The Joining of Families Through Marriage: The New Couple

Monica McGoldrick, M.S.W.

Becoming a couple is one of the most complex and difficult transitions of the family life cycle. However, along with the transition to parenthood, which it has long symbolized, it is seen as the easiest and most joyous. The romanticized view of this transition may add to its difficulty, since everyone—from the couple to the family and friends—wants to see only the happiness of the shift. The problems entailed may thus be pushed underground, only to intensify and surface later on.

Weddings, more than any other rite of passage, are viewed as the solution to problems such as loneliness or extended-family difficulties. The event is seen as terminating a process, though it does not: "And they lived happily ever after" is the myth. Families will often say, "At last they're settled," as though the wedding resolved something rather than coming in the middle of a complex process of changing family status.

This chapter will outline the issues in becoming a new family and discuss clinical interventions for those who have trouble negotiating this phase. The meaning of marriage in our time is profoundly different from its meaning throughout previous history, when it was tightly embedded in the economic and social fabric of society. The changing role of women and the increasing mobility of our culture, along with the dramatic effects of widely available contraceptives, are forcing us to redefine marriage.

Marriage requires that two people renegotiate together a myriad of issues they have previously defined individually, or that were defined by their families of origin, such as when and how to eat, sleep, talk, have sex, fight, work, and relax. The couple must decide about vacations. and how to use space, time, and money There are also the decisions about which family traditions and rituals to retain and which ones the partners will develop for themselves. These decisions can no longer be determined solely on an individual basis. The couple will also have to renegotiate relationships with parents, siblings, friends, extended family, and co-workers in view of the new marriage. It places no small stress on a family to open itself to an outsider who is now an official member of its inner circle. Frequently no new member has been added to the system for many years. The challenge of this change can affect a family's style profoundly: the tendency of members to polarize and see villains and victims under the stress of these changes can be very strong.

The joke that there are six in the marital bed is really an understatement. It has been said that what distinguishes human beings from all other animals is the fact of having in-laws. In the animal kingdom, mating involves only the two partners, who usually mature, separate from their families, and mate on their own. For humans it is the joining of two enormously complex systems. It is possible that if couples could fully appreciate the emotional complexity of negotiating marriage right at the start, they might not dare to undertake the proposition.

The place of marriage in the life cycle has been changing dramatically. Men and women are having sex earlier but marrying later than ever before. An ever increasing proportion are living together before marriage, or even living with several partners before deciding to marry. Marriage used to be the major marker of transition to the adult world, because it symbolized the transition to parenthood; now it often reflects a greater continuity with the phase of young adulthood or even adolescence, since childbearing is increasingly postponed for a number of years after marriage.

In fact, the status changes of marriage may not be fully appreciated by the family until the next phase. It is this transition to parenthood that confronts couples more sharply with the problems of traditional sex roles and of multigenerational patterns. Women are wanting their own careers and are increasingly resistant to having the primary household and childcare responsibilities and to having husbands who are absent from family life. But change comes very slowly:

In most societies to talk of the choice to marry or not would be almost as relevant as to talk of the choice to grow old or not: it has been considered the only route to full adult status. To marry has been simply part of the "natural" progression through life, part of the inevitable, unless catastrophe intervened. Only recently has our society been modifying its norms on this, as more of the population do not fit into the traditional patterns. and even raise questions about their viability.

The cultural ideal is still that in marriage men should be in the one-up position. The husband "should be" taller, older, smarter, more educated, and have more income-generating power. For more than a generation, Jessie Bernard has been discussing the fact that marriage produces such profound discontinuities into lives of women as to constitute a genuine health hazard (Bernard, 1982). In spite of the widespread cultural stereotypes that marriage is something men should dread and fear, all the research supports the opposite—that in every way marriage improves men's mental health, while in almost every way, mentally, physically, and even in crime statistics, single women are healthier than married women (Apter, 1985).

Contrary to the popular stereotypes of the frustrated old maid and the free unencumbered bachelor life, spinsters do very well and bachelors do very poorly (Gurin et al., 1980 p, 42). And statistically, the more education a woman has and the better her job, the less likely she is to marry. Just the reverse is true for men.

