Home > Media > Books > Howard Markman Ph.D., Scott Stanley, Susan L. Blumberg - Fighting for Your Marriage: Positive Steps for Preventing Divorce and Preserving a Lasting Love
Howard Markman Ph.D., Scott Stanley, Susan L. Blumberg - Fighting for Your Marriage: Positive Steps for Preventing Divorce and Preserving a Lasting Love
Grouch's Full Review: Howard Markman Ph.D., Scott Stanley, Susan L. Blum...
A refrigerator magnet saved my marriage.
Sounds like a supermarket tabloid headline, doesn’t it? But, in my case, it’s true. A four-inch-square rubbery magnet printed with the words “Speaker Listener Technique” was the best thing to happen in my marriage in a long time.
Maybe “save” is the wrong word—“strengthen” is more like it.
I received the magnet when I went to a marriage enrichment class with Jean, my wife of 17 years. The class was the first step in our journey through the Prevention Relationship Enhancement Program.
The program is built around the principles outlined in Fighting For Your Marriage, a 1994 book written by Howard Markman, Scott Stanley and Susan L. Blumberg. Subtitled “Positive Steps for Preventing Divorce and Preserving a Lasting Love,” the book is like an owner’s manual for marital bliss and should be required reading for all couples. I say, put it in every honeymoon suite at Niagara Falls and watch what happens.
Born out of research conducted at the University of Denver in the early 1990s, Fighting For Your Marriage helps couples establish ground rules for communication (passing a magnet back and forth is just one wrench in this toolbox). It includes the usual self-help buzzwords (commitment, forgiveness, togetherness…and so on), but it livens things up with cartoons, case studies, quizzes and practical exercises that both partners can take. Even for guys like me who are allergic to self-help “empowerment” books, there’s something to glean from these pages.
And for me, the book’s lessons were magnified during our weekend marriage retreat. Even though I’ll be discussing a particular place at a particular time, you’ll get much of the same benefit just by reading Fighting For Your Marriage.
For Jean and me, PREP (as in “prepare to improve your marriage”) culminated in a weekend retreat at Alaska’s Seward Resort, a cozy camp nestled in a grove of pine trees. Two miles down the road is the equally-cozy town of Seward, best known for its halibut fishing charters in the summer and the legendary Polar Bear Jump where brave-hearted souls leap into the icy waters of Resurrection Bay in mid-January.
And now, my wife and I were about to take the plunge into the dark, frigid waters of communication, emotional intimacy, conflict resolution…and other touchy-feely topics normally reserved for Oprah episodes. I was both scared and perversely excited at the thought of diving into those ice-cube areas of our marriage.
I realize not everyone can come to Alaska and duplicate the experience I had this past weekend—for some people, that’s the same as saying, “Pack your bags, Ethel! We’re going to Oz!” But you don’t need to come north to the 49th state to tap into the marrow of your marriage. Surely there are plenty of family advocacy resources in your community. Check the yellow pages, call up your local clergy, go scouting on the Internet—whatever. Just do something. If you feel like you’re treading water (or, worse, drowning) in your relationship, and if you think that relationship is worth saving, then you owe it to yourself to get off your butt and start looking for assistance. Buying this book is a good first step. Reading the first sentence in the book (“Good marriages take work”) is a good second step. Remember, this is coming from a man who sat idle on his butt for 17 years.
The phrase “marriage retreat” is actually a misnomer. You’re running toward something, not away from it. Granted, there is the fact that you’re “getting away from it all” for a few days. In our case, “it” meant three teenage children, the always-on television, and the click-and-whir of the Internet. Jean and I “deserved a break today.” And so, we “retreated” to a quieter corner of Alaska.
Seward’s landscape comes complete with aqua-blue glaciers, seals bobbing in the harbor and moose munching willows along the side of the road. All those gorgeous sights surrounded us during our three days in south-central Alaska…but they were strictly in my peripheral vision. Corny as it may sound, I only had eyes for my wife. I was there to concentrate on learning better communication skills (I can write until the cows come home, but when it comes to verbal expression, I’m completely tongue-tied), and by gum the Kodak moments outside the resort windows could just wait until I learned those skills.
Most couples, when they hear the words “prevention” or “enrichment,” immediately think of marriages that are at the crisis stage. Not so with Jean and me.
We’re a happily-married couple whose relationship has the typical bumps and thumps of modern life: she says I spent too much time on the Internet, I say she watches too much TV; she gets jealous and paranoid when I go away on business trips, I cannot understand why she doesn’t trust my feelings for her; she likes Ricky Martin, I like opera. It’s a typical marriage: a little bit Ozzie and Harriet, a little bit Waltons, a little bit Simpsons.
