ERP 058: Beyond the wedding. What is marriage really like?

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Welcome to The Empowered Relationship Podcast, helping you turn relationship challenges into opportunities and setting you up for relationship success. Your host, Dr. Jessica Higgins, is a licensed psychologist and relationship coach who shares valuable tips, tools and resources for you to dramatically improve your relationship.

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Hi, thank you for tuning in, and thank you so much for your patience if you’re a regular listener. I normally publish about once a week, and I’ve been on a little bit of a hiatus unexpectedly.

A couple of weeks ago I went to a conference, a friend of mine had invited me to go and we drove up to the San Jose area, and it was a long day, it was like 8:30 in the morning until 9 o’clock at night every day, and it took about four and a half hours to get up there from Santa Barbara, and it was just a full-packed weekend, and I think I was next to somebody who was sick and I ended up getting the flu. It was the most sick I think I might have ever been, so I was pretty much out of commission for one full week, with the fever and the whole bad.

Then progressively I started feeling better, but I still had this nasty cough and I’m still getting over it, but it’s been a couple weeks now so I feel like I’m definitely on the up and up. So I just want to let you know what happened for me, since I haven’t been publishing the last couple weeks. Again, I appreciate your patience and reaching out, some of you who have reached out.

If you listened to my last podcast episode, episode 57 – How to Avoid Enabling Your Spouses’ Bad Behavior – you knew that I answered a question of a listener, and that listener followed up with me and just let me know she really appreciated the input, particularly on boundaries, and she is really taking some action in her life. So thank you for that follow-up, thank you for letting me know, and letting us all know that that was helpful to you.

Today’s podcast episode, episode 58 – “Beyond the wedding. What is marriage really like?” I’m also going to be publishing episode 59 very soon, and it’s titled “Risk Love To Be True To Oneself.” In this podcast episode, episode 58, I’m going to be answering two listeners’ questions, so stay tuned for that.

Okay, today’s topic again is Beyond the Wedding – What is Marriage Really Like? So this week I had an opportunity to kind o relax, and I wanted to watch a program and I was searching on HBO On-Demand, and I came across this documentary, and it’s titled 112 Weddings, a documentary by Doug Black, he released it in 2014. Basically, he is a videographer, a documentary filmmaker, and he had filmed over 20 years of couples weddings, and it was just kind of stirring in him, like “What happened to these couples? What is their life like, what is their marriage like? Are they happy?” So he made a list of 25 couples that he wanted to reach out to, and I think these are couples that just stood out to him and he just made a list of 25 couples that he thought might be interested in being interviewed. These were couples largely in the New York area, I believe that’s where he was stationed when he did all these videos of these couples’ weddings. I want to say that he actually ended up interviewing nine couples; some of those 25 weren’t available or didn’t want to be interviewed, for whatever reason.

He said – I actually put a link to this on the show notes, but also HBO has an interview with Doug Black, so I’m going to quote him a couple times here. He said, “Had I actually included more interviews, I think I would have gotten pretty much the same message.” In the HBO interview of Doug Black – which again, you can find on my show notes page – he says “I think there is an amazing story behind every couple’s marriage. The common denominator is that they’re going to face really tough challenges over time.” I have to tell you, when I was watching this documentary it was amazing to me, because he would show footage from their wedding, and then he would obviously be interviewing them, so you got to see this juxtaposition between this very happy, elated day of their wedding and just the beauty surrounding it, and then also the real life challenges of what being married and having stressors and different life events happen, what that looks like.

Couples described various challenges. Some couples described the mere fact of having a child, the lack of sleep, and sometimes the change in jobs, and the financial constraints of that, and the toll that that took, and really feeling their discomfort and feeling their pain… I just have to tell you, in my line of work I get to hear people’s intimate stories and expression of their life and their relationship, and it’s a unique role that I have.

However, when I was watching this documentary it was amazing to me how uncomfortable people were to really share. I’m going to talk more about that in a moment, but you could still read between the lines, even when couples weren’t saying perhaps what they would say really freely, if in a confidential space, but obviously this is a documentary being shown to the world. But still you could feel the difficulty. Some couples had real difficulties with a child that was diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, or child with special needs, or even one of the partners in the relationship having mental illness, severe depression, and also there was another couple that one of the partners had bipolar, and had a pretty extreme manic episode that resulted in the end of their relationship and divorce. And there was another couple that experienced divorce, and just the decisions that they made together, how they allocated their time and how couples really felt disconnected and unhappy. So this is like the real life experiences of people.