Paradoxical as it seems, having been raised to see themselves as dependent, women after marriage often devote a great part of their efforts to keeping their husband's self-image intact. Often, because the wife has put so many eggs in the one basket of marriage and given up so much for it, she has a great deal at stake in making a go of it.

A surprising 10% of women are choosing not to marry at all and the estimates are that as many as 20-30% of women in the present generation will choose to remain childless. To this must be added the couples waiting until much later in the marriage cycle to begin having children. According to a 1985 census report, 75% of American men are still single at age 25. This is an increase from 55% in 1970. For women the rates are now 57% compared with 36% in 1970, reflecting a remarkable shift (Glick, 1984).

We have no real evidence about the impact on later marriage of the tremendous recent increase in the number of unmarried couples living together; but we know that more and more couples are passing through a stage of living with one or several partners before marriage, making the transition to marriage much less of a turning point in the family life cycle than in the past. There is an increase to 4% in the number of unmarried couples living together at any given time, although a much higher overall percent live together for some period before marriage. Obviously the meaning of a wedding changes when a couple has been living together for several years and participating jointly in extended-family experiences. Nevertheless, as the movie "Best Friends" depicted, even after a couple has been living together for several years, the transition to marriage can still create great turmoil, the more so if the partners have not dealt with their extended family as a couple during the period of living together.

In any case there seems to be a timing and a pattern to this phase. With those who marry early, it often means having more difficulty adjusting to its tasks. Women who marry before age 20 (about 25% of women) are twice as likely to divorce as those who marry in their 20s. On the other hand, those who marry after 30 (about 20% of women) are less likely to divorce, but if they do, they do so sooner than those who marry earlier (Glick 1984). Thus it appears that in our culture there is a timing for coupling and while it seems to be better to marry later than sooner, those who fall too far out of the normative range on either end may have trouble making the transition. Such people are often responding to family stresses that make the process of coupling more difficult to achieve. Those who marry early may be running away from their families of origin or seeking a family they never had. They may leave home by fusing with a mate in an attempt to gain strength from each other. Later on they may have more difficulties as a result of their failure to take the step toward independent development first. Women who marry late are frequently responding to a conflict between marriage and career and their ambivalence about losing their independence and identity in marriage. An increasing number of men also seem to be avoiding commitment and prefer living alone to becoming involved in the interdependence that marriage entails. Some who marry late may also have seen a negative image of marriage at home, or they have been enmeshed in their families and have trouble forming outside relationships, developing a secure work situation, and leaving home.

In spite of the trend toward delaying both marriage and pregnancy, the majority of couples do marry and have children before age 30. Naturally those who have children shortly after marriage have relatively little time to adjust to the status changes of marriage and its accompanying stresses before moving on.

What is amazing, considering the long-range implications of the decision to marry, is that so many couples seem to spend so little time thinking out the decision. Aylmer (1977) has commented that many Americans seem to spend more time deciding which car to buy than selecting the spouse they expect to keep for life. It seems that the timing of marriage decisions is often influenced by events in the extended family, although most couples are unaware of the correlation of these events and the process which underlies their decision to marry (Ryder, et al., 1971; Friedman, 1977; McGoldrick & Walsh, 1983). People often seem to meet their spouses or make the decision to marry shortly after the retirement, illness, or even untimely death of a parent, or after other traumatic family loss. The sense of loss or aloneness can be a strong contributing factor in the desire to build a close relationship. This may blind a person to the aspects of a prospective spouse that do not fit the idealized picture that the other will complete him or her and make life worthwhile. This desire for completion is likely to lead to difficulty accepting the spouse's differentness, which will necessarily show itself in the course of the relationship. As one woman put it, "My husband and I have always been afraid of the stranger in each other. "We kept wanting to believe that the other thought the same as we thought they were thinking, which could never be. We just couldn't appreciate that here was a new and different person, with his or her own thoughts and feelings, who would make life more interesting."

A basic dilemma in coupling is the confusion of intimacy with fusion. Fogarty has clarified the problem in the following way : "The forces of togetherness spring from the natural human desire for closeness. Carried to extremes they lead to a search for completeness. Carried beyond the possible, such forces lead to fusion, a uniting of two people and resultant distance. Spouses try to defy the natural incompleteness of people and systems, as if one can become complete by fusing into a united twosome (Fogarty, 1976. p. 39).

