Marriage Skits for Laughter and Learning
produced
by
Nancy Landrum
The History of Marriage
by Nancy Landrum
In every generation there have been marriages that appeared to deliver the rich benefits of romantic love, emotional intimacy, practical partnership and personal satisfaction that even the most jaded secretly crave. Most marriages throughout history, however, were a practical trade off of needs met. Traditionally his need was for an available sexual partner, a stable home base from which he could conquer his world, and children, preferably sons, to carry on his family line and/or help with the work of providing food and shelter. Her need was for physical protection and financial provision for the safe rearing of children. The goal was survival.
Mankind’s basic needs—the ones absolutely necessary for survival—are the ones that must be met first: food, water, shelter, and clothing. It’s only after these needs are consistently met that mankind can concern itself with the higher needs of self-fulfillment. For many centuries the greatest majority of persons were consumed with meeting those basic survival needs. Things like emotional satisfaction, personal growth, intimacy in relationship, or even being “in love” were not essential. Time and intelligence were given to studying the physical world in order to better survive it’s dangers: domesticating animals and farming for more dependable food sources, weaving to provide protective clothing, astronomy for the purposes of safe navigation, mathematics and mechanics for labor saving devices, anatomy and physiology for recovery from accidents and disease, and war to defend families and territory. (It was only those whose survival needs were met that waged war to satisfy ego needs for conquest!) Language was for essential communication of instructions and cooperation, not for creating intimacy in relationships.
Due to their superior physical strength and the aggressive natures needed to provide and protect, men historically treated women as property. Women looked to other women for friendship and emotional support and derived their sense of worth from bearing and nurturing children and other aspects of home-making.
As a consequence, a “good” marriage was often defined as one that created or cemented alliances—in other words, benefiting the community as a whole—rather than pleasing the individuals. In the past, a “successful” marriage might be seen as one that brought financial benefits to one of the partners, or one in which either partner was strong enough to endure heavy work or the woman capable of bearing healthy children—a “good breeder.”
Yet the longing for deep and enduring romantic love…the experience of oneness… seems to be an inherent part of our nature. Thus, even through past centuries, great love stories have been told and retold, recorded and passed on from generation to generation as the ideal which most have longed to attain.
As the Industrial Age ushered in what we know as the middle class, more and more persons were able to live lives of relative stability and even luxury. Until roughly the end of the 19th century, however, the lines drawn between the male-power and female-support roles remained little changed.
In the 19th century religious crusaders and philanthropists, both male and female, began to wage war against more subtle enemies than lions or droughts. The abuses of power that led to sweat shops, child labor, and slums became concerns. More attention began to be given to mankind’s need for fairness, to be treated with respect, for compassion given and mercy received. George Muller’s care for orphaned street children living in London’s slums, Florence Nightingale’s battle to raise nursing to an honorable and ethical profession, prison reform led by the Quakers, the fight to win property rights for women, then the right to vote and even the temperance movement are collective evidence that mankind was turning to the fulfillment of higher needs of consciousness. The battle continues with enforceable laws, education and treatment for spousal and child abuse, the world-wide battle for basic humanitarian behavior and other concerns affecting the quality of life rather than simple survival.
As progressive men and women fought for the rights of women 1 to be treated with respect and dignity, the desire for a new kind of marriage intensified. After World War II, in spite of wage inequalities, it became more possible for a woman to provide financial support for herself and even her children. With this independence, the previous reasons for marriage became, if not exactly obsolete, unable to fully satisfy our increasing demands. Marriage for the sole purpose of protection and provision was less necessary. Marriage to meet the need for love became the primary dream and the goal.
And with these new expectations came greater chances of disappointment. With few exceptions, marriage had never before been asked to provide emotional safety, deep spiritual communion or equal partnership. The new demands for these qualities strained to the breaking point the old model of marriage as an exchange of practical services. In the past, both men and women stayed in marriages that were cold, distant, emotionally abusive or even violent because there was little tolerance for those who left and little opportunity for survival outside of its walls, particularly for women and children. It was just accepted that one did the best one could with whatever the condition of the marriage. Those who were happily married were just considered lucky.
Never before in the history of mankind had marriage been asked to meet more than the most basic of needs. From today’s perspective, the enormity of the problem was that we didn’t know how to recreate marriage to meet these greater requirements. The resulting upheaval—the avalanche of open dissatisfaction with the quality of many marriages—was seen by many to be a failure of marriage itself or a mistake in an individual’s choice of partner. With more and more frequency and with less and less censure, women—and men—left abusive or emotionally barren or simply unsatisfying marriages. These failures were not recognized as a crisis of growth brought about by inadequate understanding or knowledge.
The definition of a “good” marriage has drastically changed. Marriage still provides an effective institution for meeting practical financial needs and the opportunity for begetting and rearing children with the optimum emotional support of a father and mother. Now, however, it must also be a relationship in which both partners feel loved and experience emotional and spiritual communion as well as sexual gratification.
By the mid-twentieth century the failure of many marriages to meet these higher needs and the demand for the freedom to either live independent of marriage or to find the “right” partner in order to have a “good” marriage swamped the legal capacities of the courts. In consequence the state of California enacted a “no-fault” divorce law enabling an unhappy spouse to leave a dissatisfying marriage with nothing more than “irreconcilable differences” as a reason.