The footage is pretty raw; it’s edited for sure, but you get to see this one couple particularly, he’s interviewing them and they’re both kind of talking over each other, it’s kind of hard to hear the answer of either one of them, but you can just tell… I think they had two young children at the time, and just kind of the chaos of what they are living in, and how they are making decisions and how they are working together. So it’s complicated, it’s messy and it’s not pretty at times.

There’s also footage of Doug Black interviewing a rabbi, and he is talking about just how amazing it is that people have no idea what to expect with marriage, and that the nature of marriage is something that is completely unknown. This is like life – we have no idea what to expect, we have no idea what the future holds for us per se. We can be very clear about our intentions, but life has certain challenges that will be presented to us. I think this is one of the beautiful things about this documentary, we get to span back and look at this bigger perspective, like a bird’s eye view – some of these couples have been married for 13 years, some 9, some 7, some 5 – and just look at it from a different perspective, and get to see the hardship and the pain, but also see the beauty and the strength, and the growth that comes from this type of experiences, who we become on the other side.

If you’re interested in even just watching the trailer, I’m going to put a link to the YouTube of this trailer, so you can just get a taste of this documentary. And I’ll also put the link to actually how to purchase it, as well as, like I said, the interview of the videographer, documentary filmmaker Doug Black, as well as the synopsis on the HBO page that really kind of gives you a description of each of these couples and a little bit about each one.

For me, one of the first takeaways, which I feel like in my line of work I already know, but to see this done in such a beautiful way, in such a real raw, authentic way – and it’s really an art form – so you have this film that’s showing these couples as an example, and we get this perspective from watching this documentary, but one of the takeaways for me was just the challenges that we’re all going to be faced with, whether or not it’s personally, or in our family, or in our marriage, and just that that’s the real part of living, and in my mind it’s part of the growth opportunity.

As a mentor of mine would say, it’s the curriculum of your development. We all need challenges to grown. She would say, in elementary school you would have certain math questions to help you learn and acquire certain skill sets. You would have your multiplication math questions, you would have your division, you would have your adding and subtracting, and all of the different skills to develop your math knowledge, and your math skill set. So similarly with our personal development, as well as our relational development, we need a certain curriculum to grow and to develop. In my mind that’s what these challenges provide, and that’s why I’m often talking about having a growth mindset, why I’m also really passionate about sharing relationship principles, as well as teaching in my course or my coaching curriculum these relationship principles, so that you can gain the skill set to grow and to develop in your relationship, as well as personally. So just that takeaway of challenges are inevitable.

The other takeaway was just the expectations. So wedding day – everything that that symbolizes is so beautiful; it’s almost this pinnacle state of happiness, of union, of love, of celebration and family and community, and it represents so much. Yet I think there is an underlying assumption of happily ever after. I think we emphasize, we romanticize the partnering and the bonding and the pairing. In movies, how many romantic comedies are there around two people falling in love and their deciding to be together, and we really enjoy that romance phase. Well, when we think about marriage and getting married and the wedding day, we all want to believe in the fairytale of happily ever after, but there’s an assumption there that it just happens to you. I like to tell people that it happens through you; you’re becoming, you’re developing to create the happily ever after, but most of us I think on some level buy into the assumption that it happens to us, that happily ever after is part of the deal. We get married, we create this wedding ceremony and then part of what we’re getting is the happily ever after, or so we hope.

In the field of psychology there is a difference between what we call state and trait. This is where if you think of state as more of a fluctuating, temporary, more fluid experience. Our emotions are usually state-dependent; depending on how we’re feeling, our state is going to be different. So for happy, we’re going to feel a sense of elatedness, excitement, joy and if we’re feeling sad, we’re going to feel a little more melancholy, and some people would feel a little more introverted or down, or maybe there’s some reason why they’re sad. Well these emotions, as I’m describing them, are fluctuating, they’re temporary.

Emotions usually have a beginning, a middle and an end, so it’s not a permanent state. A state is more an experience, where a trait – I feel like I’m teaching a little bit here – but a trait is something that’s more lasting; extroversion or introversion, or someone who is very anxious, for example – these are more characteristics, more lasting qualities or traits. So someone who is a little more social, or shy, or ambitious – some of these characteristics or personality traits are lasting. Why I bring this up is because marriage or the wedding day is a temporary experience. You have one day or, depending on your cultural tradition, you might have a few days, but it’s a temporary experience, it’s a ceremony for your union, but it’s not your marriage, it’s not going to be this lasting experience; it’s an event.

