PREMISES FROM EARLIER EXPERIENCES
In 1962 Joe and Edith Platt, a Quaker couple who helped run a retreat center called Kirkridge, invited us to conduct a weekend for married couples. We were at that time joint Executive Directors of the American Association of Marriage Counselors, so this was a challenge we could hardly evade. Although we had been involved in many lectures and conferences about marriage, and plenty of marriage counseling, a retreat for married couples was a new venture. However, we accepted the invitation, conducted the retreat to the best of our ability, and learned a great deal in the process. There is no need at this point to go into detail about the procedures we followed for we improved on them considerably later as we gained further experience.
The first Kirkridge retreat was successful enough to encourage the Platts to ask us to come again and again. We then began to receive other requests as it became known that we were available for this kind of leadership, most of them being under religious auspices. The retreats generally began on Friday evening and ended with Sunday lunch. One, for Methodist ministers and their wives, lasted five days, and proved to be the inauguration of a nation-wide program now being run by the United Methodist Church under the title "marriage communication labs."
These experiences brought us into close touch with many "normal" married couples. Our practice was to insist that the retreats were not for couples with problems, but for those who considered they had satisfactory marriages and wanted to explore their potential for further growth. As counselors, we had previously dealt only with marriages in trouble. Now we found that many of these "normal" couples were settling for relationships that were far short of their inherent potential. Some exhibited the same self-defeating interaction patterns which we were accustomed to finding in couples with "problems"—but either they had accepted these poor patterns as inevitable, or the conflicts they caused had not yet reached crisis proportions.
Matching our observation of these couples with some of the research findings on marital interaction, we arrived at four important conclusions:
1. Only a small proportion of marriages came anywhere near to realizing their full potential. Lederer and Jackson[C] suggest that the proportion of "stable-satisfactory" marriages in our culture does not exceed 5-10 percent.
2. Most married couples desire, and hope for, the achievement we have called "relationship-in-depth." Early in their married life, however, they find their growth together blocked by interpersonal conflicts which they either cannot understand or are not prepared to make the effort to resolve. They settle for a series of compromises, resulting in a superficial relationship.
3. As time passes, the couple either accepts this unsatisfactory situation, or it becomes progressively intolerable. They are usually so "locked into" their self-defeating interaction pattern that they are quite unable to change it by their own unaided efforts. Some seek marriage counseling, but often too late for it to be effective.
4. This tragedy of undeveloped potential could be avoided in many instances if married couples had a clearer concept of the task of marriage and did not have to struggle in almost total isolation from other couples going through the same experiences. The potential of married couples for giving each other mutual help and support is very great; but it is unable to function because of an unrecognized taboo in our culture.
This taboo, hitherto unrecognized as such, prevents married couples from sharing their intramarital experiences with other couples. In many settings married couples form friendships with each other, enjoy social contacts, even work together on projects; but there is always a tacit understanding that they do not reveal to each other, further than is unavoidable, what is going on in their husband-wife relationships. Complex mechanisms for evasion and mutual defense exist. Some of these are familiar, strong hostility in one partner when the other appears to be revealing too much; making jokes to relieve tension when some inner secret of the marriage accidently breaks to the surface; silence or withdrawal when "outsiders" appear to be probing too deeply. These defense systems work so well that it is not unusual when a couple begins divorce proceedings for others in their circle of acquaintance to express astonishment in such terms as "We are amazed! We had no idea that they were having trouble!"
We could speculate about the reasons for this taboo: a protection against public humiliation, since we all want others to feel that we can manage competently such a basic undertaking as marriage; a safeguard against exploitation, since a discontented marriage partner offers fair game to a predatory third person; a link with our sexual taboos, since difficulties in marital adjustment often have a sexual component, and any suggestion of sexual incompetence is deeply wounding to our pride. It could reflect the traditional tendency to regard the family as a closed "in-group"—an attitude not without advantages for its strength and stability.
What we are concerned about, however, is that this taboo is being maintained with a strictness that goes far beyond its usefulness in our changing society. It is depriving married couples of help and support from each other, at a time when marriage has become much more difficult and demanding than it was in the past. Indeed, we believe that with the emergence of the nuclear family as the norm in our Western culture, the individual marriage has been deprived of the supports derived from the extended family of the past precisely at a time when our rising expectations of highly rewarding interpersonal relationships are subjecting it to demands it is often unable to meet. In the larger family groupings of the Orient, despite their hierarchical structure, a great deal of help and support can become available to the individual couple in times of trouble from those with whom they share a common corporate life.
It may well be that the new "life styles" being experimented with today—mate-swapping, multilateral marriages, and group marriages, for example—represent attempts to enable the individual marriage to break out of its isolation and to gain better communication, interaction and needed support from other marital units.
A striking illustration of this trend toward deep sharing between married couples has come to our notice from an unexpected quarter. Two married couples from a conservative Christian background decided to meet and talk together, with complete detailed frankness, about their sexual experiences. A series of such meetings was held, the conversations taped, and subsequently published in book form.[D] The couples, after careful consideration, decided not to hide behind a cloak of anonymity, but to use their real names and disclose their identity.
Confronted with this new trend, we take the view that the taboo against the sharing of husband-wife experiences between one married couple and other married couples can with impunity be relaxed in appropriate situations with benefit to all concerned. Between such couples the development of great warmth, empathy, mutual understanding and support, can contribute significantly to the enrichment and growth of the individual marriages involved. This is essentially what happens in marriage enrichment retreats.