There is a vast difference between forming an intimate relationship with another separate person and using a couple relationship to complete one's self and improve one's self-esteem. The natural human desire to share one's experience often leads to this confusion between seeking intimacy and seeking fusion in coupling. Poets have long talked about the difference. Rilke (1954) writes: "Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate?): it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen . . . it is a great exacting claim" (p. 54).

There are, of course, sex differences in the way fusion is experienced. since women have traditionally been raised to consider "losing themselves" in a relationship as normal, and men have been raised to see intimacy as frightening. Thus men more often express their fusion by maintaining a pseudo-differentiated distant position in relationships and women by maintaining a pseudo-intimacy, which is really a giving up of themselves.

Frequently others expect a couple to fuse and view the wife as somehow joined to the identity of her husband, thus increasing the difficulties for women in differentiating and maintaining their separate identities. For men the fear of intimacy and the social expectations of his "independence" and of his wife's adaptiveness work together to inhibit his establishment of intimate relationships that permit differences to exist.

Bowen systems theory (1978) elucidates the universal tendency to seek fusion as related to a person's incomplete differentiation from her or his family of origin. In other words, couples seek to complete themselves in each other to the degree that they have failed to resolve their relationships with their parents, which would free them to build new relationships based on each person's freedom to be him or herself and to appreciate the other as he or she is. The process whereby people seek to enhance their self-esteem in marriage is based on denying their "differentness" from their spouse and can result in severe distortions in communication to maintain the myth of agreement (Satir, 1967 ).

During courtship couples are usually most aware of the romantic aspects of their relationship. Marriage shifts the relationship from a private coupling to a formal joining of two families. Issues that the partners have not resolved with their own families will tend to be factors in marital choice and are very likely to interfere with establishing a workable marital balance.

It may be that much of the intensity of romantic love is determined by one’s family values. From this perspective a Romeo and Juliet might have felt intensely attracted to each other precisely because their family situation prohibited their relationship. Such obstacles may lead to an idealization of the forbidden person. They, and many other romantic heroes. from Tristan and Isolde on down, were conveniently spared a more complete view of their relationship by their untimely deaths, thus preserving the romance, and perhaps obscuring the more pedestrian underlying family dramas that probably fostered their attraction in the first place.

In everyday life the outcome of such love affairs is often not so romantic, as the following case illustrates (see Figure 10-1).

What began to happen between Nancy and Tom is what happens to many couples when the hope that the partner will solve all problems proves to be in vain. There is a tendency to personalize stress and to blame someone for what goes wrong. At times one blames oneself; at times, one's spouse. Given enough stress couples tend to define their problems solely within the relationship. They may blame the spouse ("He let me down: he doesn't love me.") or themselves ("I'm no good: I'd be able to satisfy her if I were.") Once this personalizing process begins. it is very difficult to keep the relationship open. Nancy began to lay the blame for her disappointments in life on Tom and he saw himself as responsible for her unhappiness.

A major factor that tightens couple relationships over time is their increasing interdependency and their tendency to interpret more and more facets of their lives within the marriage, which is often supported by others who also promote the couple's narrow focus. For example, during courtship, if one partner becomes depressed, the other is not likely to take it too personally, assuming. "There are many reasons to get depressed in life; this may well have nothing to do with me." Such an assumption of not being responsible for the other's feelings permits a supportive and empathic response. After several years of marriage, however, this partner has a much greater tendency to view the other's emotional reactions as a reflection of his or her input and to feel responsible for the partner's depression. After five years of marriage, the partner may think, "It must mean I'm not a good wife, or I would have made him happy by now." Once each starts taking responsibility for the other's feelings, there is a tendency for more and more areas in the relationship to become tension-filled. Over time they will avoid dealing with more and more areas. For example, she may feel inadequate, guilty, and resentful. She may then decide to avoid dealing with him because she does not want to be blamed, or she may become very protective of him and not say anything upsetting for fear of making him feel worse. In either case the more her reactions are a response to his, the less flexibility there will be in the relationship and the more the couple's communication will become constricted in the areas that are emotionally charged.