Even if you don’t believe in ‘happily ever after’ as a concept, we are inundated with it. Again, we pick it up from romantic comedies, it’s in Disney, it’s in books, it’s really everywhere, our friends, our family, our community, because we freely talk about the romance, we talk about the good things. This is why social media sometimes if you’re feeling down, psychologists will suggest not to go on Facebook, or not to go on social media because we present the bright side, we want to show people what’s good, so we will tend to do the comparisons. So if you’re not feeling great and then you go on Facebook and you’re seeing all these romantic highlights or the positive highlight reel of other people’s lives, it’s easy to fantasize that they have this beautiful, amazing life with no challenges, yet that’s not the reality.

So when we are in our family and our friends and we’re talking, and we’re freely talking about all the good stuff in our relationship, particularly the romance stage or those beginning phases, or even being engaged and planning a wedding, and the wedding itself – it’s really focused on all of this positive connection and beauty in the relationship which is real, yet we don’t always talk about the hardships, we don’t talk about the challenges as freely, as openly. So it’s easy to think everyone else has the happily ever after.

I have so many clients that want my feedback, like “Is this normal?” I was just talking with a client yesterday, and she was like “Is it supposed to be like this? Am I supposed to have these conversations with my significant other? Or is this harder than most people’s relationship?” We just have no concept of what’s realistic in the way of challenges and marriage.

In this documentary the rabbi is sharing, “Wedding is day one. It’s easy to make it happy. You just throw a ton of money and liquor at it. A wedding is easy to make happy and a marriage is hard to make happy.” Then I think he makes a joke and says, “You know, if you try to throw a lot of money and liquor at it, it just makes it worse.”

So again, what we’re pointing out here is the expectations, so that when we are trying to develop a career… One of the couples really was focused on his career and wasn’t really giving a lot of attention and priority to his relationship. In another couple, the woman was hyper focused on her children, and really being the best mom possible, but maybe wasn’t giving enough attention to her husband. Or not attending to intimacy… There are a lot of things that we can take for granted, but also just expect things to be easy in the relationship, expect the relationship to just idle, or to fuel itself.

I had an old professor in my PhD program, and she said, “Often when I’m working with couples I invited them to consider their relationship as a third entity. So you have partner one and partner two, and then you have the relationship as its own breathing, living thing. You need to nurture it, you need to give it life, you need to invest in it, you need to foster its growth and keep it alive.” So when we expect the ‘happily ever after’ and we’re presented with, number one, all the challenges, we can feel slammed, broken, disheartened, disillusioned and questioning “Why is it like this? Is there something wrong with me? Is there something wrong with my partner? Is there something wrong with us?” and that is not fueling and nurturing your relationship. So number two, I think the expectations of it’s supposed to just be easy, it’s supposed to just happen without a lot of work or investment…

You know, after watching this documentary – I think if you’ve listened to my podcast you’ve heard me say I had a whole career in working with teens. I ran a teen program and we’d lead these retreats, and often times we would do experiential exercises. That might include a ropes course, or certain initiatives where they get to learn about themselves through these activities, how they deal with challenges, how they work together, how they make decisions, how they communicate, their confidence level – all these things that they were able to see and were revealed in these challenges. Most of these challenges were really just games where you had a goal but again, it simulates life, because most of the time how you do one thing is how you do everything. So if you’re super invested, super engaged, want to do your best and you try as hard as you can, you’re most likely to have that approach with other things, so it’s just really revealing. We would debrief these exercises and it would be a great learning opportunity.

So after watching this documentary I was like gosh, I wish I could just create these retreat experiences for couples before they get married, and allow them the opportunity to see how they work together, how they deal with challenges, how they deal with conflict, how they talk to each other, how they make decisions. The other thing that occurred to me is, you know, we have these programs where the facilitator, teacher or mentor will be telling people “This is hard”, like in the movies where in the air force where you have these firefighter pilots, and they’re doing this rigorous training, they’re like “Look around the room, it’s like 1 in 10, or 50, I don’t even know what the percentage is, but this is not easy. Most of you are not gonna make it.”

