FAMILY TIMES
Judy Gibson
Dells Events
July 28, 2001
One thing I used to love doing with my children and various friends when I lived in Minnesota was to take a canoe trip in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA). In this place, inaccessible except by canoe, it is possible to travel for days, weeks, even months without leaving an extensive wilderness area.
Since I have taken many trips with various people, I formed a theory that a BWCA trip is a microcosm of the relationship of those who travel together.
My second husband and I made a trip together, arguing the entire time in a sort of power struggle. Indeed, that characterized a relationship that reflected a need for both of us to wield power over the other.
A woman I shared this theory with said it proved true for her, too. She and her husband took a trip before their marriage that was sunlit days of enchantment and happiness with a few moody times thrown in. That has been the story of her marriage, she said, wonderful most of the time interspersed with occasions when her husband goes into a funk.
Marriages, intimate relationships that they are, bring out the best and the worst in us. The manuals on making marriage work are numerous and repetitive – stressing communication skills and mutual values.
One concept that has always helped me in my own life and also in my work with couples has been a concept from psychoanalyst Carl Jung about the ways that we look outside ourselves for our incompleteness inside. He calls it the “animus” and the “anima” – the inner male and the inner female. Jung says that all of us carry a mirror of our gender and things can go awry when those aspects of ourselves are not acknowledged. One way this comes out is in seeking a partner that somehow fits these internal pictures and serves to “complete” the person like the famous line in the movie “Jerry Maguire” – “You complete me.” We hope to find, and then create the reality of a partner that can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.
There lies the trap.
Couples who have been married for many years have negotiated the mine field of this disappointment, for surely a disappointment it is when the other fails to live up to the projection of the inner need. My parents generation had it a little easier, I think, since female and male roles were more defined. Expectations were clearer.
In this new century male and female roles are all mixed up; yet each of us still carries within us the ideal of a partner who will fulfill us. The conservative, cautious man marries a funloving, adventurous woman. They may balance each other for awhile, but eventually the roles can become a prison.
When I married for the second time we had a pre-ceremony conference with the minister. He asked both of us what about this new marriage would make it more likely to last than the last one.
I said, “I think I’ve changed a lot since then.”
He replied, “My dear, don’t you think you will change again?”
He was right. Adapting to the changing partner is nearly impossible if we hold them to the image of the ideal we need to complete ourselves.
The answer is, of course, to work on completing ourselves without looking to each other. This is what I used to encourage in couples I counseled who were having difficulty. Often one or both would be waiting for the other to do something they wanted and expected, while the spouse was on to something else – exploring some other aspect of his or her growth.
I would be able to tell if a couple would make it through the rocky times almost immediately in the first few minutes of the first session. It was an intangible – something that could nearly be felt in the air, and I can only describe it as the love between them or maybe the level of commitment to the marriage.
I maintain that everyone who marries will need at some point to deal with this issue of internal projections. How they resolve it together is unique to each couple, but whether they do it at all depends on the degree of their love for and commitment to each other.