A Writer Chooses to Better Her Good Marriage

Elizabeth Weil, then a contributor to the New York Times Magazine who had won a slew of awards for her pieces, turned her deft writerly eye to a perilous terrain: her own marriage. Approaching it with a self-improvement zeal, she embarked on the rather ambitious and potentially thorny project to better a relationship that was already going well. This too, after she and her writer husband, Dan Duane, had already been married for nearly a decade, and had two daughters to boot.

Like many other long-married couples, Weil and Duane knew that marital tests extended well beyond wedding vows and white gowns. After all, the real trials began long after the champagne glasses had been clinked and toasts raised. Or in South India where I reside, years after the folded plantain leaves have been carted to rubbish piles, the cooks and their frying vats disbanded, and the big fat families dispersed into more granular units. As Weil puts it, marriages unfold “slowly, over time, through all the dental plaque you inadvertently flick into each other’s faces.”

Duane was understandably uneasy about her experiment. As Weil puts it: “He feared, not mistakenly, it turned out – that marriage is not great terrain for overachievers.” Weil too was also afraid of undoing everything. Would analyzing and attempting “improvements” on her marriage cause it to implode? Moreover, unlike parenting, which functioned more on autocratic terms, her modern marriage, was supposed to be democratic and equal. But was it?

In subjecting it to such scrutiny, she was afraid too, of discovering that currently she was the more bossy one. What if their analysis toppled the equilibrium that the relationship had settled into, changing shape over decades and tipping the power balance this way and that? When going through many of the aggravating exercises and questions, they were afraid of uncovering uncomfortable truths like: “Well, honey, if you really want to know, I hate that Aveda face cream you buy me for Christmas every year, and you snore.”   

Their Relationship in its Early Stages

Early in their relationship, two basic rules that they held each other to were: “No Cheating, No Dying.” Now, while bolstering the ties that bind, she knew how significant it was to strike the Goldilocks mean. After all, right from the start, she had been less wary of differences, but more apprehensive about their similarities.

With Duane also being a writer, was there a problem of having too much in common? Raised to be an independent thinker, she was afraid of giving too much of herself to the relationship. Of even losing herself in their coupledom: “What algorithm should determine how much I tipped over into the warm bath of our union and how much of myself to keep separate, outside?”

Weil had grown up in the town of Wellesley in Massachusetts, where even the CVS store bore a gilt-edged frontage, “in a home filled with awful fabrics.” She first met Duane when she turned 28, and had recently moved to San Francisco from Chicago. Like in one of the Hollywood romcoms, they met at a bar where single writers hung out. She was attracted almost right away to the handsome, salt-flecked, surfing enthusiast with piercing blue eyes. Duane, raised by offbeat, leftie parents, with a ‘60s-type Berkeley vibe braided into his childhood experiences, was accustomed to lavish praise. In Weil’s home, compliments were scant.

Weil Scours the Literature on Marriage 

But that was the past. Who they were, before they had started seeping into each other. Till she decided to undertake the Marriage Upgrade, Weil hadn’t been a self-help junkie. She wasn’t the kind to lap up the latest psychology study on how to improve this or that aspect of her life. Duane, on the other hand, was always on some new skill-acquisition mission – all of which seemed to stretch himself and their relationship to extreme limits. Weil decided to mimic this aspect of Duane, even as she started reading up on the constituents of a “good marriage,” with a somewhat bemused lens.

What then, according to the experts, makes for a “good marriage?” While delving into the literature, Weil quickly grasped that measuring the strength or health of a marriage is as slippery as computing or ranking one’s happiness. Unsurprisingly, the United States, which as a nation, is famously known to both propagate and consume personal improvement mantras, has hardly left marriages outside self- help scanners.

Some of the rib-tickling historic material on “marriage assessments,” comprised of a 1933 appraisal of a husband’s demerits. Qualities that warranted bad marks entailed: “Picks teeth, nose or sucks teeth in public.” “Calls ‘where is…’ without first looking for object.” “Teases wife about fatness, slowness etc.” Redeeming virtues included: “Makes guests feel welcome; an interesting entertainer.” “His children are pleased at his arrival home.”

Since then, the tests might have evolved, but Weil wanted to change her marriage in ways that transcended such fallacious measurements. She quickly realized that there were few compelling studies on such a widely-discussed topic. Wading through a pile of self-help titles ranging from Getting The Love You Want to How To Improve Your Marriage Without Talking About It, Weil started applying various relationship drills and workouts inside their home.

A Couples’ Drill

One suggested exercise termed “positive flooding” required one partner to circle the other, all the while reading out from a list of “nice things you wish your partner would say to you but never does.” Such rare compliments were to be delivered in an increasingly amplified voice, with the speaker eventually “jumping” off the floor.

Choosing to skirt this activity, Duane, the still hesitant participant, picked “re- romanticizing” instead. This also involved conjuring up a list of sorts: of things the partner did that made the other feel loved or cared for. In trying to dredge up “ten” such things, Weil and Duane groped for ideas. Duane said, “Ten?! I can’t even think of three.”