The period when couples are courting is probably the least likely time, of all the phases of the cycle, to seek therapy. This is not because coupling is so easy, but rather because of the romanticization of the attraction between the partners. They will have a strong tendency to idealize each other and to avoid looking at the enormous and long-range difficulties of establishing an intimate relationship. While the first years of marriage are the time of greatest overall marital satisfaction for many, they are also the time of the highest rate of divorce. The degree of disillusionment and mutual disappointment will usually match the degree of idealization of the relationship during courtship, as in the case of Nancy and Tom. During courtship the pull toward the relationship is likely to prevent realization of potential difficulties (Friedman 1977), so they do not show up until further down the road. On the one hand, there is the tendency toward pseudomutuality during courtship, and, on the other, as Bowen has observed, this can be the time of greatest openness in the relationship because years of interdependence have not yet constricted the relationship. Most spouses have the closest and most open relationships in their adult lives during courtship. It is common for living-together relationships to be harmonious and for fusion symptoms to develop when those involved finally get married. It is as if the fusion does not become problematic as long as there still is an option to terminate the relationship (Bowen, 1978, p. 377). While marriage frequently tightens a relationship, the fusion often starts developing during courtship, when couples say they like everything about each other, share all their free time together, and so on.

The failure to appreciate or allow for the differentness in the other person comes from never really having become emotionally independent of one's parents. This leaves a person in the position of trying to build self-esteem in the marriage. Neither partner dares to communicate his or her fears to the other. He may be thinking: "I must never let her know that I am really nothing or I will lose her, and I will never tell her that at times she is boring and talks too much." Meanwhile she may be thinking: "I mustn't let him know that I am really worthless or he will leave me. And I mustn't let on that he is boring, only wants to watch sports and TV, and has nothing interesting to say." Each puts the other in charge of his or her self-esteem: "I am worthwhile because you love me." This leaves both vulnerable to the converse possibility: "If you do not love me, I am worthless.'' Thus couples can become bound in a web of evasiveness and ambiguity, because neither can dare to be straight with the other, for fear of things turning out unhappily, as they did in their families of origin. Messages between them may become more and more covert as more and more they define their own worth by the relationship. It can lead to the content of communication becoming totally obscured by the need of both partners to validate themselves through the spouse. It may end with the absurdity of couples spending their time doing things neither wants to do because each thinks the other wants it that way.

While many couples seem to make it to couplehood with the help of romance, pseudomutuality, or the resistance of their parents to the idea, some couples. perhaps an increasing number, get stuck in the process of becoming a pair.

In such situations family patterns contribute to the inability of each successfully to negotiate the transition to couplehood. In such instances the concept of "marriage" has taken on a meaning far beyond the fact of two people sharing their lives with each other. Very often couples fall into the stereotypic roles Mary and David were playing here. She can think of nothing but marriage, and that is the one thing he cannot think about. These patterns reflect opposite sides of the same lack of differentiation from their families of origin. Men who are not comfortable with their level of differentiation typically fear commitment whereas such women typically fear being alone.

It is not uncommon for two people who have been living happily together to find that things change when they do get married because they have now added to the situation the burdensome definition, of "husband" and "wife." These words often bring with them the conceptions of heavy responsibility for rather than to each other, which living together did not impose. There may also be the burden of having definitely passed beyond youth into "serious" adulthood.

This couple viewed marriage as such an enormous task that they could never be sufficiently prepared for it. Many couples have the opposite misperception, that marriage will fulfill them regardless of all other aspects of their lives. Family attitudes and myths about marriage filter down from generation to generation, making such transitions proportionately smoother or more difficult.

