5 Simple Steps to Take Your Marriage from Good to Great - Hardcover

Orbuch, Terri L.

 
9780385342865: 5 Simple Steps to Take Your Marriage from Good to Great
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385342861 ISBN 13: 9780385342865
Verlag: Delacorte Press Books for Young Readers, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

The "Love Doctor" host outlines five strategies for revitalizing an unfulfilling marriage, drawing on the author's National Institutes of Health-funded study with hundreds of couples to counsel readers on setting realistic expectations, improving communication, and enabling positive changes.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

In addition to her role as the project director of The Early Years of Marriage Project, Terri L. Orbuch, Ph.D., is research professor at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan and a professor at Oakland University. The host of the weekly “The Love Doctor®” radio show” on VoiceAmerica.com, she’s been a marriage therapist for more than twenty years. She lives in Michigan with her husband.

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Chapter One


Expect Less, Get

Neutralize frustrations that are eroding your relationship.

One trait happy couples in my study share is that they have learned how to have realistic expectations of their spouses and marriages. To take your marriage from good to great, it’s essential to transform unrealistic expectations—the ones that rarely get met and then cause you frustration, anger, sadness, hurt, and other negative emotions— into more realistic versions that will be met.

Contrary to popular belief, the biggest reason marriages fail is not conflict, lack of communication, or sexual incompatibility. It’s frustration. The first step to achieving a truly great marriage is to defuse the frustration that is eating away at the love and happiness in your relationship. Frustration creates tension that builds and eventually explodes. Enough of these explosions and you’ve got a broken marriage. Where does this frustration come from? Unrealistic expectations! By having realistic expectations of love, men, women, and relationships in general, and then realistic personal expectations between you and your spouse specifically, you can dramatically improve your marriage.

In the first part of this chapter, we will look at the ten most common myths about marriage, and the reality behind each one. The simple act of dispelling myths that drive your expectations is a necessary step toward arriving at more realistic expectations and reducing marital tension. By learning what relationship research tells us about how men and women relate, behave, and think, you can approach your marriage with fresh, unbiased knowledge. Whenever I share the scientific research that debunks these common myths in my classes, therapy sessions, or workshops, people are always astounded to discover that what they’ve believed all along about the other gender, love, or marriage is just not supported by scientific facts and rigorous research. After you get rid of relationship expectations that are based on myths, rather than rooted in reality, you will see immediate, significant improvements in your marriage. I’ve seen this so many times, I no longer doubt it.

In the second part of the chapter, you will examine the specific expectations you and your spouse have of each other and your marriage. I present a number of exercises that will ask you to dig deep within you and ask yourself, “What are my top personal expectations for how my marriage should work?” I will help you identify your own personal expectations from a list of the sixteen most common personal expectations of married couples that came out of my long-term study. You and your spouse will discover what is most important to each of you in your ideal marriage. You will learn how to prevent disappointment by sharing your personal expectations with your spouse so that each of you has a clear understanding of what is important to the other. My own research shows that spouses who can identify each other’s personal expectations experience greater happiness over time.

When one couple from my study, Timbra and Alan, were asked at year seven what advice they would give to other young newlyweds, their answer was very typical of many happy couples:

timbra: Know what your spouse wants and expects—and communicate that to each other. You can avoid a lot of fighting that way.

alan: (laughing) I’ve known her since we were fourteen. You’d think I’d have a clue by now. But seriously, she’s right. We really know what our limitations are and what each other’s dreams and expectations are. The only surprises we have in our marriage are the good ones.

These two are typical of the happy couples in my study who have reasonable expectations of themselves, their spouses, and their relationships—and really “get” each other. My research continues to confirm that happy couples who have such reasonable expectations experience less frustration in their marriages, and more affection, closeness, respect, trust, passion, fun, and overall well-being and satisfaction than their peers. Sounds enticing, doesn’t it?

How Frustration Sabotages Marital Happiness

Frustration is tension that builds up until it eventually erupts into disappointment, anger, or unhappiness. Frustration occurs when our expectations aren’t met; we think something should occur or unfold in one way, and then it doesn’t go as we planned.

Psychologists think of relationship expectations much like a play’s script. Each of us is given a script early on in life for how we should act in relationships. And from this script, we also have very strong assumptions about how others should perform or respond to us. These “should” statements are relationship expectations. If our love partner meets our “should” statements or relationship expectations, then we are very happy. If he or she doesn’t meet these expectations, we become frustrated.

Many of us have been taught by the media, friends, and family that our spouse should be everything to us. We learn that when two people find each other and get married, their lives should be forever intertwined. We expect our spouse to be our best friend, an excellent parent, a great lover, a good provider, a loving caregiver, a willing volunteer, physically fit, healthy, sensitive, generous, well-liked, open-minded, polite, intelligent, with similar interests, and happy to spend leisure time with us. Phew—and that’s just for starters! No one can be all that, so we really need to learn to change our expectations. When such unrealistic expectations are not met, we will feel frustrated. Bottom line: Frustration takes the fun and passion out of your relationship, and can be very corrosive over time.

Instead, we need to have expectations that are realistic. Let me give you a concrete example so you can see how it works. A wife has had a run-in with her teenage son after he got home from school and is feeling as though she didn’t handle it well. She wants her husband’s input and reassurance, and she’s also realized that the boy should hear from his father. The boy is holed up in his room, and she’s seething. Here is her unrealistic expectation: that her husband will be 100 percent available to her when he walks in the door, because she’s done the heavy lifting, and now it’s his turn. She’s looking for superman. You can see what’s coming, right? When her husband arrives home, maybe he’s had his own rough day and needs her support, and is desperate for a few moments to unwind and decompress. His aloof behavior doesn’t signal that he’s unconcerned or uninvolved, but she interprets it that way and is infuriated and frustrated by his seeming lack of attention to her needs and those of the family. Now let’s rewind her scenario starting from a realistic expectation: that he will be caring, responsive, and a good listener once she has given him the heads-up about the situation, asked him directly for his help, and the two of them have blocked out a mutually convenient half hour before dinner to discuss the situation together. By expecting less, she gets more. The less you expect—when those expectations are potentially excessive and unrealistic—the more satisfaction you will get out of your marriage.

John and Sue-Ellen, one of the happy couples in my study, are a good example of this. They talk a lot about eliminating unrealistic expectations when asked why they are happy in their marriage together.

John and Sue-Ellen are both doctors who first met in medical school. They were both academically driven and competitive with each other, and made good study partners. They married eight years after they...

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Verlag
Delacorte Press Books for Young Readers
Erscheinungsdatum
2009
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385342861
ISBN 13 
9780385342865
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
224
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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