Therapy and Education, for Better or Worse

Naturally couples’ therapy, the much-touted modern fix, was tried too. They requested the therapist to focus only on the positives in their relationship. As Weil had discovered, despite the rise in couples seeking therapy to improve their marriages, the general outcomes of marital therapy are shockingly poor. In Take Back Your Marriage, William J. Doherty, Director of The Marriage and Family Therapy Program at the University of Minnesota, reports that many therapies not only fail to better marriages, but even contribute to making things worse.

Inevitably, the therapist they chose had a mind of her own. She insisted on unearthing the defects and omissions. As Weil observes, “[two] fifty-minute sessions of therapy, and Holly had reduced our pretty-good marriage to an unappealing, maybe even unsalvageable conundrum.”

Therapy was followed by marriage education. The idea behind marriage education can be construed as a positive one: that marriage is a skill that can be acquired, through practical coaching classes, just like piano or tennis. Apparently, the second Bush administration had allotted as much as $100 Million a year on Marriage Education classes, for a period of five years.

In the first class that Weil and Duane attended, they were told to learn to converse skilfully. But as writers, they were already nimble with words. Wasn’t it going to be awkward to fit themselves into some hackneyed conversational script? Even as they seemed unmoved by the instructions, to listen rather than talk all the time, to precede criticism with praise and so on, they were both surprised by how shaken they felt by one particular exercise.

This involved narrating a story from childhood, and then having one’s partner repeat the story, pretending to be the spouse. Duane told Weil a story he hadn’t shared earlier: about injuring a child’s eye, when he hit him with a rock wrapped in dirt. About the guilt and shame he’d felt after.

Surprisingly, when Weil retold it as Duane, they were surprised at how changed they felt. Duane even said, “You never talk to me like that. I think you must really love me.” Engaging in that and in other empathy-building conversational exercises actually seemed to flood them with a surprisingly authentic and hitherto unfelt understanding of each other. As Weil puts it, “How had a cheap rhetorical trick to manufacture unconditional allegiance made us feel so connected?”

Sharing Tasks

Conversational skills might have been easy; the division of household chores less so, particularly when they had turned into parents. There was a time when children were perceived as a binding force that held a couple together. But studies have shown that the rising stress associated with childcare can work against a relationship too.

When their own daughter was born, they had to divide tasks between themselves. Weil opted for childcare, Duane for cooking. But in Duane’s case, it wasn’t just cooking, as in churning out an edible meal for the family. It was Cooking with a Capital C, since he approached the new task with a manic mountain-conquering zeal. He wanted to churn out meals that could rival those of professional chefs, checking off his conquests – recipe after complex recipe – in cookbooks with titles like Chez Panisse Vegetables or Chez Panisse: Pasta, Pizza, Calzone. Even as everyone else assumed that Weil was the lucky beneficiary of his messianic obsession to rip through all possible vegetables and meats, Weil herself started craving a break from the “increasingly intense” fare.

The problem wasn’t really with Duane cooking. The problem was that he wasn’t cooking for Weil or the family. He was more focused on upping the talent ante; eventually, they reached a happy compromise when Duane found a cookbook that laid out “home meals” – the kind of comfort food that Weil preferred.

Negotiating Religion

Besides the day-to-day, there were the larger, unaddressed questions that hung between them about religion. Given that Weil was raised Jewish and Duane, at least officially, a Christian, their children were considered half-Jewish, half-Christian. So they also outsourced all the religious training to the grandparents. While Weil’s parents celebrated Jewish festivals and bought them books on Judaism, Duane’s parents did pretty much the same with Christianity.

All this seemed to work well, in a big picture sense. Except, as Weil puts it, quoting Lorrie Moore: : “Marriage is a fine arrangement in general, except one never got it generally. One got it very, very specifically.”

Weil met with a rabbi who suddenly decided that half-Jewish and half-Christian couldn’t work. Weil returned home with a new-found fervour to ignore the Christian half altogether and raise her kids as fully-Jewish from thereon. In the process, she was ignoring Duane’s feelings and the sentiments of his parents. He was, quite understandably, outraged. It took only a short conversation for Weil to return to their more workable half-this, half-that arrangement. They were also to realize, in making such decisions, that they had to choose whatever worked best for them and their daughters, without heeding other censorious voices.

Till Death Do Us Apart

Some writers have even argued that couples stick it out because of “Stockholm Syndrome”. In Against Love, the author Laura Kipnis observes that despite subjecting each other to the methods of kidnappers, like “routine interrogations,” “surveillance” and “impromptu search and seizure”, partners still cleave to each other.

Weil, however, did not want to frame her marriage in such cynical terms. She preferred Stendhal’s take in On Love: “In the salt mines of Salzburg, they throw a leafless wintry bough into one of the abandoned workings. Two or three months later they haul it out covered with a shining deposit of crystals.” In other words, we crystallize our lovers with qualities that overcome the commonness that lies at each of our cores.

Weil also realized that when Duane died, if he did before her, she would end up missing exactly those aspects of him that she currently finds annoying. After all those qualities might be the very ones that mark him out as him, the dimensions that have eluded the blending in or homogenization engendered by marriage.

References

Weil, Elizabeth, No Cheating, No Dying: I had a Good Marriage. Then I tried to Make it Better, Scribner, New York, 2012