Is marriage/partnership safe?
Recently I’ve been catching up with a friend I knew in college, and we compared notes on our careers. Hearing that I’m a couples therapist, she asked me for my thoughts about relationships and marriage, and wondered whether I saw marriage* as a “safe container” for people to work on things–on their own emotional maturity, their own development of a stronger self.
My response: marriage is not a safe container, but it is a container nonetheless. Marriage forces us to do one of three things:
1) Grow (painfully!) and experience ecstasy in a close relationship with another person
2) Suffer fruitlessly
3) Split up
You can guess which choice I want you to make! Marriage is not safe because none of the three choices above are safe. In your effort to become a better person by drawing close to another person, you can–and probably will–get hurt. (Surely you know that already!) But marriage can be a “container” for you to do the hard work on yourself, the hard work of increasing your emotional maturity, the hard work of strengthening yourself so that you can be close to another person without falling apart, melting into them, or overwhelming them. This is why David Schnarch calls marriage a “people-growing machine.” And I’ll bet it explains why, if you’re in a relationship right now, you are feeling uncomfortable.
Safe? No. But then, few valuable things in life are safe!
*It’s been a while since I’ve written about the word ‘marriage’ and what I think it means. I do not think it means the legal union of a man and a woman. I use the word ‘marriage’ to refer to any relationship between two people (same gender or not) who are intentionally relating to one another as spouses.
January 12th, 2009 at 7:15 pm
[...] post often about the hard challenges in marriage (and partnership). Just the other day I was writing about the three choices people face when they are in a one-on-one romantic union: painful growth [...]