The State Of Marriage In The '90S -- Successful Marriages Combine Fantasies, Realism

First of Seven parts in The Seattle Times

It's sobering up time on the love-and-marriage scene.

Nobody's talking Ozzie and Harriet redux, but we are seeing a trend toward caution when it comes to "I do," with couples waiting to marry, trying harder to stay together through the hard times and weighing the downside more carefully when considering divorce.

Today, to begin our weeklong series, "Marriage and Divorce in the '90s," we look at marital fusion and fission - recent movements to save marriage on the part of science, society and religion and what 25 years of research tells us about the fallout from divorce, especially for children. And we meet a Snoqualmie Valley couple whom we'll follow throughout the week as they grapple with whether to mend or end their marriage. -----------------------------------------------------------------

Together you've endured financial struggles, meddlesome in-laws and arguments over sex. You've loved and bored each other to distraction. You've suffered football, flu and teaching the kids to drive, all in their season.

And you expect to be there 'til death do you part.

Well, some of you, anyway.

Marriage isn't the same old Ozzie and Harriet institution it was 30 years ago. Most people still marry. But if and when, to whom and for how long are open to debate as never before.

Recent shifts in Americans' attitude toward wedlock - with high rates of divorce, more co-habitation, fewer remarriages after divorce and a higher average age for first marriages - have lowered the proportion of married adults and created a torrent of public concern. The tone of the debate ranges from analytical to overwrought.

The scholars and traditionalists sounding the alarm in books, periodicals and scientific treatises are part of a burgeoning ecumenical movement to take marriage and family off the endangered list.

They don't always agree on the rhetoric, but they do agree on this: Marriage and family are being pushed to the limit, and they're both worth saving.

Marital freefall

Americans long have run hot and cold toward marriage, says Frank Furstenberg, a University of Pennsylvania sociologist.

Early this century there were several decades of marital turbulence as the country became more urban, women more emancipated, families more mobile and religion less important. But the years following World War II introduced "a time of remarkable domestication." And extended families shrank to the one-couple, two-kids nuclear unit some feel so nostalgic toward.

And then marriage began this free fall the experts haven't yet explained adequately.

But they do have some ideas.

Many experts - even those without a conservative agenda - say the women's movement probably did more to change marriage and family than anything.

Both men and women are likely to bring home the bread these days and both increasingly expected to sweep up the crumbs (although women still do more housework).

As the gender roles in marriage have blurred, its benefits to individuals have become less obvious. Men don't have as good a deal as they once did as king of the castle, so they may not be as willing to marry in the first place or stick with a troubled relationship. Women aren't as likely to stay in a bad marriage either if they can support themselves.

Experts say women are more likely to initiate divorce. They may be more sensitive to trouble in the relationship because they generally put more value on emotional satisfaction in marriage than men.

Values have shifted

Surveys seem to back up moralists who say no-fault divorce and shifts in values have put the individual above the family and led to more break-ups. Most divorced people used to say alcoholism, infidelity or desertion pushed them over the brink; now they cite boredom, alienation, sexual incompatibility and differences in lifestyle and values.

"It used to be that people needed family to survive," says Leslie Parrott, co-director with her husband, Les, of Seattle Pacific University's Center for Relationship Development. "It's been only recently that people have expected to be happy. That loads marriage with more emotional demand than it's ever had."

Society is no help, says Mindy Lincicome of the Washington Family Council, which promotes marriage and family. It no longer pressures people to marry nor helps them stay married.

"The experience of no-fault divorce shows married people need more than a personal commitment," Lincicome says. "We're just human. There are going to be times when I'm not so happy to be married and he's not so happy to be married. Societal accountability supports people in their spiritual commitment and that helps them through the rough spots."

Factors hamper relationships

African-American couples have been affected by those factors and more, says Larry Davis, an associate professor of social work and psychology at Washington University in St. Louis.

African-American men are just as committed to their partners as white men, Davis found, but other factors work against their relationships.

"People cite the figures that say there are more black men in prison than in college and the figures that say how many black men are killed each year," Davis says, "and then they skip right on to the next step and say, `Why aren't black people getting married when there are so many single black mothers?'

"If there aren't people there to marry, they'll forego children or they'll have them by themselves."

Many women still expect their men to make more money than they do, Davis says, putting yet another burden on black marriages - African-American women tend to be better educated than their husbands and have more earning power.

A connection and a covenant

Though many people see marriage as a largely pointless and outdated ritual, others - experts and ordinary people as well - are putting extra effort into reviving old values, encouraging marriage as a lifelong commitment and discouraging divorce as an easy way out.

To consider such primal hungers as enduring love and marital intimacy somehow passe is "absurd," says Judith Wallerstein, a California psychologist who has written several books on marriage and divorce.

A good marriage serves a vital function in modern society, she says, offsetting the loneliness and alienation of living in crowded cities and providing a refuge from the stress of work and a safe place to "test our half-baked ideas." A good marriage with children connects us to the past and the future.

Help is available

There are indications of a marriage revival.

Churches - which one faith-based critic once slammed as "wedding-blessing machines" - are taking the initiative, requiring in some cases several months of premarital counseling. Churches in a number of communities are sponsoring support groups and mentoring programs for engaged and married couples. And about 2 million married couples nationwide have attended Marriage Encounter weekend retreats to encourage them to fall back in love.

Even traditionalists are urging people to look at their relationships with a less romantic and more practical eye from the outset, stressing personal responsibility and downplaying sexual chemistry.