The patterns described here for heterosexual couples are similar, but frequently more difficult for homosexuals for several reasons (Krestan & Bepko, 1980: Roth, 1985; Nichols & Leiblum, 1986). The horrendous implications for gay men as well as for heterosexual couples brought on by the AIDS crisis in the formation of couple relationships is hard to anticipate. One large study carried out prior to the AIDS crisis suggests that in many respects the impact of gender on the couple has outweighed the effect of their gayness in terms of the patterns that couples developed regarding sex, power, and work (Blumstein & Schwartz, 1983). We can only predict that the forced changes in sexual behavior brought about by the AIDS epidemic will radically influence gay men and heterosexuals (lesbians have a very low likelihood of developing the disease), both in their sexual patterns and in their relationships with their family members. At the same time that the similarity or identification of homosexuals being of the same sex may increase the understanding between partners, it is also likely to make them more vulnerable to fusion. A second and related area of difficulty comes from the lack of acceptance that most gay couples experience from their families and from the culture at large throughout the life cycle. This increases the risk that they will develop boundary problems with each other in response to their family or society's negative reactions to their couplehood; the stigma of being homosexual may lead either to having a secret identity or to having a fusion with others in the gay community and cutting off the straight world.

Related to this familial and societal negativity is the lack of normative rituals for homosexuals as they move through the life cycle. They do not have the benefit of formal marriage, or even divorce, to mark their relationship transitions. Often the family of origin tends to view them as perpetual adolescents. It requires special efforts on their part to receive adequate recognition for their relationship transitions.

As can be seen from this example, the systemic problems around couple formation are generally similar, regardless of the content of the problems. However, certain patterns are quite predictable for homosexual couples, as for religious, class, ethnic, or racial intermarriages. Where the extended family is extremely negative toward the couple for whatever reason, we encourage couples to take a long view, not trying to turn the acceptance of their relationship into a yes-or-no event, but working gradually over time to build bridges for family closeness. Other- life cycle transitions. particularly births and deaths, often create a shift in the family equilibrium. which allows for redefinitions of family status for the couple.

One of the best indicators of the family process at the time of couple formation and one of the best places for preventive intervention, is the wedding itself. As family events, weddings are the only major ceremonies organized by the family itself, and they are the family ceremonials that involve the most planning (Barker, 1978). The organization of the wedding, who makes which arrangements, who gets invited, who comes, who pays, how much emotional energy goes into the preparations, who gets upset and over which issues, are all highly reflective of family process. It seems generally that those who marry in unconventional ways, in civil ceremonies or without family or friends present, have their reasons. Most often the issues in such situations are family disapproval, premarital pregnancy, an impulsive decision to marry, a previous divorce, or the inability or unwillingness of the parents to meet the costs of the wedding (Barker, 1978). From a clinical point of view, the emotional charge of such situations, when it leads to downplaying the marriage as a family event, may well indicate that the family members are unable to make the status changes required to adapt to this new life cycle stage and will have difficulty with future stages. Weddings are meant to be transition rituals that facilitate family process. As such they are extremely important for marking the change in status of family members and the shifting in family organization.

The opposite problem ensues when the family overfocuses on the wedding itself, perhaps spending more than they can afford, putting all their energy into the event and losing sight of the marriage as a process of joining two families. Families and couples often assume that once the wedding has occurred, everyone should feel close and connected. Today, with the changing mores, this focus on the wedding may be less intense. but there is still a large overlap of myth associated with marital bliss, which gets displaced onto wedding celebrations in a way that may be counterproductive.

Surprisingly, few couples ever seek premarital counseling in spite of the obvious difficulties in negotiating this transition (Freedman, 1977), and in spite of the fact that preventive intervention in relation to the extended families might be a great deal easier at this time than later in the life cycle. The most that can be said is that it is extremely useful when working with any member of a family around the time of a wedding to encourage him or her to facilitate the resolution of family relationships through this nodal event. One can only encourage all participants to make maximum use of the event to deal with the underlying family process. For example, it is often fruitful to convey to the couple that in-law struggles are predictable and need not be taken too personally. It is important for couples to recognize that the heightened parental tension probably relates to their sense of loss regarding the marriage. When families argue about wedding arrangements, the issues under dispute only cover up underlying and much more important system issues, as in the following example:

Since family members so often view others as capable of "ruining" the event, a useful rule of thumb is for each person to take his or her own responsibility for having a good time at the wedding. It is also useful for the couple to recognize that marriage is a family event and not just for the two of them. Looked at from this perspective, parents' feelings about the service need to be taken into consideration in whatever meaningful ways are possible. An interesting example is the young woman mentioned above, who was having conflict with her mother about the undiscussed annulment. She had always been allied with her father. For the wedding she asked both parents to escort her down the aisle, since, she said, they had both helped to bring her to the point of marriage. The mother was extremely touched by the invitation, and this small gesture allowed the young woman to make a significant family statement to her parents about their meaning in her life. Probably the more responsibility the couple can take for arranging a wedding that reflects their shifting position in their families and the joining of the two systems, the more auspicious this is for their future relationship.

