How to Think Systemically About Your Relationship

Systemic thinking can reveal a great deal about what is going on and what to do about it, but like thinking behaviorally, it is very different from lay thinking about causality and behavior and much harder to learn than, say, psychoanalytic or cognitive-behavioral thinking. The main features of systemic thinking that make it hard to learn are the irrelevance of personality, the de-emphasis on intentionality, and the view of people as embedded in a network of relationships rather than as independent actors.

Evolutionary theory says that genetic variations are selected by consequences, where the relevant consequences include the survival of the organism, reproductive success, and the survival of the offspring. Behaviorism says that behavioral variations are selected by consequences that include both biological and learned rewards or their absence. Systems theory says that behaviors are selected by their effects on relevant systems, including rewards but also including the smooth functioning of the system. Thus, a girl breaks curfew partly because it’s exciting but primarily, perhaps, because it leads to her parents acting in concert.

Systemic thinking resists the intuitive theory that we behave as we do because of our intentions, a theory we are generally taught as children. This folk psychology is also embedded in our language, where subjects drive effects with verbs. A thermostat doesn’t “realize” it’s getting cold and doesn’t “decide” to turn on the furnace any more than, systemically, a husband “realizes” he is being taken for granted and “decides” to flirt with another woman.

A brief overview of systems theory is that people define the situations and relationships they’re in according to how effective various definitions are at making the system run smoothly, where "smoothly" is itself defined according to the definition of the situation. For example, a boot camp runs smoothly if the recruits are exhausted and intimidated and bound to each other cohesively, and a marriage defined as a boot camp will involve someone barking orders and someone cohering under orders. A marriage defined as a spiritual retreat will run smoothly if the couple reduces socializing with others and never contradicts each other.

It’s helpful to develop a vocabulary of types of marriages apart from the people involved. The “ultimate love story,” “the duel to the death,” and “the parochial school” are all marriages I’ve seen. It can also help to use specific marriages to describe what’s going on. “We are drawn to Petruchio and Kate, but we keep slipping into Othello and Desdemona.” “Do you want to be Monica and Tom Selleck or Monica and Chandler?”

Above all, thinking systemically takes personality out of the equation. Personality leads to ideas like, “My spouse is messy, and I am neat; my spouse should be neater.” Systemic thinking leads to thoughts like, “My partner wants a fraternity, and I want a dollhouse. Hmmm.” Instead of thinking your partner doesn’t respect you, systemically one might think that the partner is trying to promote one definition of the relationship (captain and crew? bumper cars?) while you are trying to promote another (domestication? ungendered responsibilities?).

The crux of my approach to couple’s therapy is relevant here. Regardless of what the couple is struggling with, and regardless of the theoretical approach I choose, one thing I am always doing is monitoring their treatment of each other and especially what they say to each other. If one of them says something that strikes me as a sour note, I make the “time-out” sign. I say something like, "Is that the way a spouse talks to (or about) a spouse (or a wife to a wife or whatever)?" If they say no, I invite the person to try again, this time speaking as one does to (or about) one’s spouse.

If they say yes, I may raise some unintended consequences of the kind of marriage they are implementing. (For example, when the marriage is run like a kindergarten, I may point out that there’s not a lot of sex between kindergarten teachers and kindergartners.) If they disagree about whether the statement was aligned with the relational roles, then we talk about that.

Couples can benefit from the time-out sign. Be careful not to use it when your partner says something you disagree with; only use it when you disagree with the way they said it. Then talk about what kind of relationship their way of speaking promotes and what kind of relationship the two of you want to have.

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If nothing else, the friendly, collaborative time-out space will be a good place to reconnect. Of course, the time-out sign has to be used at the outset of a misstep. If you ignore the first time you are spoken to like you are a kindergartner, you are likely to respond childishly, and then by the time you make the time-out sign, you’re in a full-blown fight. Still, once things settle down, you can try to locate together when the couple went off the rails of marriage and onto the tantrum track, and you can review the advantages of calling for time-outs when things start.

In addition to taking time-outs and talking things over (which is called “metacommunication”), you can also take steps to promote the type of marriage you want to be in rather than inadvertently implementing the sort of marriage you don’t want to be in. The latter often takes the forms of vicious circles. For example, in the parochial-school type of marriage, the wife acts virginal or scolding, and the husband pretends to be domesticated but keeps having adolescent eruptions. His adolescent eruptions are likely to make her feel like scolding him, and vice versa, and both react to the other rather than promoting the marriage they might prefer.

I tried to express this last idea in a sonnet that was published in Voices.

"Marriage Reflections"

If I had married her then I’d be him.

How else can you explain his reticence?

Her rage, her manic conduct on a whim

Would drive to silence anyone with sense.

Her unpredictability assaults

Him like a Caribbean hurricane.

His levees, walls, and sandbags aren’t faults.

Who wouldn’t seek protection from her rain?

The more he hides the more she must attack

To penetrate his stony barricades.

So, when she fights he never does fight back,

And thus her lonely fury never fades.

She storms for a response but he’ll defer.

If I had married him then I’d be her.