Jeff Kemp of the Washington Family Council, offers a stripped-down definition of love that's echoed by many marriage experts - one that may shock a generation not used to sorting out sense from sensibility:

"Love is a decision, a verb," says Kemp, whose Bellevue-based organization promotes Judeo-Christian mores, "It's not a ditch you fall into. It's not a feeling. It's what you do. The picture of love as sex and feeling is very unreal."

John Gottman, an internationally recognized expert in family systems and interaction between couples, paints a similar image based on married life at its most mundane.

At its heart, says the University of Washington professor, marital love is a simple, often subtle connection that draws the couple together despite the push-pull of their separate lives.

"We see it all the time," Gottman says. "She says something like, `Honey, I had this dream last night;' and he says, `I don't have time for that, but tell me anyway.' It's the stupid everyday interactions that give us emotional money in the bank."

Gottman has studied 2,000 couples over the past 20 years, studying their relationships in his "love lab." In the end, he says, he's able to foretell with 94 percent accuracy which couples are headed for divorce within three years.

For better or worse

Some experts say we have to look at divorce if we're going to save marriage; and all but the most traditional agree it, too, has a place in society.

"I am deeply aware of how wretched a bad marriage can be and of the need for the remedy of divorce," Wallerstein wrote in her book, "The Good Marriage."

"But divorce by itself does not improve the institution of marriage. Some people learn from sad experience to choose more carefully the second time around. Others do not."

Wallerstein, Gottman and others have picked at the problem from every angle, trying to figure out what factors start a marriage on the right course and what influences might cause it to careen out of control.

One study of marriage, divorce and remarriage in more than 2,000 people found marriages more stable if the newlyweds were in their mid- to late-20s - over-30s tend to be too set in their ways. Other indicators of stability are a better income and participation in church, clubs or community activities together. Couples who bought homes were more stable than those who didn't.

Weathering the storm

In addition, the experts have outlined several stormy phases most couples must weather if they're to stay together. One study suggests divorce rates rise steadily as children are born, enter kindergarten and go through adolescence. Another suggests there may be a drop in divorce after that - couples with grown children, it says, have more stable relationships than those with preschoolers.

Another study (which apparently doesn't consider children) pegs the fourth year as the time of greatest risk for a marriage - not the seventh, as we usually hear. Yet another found that people who considered divorce an option were much more likely to get one.

The key to riding through the danger stages is learning to fight well, Gottman says. Even volatile couples can learn where to draw the line and how to douse a blistering argument.

It's the behaviors Gottman calls "the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" - criticism, contempt, defensiveness and withdrawal - that signify a marriage in trouble.

For the past six years, Gottman has studied a particular group of couples who've been married 20 to 40 years, hoping to find their secrets of marital survival.

"They're masters at taking care of each other's feelings," he says, "even with conflict issues they don't resolve throughout the entire marriage. They keep coming at them, but always from a different angle. They don't give up. It's magical when you see them doing it. They have a way of suggesting to the other, `This is not you; there's nothing wrong with you. We've been through this before and we'll get through it together.' "

Such artful peacemaking can work even for that most notorious of marriage destabilizers, the affair, Gottman says.

Research is divided on the consequences of extramarital affairs. Studies show two-thirds of couples survive and many say they're closer for it. But Gottman also has likened infidelity to the shattering of a fine crystal vase - you may be able to glue the marriage back together, but it will never ring quite the same.

Happily ever after

Despite the gloomy outlook of some of the studies, there are happy marriages, say Wallerstein and Gottman, and ways to help everyone's marriage be more successful.

In the absence of the extended families, the small-town living and the close-knit church groups of yesterday, couples must find their glue within, Wallerstein says. They must accept that their marriage will change with time - it won't be the same when they're in their 20s as when they're in the empty-nest or retirement stages.

Gottman says stable couples - even those who seem to bicker a lot - actively regulate their relationship, balancing out every negative interaction with five positive ones. A flip comment, for instance, a faint smile or a light touch can cool down even a hot argument.

Keeping marriage on track

Wallerstein suggests nine psychological "tasks" that, met head-on, will help keep a marriage on track. The couple must detach emotionally from the families of childhood; build intimacy; expand the family circle if children are born; confront inevitable challenges and adversities; create a safe place within the marriage for dissent; establish an imaginative and pleasurable sex life; share laughter; encourage each other; and maintain a double image of the relationship that combines the fantasies of courtship with a realistic view of the future.

Other experts advocate greater equality between partners. Pepper Schwartz, a UW sociologist, describes a trend toward "peer marriages" in which each partner has equal status and responsibility for emotional, economic and household duties. Couples in such marriages usually have a friendship that is the most satisfying part of their lives; understand each other better because they're both responsible for housework, children and money; and have a greater sense of commitment because they find each other irreplaceable.

But traditionalists say it's the children couples most need to focus on if they're going to breathe new life into marriage. The goal of the Council on Families in America, which issued a report last year decrying the state of marriage, is to "increase the number of children who grow up with their own two married parents."

The council would: discourage living together, bring back shame to out-of-wedlock childbearing, create more jobs for young men, encourage family life by cleaning up unsafe neighborhoods, and reconsider no-fault divorce.

The effort to pull marriages from the brink is all to the good, Furstenberg says. But it needs to be more far-reaching than simply calling for a return to family values or tightening divorce laws.

He and others contend society also must provide more resources to bolster marriages - including parental relief in the form of better child care, family leaves and flexible work schedules. That would reduce some of the modern-day pressures that prove too heavy a burden for many marriages.

Whatever their differences, many scholars and observers come together on one point:

Marriage is just as important as it ever was. It's still the best way we've come up with to satisfy two very basic needs - someone to love and someone to help raise the kids.