From
Deadlock to Divorce
by
Abigail Trafford
People
will ask you: I didn't know you were having trouble.
What went wrong? You already know the easy answers -
-they were in the script of the confrontation
scene.
Then
some of your friends say: I never liked the
bitch/bastard you were married to anyway. You wonder
if they know something you never knew. Then you go over
the confrontation script again, refining your
grievances, sharpening the battles. The main thing is to
get this over with and get on with life. You roll the
breakup scene around in your mind for a few nights. Your
emotional editing process gets to work. You put the
story through your memory a couple of times. It's
finished, you think. The marriage is dead.
And then
the ghosts start dancing on your bed at night. You shut
your eyes tight. They stomp louder, laughing. These
ghosts, they nag, they question, they taunt, they blast
holes in your version. You run from them. You refuse to
speak to your ex. You only communicate through lawyers
now. The ghosts keep boogying, jeering. You fight over
the house, over child support. The ghosts are clapping.
You fight about custody, visitation rights. The ghosts
are cheering. You get frightened. You thought you had it
all figured out. Life is full of beginnings and endings,
you tell yourself. After all, more than a million
couples get divorced every year. But you had forgotten
about the bad ghosts that go dancing in the night.
What
was your marriage really like?
You have
to stop a minute. When did it start? You don't
have a lot of time to think just now, with all the new
things you have to do -- figuring out how to pay the
electricity bill, explaining to your mother, hugging
your children. But in that spare moment when the house
is quiet and your anxiety dulled, you start wondering
about what really went on in your marriage. You have to
confront those dancing ghosts. Because that's the only
way you're going to get through your divorce. Otherwise,
you carry the ghosts with you forever.
It
begins the day you walk down the aisle, your fears and
hopes buried in the rituals of getting married. The
wedding march, the ring, the flowers; church and state
smiling down on you, the in-laws cautious. Wait. Here
comes the bride. A long white satin gown, the distant
veil. But something's amiss -- an omen. The minister
notices first: the bride's wearing red shoes! Her
grandmother gasps. The ring bearer giggles. The groom is
anxious. For better or for worse. You pledge your
life to another. Flashbulbs, the rice raining down on
you. Someone is crying. Where's the cake? The ushers are
laughing. The bridesmaids are dancing. More champagne. Till
death do us part.
Most
people have the dream of falling in love, getting
married and living happily ever after. So you barely
notice on your wedding day that your future partner
wants to live on a houseboat and inclines to believing
in the Moral Majority; you don't think about the fact
that your mother-in-law is a bitch and wants to move
next door. You block out of your mind that maybe you'd
like to go to law school in the fall. It's only later
that you remember these things -- much later, when the
dream and the marriage are in shambles.
The time
bomb for crisis is set early, often as soon as two
people meet. You marry for all the obvious reasons --
you look to your partner for stability, warmth,
ambition, sensitivity, success, money, mystery. You
often marry to complete yourself, ascribing to your
partner magical properties that he/she may or may not
have. Like a homing pigeon, you marry the very qualities
you don't think you have but want to acquire.
"Nature leads us to fall in love. It gets us in
touch with what we don't have," says Washington,
D.C., Jungian analyst Lawrence Staples.
It is
here, in the twilight zone of your emotions, that you
make the psychological contract of wedlock. You're not
aware of it at the time, but in return for those magical
properties you need so much, you make the basic marriage
bargain with your spouse. The French say there is always
one who kisses and one who is kissed. It's a crude
generalization, of course, but in general terms it does
seem to work out that in the subconscious wedlock
contract, one of you takes the dominant position in the
marriage and is the "kisser"; the other the
submissive role and is the "kissee". One of
you assumes responsibility for controlling the course of
married life. The other agrees to be pleasing and
supportive, the dream partner who fulfills the common
wish of the marriage. One of you is the initiator, the
pursuer, the seducer. The other is the passive one,
swept up by the dominant one. This is the wedlock
contract when you start out. The power balance reflects
the psychological dynamics between you when the marriage
begins.
But as
James Taylor reminds you in "It Used to Be Her Town
Too": "Nothing lasts forever."
Francesca
Livoti is Italian-American, dark and beautiful, from New
York City. She once had a small part in a Broadway show.
For a while she lived with a British architect. Bill
Taylor is an all-American boy from Dayton, Ohio, who has
never been out of the country. They meet in his
hometown, where she has a job with a radio station. He
is going to night school to learn engineering. His
people are farmers. His arms seem too long and he's shy.
Francesca is six years older. She meets him in a
furniture store. A few days later she calls him up. It's
not long before she seduces him. To Bill she's the most
exciting person he's ever known. He falls deeply in
love. They marry. The bargain: She gives him the
worldliness and adventure he seeks; he promises her the
small-town American security she desires. The wedlock
contract: She's dominant -- after all, she knows more
when they start out; he's submissive -- he owes her for
opening the door to adventure.
In time,
he becomes an aeronautical engineer. They move to
California, where he gets a job with an aerospace
company. There are overseas assignments: Japan, Germany,
Saudi Arabia. He becomes vice-president in charge of
government contracts. It's an expense account life: the
Asian ruins of Angkor Wat and the Mozart festival in
Salzburg. She raises dogs and dreams of a farm in Ohio.
He wonders: What happened to that worldly woman with
adventurous eyes? She wonders: What happened to that shy
farm boy? One day he buys a car without consulting her;
then he announces they are moving to New York. She is
outraged. How could he do this without asking her first?
He smashes a glass in the fireplace and spends the next
weekend with another woman. She stays at home and
develops a bad back. Who's dominant now? The marriage
bargain is betrayed, the wedlock contract broken.
The man
is submissive on the way to independence; the woman is
dominant on the way to dependence. They each marry the
person they want to be. But instead of renegotiating
their basic marriage contract as they both changed, they
remained trapped in their original dominant-submissive
relationship. Instead of a wedlock contract, they have a
Deadlock contract in which they are stuck in unequal and
opposing roles. As a result, they are not able to
negotiate what they need or want in the marriage. She
behaves like an aggrieved mother; he like a rebellious
child. In this case they break out of Deadlock by
breaking up the marriage.
Think
back: Who wielded the psychological big stick in your
marriage? When you first met, were you the kisser? Or
the one who was kissed? As the ghosts dance gleefully
around your head, you want to know: When did it
start? You stare at the ghosts. To more and more
family therapists, the genesis of divorce is rooted in
the original wedlock contract couples make when they get
married.
What
attracted you to your spouse? Were you very young? Did
you need someone to give you what you didn't get from
your parents?
"A
lot of people have very low self-esteem when they get
married," says Suzanne Keller, professor of
sociology at Princeton University. "That means you
are going to put a lot on the other person to make the
world right for you."
The more
you need your spouse to "make the world right for
you", as you get deeper into the wedlock contract,
the more you will be willing to accept emotional
inequality in the relationship.
 This
article is excerpted from the book:
Crazy
Times: Surviving Divorce and Building a New Life
by Abigail Trafford.
Reprinted with permission of the
publisher, HarperPerennial Library an imprint of
HarperCollins Inc. www.harpercollins.com
For
more info or to order this book
About The
Author
Abigail
Trafford is health editor of the Washington Post. An award-winning
journalist, she has contributed articles to Time, the Boston Globe, and
many other publications. Join her Tuesdays at 2 p.m. on www.washingtonpost.com
for a Health Talk discussion. She can be reached by e-mail at
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.
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