not in Texas!).  This is understandable but it only adds to the conflict we feel.  I am grateful that I have ample vacation time in Denmark, but it still never is enough to maintain loving relationships on both sides of the pond.

Many of my clients seem to have similar conflict.  Some of them have parents who are not well and cannot travel at all.  Sadly, a colleague of mine just had her mother die of cancer, in New Zealand.  She was not there to wish her mother goodbye.  Complicating everything was the fact that flights to New Zealand are expensive and exceedingly time-consuming.  It’s not humanly possible to make a quick trip to New Zealand on the spur-of-the-moment, when a medical crisis has afflicted a loved one.

For my more mobile family members, one solution has become to rent a summerhouse somewhere in Europe, in the summer, and invite them to come, with no charge for boarding.  This makes a yearly European vacation nearly doable, and has us assume part of the burden of cost for the rest of my family.  It’s fun, and it’s a ‘win-win’, in many ways.   Two summers ago, we rented a lovely place on Tinos, Greece, and paid to have it for three weeks.  Many members of my family came to visit and we made some exquisite memories.

It dawned on me that this is an important issue and I endeavored to find some information about long distance relating, in particular with aging parents.  There is almost nothing academic, though there are a few essays that I found.  One I will share with you here.  It strikes me that this issue is going to become more relevant, in our increasingly globalized world, and that we should share with each other strategies we learn to increase our sense of closeness to our birth families.  Feel free to write me or to comment here with your thoughts and ideas about this topic.