We’d come a long way since our first date when we went to see Flashdance back in 1983. We’ve had ups and plenty of downs, but mostly it’s been the day-to-day in-betweens—you know, the kind of life that just keeps throbbing along like an outboard motor. Lately, our relationship was starting to make a strange sputtering sound. When I got home from work, my wife would be all ready to start talking about her day, a day mostly spent cooped up in our Army family housing quarters. My mind spinning like a carnival Tilt-o-Whirl with my own day’s activities, I’d make empathetic sounds, my head bobbing up and down like one of those toy dogs you see in the back windows of cars. I heard what she said, I just didn’t always process the information.
Like the authors of Fighting For Your Marriage write: “What starts out as a relationship of great joy and promise can become the most frustrating and painful endeavor in a person’s lifetime.”
I realized it was time to take our marriage motor in for a tune-up.
And that’s how Jean and I found ourselves passing a large refrigerator magnet back and forth at Seward Resort.
Rules for the Speaker: don’t mindread, keep statements brief.
Rules for the Listener: let the speaker talk, then paraphrase what you’ve heard.
One partner holds the magnet and speaks, while the other person listens, keeping their lips zipped and their ears cocked open. It’s a simple tool, but one that’s as powerful as a hand grenade. I found myself paying attention—really paying attention—to every word dropping from Jean’s lips. Listening, then repeating, helped me focus on what she was saying; for her part, the technique reassured her that I was absorbing her words like a sponge.
We came to Seward Resort with a dozen other couples, all of them there in the glacial shadow of Mount Marathon to roll up their sleeves, spit on their hands, and get down to work. The marriages ranged from one month (an all-too-giddy couple) to 17 years (us). Every one of these relationships had different expectations, different goals. Some wives wanted husbands to be more involved in family activities; some husbands wished their wives would learn how to accept compliments.
All of us wanted to identify and deal with conflicts, none of us wanted to end up a statistic (according to the latest, albeit fuzzy, figures: 50 percent of first marriages, and 70 percent of second marriages, end in divorce).
“Verbalize your expectations,” said Karen, one of the retreat facilitators. “Unmet expectations are the number-one conflict in marriages,” she added.
In the book, the authors write:
1. Be aware of what you expect
2. Be reasonable in what you expect
3. Be clear in what you expect
Now it was my wife’s turn to nod her head in understanding. By the way, my pet nickname for her is “Mindreader” (as in, Me: “How was I to know that you needed me to pick up some more Sure I’m Dry deodorant while I was at the grocery store?” Her: “I just figured you noticed that I was out and I expected you to buy some for me. Sheesh!”).
Later, Pascal—another of the retreat facilitators—explained how one partner (usually the wife) pursues, while the other spouse avoids or withdraws from conflict.
“Getting him to talk to me is difficult sometimes,” said one wife sitting at the tables grouped in a horseshoe. “He’ll tell me about his day and I’ll tell him about mine, but sometimes it seems like we’re talking in foreign languages. How do I get him to open up?”
From where he sat next to her, arms crossed and head bobbing like a rear-window doggie, the husband said, “It’s definitely something we need to work on.”
They’re not alone. According to Fighting For Your Marriage, “Many couples do this kind of dance when it comes to dealing with difficult issues.”
Among the many other topics of discussion at PREP are Resolving Religious Conflicts, Intimacy Issues and something called “Negative Communication and Constructive Griping”—a class which, Pascal said, “Helps us own our feelings by being specific. If the other person knows how you feel, that’s a motivator for constructive communication.”
Recognizing there’s a need for conflict resolution is the first step couples attending a marriage retreat usually take. “You have to realize it’s no longer 50-50 in a marriage—it’s 100-100,” Pascal told our group just before we broke into pairs to work on practical exercises—questionnaires which required them to answer and discuss hot-button issues: “During problem discussions, my stomach often feels as if it’s all tied up in knots” (True, I scribbled), “I often sit and stare at my partner, not saying anything” (True, I jotted, then peeked at Jean’s paper—she, of course, had marked False for that one).
If nothing else, after a weekend retreat like this or reading a book like Fighting For Your Marriage, you’ll know exactly how to rate your relationship on a scale of one to 10.
PREP is designed to get couples talking to one another. Men and women who entered the room in the morning barely looking at each other are, by the end of the second break, chattering with the romantic energy of high school sweethearts.
The retreat also gives husbands and wives plenty of time for walks along the beach or an intimate dinner at one of the harbor-front restaurants (I highly recommend the Chocolate Praline Fantasy at Ray’s). For many hard-working couples, it’s a much-needed second honeymoon. I’d always promised Jean I’d take her to Paris…but now we realized Seward, Alaska would have to do.
And a curious thing started happening between the Mindreader and the Stoic during this weekend: we really started to hone in on each other. Away from the buzzing distractions of our everyday world, we found ourselves looking deeper into each other's eyes and really hanging on every word of every conversation. If this was a romantic movie, this is where they'd start playing the sappy music.
“Your relationship will never be the same as it was before you came down here this weekend,” Karen said as PREP came to a close.
Every time I pass our refrigerator and see that big magnet, I’m inclined to agree with her.
This new and revised edition is based on the widely acclaimed PREP (Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program) approach. Groundbreaking studies ...More at Christianbook.com
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