Read an Excerpt
Chapter One Crisis
"Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
--T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
"She picked up her glove and hit his cheek with it,
but so lightly he did not even blink.
"I despise you," she said.
"Quite," said Mr. Mackenzie.
--Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie
Deadlock People will ask you: I didn't know you were having trouble. What went wrong? You already know the easy answers--they were in the script of the confrontation scene. Then some of your friends say: I never liked the bitch/bastard you were married to anyway. You wonder if they know something you never knew. Then you go over the confrontation script again, refining your grievances, sharpening the battles. The main thing is to get this over with and get on with life. You roll the breakup scene around in your mind for a few nights. Your emotional editing process gets to work. You put the story through your memory a couple of times. It's finished, you think. The marriage is dead.
And then the ghosts start dancing on your bed at night. You shut your eyes tight. They stomp louder, laughing. These ghosts, they nag, they question, they taunt, they blast holes in your version. You run from them. You refuse to speak to your ex. You only communicate through lawyers now. The ghosts keep boogying, jeering. You fight over the house, over child support. The ghosts are clapping. You fight about custody, visitation rights. The ghosts are cheering. You get frightened.You thought you had it all figured out. Life is full of beginnings and endings, you tell yourself. After all, more than a million couples get divorced every year. But you had forgotten about the bad ghosts that go dancing in the night.
What was your marriage really like?
You have to stop a minute. When did it start? You don't have a lot of time to think just now, with all the new things you have to do--figuring out how to pay the electricity bill, explaining to your mother, hugging your children. But in that spare moment when the house is quiet and your anxiety dulled, you start wondering about what really went on in your marriage. You have to confront those dancing ghosts. Because that's the only way you're going to get through your divorce. Otherwise, you carry the ghosts with you forever.
It begins the day you walk down the aisle, your fears and hopes buried in the rituals of getting married. The wedding march, the ring, the flowers; church and state smiling down on you, the in-laws cautious. Wait. Here comes the bride. A long white satin gown, the distant veil. But something's amiss--an omen. The minister notices first: the bride's wearing red shoes! Her grandmother gasps. The ring bearer giggles. The groom is anxious. For better or for worse. You pledge your life to another. Flashbulbs, the rice raining down on you. Someone is crying. Where's the cake? The ushers are laughing. The bridesmaids are dancing. More champagne. Till death do us part.
Most people have the dream of falling in love, getting married and living happily ever after. So you barely notice on your wedding day that your future partner wants to live on a houseboat and inclines to believing in the Moral Majority; you don't think about the fact that your mother-in-law is a bitch and wants to move next door. You block out of your mind that maybe you'd like to go to law school in the fall. It's only later that you remember these things--much later, when the dream and the marriage are in shambles.
The time bomb for crisis is set early, often as soon as two people meet. You marry for all the obvious reasons--you look to your partner for stability, warmth, ambition, sensitivity, success, money, mystery. You often marry to complete yourself, ascribing to your partner magical properties that he/she may or may not have. Like a homing pigeon, you marry the very qualities you don't think you have but want to acquire. "Nature leads us to fall in love. It gets us in touch with what we don't have," says Washington, D.C., Jungian analyst Lawrence Staples.
It is here, in the twilight zone of your emotions, that you make the psychological contract of wedlock. You're not aware of it at the time, but in return for those magical properties you need so much, you make the basic marriage bargain with your spouse. The French say there is always one who kisses and one who is kissed. It's a crude generalization, of course, but in general terms it does seem to work out that in the subconscious wedlock contract, one of you takes the dominant position in the marriage and is the "kisser"; the other the submissive role and is the "kissee." One of you assumes responsibility for controlling the course of married life. The other agrees to be pleasing and supportive, the dream partner who fulfills the common wish of the marriage. One of you is the initiator, the pursuer, the seducer. The other is the passive one, swept up by the dominant one. This is the wedlock contract when you start out. The power balance reflects the psychological dynamics between you when the marriage begins.
But as James Taylor reminds you in "It Used to Be Her Town Too": "Nothing lasts forever."
Francesca Livoti is Italian-American, dark and beautiful, from New York City. She once had a small part in a Broadway show. For a while she lived with a British architect. Bill Taylor is an all-American boy from Dayton, Ohio, who has never been out of the country. They meet in his hometown, where she has a job with a radio station. He is going to night school to learn engineering. His people are farmers. His arms seem too long and he's shy. Francesca is six years older. She meets him in a furniture store. A few days later she calls him up. It's not long before she seduces him. To Bill she's the most exciting person he's ever known. He falls deeply in love. They marry. The bargain: She gives him the worldliness and adventure he seeks; he promises her the small-town American security she desires. The wedlock contract: She's dominant--after all, she knows more when they start out; he's submissive--he owes her for opening the door to adventure.
In time, he becomes an aeronautical engineer. They move to California, where he gets a job with an aerospace company. There are overseas assignments: Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia. He becomes vice-president in charge of government contracts. It's an expense account life: the Asian ruins of Angkor Wat and the Mozart festival in Salzburg. She raises dogs and dreams of a farm in Ohio. He wonders: What happened to that worldly woman with adventurous eyes? She wonders: What happened to that shy farmboy? One day he buys a car without consulting her; then he announces they are moving to New York. She is outraged. How could he do this without asking her first? He smashes a glass in the fireplace and spends the next weekend with another woman. She stays at home and develops a bad back. Who's dominant now? The marriage bargain is betrayed, the wedlock contract broken.
The man is submissive on the way to independence; the woman is dominant on the way to dependence. They each marry the person they want to be. But instead of renegotiating their basic marriage contract as they both changed, they remained trapped in their original dominant-submissive relationship. Instead of a wedlock contract, they have a Deadlock contract in which they are stuck in unequal and opposing roles. As a result, they are not able to negotiate what they need or want in the marriage. She behaves like an aggrieved mother; he like a rebellious child. In this case they break out of Deadlock by breaking up the marriage.
Think back: Who wielded the psychological big stick in your marriage? When you first met, were you the kisser? Or the one who was kissed? As the ghosts dance gleefully around your head, you want to know: When did it start? You stare at the ghosts. To more and more family therapists, the genesis of divorce is rooted in the original wedlock contract couples make when they get married.
What attracted you to your spouse? Were you very young? Did you need someone to give you what you didn't get from your parents?
"A lot of people have very low self-esteem when they get married," says Suzanne Keller, professor of sociology at Princeton University. "That means you are going to put a lot on the other person to make the world right for you."
The more you need your spouse to "make the world right for you," as you get deeper into the wedlock contract, the more you will be willing to accept emotional inequality in the relationship.
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