1-25-02, Side Streets, Kimra Traynor Herb
From Marriages to Baby Carriages
By Kimra Traynor Herb
IPS Features
I recently read in the Lifestyle section of my daily newspaper that an acclaimed therapist was coming to town. His specialty? Marriages. Saving them, that is. The article gushed that he personally was responsible for turning millions of people's ideas around; to bringing them enlightenment on the subject of what really makes a marriage work. Intrigued, I read on, hoping to be enlightened without having to pay the $540 per couple fee that his seminar cost.
"In the eighties," He said, "I thought the key to a successful marriage was communication. That was the going theory at the time." He went on to suggest that at that time, if a couple had good communication skills, they were thought to be a shoe-in for the lifetime achievement award in the arena of marriage. "That was," he ruminated, "until I started seeing couples who had GREAT communication skills- and who still wanted to get divorced. " The marriage guru reported that the communicative couples were quite adept at expressing their hatred and disgust towards their partner to their estranged spouse.
So, the article went on, it was back to the old drawing board for the therapist dude. He put his head together with the leading psychiatrists, spoke to numerous couples, did some long term studies and finally, FINALLY, he came up with the key to a successful marriage.
"Love." He said. "Love is the true key to a successful marriage."
This for $550?? Here I thought it was love all along. The article went on to point out that in all of the cases he studied, 100% of the couples who had been married for a long period of time and rated those marriages "very happy" said that LOVE was the key reason they had a good marriage.
As my kids would say, "duh." Without love, the way I figure it, why would you want to be married? Dealing with in-laws, bills, kid raising issues, and the complexities of life are hard enough when the marriage is solidly based on love.... imagine if it were not.
Well, apparently the world needs to be enlightened on the subject, and for the mere cost of $550, you and your spouse can discover that LOVE is the firm foundation on which to build a marriage. It's no wonder I'm so cynical. I find it so hard to imagine that folks would dish out that kind of dough just to be told what they should have known in the first place.
When I was in first grade, and we wanted to tease someone, we would say, " Michelle and John..... sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-ING! FIRST COMES LOVE! THEN COMES MARRIAGE! THEN COMES MICHELLE PUSHING A BABY CARRIAGE!"
It was always sure to generate a few punches between friends, but the little ditty spoke the truth, and we've known it since we were five.
'Course, these days it doesn't always go like that..... the baby carriage seems to arrive often in our society without any thought of love or marriage, but that doesn't make the truth any less relevant. I figure that the couples who attend those kind of workshops either have a lot more dough than we do, so they don't mind spending half a grand to find out what they should have known since the playground, or they're just stupid.
As for my marriage, well..... let's
just say that thus far I have practiced what I preach. My husband and I have
known each other for 24 years, been married for 19, and I have been solidly in
love with him every single day. (Well, there was that time he said that a
certain pair of pants made me look fat...... but we won't go there!) We've gone
through some hard times together- the death of my father, some financially rough
patches here and there, and of course the daily challenges of trying to raise
three young men. I can honestly say that surviving even the rockiest moments has
been doable, thanks to the love of my good man. And he loves me too, oh, don't
doubt it, because there is no way in LIFE a human being would put up with
someone like myself without a hefty, humungous dose of love to temper
my many, many flaws.
When I finished reading the article, I couldn't help wondering if maybe I was missing my calling- if I should be giving seminars on the basics of life- really obvious subjects which apparently the world has not yet caught onto. The way I figure it, if people don't know that the key to a successful marriage is love, maybe they don't know that if you want to live, you need to eat, and in order to feel better, you need to go to sleep at night. I'm on a roll now, and I expand my subject matter to include, if you are cold, put on more clothing, and if you are hot, take off your sweater! At $550 a pop, my seminars are sure to be enlightening to the confused masses out there, and also should help me to put all three boys through college.