When I was in my PhD program and I lived in Palo Alto I had a roommate that was going to Stanford and was in the engineering masters program. Actually two guys that I was living with and I had another roommate, a fellowship from another country and her and I were really good friends, but we had two roommates that were in an engineering program, and they would just be besides themselves, because they were in the first year, which often is called ‘the weeding out year’. It’s almost like the program is designed to make it extremely hard to see if you can make it. You’re weeding out the people that are not committed, that don’t want to do the work, that aren’t really cut out for it, or for whatever reason aren’t gonna make it. So there’s this intentional challenge infused, and it’s explicit, so you go into it knowing this is hard, and I think that the mindset is extremely different if you go into something, any experience, with “This is supposed to be easy, this is supposed to be beautiful, this is supposed to be exciting” and then it’s not. The way you’re going to handle that is extremely different than if you know it’s going to be challenging and you know you have to dig deep, you know you have to work together and be skillful – then you’re going to approach it extremely differently, I think.

If you just even imagine expectations where – I’m thinking of myself actually, I used to do this when I was younger, because I would have people tell me that they loooove this movie, and everybody would rave about it, and I would go see it and I would have these huge expectations and I was never really happy with the movie. Then I was like okay, from now on I’m not doing that. If people love the movie I’ll just say “Great, I’m glad you liked it. I want to see it for myself and make up my own mind”, so I would always try to keep my expectations at a neutral stance. Or if you’ve planned for this vacation and “It’s gonna be fantastic, it’s gonna be great”, and then all these things happen and it’s a total let-down; the way that we deal with that is very different.

If we expect it to be magical and beautiful and it’s not, we usually feel deflated, we usually feel like something’s wrong, we usually feel – just like I said – disappointed, deflated, and something’s wrong, and we kind of just collapse. But if we know that it’s going to be a challenge, we’re going to dig deep, we’re going to build our resources and we’re going to meet the challenge more likely than not, if we know it’s going to be hard – one foot in front of the other, whatever we need to do to get up the hill. You don’t hike a mountain thinking it’s going to be effortless, right? You want to get your water, you want to get your food prepared, you want to maybe train a little if you’re going to do a really hard hike, you want to have the good boots on, you want to think positive, you want to be ready to have the stamina and maybe take it in stride and not run up the first part, you want to have a strategy.

So anyway, I feel like I’m beating this point, but I think that it’s so key – our expectations really impact the way we think, the way we believe and the way we act in our mindset. It’s huge.

The other real point that I thought about after thinking about this documentary for a couple days, which really kind of saddens me, is the sense of shame that people have. Again, this private nature of intimate relationship, but particularly when things are hard, it seems like it feels so isolated or so private that we’re really alone in it, and nobody else is really going through the same thing, or we think that they might be, but we don’t really know and we feel bad that our relationship or our marriage isn’t going the way that we want it to go. Out of the couples there is only one or two people that were really willing to talk more openly, and it was really beautiful because I felt connected to them, and I felt like yes, this is so real, and it makes it human, and we can all relate. I think that’s the other thing why I’m doing what I’m doing with this podcast, helping people feel – in psychology we call this ‘normalizing’ – this normal, it’s healthy, it’s natural for you to feel challenged with whatever relationship challenges you’re dealing with or whatever life challenges you’re dealing with. It’s not that it’s happening that’s the bad thing, it’s more how you deal with it that determines your success.

Recently I was reading – I think it was in Scientific Mind, a magazine that I get, and it was talking about people’s happiness with their sex life; they were focusing on this research study that if couples believed that the average couple had sex about once a week, and then the couple had sex once a week, they would feel satisfied with their sex life. It was largely related to what they thought the norm was. So if other people were having sex a certain amount of time and they were in that ballpark, then they felt good about their sex life. So it’s totally about how we think other people are, and we’re measuring our own self based on that. If we have the belief that other people’s marriage is going well, if you’re comparing yourself to what you imagine other people are experiencing, and that their marriage is going well, and you’re feeling difficulty, you’re going to feel that much more alone.

So when I was watching these couples, some of which were it seemed as though trying to hide some of their challenges, or concealing it, which to me feels like shame, like we feel somehow that what we’re experiencing isn’t okay, we have to hide it – that is very sad to me. And it’s sad to me because this is my line of work, this is the main reason why I’m doing what I’m doing, it’s that I truly believe a long-term relationship is the most fertile ground for growth and development. So if we’re experiencing challenge in our marriage, in my mind that’s exactly where we should be, this is part of the growing process. Yet again, most of us don’t ever have any exposure to this type of thinking. If we have the belief of the ‘happily ever after’ and we’re experiencing challenge in our marriage and we don’t hear anyone else talking about “Oh, challenge is part of the development”, then we’re going to feel really alone in that.

