Forecast for Couples

Painful and confusing as they may be, intimate relationships today actually follow particular dynamic patterns; they evolve through recurring cycles of promise and betrayal. Herewith, a map of the territory

For both men and women relationships have come to assume an importance that is perhaps unprecedented. And while the sexes are having a devilishly hard time getting together in these days of rapid role change, they are clearly struggling to make things work in a way that satisfies both partners. What is so surprising is that the struggles have been taking place almost entirely in the absence of a general cultural understanding about the nature of relationships.

Not so long ago, a simple story stated that a couple began when a man and a woman fell in love. They would then marry and form a family. The woman would take care of the home and children; the man would support them by toiling in the heartless world. They would both sacrifice their individual goals to the greater good of the family. Their romance would gradually melt into affection and partnership. The man would be the acknowledged leader, following law and custom, but the woman would rule in domestic matters.

Not every couple followed this prescription-far from it. Forms of coupling varied from couple to couple and from community to community. But each couple, whatever they did, had to contend with this story, this cultural narrative. Some adopted it with relative ease; some twisted and changed themselves in order to accommodate; others were defiant, but their very defiance proved the story's continued vitality. Anyone could invoke it as an authority against a partner who failed to play the assigned role. The same is true today, albeit in response to a different cultural narrative.

The contemporary couple is changing rapidly, responding to shifts in where and how people live, in the economics of employment, in the different kinds of power women and men wield, in beliefs about how things are supposed to be between the sexes, and in the nature of the family. As couples change, so does the cultural narrative about them. One result of the rapid changes is that both men and women tend to overestimate the power the other sex wields in intimate relations today. Both feel like victims in the war between the sexes.

Fascination with couples fills today's media and shapes our popular imagination. The romantically engaged couple is the icon of our time, a major focus of movies, television, books, and music. Most people devote tremendous energy to trying to find the perfect partner. And yet the couple is an isolated and fragile form, caught between great expectations and declining resources. It is supposed to be the cure for all that ails you. In fact, our commitment to the inner life of relationships has grown as our commitment to the larger society recedes. But the couple falls apart almost as easily as it comes together: half of all marriages end in divorce; early love often fades into domestic boredom. Contemporary couples must develop in the shadow of their potential demise.

There have always been many different kinds of couples: "just living together" couples, gay and lesbian couples, childless couples, interracial couples, post-divorce couples, couples of vastly different age, and so on. The life course of real couples varies widely; few march in a straight line past every predictable milepost, from the first romantic attachment to the birth of children to the empty-nest syndrome, and finally into retirement together. But certain stories regularly prevail. Against them, social diversity continues to build, often in unexpected ways (as by the impact of new immigrant families.

People-psychotherapists included-often participate in, theorize about, and try to fix ailing couples without a dear sense of what a couple is or an understanding of how it has gotten that way. This is like trying to treat the heart without knowing something about its normal functioning. Intimate couple relationships, painful and confusing as they may be, follow particular patterns; yet couples today have only the most rudimentary map of the territory through which life takes them. They are in a psychological and moral wilderness. Self-help books and psychotherapists try to help but often fail. What is needed is the creation of a living narrative, new language, new concepts, and new metaphors-a map of couples in our time.

As family therapists, we begin our thinking with a simple observation: so many people seem disappointed in their relationships. What is the disappointment all about? Psychotherapists look for the roots of disappointment in unresolved childhood conflicts; philosophers and psychologists note its origins in our attachments to specific goals and material comfort. But the more we thought about it, the more a simpler answer emerged: relationships are disappointing because they do not seem to metaphors their early promise.

Our culture asks so much of couple relationships-romance and passion, partnership, friendship, and nurturance-that disappointment is inevitable. The expansive promise of new beginnings often comes to seem like a youthful illusion at best, a cruel hoax at worst. The implicit contracts make with each other--which are based more on potential than on past performance--come tumbling down. Partners break promises; individuals break their own resolutions. Husbands and wives are forever noting, "This is not the person I thought I had married" and "If I had known then what I know today, I never would have married her." These statements are not simply sour grapes or the distorted complaints of dissatisfied individuals. They reflect the truth of broken promises.

