Love on the ropes: Men and women in crises

A Review of How Can I Get Through to You: Reconnecting Men and Women by Terrence Real

By Philip Chanin, Ed.D, ABPP, CGP Board Certified Clinical Psychologist

“Psychological patriarchy is the dynamic between those qualities deemed ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ in which half of our human qualities are exalted while the other half is devalued. Both men and women participate in this tortured value system.” (p. 20)

“We live in an anti-relational, vulnerability-despising culture, one that not only fails to nurture the skills of connection but actively fears them. Few of us have emerged from healthy, psychologically responsive families because the patriarchal norms all families live within are profoundly skewed against emotional sensitivity what we most likely share is longing, a sense of inner emptiness. Part of that emptiness is spiritual, existential, our ‘human condition.’ But a great part of the troubling sense of dis-ease comes from a profound missing of the abundant well-being we find in authentic connection. The wound of being torn from that state represents nothing less than the core environmental contribution to most psychiatric and behavioral disorders.” (p. 21)

“Men and women will not completely love one another until both recover the state of integrity in which they began their lives. From there, each must proceed to hone and nurture qualities and skills that may well have stopped growing from the age of three, four, or five. The cultivation of our nascent relational skills is the kind of help all of us as children deserve but few of us receive. Instead, girls are taught to submerge their own needs in the service of others, while boys are taught to ignore their own and anyone else’s needs in the service of the great god, achievement.” (pp. 22-23)

I begin this article with quotations from the introduction to Terrence Real’s seminal book, How Can I Get Through to You: Reconnecting Men and Women. (New York: Scribners: 2002) I have recommended this book to countless patients since first reading it 20 years ago. Throughout the book, Real gives powerful vignettes of the exchanges that take place in his office between him and the couples he works with. I say to my women patients, “This book will encourage you to push harder for what you need in your marriage.” I say to the men I work with, “This book will show you what you have been doing and the toll it’s taking on your marriage.”

In Chapter 1, “Love on the Ropes: Men and Women in Crisis,” Real states to the husband of a couple he is working with, “The fundamental thing is that, real or imagined, your wife experiences you as someone who, though you don’t mean her harm, is nevertheless in day-to-day life simply too selfish and in your own way too controlling to live with.” (p. 29).

Real continues: “There is an old saying, ‘Hope is the remembrance of the future.’ Steve and Maggie had it in them to remember a future, their love, at least for an instant. If they could do that, then the odds were that with hard work, they could remember it for an hour or two, perhaps a whole day. This is how couples heal, building up from such small instances of recovery. Finding these moments, sometimes creating them - through teaching, encouraging, exhorting is the essence of my job.” (pp. 31-32). Real adds, “Maggie brings to mind the angry wife in a New Yorker cartoon who exclaims to her puzzled husband in front of their marriage counselor, ‘Of course you don’t know why we’re here. That’s why we’re here!’” (pp. 32-33)

Real laments the current state of marriage in our country: “One of the few stable statistics in our fast-changing world is the rate of divorce, which has hovered between 40 and 50 percent for the last thirty years. Any two people who marry face a grim 50 to 60 percent chance of survival Of those who remain together, how many do so happily, as opposed to those who stay for external reasons, like their children, finances, religion, or fatigue? Conservatively, we can estimate that at least one out of three, perhaps one out of two, of those couples left standing do not relish their lives together.” (p. 33)

Real poses an interesting question: “Is there some natural law of marital entropy? Some ubiquitous centripetal force pulling people away from one another? Of the thousands of statistics about marriage churned out by social research each year, the one I find most depressing is that in all couples, rich and poor, happy and unhappy, one of the most reliable predictors of marital dissatisfaction is simple longevity. The longer couples live together, the lower their reported contentment.” (p. 35). The wife Maggie is quoted as saying, “My feelings for Steve are like a balloon that’s been leaking air for years. I don’t hate my husband anymore. I did for a while. But I don’t even have that much left in me. I’m just out of air.” (p. 36)

Real addresses the question of who is most likely to initiate divorce: “The crisis starts with Maggie. It is women who buy magazines with headlines that promise “Ten things to do to keep your marriage hot.’ It is women who fuel the self-help industry. And it is women, by and large, who end their marriages. In fact, over 70 percent of divorces are initiated by wives. Most men, like Steve, are not dissatisfied with the status quo, and they are not dreadfully unhappy in their marriages; they are unhappy with their wives’ unhappiness. If their partners could just ease their complaints, most men tell me, they’d be fine. Wives like Maggie, by contrast, often live in a state of chronic resentment.” (pp. 37 -38)

I often say to the men in my office that psychological health for men involves the ability to bear uncomfortable feelings such as hurt, disappointment, and loss. In Chapter 3, “Bringing Men in from the Cold,” Real describes men’s difficulty with this: “For all of men’s vaunted stoicism in the face of physical distress, many of the men I have treated are babies when it comes to bearing emotional discomfort. Men are socialized to mistrust feelings, particularly difficult feelings, to experience them as threatening, overwhelming, and of little value.’” (p. 61). Real concludes this chapter with a vignette: “’Where did you learn to demand so little?’ I ask Tracy in our first joint session. ‘And just where would I have learned to demand more?’ she returns Tracy must drop the mantle of long-suffering selfabnegation and allow herself to become dangerous. She must risk fighting for her real needs and taking on her husband.” (p. 70)

Real discusses how most marital therapy is initiated: “The problem with treating heterosexual couples even-handedly is that it assumes men and women in therapy are on an even playing field, when after twenty-plus years of clinical experience I can unequivocally say that most are not. Let’s start with who initiates therapy. Are men as likely as women to pick up the telephone to call a couple’s therapist? I like to tease my students by saying that if I had a nickle for every guy who dragged his wife into therapy complaining of their lack of intimacy I would not be able to retire. Men do not bring women into therapy. Some men may volunteer, but most are brought; they are what I call ‘wife-mandated referrals.’” (pp. 119-120)

Real has a rebuttal to the idea that good relationships make us happy: “The truth is that relationships do not make us happy. Relationships are the crucible in which we get to work on ourselves, in which we have the opportunity to stretch, grow, and, if we are fortunate, thrive

Perfect intimacy, just like distant love, is an oxymoron. Just as healthy self-esteem evolves not from fleeing one’s humanity but by cherishing oneself in the face of our flaws, so, too, real intimacy is not an escape into unbroken harmony; it grows precisely in the difficult and yet endlessly creative clash of your imperfections with mine.” (p. 209)

Real closes Chapter 13 with a profound statement about grief in relationship, that I have shared with so many of my patients who have been struggling with whether or not to stay in their marriages: “There are things you get in a real relationship, and things you do not get. The character of the union is determined by how the two partners manage both aspects of love the getting and the not getting. Moving into acceptance means moving into grief, without being a victim. You own your choice. ‘I am getting enough in this relationship,’ you say, ‘to make it worth my while to mourn the rest.’ And mourn we do. Real love is not for the faint of heart. What we miss in our relationships we truly miss. The pain of it does not, and need not, go away. It is like dealing with any loss. I object when people, especially therapists, talk about ‘resolving grief,’ as if grief could ever be so compliant. We humans don’t ‘resolve’ grief; we live with it.” (p. 224)