When
Tara Parker-Pope, mom, health writer and author of the New York Times’ “Well”
blog, saw her 17-year marriage beginning to crumble, she found herself “at a
loss.” “If the crisis in my life had been cancer or diabetes, I would have
known exactly where to get answers, but I was facing this life crisis in my
marriage and I really didn’t know what to do,” says Parker-Pope, who is now
divorced. To try to make some sense out of her situation, she turned to the
field she knew best—science. What she found was a “fascinating world” of research
devoted to this most profound human relationship, and what began as a personal
quest became the basis of the book “For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage.” In the book, Parker-Pope shatters
widespread myths, describes a surprisingly hopeful future for today’s couples
and offers practical, evidence-based advice—“a prescription for marital health”—for
improving your relationship.
“For Better” is different from many other
marriage books in that it draws its conclusions from scientific research. Yet
even though you wrote the book as a science journalist, your tone is personal,
and you’re open about the fact that your own marriage ended in divorce. What
was it like writing this book as someone whose marriage ultimately did not work?
It
was a bit cathartic. I can’t say that if I’d read this book, I wouldn’t be
divorced; marriage and life are so much more complicated than that. I think,
though, that I would have made more informed choices along the way. Sometimes I
think, “Would [the book] have been better if I’d had a successful 30-year
marriage?” and I’m not sure it would. When your marriage is falling apart, it’s
a very isolating experience. Delving into the research made me realize that
these are issues that people have always struggled with; I really wasn’t so
alone. Once you’ve been through marriage and a divorce, there’s a lot of
insight and wisdom that comes from that. I was happy to use that difficult
experience towards something better.
One of the most persistent myths you debunk
is the idea that the U.S. has a divorce rate of at or near 50 percent. What
does the marriage landscape in America today really look like?
I
think this was probably my biggest surprise in reporting this book. I remember
the moment when I said to myself, “You know, half of marriages end in divorce,”
and I just accepted that this is something that was a coin toss and I had just
gotten on the unlucky side. But I realized that this is really not a true
number. I realized it personally because when I got divorced I thought, where
are all these people that are supposed to be divorced like me? I was
married in the 80’s, and marriages in the 80’s are stronger than marriages in
the 70’s, and marriages in the 90’s are stronger than marriages in the 80’s.
What we know is that people who got married in the 70’s really struggled with
marriage and that generation of couples are not at a 50 percent divorce rate
yet, but they’re close to it. That generation was dealing with a lot of change.
But
what happened to that generation really doesn’t have anything to do with
couples today. The data show that when couples wait a little longer to be
married, when they finish college before they get married, those couples have
stronger, more stable relationships. That’s more typical of many of the couples
who got married in the 90’s, and the divorce rate is dropping. Couples who
choose to get married today, their chance of succeeding in marriage is greater
than their chance of failing. People are so cynical and skeptical about
marriage and the fact is, most of us are doing a pretty good job with it.
You say that couples today are asking far
more from our marriages than ever before. What do you mean by that?
One
hundred years ago, marriage was a social contract and an economic contract.
Even in the 50’s, the model of marriage was very different in that the women
typically stayed home and took care of the house and the man typically went to
work and earned the money, and that’s a very separate kind of existence. With
the current model of marriage, couples really are partners; they are both
working in the home and they are both working outside the home. Even when you
have one partner that does stay home and doesn’t earn money, you still have a
lot more sharing—if it’s the woman who is staying home, she is more involved in
her husband’s work life, and the man is involved in the home life. So the new
model of marriage is that we’re spending a lot more time with the person that
we marry, so we have higher expectations for the relationship. We want to be
with somebody we like to be with; men and women are both looking for a partner
to make life more interesting.
You talk about several ways by which couples
can “diagnose” their relationship and assess their risk for divorce. In
particular, you say that the way a couple tells the story of their first
meeting and falling in love says a lot about the current state of their
relationship.
Anybody
can listen to themselves and learn a lot about what they’re feeling. One of the
exercises is to talk about the early days of your courtship, and what you find
is that couples who are feeling very connected now, when they talk about the
past they will say things like “We did this.” And it might even be a
terrible story, like “We got caught in a rainstorm and got lost.” A couple who
is less connected will tell that story but in a different way. They’ll say, “You
didn’t ask for directions, and I got soaking wet.” The memory is the
same, but the connectedness is different.
There’s been a lot of talk recently about how
kids affect the marriage dynamic. What are some ways parents can care for both
their children and their marriages?
I
think it’s hard to talk about because we love our children so much, but it does
take a toll on marriage. With the issue of sharing chores, I talk about how
housework and childcare tend to fall disproportionately on the woman. I think
that women need to learn to ask for help more, and they need to stop trying to
micromanage the way their partner does things. He may pick the wrong pair of
shoes or the wrong dress, but you know what? He got the kid dressed, so let it
go. And I think men need to step up and say, “I need to contribute more.”
What, in your mind, are the most compelling
lessons from the research on how couples handle conflict?
I
think re-thinking the value of conflict in a relationship is a pretty important
lesson. For me personally, the idea that conflict can be healthy in a marriage
was a very hard thing to accept. But it makes a lot of sense that couples who
have a lot of conflict early in their marriage are moving towards something
better, they’re trying to work things out. Recognizing the power of conflict to
clean house and to move yourself forward is a good thing. But I hear and see so
much negativity when couples talk to each other, and I think “Gosh, just a
slightly different word would change the whole tone of that discussion.”
Instead of saying, “Ya think you could help me with this?” why not just say,
“Honey, can you help me with this?” I think we miss opportunities to be kind to
our partners. Couples that are successful get angry with each other, but they
don’t rip each other to shreds during conflict. They know how to love their
partner even when they’re angry with their partner.
You say that, according to the research,
“compatibility is overrated.” What do you mean by that?
I
think when you hear couples start to talk about compatibility—“we’re just not
compatible”—that’s a red flag that shows that they’re unhappy and they don’t
know how to express it. When you hear this coming out of your mouth or your
partner’s mouth, this is a big siren going off in your marriage that
something’s wrong, and the problem is most likely not compatibility. Couples
who get divorced are no more or less compatible than those who stay together,
in terms of the strictest definition of the word. So you have to stop focusing
on issues of compatibility and hone in on what really is going wrong in the
relationship.
You report that good marriages are good for
overall health, whereas bad marriage relationships take a negative toll on
well-being—even causing changes to the heart similar to those caused by
smoking.
I found this data to be so
compelling. Some of the research is so interesting, where they would literally
create wounds on people’s arms and watch how quickly or slowly the wounds
healed, depending on if they’d had a fight or if they’d had a positive exchange
with their partner. For people in negative relationships, the wounds would take
twice as long to heal. We know stress is bad for you, and marital stress is
particularly bad for you because it’s so personal. Your marriage and your home
is a place of refuge, and when that’s not going well, you’re going to
internalize all that and it’s going to create a lot of problems. Knowing that
taking care of your marriage is also taking care of your health is important. And
if you love your partner, and yet there’s a lot of anger and hostility in your
house, you have to know the toll that’s taking on your partner’s health.