CONTRADICTIONS

This is a revolutionary time in male and female relationships and therefore in the lives of couples. In times of change, contradictions sharpen. This process marks the lives of contemporary couples, making both partners tense and excited. We can point out three basic conflicts with which couples today must cope.

1. The clash between great expectations and limited resources.

According to our cultural narrative, the romantically engaged couple is an answer for everything. We want more from our partners, but we're less and less able to give of ourselves. Our partners must be passionate lovers as well as loyal confidantes, willing to join us intensely when we want, but leaving us alone when we need "private space." We ask for romance in our quiet moments, but want a sturdy partner to help raise children, maintain a household, and coordinate schedules. These activities interfere with one another, and our expectations don't mix.

The couple is supposed to be a stable haven in a cool, hostile, unpredictable world. In the past, women had the role of maintaining domestic relationships, but now that two incomes are required to get by, more and more couples are made up of two working partners. Many couples, even those without children, return home each day exhausted. No one stands at the threshold to welcome them and soothe their return.

At the same time, couples are more than ever isolated from the resources that used to sustain them, such as extended families and communities. We all have friends, but fewer of us live close to our families. Who can we depend on, no questions asked, to take care of the kids when we are in a pinch? Who will support us and offer us wisdom through the hard times? Most couples are jammed for time, for emotional energy, and for patience. "I just need a minute to myself" has become our modern litany. Our partner's company sometimes drains us more than it enhances us. We probably do more for one another these days, but we expect so much that we're still often disappointed.

2. The clash between the individual and the couple.

We always marvel at those selfless individuals who place others' needs and comforts first. in an age such as ours, individual pleasures, development, and fulfillment often come first. The contemporary concern with self intensifies the basic tension between our allegiance to the relationship and allegiance to ourselves.

In couple relationships this tension is often polarized by gender: women have tended to stand for the relationship, connection, and mutual dependence; men for individualism and independence. Such polarization, where it exists, exaggerates and distorts and leads to dramatic confrontations such as those in which women feel abandoned while men feel controlled. This is probably the most common dilemma presented to couple therapists today, and can be seen as the archetypal struggle of the modern couple.

But there is a growing trend to dissolve this simple division by gender. Women are also concerned with their own development, with being independent, respected partners, capable of pursuing their goals outside of the relationship. The question then arises: just who in the couple is committed to the relationship?

In other eras, romantic love centered on the partner. "What can I do to win you?" was a burning question. These days we look for partners who can bring out the best in ourselves. "What can you do for me?" we ask. The ideal partner today is a cross between a psychotherapist and a good parent. Even generosity, we are told, proceeds best from self-fulfillment: only if we feel good about ourselves will we be good to our partners. But when we feel bad about ourselves, and our partners are not filling our needs, we may soon lose our commitment to the relationship. We and our partner then become two islands in an unfriendly sea.

3. The clash between staying together and splitting up, marriage and divorce. Many relationships last a short time. We discard our partners-or they discard us-and we move on. Even longer relationships have a way of fizzling out after a year or so: they just don't seem right any more; nasty arguments turn us sour; our involvement fades away. Even those relationships that lead to marriage have trouble holding fast. And yet we keep starting relationships again, hoping each time we'll find the right partner at least take a more realistic attitude towards them.

We seem less angry, less disillusioned with relationships than with ourselves or our current partner. As difficulties in a relationship mount, we often persist because we have so much "invested" in it; but eventually we wonder if it makes sense to put any more into such a losing relationship.

Most of us become less willing to accept a stale relationship. As breakup and divorce have become easier, so has our dream of the good partner. We imagine anew that someone out there will save us from loneliness, redeem us as individuals, and help us avoid the problems that destroyed our last relationship.

We're vividly aware that breakup and divorce are possible. Such awareness can take the edge off our own commitment: it is an escape clause, a skepticism built into contemporary relationships. We react to this skepticism by nervously maintaining a safer distance, withholding a part of ourselves, and trying to let go of some of our romantic intensity. As we struggle to avoid breaking up, we often distort the very relationships we are trying to preserve.