Because this law relieved the courts from refereeing battles to prove infidelity or abuse, other states soon followed suit until every state had provided a way to more easily escape a marriage that “wasn’t working” and gave the unhappy person, or couple, the freedom to try again, hopefully with a “good” partner who would understand and meet the higher needs of love and respect.
It’s taken roughly three generations of trying this new approach to marriage—one of trying on a marriage as though it’s a garment that can be discarded if it doesn’t fit—for the results of this social experiment to be evident. For the most part it hasn’t worked. There are a small percentage of persons who were in dangerously abusive and hopeless marriages that have found it possible to escape and had the freedom to build better, safer lives for themselves and their children. Neither I, nor any compassionate person would want anything less for them.
However, the greatest percentage of those who left a “bad” marriage, or what was thought to be the “wrong” partner, found themselves, in a year, or two, or three facing the same frustrations and disappointments and unmet needs as before, often with the added complications of step-relationships…another challenging dynamic for which we as a culture were uneducated and unprepared. This conclusion is supported by the amazingly consistent divorce statistics from the past three decades: of first marriages, roughly 50% end in divorce, 65% of second marriages and a whopping 85% of third or subsequent marriages. For the most part, whatever is being sought is obviously not being found in a better partner or a different marriage.
Fortunately, tucked away in quiet corners of our nation, individual researchers and inquisitive think tanks (those blessed souls who have done their best to just be observers, learners, and evaluators), began to ask the questions: “Have we outgrown our need for marriage? Is marriage still a viable institution? Can it be adjusted to meet the increased demands for emotional and spiritual intimacy? What makes a “good marriage” good?”
All the questions are distilled in this one: “Can the qualities observed in good marriages be replicated? Taught? Learned?”
Throughout this book, I will share the very personal experience of Jim and me with our own marriage. I will also draw on my extensive experience teaching and personally coaching couples who wanted more from their marriages, including including the process experienced by a couple currently facing these modern challenges. I will also highlight some of the pioneers that are answering these important questions about marriage in ways that give us all hope.
The qualities that make a “good marriage” good have been identified and can be learned and duplicated by those whose marriages are falling short of their ideal…or, better yet, learned in anticipation of creating a successful marriage! Great marriages are no longer a serendipitous accident of Fate! There is no secret. The mystery is solved! Those of us who do not naturally bring the qualities into marriage that would produce its success, can learn them. The answers are here and easily accessible to all of us. They are not hard to learn, although humbling ourselves to learn new skills and changing ingrained relationship habits that predictably produce hurt and failure does require a healthy amount vision, desire, determination and, usually, short-term support.
Experience teaches us that learning a new skill is necessarily a process. We expect to need reading and math lessons. Few of us learned to drive without some instruction. Most of us needed training of some sort in order to meet the requirements of any job. The assumption is that the more demanding the job, the greater the need for more education.
Yet when it comes to marriage, the belief that we should automatically, without investment of effort, just know how to create a satisfying marriage is left over from the dark ages of a simple exchange of survival needs met. It doesn’t require very much training to exchange basic needs. It’s time to admit that, as a whole, we don’t know how to “do marriage”…not in a way that allows us to give and receive the depth of love and respect that is now the expectation.
It’s time to discard divorce as an experiment that, in most cases, hasn’t produced the desired result…happier lives.
It’s time to stop bashing marriage as an institution that’s failed. Never have we expected more from marriage with so little change in our investment of time and effort. If we want the outcome of a more alive, romantic, satisfying marriage, an investment must be made in learning and integrating better communication skills that produce that result.
It’s also time to stop looking for that magic “someone” out there who will make a “great” marriage happen for me. Surely our consciousness, globally, has been elevated to the degree that we can expect some personal growth to be necessary in order to have the results for which we long!
It’s also time to stop passing on to our children and grandchildren the legacy of cynicism and confusion and devastation that usually comes from a failed marriage. Generations of children have inherited a fear of relationship failure and distrust of love and faithfulness that make them hesitant to commit themselves to another. It’s easier to live without the love and constancy they long for than to try and then experience the pain of failure. Consequently many young people are lessoning their chances of marriage success by participating in a series of uncommitted relationships that almost guarantee dissatisfaction and ultimate failure.
There’s a change in the air that is gaining momentum. As we understand that our failures with marriage are the collective result of a global, uncharted frontier of previously unknown marriage skills, the impulse to hide that most couples experience when they have marriage problems will disappear. Soon, enrolling in marriage classes will be as common as enrolling in driver education or computer skills classes…and will be approached with the same lack of negative judgment or defensiveness. Couples planning marriage will just assume that some learning of new skills is called for in order to produce the marriage of their dreams. This increasing wave of greater understanding and information is already transforming unhappy marriages and making good ones even better.
In future pages I will share the story of one marriage… that of a couple who were very close to becoming another divorce statistic just a short time ago. Within the context of their story, you’ll be introduced to the skills that build great marriages—skills proven by researchers and validated by struggling couples such as Jim and I. Throughout this book you’ll meet some visionary researchers who are reclaiming the ground lost by the last hundred years of disillusionment with marriage and get a bird’s eye view of the marriage revolution that is gaining momentum in this century.
So…let’s get to know Sue and Bill…
"Honey whets the appetite, and so does wisdom!
When you enjoy becoming wise, there is hope for you!
A bright future lies ahead!"
Proverbs 24:13,14
How to Stay
Married and
Love It!
by
Nancy Landrum
