Objective Proficiency p 92. Where did happily ever after go – and can you get it back? Extra Reading

Is being in love a distant memory? Couples therapist Andrew G Marshall teaches techniques to revive flagging long-term relationships – Joanna Moorhead tries some of them out.
Today started, for my husband, like any other day. Grumpy at 5.30am, he woke to the equally grumpy tones of James Naughtie (they are both Scottish, and I sometimes wonder if perhaps they are related), before proceeding – as usual – to edit me out of his morning as he focused on the news on the radio, having his bath, finding his cufflinks and heading out to get the train to work.
But on the doorstep, something happened. Normally we just bark “bye” to one another, usually from opposite ends of the house. Today, though, I was waiting at the front door as he left. I stood close to him. I said his name. I touched his shoulders. And then I kissed him, on the lips.
Gary was alarmed. Not just a bit alarmed – seriously rattled. He backed off and stared at me as though I’d grown a second head, and said: “What on earth is going on?:
I laughed. He looked at me as though I’d truly lost it, then saw his chance to get past me on to the pavement and scuttled off towards the station. Whew, he was probably thinking. That was weird.
It was weird, but here’s the thing. That was love. Or at least, it’s the sort of thing people who are in love do. Gary and I have been married for 28 years – being in love is just a distant memory. Somewhere inside we do care and respect and look out for one another, but these days the focus of our relationship is our children. We have pretty separate lives and it’s a long time since the focus for either of us was the other one.
Couples like us are prime contenders to start the new year by calling a divorce lawyer because, really, how easy is it to stay married on and on and on into the future? How easy is it to stay married when so many marriages around you are ending in divorce? How easy is to stay married when you can’t quite remember, most days, what made you decide to team up with the other person anyway and when their habits drive you more to derision than distraction?
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It’s definitely not easy, as the bestselling marital therapist Andrew G Marshall would be the first to agree. As his book I Love You But I’m Not In Love With You, which has already sold more than 100,000 copies in 20 languages, is reissued to mark the 10th anniversary of its publication, we are sitting in his local tea shop in Sussex, eating carrot cake and drinking tea, and pondering the $64m question: do all these couples who will be lifting the phone to their lawyers next week really need to do that? Could they still save their marriages?
The thing is, says Marshall, that in the decade since he first wrote the book, more of us believe it’s at least worth another punt. “People used to say, how can we ever fall in love again?” he says. “But these days there’s more of a realisation that people have built a wall in their relationship and they can take the wall down again.”
Also, many more people are open to the idea of therapy. “Thirty years ago, if you went to see a therapist it would have been regarded as odd, whereas now I’m surprised if I meet anyone who has never seen a therapist. The more we understand ourselves, the less likely we are to have a car crash.”
At the core of Marshall’s relationship credo – the truth he says he wants to dedicate his career to furthering – is that no marriage, no partnership, is ever all plain sailing. “It’s my all-time ambition to be remembered as the man who exploded the myth of soul partners,” he says. “That idea that you’ll find someone you’re so in tune with and so similar to and that you’ll never have any arguments or problems in your life is at the heart of 95% of all relationship problems.”
So here are two big truths: no relationship is ever perfect, and every relationship requires hard work to survive. A lot of hard work, and then some. The funny thing is, says Marshall, that it’s in the very differences between us – the snarls and grumbles and shortcomings – that the space for growth and betterness lies. “Too many couples bury the nasty bits – they avoid arguments, but what they don’t realise is that it’s the conflict and challenge in a relationship that helps it grow,” he says.
“What I want people to realise is that it’s OK to argue and actually that’s the best way of repairing your relationship. Arguing is very intimate: you have to care enough about someone to want to have it out with them. Often it’s easier to let something go than to have an argument. But that’s another brick in the wall in a relationship.”
One of the big issues with long-term togetherness is that we have very poor linguistics relating to what constitutes love. “I love my partner and I love this carrot cake, but the two loves are very different things,” says Marshall. “Yet it’s the same word. But love is so many different things. And what our society most focuses on as love – and what we seem to most believe love is about – is something that would more properly be called limerence.”