In trying to understand the disappointment of couples, we began asking couples about their original promises. What was it they had originally pledged to one another, what contract had they tacitly made? And how did this contract affect the dissolution or reconciliation that followed their sense of betrayal? Further, how did couples move beyond their outrage? How did the resolution of their disappointment affect how they subsequently thought of themselves-both as individuals and as a couple? Out of the answers and our observations of hundreds of couples arose our notion that couples continually move through a three-stage cycle of promise, betrayal, and resolution. It was surprisingly simple. But the more we turned it over and measured it against our experience, the more it seemed to fit.

Our basic idea was that couples initially pass through three recognizable stages: Expansion and Promise; Contraction and Betrayal; and Resolution. The early expansiveness of relationships expresses our desire for romance, our yearnings to burst through the walls of our isolation and alienation to connect with another person, and our longings to be more than insignificant beings on this "little" planet.

Later in relationships we contract and pull back into our skin. This contraction demonstrates our pessimism, our cynicism, our capacity to see ourselves as victims, and our lack of vision and enduring discipline. It expresses our belief that men and women are not natural allies but naturally at war, and our conviction that we were fools for believing in romance.

When in our lives we bring these two opposing currents together, when we struggle past our pessimism with a sense of perspective and compromise, there is a period of resolution, a time of apparent stability. But new challenges, like the birth of a child or one partner's press towards self-fulfillment and growth, often threaten and topple these stable places. No couple can stay at a point of resolution forever; they must always adjust. The character of couples is thus constantly evolving.

COUPLE DEVELOPMENT

In order for a couple to endure, the partners must resolve the problems that emerge in their relationship. No couple does this by moving in a straight line. Instead all pass through series after series of endlessly spiraling three-stage cycles of Expansion and Promise, Contraction and Betrayal, and Resolution.

Couples first move through times of positive hopes and experiences, then through times of trouble and disappointment-perhaps the positive experiences were not deep enough, perhaps they did not last long enough. Then they move into some middle ground between the two opposing conditions. Each cycle reflects their effort to recognize and reconcile a conflict: the freedom and the promise of the early relationship versus the crushing defeat that invariably follows.

Initially, two people come together enough to form a lasting relationship. This is the task of the first Expansive Stage. According to today's cultural narrative, couples should begin in a burst of romance, exploration, and sexual attraction. But not every couple, and not every partner, falls in love. Instead,couples commonly begin with a shared experience of expansiveness and promise, which may include romantic love, but may also arise from a warm and respectful friendship.

In this stage, individuals feel somehow larger, more witty and charming, stronger yet more vulnerable-in short, closer to their ideal selves than ever before. The developmental trajectories of men and women converge for a moment, so that men take time to talk and understand, while women appear more independent. Each partner's appreciation spurs the other to expand his or her capacities. Early relationships lack the constricting patterns that eventually emerge. They are spacious instead, encouraging both exploration and experimentation.

The Expansive Stage is one of the few times when we tell our whole story to another person, who bears witness to it and helps shape it further. The two individual narratives are then woven into a couple narrative, which takes on a life, an identity, of its own. People will say, "This is how we do things" and "That is just how we are" Individual identity becomes inextricably bound to the character of the couple.

But couples must also find a way to include the fears and insecurities, the ineptness and even the cruelty that figures prominently in their lives. Introducing this material into the relationship is the task of the Contraction and Betrayal Stage.

This second stage begins when one partner pulls back to routine ways. The withdrawal may be neutral, not angry; but the person who is left feels abandoned and betrayed. When she (it is almost always the woman who stays connected longer) objects, he may feel controlled and withdraw further; she may then be both frightened and furious, insistently asking that the person she had gotten to know reemerge. In response, he may build his shell thicker, and so the sequence grows.

This nightmarish cycle makes caricatures of the two partners. The great potential of the Expansive Stage, when men and women shared "male" and "female" attributes, dissolves into cruel stereotypes. Each partner feels trapped and betrayed not only by the other but also by himself or herself. More than anything, people wish to remain the person they were in the Expansive Stage, the person they had striven to be through years of dreaming and preparing. Now they feel immensely let down by their own failures. They blame both self and other, and a mood of accusation permeates the relationship.