So part of what I’m wanting to encourage people to think about is that the challenges are a part of your growth in your relationship, it’s growing your relationship as well as growing you each independently.

Again, I’ll say it one more time, the challenges are normal, healthy and a natural part of the process. Now, everybody’s challenges look different, they’re not going to look the same in every relationship, but the fact that we have challenges is part of an authentic, growthful, natural, healthy relationship.

As I mentioned just a moment ago most of us, if we’re setting out on a journey, or we’re going to embark on some challenge, most of us are going to want to gather resources. We’re going to want to feel well-prepared, well-equipped to handle to the best of our ability whatever challenge is going to be thrown at us. So we want to train, we want to build our resources, our tool bag or whatever it is that we’re needing.

One of the things that I’ll teach couples about is the developmental stages of a relationship, that there is a natural, developmental process to developing your long-term intimate relationship. If you’re interested in those, you can find that on my show notes. What I’ll do is I’ll put a link to an e-book that I have, it’s Seven Ways Relationships Fail and How to Save Yours. One of those ways is not knowing the lay of the land of intimacy. I talk about the five developmental stages in a relationship, and that’s really important information to know. I also put a link to a podcast episode where I was interviewed on Bruce Van Horn’s Life is a Marathon Podcast last year, and I talk about these five developmental stages.

This is just one resource, and I think it’s a resource because if you have a map in your mind of the lay of the land of intimacy, and the developmental stages, then perhaps if you’re experiencing challenge you might be able to find your stage where you’re at in your relationship on this map. And if you can look and say, “Okay, this is exactly where we’re supposed to be”, then you’re going to probably think about your current challenge differently. So I see that as a resource, it’s just one example.

One couple in this documentary was talking about marriage is like waves; there’s going to be different phases in your relationship – times where you’re going to feel really challenged, and times where you’re going to feel extreme joy and happiness. I think this couple was talking about remembering why you married them in the first place; having gratitude, not taking the other person for granted, remembering to laugh, and really working together. For this couple, these are the things that get them through some of the harder phases. I think she even said, “Sometimes you’re gonna love your partner and sometimes you’re gonna hate your partner.” She really spoke to these things that help her get through the more difficult times.

In my line of work this is what I’m all about. I’m wanting people to have the resources, the skills to feel really prepared to deal with upset, differences and conflict and communication in a relationship, so that people can have the type of relationship they’re really wanting to have together.

In the interview with Doug Black he is asked “What do you hope people take away from this film?” and he says “When people tend to think about marriage, their thoughts end at the wedding. The wedding is such a big deal, and they conflate marriage with weddings. The whole point of this film is that the wedding is just one day. You’re going to have a long life together, and the only thing that you can expect is that life will throw the unexpected at you. That’s your task as a couple, facing life together, and the things you can’t possibly prepare for.”

Again, in summary, the big points here for me are just that there are going to be challenges in a marriage, and that your expectations have a huge impact on how you’re going to approach those challenges. Challenges are normal, and if your tendency is to feel bad or feel some level of shame around challenges that you’re experiencing, then I’m going to reassure you that you’re supposed to be feeling challenged in your relationship; it’s how you deal with those upsets, those problems, those pain points that determines your success.

So if you feel like the way that you and your partner are dealing with your challenges is destructive and destroying your love bond, then I would really encourage you to seek resource, to seek support. And if you find me as someone that might be that resource, please feel free to reach out to me. I will do my best to support you and we can talk about what kind of services and programs that I offer. Whether or not it’s me or someone else though, I highly encourage you to act now. It’s not usually just going to go away on its own. So whether or not you’re feeling like you need support or you’re just recognizing “I wanna invest in our relationship, I want it to feel resources”, then I want to encourage you to be conscientious about what your resources are, so that you can nurture and fuel yourself and your relationship.

If you’re interested in gaining access to any of the resources that I’ve mentioned in today’s podcast episode, you can find the show notes on my website, which is drjessicahiggins.com. Click on Podcast, and you can find the most recent episode there at the top. Today’s episode again is episode 58.

If you have a question or wondering about a relationship challenge or any relationship topic, I would love to hear from you. You can reach me on my contact page on my website, which is drjessicahiggins.com. You can find a way to leave me a voice-mail on my website, you can e-mail me or call me. I would love to hear from you and collaborate with you in creating an upcoming podcast based on your question or topic. Until next time, I hope you take great care.

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