Coined by the psychologist Dorothy Tennov in the mid-1960s, limerence is the experience of being in love; it’s a vital stage of a couple’s love journey, the foundations in many ways of the whole relationship – but contrary to the Hollywood myth of happy ever after, it’s only ever a prequel to more settled forms of ongoing love as months turn to years and the years become decades.
According to Marshall, there are six distinct stages to a couple’s love journey: limerence, blending, self-affirming, collaborating, adapting and renewing. All of them are about love, but only limerence is about that aching heart, that spring in the step, that total inability to focus on anything else but the object of desire. As he says in his book, it’s that moment in West Side Story when Maria sings I Feel Pretty. It’s life-giving and bubbly and beautiful and magical, and we can all sing it in our heads, but it’s not the only part of the movie – and perhaps more importantly, when Maria’s friends sing about how she’s crazy, insane and in an advanced state of shock, they are right. Limerence is a bit of madness – the bit of madness, perhaps, that we all long for in our lives. “I always say, if that’s the stage you’re at then enjoy every minute,” says Marshall. “Because it’s absolutely wonderful.”
And it’s the madness that everything else is built on.
“People say what’s the craziest thing anyone has ever done for love?” says Marshall. “I say the craziest thing any of us has ever done was to open our home and our bank account, and our heart, to an absolute stranger.”
The only reason any of us does that is limerence; but the reason we are still with the other person decades later is because of all those other love stages.
Like all therapists, Marshall is coy about his own story. What he will say is that he started out as a radio journalist, and it was while brokering a phone-in show one day with a marriage guidance counsellor that he had a lightbulb moment.
“I was almost shaking as I listened because I suddenly knew this was what I wanted to do.”
He went to what was then the Marriage Guidance Council, now Relate, and trained as a therapist in the mid-1980s – at this stage, he recalls, the job was voluntary. He reckons he has counselled more than 3,000 couples in the decades since and 17 more books have followed his original I Love You But … All he’ll confirm about his own love story is that he is in a relationship, and that he tries (though sometimes fails) to live by his own rules.
So what are his rules? Well, the first one is that it’s all too easy, in a long term relationship, to start living in silos and to be convinced that nothing will ever make your partner change. You get stuck in ruts and you become certain that nothing will ever be any different. But you are wrong, says Marshall. OK, so you can’t force your partner to behave differently but you can change yourself. And by changing yourself, you could trigger changes in your partner – and, in time, everything else. “It’s like the mother who says to her child who has been in a row, you’ve got to be the big person here. You’ve got to make up first.”
There is simply no knowing, he says, what might happen when you introduce a bit of kindness, a bit of intimacy, a bit of connection. Hence Gary’s weird encounter with me on the front step this morning – that device to reconnection is a Marshall suggestion for how to reconnect.
And, he says, there are lots more little things you can do to change things in a stale relationship. “One fabulous habit to get into is actually being in the same room as the other one when you’re speaking,” he says. “And look into one another’s eyes – that’s a great thing to do as well.”
It’s also important to try to recognise your partner’s love language: he or she might just be doing the washing, or tidying the kitchen, or shopping, but underlying it is an act of love that should be named and acknowledged. Eating together gets another big Marshall tick. So, too, more controversially, does putting your partner first, rather than the children. “The way I see it a marriage is for ever, but the children are just passing through.”
But what message does he have for those couples who are thinking that they may be at the end of the road?
Marshall is not in favour of couples hanging on in there at any price: if the relationship is abusive or dead, then you’re right to get out. But there’s often a bit more road to be travelled and the process of trying to negotiate it can be healing even if you do eventually divorce. “Trying to save your marriage puts you into a win-win situation. Even if you separate, you’ll have learned to be better co-parents. It will also help you with the mourning process that’s an inevitable part of marriage breakup. So whatever happens, you’ll be in a better position.”
All things considered, I’m not quite ready to give up. At supper in a brasserie, I slip off a shoe under the table and gently slide my foot on top of my husband’s. “Eeergh!” he shouts. “There’s a mouse under the table!”
But when I’ve calmed him down, and we’ve assured the waiter it was a false alarm, we do both laugh for ages. And it feels good. If I find out where the headlights are, even though it’s a dark night, I think there might still be some road ahead for us.
The Guardian




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