Super Marital Sex Rule: Your parents’ marriage affects your own style of being married, but it must be a starting point, not a goal to be achieved or an end to be avoided.
I love my parents. But I’ll tell you one thing. I will never understand how they stayed together.
HUSBAND
We are seldom allowed a view into the intimacy of our parents’ marriage from which we can construct a model for relating in our own marriage. Few of us have the slightest idea about our parents’ sexual interaction beyond some secret late-night bed squeaks and unclear murmurs. Short of pornographic distortions, we almost never see anyone else making love, and our ideas about our parents’ marriages are probably badly distorted.
A basic question asked of all the thousand couples was, “How do you remember you parents’ marriage?” More than half of the men and women in my sample (57 percent) had negative memories of the way in which their parents interacted. Thirty-six percent reported physical or verbal abuse in their parents’ relationships. Often, couples commented that their parents tolerated one another, just ignored each other, or “survived.”
When asked if they would like their marriage to be like their parents’, the response (58 percent) was more typically no than yes. Even those who could find something to copy stated that they may be “seeing what I wanted to see” or “what I thought might be going on but never really knew.”
How about you? What is you marital learning history? Where and how did you learn to be married?
The media marriages leave us little to go by. They are either delightfully benign “Ozzie and Harriet” or “Leave It to Beaver” styles of relating, desexualized “marrinoids” acting out life, or hot, conflicted, distressed relationships of the Archie and Edith, Ralph and Alice type, drawn together by some secret attraction that not even they understand.
You will learn in following chapters that our relating style depends to a great extent on what researcher John Money calls “love maps,” early tracings of the results of our sex rehearsal during childhood. These rehearsals too often are corrupted, censored, and distorted by a society that insists on desexualizing children, preventing them from learning to unite emotion and sex. We have learned much more about what marriage is not and should not be than what it can be.
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