It frequently happens that friendship systems and extended-family relationships change after the wedding. Many couples have difficulty maintaining individual friendships and move, at least in the first years, toward having only "couple friends." We encourage the spouses to keep their individual friendship networks, since "couple friends" typically reinforce fusion, and do not allow the spouses their individual interests and preferences.

Marriage symbolizes a change in status among all family members and generations and requires that the couple negotiate new relationships as a twosome with many other subsystems: parents, siblings, grandparents, and nieces and nephews, as well as with friends. Most often women move closer to their families of origin after marriage and men become more distant, shifting their primary tie to the new nuclear family. In any case spouses deal with their families in many different ways. Many find marriage the only way to separate from their families of origin. They tend to be enmeshed with their families, and this pattern continues even after marriage. Patterns of guilt, intrusiveness, and unclear boundaries are typical of such systems. Other couples cut off their families emotionally even before marriage. In these situations the partners may not even invite their parents to the wedding. Parents are seen as withholding and rejecting and the couple decides to do without them. Another pattern involves continued contact with parents, but with ongoing conflicts. In such families there is usually involvement of the extended family in the marriage plans, but often with fights, hurt feelings, and "scenes" around the time of the wedding. This pattern is perhaps the most helpful for future resolution of the issues. The conflicts indicate that at least the family is struggling with separating and is not forcing it underground as in enmeshed or cutoff families. The ideal situation, and the one very rarely found is where the partners have become independent of their families before marriage and at the same time maintain close, caring ties. In such instances the wedding would serve for all the family as a sharing and a celebration of the new couple's shift in status.

Many couples develop restrictive couple patterns like Jack and Mary that work until later developmental stages destabilize them.

The third common pattern of relationships with extended family involves some contact, some closeness, some conflict, and the avoidance of certain issues. In such families the time of coupling is an excellent opportunity to reopen closed relationships, for example, inviting to the wedding relatives with whom parents are out of touch. It is a good chance to detoxify emotional issues, reviewing marital and family ties over several generations as part of redefining the system. However, the underlying tensions often surface reactively at the time of transition in emotional scenes or arguments around wedding plans, only to go underground again as family members try to act happy and friendly so as not to "create unpleasantness." The attempt to smooth things over in itself often increases the likelihood of outbursts. The fact that all change creates disruption and uncertainty in the system needs to be dealt with in the family if the developmental processes are to move along. For example, it may be easier for the family to move on if they are in touch with their sense of loss at the time of the wedding, and if they are a bit confused and uneasy about how to manage the new relationships. Whatever the patterns of difficulty with extended family-conflict, enmeshment, distance, or cutoff---the lack of resolution of these relationships is the major problem in negotiating this phase of the family life cycle. The more the triangles in the extended family are dealt with by an emotional cutoff of the relationship, the more the spouse comes to represent not just who he or she is. but also mother, father, brother, and sister. This input of' intensity will surely overlord the circuits in time. If the husband's relationship with his wife is his only meaningful relationship, he will be so sensitive to her every reaction, and especially to any hint of rejection. that he will overreact to signs of differentness by pulling her to agree with him or blaming her for not accepting him. The intensity will probably make the relationship untenable eventually. Our culture's social mobility and overfocus on the nuclear family to the neglect of all other relationships contributes to this tendency to place more emotional demand on a marriage than it can bear. Once a spouse becomes overly involved in the other's response, both become bound up in a web of fusion and unable to function for themselves.

Therapy for this couple involved reducing their focus on the marriage and placing their relationship in the broader context of their extended families. This therapeutic approach, the hallmark of Bowen systems therapy, appears to have great merit for couples who become myopic and see their partners as the source of all pain and joy in their lives.