Just as the Expansive Stage brings us closer to our ego ideal, so the Contraction Stage confronts us with our greatest fears and our poorest self-image. During this stage, distinctive, repetitive struggles form and consolidate. They seem to define the whole relationship. The struggles are so distressing that the couple may draw someone, like a child or parent, or something, like alcohol or excessive work, into the relationship to buffer the conflict. These patterns become integral parts of the couple's moments together-and recur throughout the life of the couple. They become as familiar and distinctive as the implicit promises of expansion. Couples grow very accustomed to the predictable experiences of contraction.

Even though it is a difficult stage, contraction is essential. Unless partners can bring their wounds and uncertainties into the relationship, they will feel neither real nor whole, and the vigilance required to protect themselves will make them guarded and superficial. In contraction, critical themes from the partners' past enter the couple's experience, further deepening their character. Contraction, then, is not a "negative" stage; it is as necessary as the others. We confront ourselves honestly in contraction's harsh light, telling the truth about our limitations and those of our partner. The insights must be folded into the relationship. Couples who endure contraction will look back on it as a time when they were tested and triumphed.

RESOLUTION

To survive, couples must climb out of the Stage of Contraction without entirely excluding its messages. They must at least partially reconcile the first two stages. This is the task of the third stage, the Stage of Resolution.

This is a stage of compromise, negotiation, accommodation, and integration. The partners struggle to be reasonable and maintain perspective, to affirm complexity and to handle difficult situations with competence and maturity. In contrast to the intense, narrow focus on one another that characterized the first two stages, the couple now opens up more to family and community. Having a child, for example, may serve as a bridge of common concern to repair long-strained relationships with parents; it may become a rite of passage into a more durable adulthood.

The early desire for fusion in the Expansive Stage gives way to close, bitter struggles in the Stage of Contraction. Paradoxically, the blaming and rejection may eventually lead to a sense of perspective. For example, a statement uttered in close, angry combat, like "I'm not at all like you," may usher in a realization of genuine difference: "We really are different." With this realization comes alienation, then at least tolerance and possibly acceptance, followed by a flood of relief.

For a moment the struggle seems over. What had seemed mean in one's partner now seems tolerable. Relief follows, and renewed optimism often comes in its wake. At this point the couple frequently moves forward into "another Expansive Stage; but just as quickly, they can be thrown back into contraction, with each partner feeling disappointed, as if the whole experience had been an illusion.

This moment of increased perspective represents a foray into resolution. The accumulation of these moments of realization, from contraction into resolution, put the couple past a threshold that consolidates their growth. The forays overwhelm the experience of contraction-which comes to seem like a crabby, limited view. The couple moves forward.

Couples try to hold onto their new perspective and the optimism that follows, but they invariably fail. The progress of expansion, contraction, and resolution is a spiral through time: stages cascade one after the other. The character of the couple, as distinguished from the character of the individual partners, is shaped more by the overall cycles than by any single stage. Cycles can be precipitated by a wide number of crises and events.

At first, the promise of the Expansive Stage and the fears of the Stage of Contraction remain relatively separate; but with each turn of the cycle, they become more integrated. Each revolution brings new information into the couple's domain. One partner's terrible and characteristic rages, for example, which show up in other domains, may suddenly emerge in the relationship after years of life together, and eventually become acknowledged and worked into their ways of being together. So, too, with many positive traits, such as capacities that emerge only in response to dangerous situations, such as courage in the face of danger.

For those couples who survive many turnings of the cycle, the Stage of Resolution tends to broaden in content and lengthen in time. Couples spend more and more time in it, and its qualities of tolerance and accommodation increasingly come to define their character.

The character of couples is shaped as much by the rhythm of the cycles as by the content of their stages. In this, couples vary greatly. Some couples, for example, move through wild swings: everything's great, then everything's awful; then there is a brief moment of reconciliation, after which everything's better (or worse) than ever. For others, the stages pass more subtly and their cycles are relatively smooth. Some couples move slowly out of one stage into another; others seem to cycle all the time.