Some couples transfer parental struggles to the spouse directly. One such young couple's marriage foundered when the husband's possessiveness led to his striking his wife for starting an affair. The wife, Roberta, had played the role of the "bad girl" and rebel in her family of origin. Her incestuous affair with a first cousin at the age of 17 had led to a thunderous response by her parents. She met John while still involved with her cousin and married him the following spring. Within a few months, the cycle of John's possessive intrusiveness and Roberta's rebellious acting out had developed full swing.

A related coupling problem occurs when people choose partners to handle their families for them. A man may choose a wife totally unacceptable to his parents and then let her fight his battles with his parents, while he becomes the "innocent bystander." The price everyone pays in such situations is the failure to achieve any real intimacy, since issues can never be resolved when other members are brought in to handle one's relationships.

When family members have served a central function in their parents' lives or in the preservation of their parents' marital balance they may not feel the parents have granted "permission" for them to marry successfully. We would suggest that most marital problems derive from unresolved extended-family problems, and not from the specific marital conflicts on which spouses may focus.

While it is less common in our time that a parent dies before the children marry, when this does occur, the power of death-bed instructions regarding the marriage, and of other unresolved parental directives about marriage, are crucial in evaluating a couple's functioning expectations of themselves and each other in marriage.

Among the problematic triangles for the couple, the one involving husband, wife, and mother-in-law is probably the most renowned. In-laws are easy scapegoats for family tensions (Ryder et al., 1971). It is always much easier to hate your daughter-in-law for keeping your son from showing his love than to admit that your son doesn't respond as much as you wish we would. It may be easier for a daughter-in-law to hate her mother-in-law for "intrusiveness" than to confront her husband directly for not committing himself fully to the marriage and defining a boundary in relation to outsiders. In-law relationships are a natural arena for displacing tensions in the couple or in the family of origin of each spouse. The converse of this is the pattern of a spouse who has cut off his or her own family and seeks to adopt the spouse's family, forming a warm, enmeshed fusion with the in-laws, based on defining his or her own family as cold, rejecting, uninteresting, and so on.

It is important to mention also the sexism of our culture that so often focuses blame on the mother-in-law rather than on the father-in-law, who is usually seen as playing a more benign role. Just as mothers get blamed for what goes wrong in families because of their being given primary responsibility for family relationships. so do mother-in-laws get primary blame by extension. Many factors contribute to this process. Just as wives are given responsibility for handling a husband's emotional problems, so are they often put in the position of expressing issues for all other family members, and then being blamed when things go wrong.

Siblings may also displace their problems in dealing with each other on the intrusion of a new spouse. Predictable triangles are especially likely between a husband and his wife's brothers or between the wife and her husband's sisters. The sisters may see their brother’s wife as having "no taste," as infusing the brother with superficial values, and so forth. What is missed by the system in such instances is that the brother probably chose his wife intentionally as a protection from his sisters, perhaps to set the limits he never dared set alone, or to allow him to distance without the guilt of doing it directly. Often the brother will get his wife to take over dealing with his family altogether, which usually succeeds only in escalating the tension. Of course, a person may also use the extended family to distance from his spouse without taking responsibility for it, under the guise of family duty: "I'd love to spend all day with you, honey, but I have to visit my parents."

Good clues about a new couple can be found in the marital relationships of the parents, the couple's primary models for what marriage is about. The other basic model for spouses is their relationship with their siblings, their earliest and closest peers. Research indicates that couples who marry mates from complementary sibling positions enjoy the greatest marital stability (Toman, 1976). In other words, the older brother of a younger sister will tend to get along best with a younger sister of an older brother. They will tend not to have power conflicts, since he will be comfortable as the leader and she as the follower. In addition, they will tend to be comfortable with the opposite sex, since they have grown up with close contact with their opposite sexed siblings as well. Those who marry spouses not from complementary sibling positions will have more adjustments to make in marriage in this regard. An extreme case would be the oldest of many brothers who marries the oldest of many sisters. Both would expect to be the leader and would probably have difficulty understanding why the other does not take orders well, since they are used to having their orders taken at home. In addition, they will be less comfortable with the opposite sex, since they grew up in strongly single-sexed environments (Toman, 1976).

The most difficult thing about sibling-position differences is that we are not generally aware of how many of our assumptions about life are based on them. In fact, a great number of our basic life expectations come from implicit assumptions we formed in our families. We rarely realize how much we have to learn about differentness when we join with someone else, as in the following example.