Every couple has a Home Base, a stage in which they generally reside. This habitual stage represents both its public persona and its evolved self-image, but not its full character. Those who reside in contraction, for instance, think of themselves as conflicted and troubled, even though they have moments in expansion and resolution. Once a couple has settled into a stage as its Home Base, its cycles will tend to begin and end there. The couple in contraction might climb out through one compromise or another, relax momentarily in resolution, which feels good enough to revive some old romantic feelings reminiscent of expansion. But with its first minor disappointment, fall back to their familiar Home Base in contraction.

After the first few cycles, the stages in each couple's repertoire become more like different states of being. The couple can enter them, know them as familiar, and then move on. In this sense the stages become a relatively constant, autonomous reality in the relationship.

But it is a couple's first turn through the cycle that imparts a distinctive style that Will tend to endure. We develop our characteristic ways of loving and being loved, of being warm and affectionate, in our first time through expansion. Subsequent expansive moments will usually bring back the memory and flavor of these patterns. Similarly, the fights we had in our first cycle usually recur over and over again through our relationship. No new fight seems all that new, but looks like a variation on the old one. Later, in our first passage through resolution, we develop our characteristic ways of solving problems our distinctive ways of talking, negotiating, tolerating, and accepting.

CONFLICT AND RESOLUTION

The character of couples is forged through regular cycles of conflict and resolution. Conflict is not an aberration that can be ignored or cured; it is inherent in couples' lives. It stems from real dilemmas that couples must acknowledge and resolve. In relationships, conflict often appears as a choice: individual versus collective good; women's rights versus male entitlement; one partner's style of upbringing versus the other's.

As they continue to cycle, couples struggle for a perspective that can embrace both the good and the bad and help them move ahead. But the perspectives they reach, and the solutions they attain, are always partial: they resolve enough so they can move on, but they rarely resolve disputes completely. Core conflicts hang around, serving as sources of new antagonisms.

Just as we feel we have resolved a conflict about sex, money, or children, our solution unravels or another problem appears. Partners need to negotiate everything, from how to structure child care to how and when to make love-and who should initiate it. Couples will be frustrated if they expect to solve their conflicts once and for all. But if they learn to recognize their cycles of conflict and resolution and adapt to them, they may survive the hard times, grow together, and thrive.

TURNING POINTS AND TRANSFORMATIONS

At some point, almost all couples find themselves in a profoundly disturbing and immovable impasse. No matter what they do, they cannot escape; there are no more areas of conversation to open up, no more strategies to try, no more activities to limit. They feel totally stuck. Many couples separate at this point. Many others, perhaps only through inertia or devotion to children or to the idea of marriage, stay together. Most couples simply endure, emerging diminished but essentially unchanged after their ordeal.

But some couples are transformed by these terrifying crises. Instead of simply enduring, the partners manage to give up their blaming and bitterness but remain in the relationship. They realize they cannot get what they want by demanding, by manipulating, or even by negotiating. In despair and exhaustion, they finally stop trying to change their partner, and stop trying to make themselves over as well. Giving up this fight has a paradoxical effect: for a moment, the partners may experience one another in a new, fresh, and undefined way.

This experience is so dramatic it often takes on a spiritual dimension. The partners feel enhanced-better known and accepted for who they are, joined anew. They feel as if they have awakened. Beyond the conflict-and their own selfish version of what's right-they can sense a deeper meaning of their relationship.

This awakening becomes a great divide in the history of their relationship, separating a time of truth from one of ignorance. The partners can then return emotionally to one another and share the wisdom and inner strength they've now gained.

Not every couple goes through this trying time of transformation. Nor can the experience be taken on willfully. It has to emerge through the difficulties of life. Still, there is something heroic about people who have the capacity to sustain crushing disappointment, undergo repeated tests of their relationship, yet feel enhanced by their commitment to each other.

We are strongly moved, deeply impressed by the energy and courage of couples who refuse their own dissolution and who seek instead to explore the potential for fulfillment in their relationship.