The dilemma presented by this couple is typical of many marital problems that are not really marital problems. They are problems that get focused in the marriage, but really derive from the couple's finding in the marriage a different situation than they were used to in their families of origin. Again the biggest problem is that these differences in experience are so difficult to recognize. So often, if one's expectations are not met, the assumption is that the spouse is at fault for not responding "correctly." One often hears complaints, "If you loved me, you would know how I feel," or "If you loved me, you wouldn't always challenge my plans," as if "love" included mind reading.

Another arena that becomes problematic in a marriage under stress is the cultural or family style differences. This may be more of a problem in the United States, where people from so many diverse cultural backgrounds marry and find themselves in conflict because each starts out with such different basic assumptions (McGoldrick & Preto, 1984).

Generally speaking, it is possible to predict that marital adjustment will be more problematic if any of the following are true:

1. The couple meets or marries shortly after a significant loss (Ryder, 1970; Ryder et al., 1971).
2. The wish to distance from one's family of origin is a factor in the marriage.
3. The family backgrounds of each spouse are significantly different (religion, education, social class, ethnicity, the ages of the partners, and the like).
4. The spouses come from incompatible sibling constellations.
5. The couple resides either extremely close to or at a great distance from either family of origin.
6. The couple is dependent on either extended family financially, physically, or emotionally.
7. The couple marries before age 20 (Booth & Edwards, 1985).
8. The couple marries after an acquaintanceship of less than six months or more than three years of engagement.
9. The wedding occurs without family or friends present.
10. The wife becomes pregnant before or within the first year of marriage (Christensen, 1963; Bacon, 1974).
11. Either spouse has a poor relationship with his or her siblings or parents.
12. Either spouse considers his or her childhood or adolescence an unhappy time.
13. Marital patterns in either extended family were unstable (Kobrin & Waite, 1984).

Most of these factors have already been given support by sociological data on divorce (Burchinal, 1965; Goodrich et al., 1968; Ryder, 1970; Bumpass, 1972; Becker et al., 1977; Mott & Moore, 1979).

A number of other factors probably add to the difficulty of adjusting to marriage in our time. Changing family patterns as a result of the changing role of women, the frequent marriage of partners from widely different cultural backgrounds, and the increasing physical distance from families of origin are placing a much greater burden on couples to define their relationship for themselves than was true in traditional and precedent-bound family structures (Rausch, 1963). While any two family systems are different and have conflicting patterns and expectations, in our present culture couples are less bound by family traditions and are freer than ever before to develop male-female relationships unlike those they experienced in their families of origin. Couples are required to think out for themselves many things that in the past could have been taken for granted. This applies also to the enormous gap that often exists in our culture between parents and children in education and social status. While it is much better for marital stability for children to be more successful than their parents (Glick, 1977), any large gap is obviously a strain since parents, siblings, and child will have to adjust to large differences in experience.

The economics of our culture have meant that a fair percentage of children are able to leave their families and support themselves financially much earlier than was previously possible. Economic independence may increase the tendency to distance from the extended family. At the other extreme, the requirements of our lengthy educational process for many professionals may also complicate the adjustment to this phase of the life cycle by setting up the problem of prolonged dependence on parents (see Fulmer. Chapter 22). For example, couples who are trying to define themselves as separate from their families, but are still being supported by them are in a difficult and ambiguous position. It is impossible to become emotionally independent while still relying on one's parents financially. so many couples struggle to develop couple boundaries in relation to their parents, but are basically unable to maintain them.

The changing role of women also influences marital relationships. It appears that the rise in women's status is positively correlated with marital instability (Pearson, 1979) and with the marital dissatisfaction of their husbands (Burke, 1976). When women used to fall automatically into the adaptive role in marriage, the likelihood of divorce was much lower. The adaptive spouse was not prepared to function independently either economically or emotionally. In fact, it appears very problematic for marriage when both spouses are equally successful and achieving. There is evidence that either spouse's accomplishments may correlate with the same degree of underachievement in the other (Ferber, 1979). Thus achieving marital adjustment in our time, when we are attempting to move toward equality of the sexes (educationally and occupationally), may be extraordinarily difficult.

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