Love, Honor and Negotiate: Making Your Marriage Work by Betty Carter
I read a lot of self help books, but I haven’t read a lot of self help books on how to make one’s marriage work. The authors are Betty Carter, who has been a therapist for decades, and Joan Peters, who made it readable.
One of the points driven home by this book is that people get their blueprint as to what kind of a husband or wife to be based on their parents. This seems obvious, but when you really get your head around the idea, it’s revelatory. Men find themselves emulating their fathers, whether their fathers wanted to or not, and women decide (or are told) what kind of a wife to be based on how their mothers reacted.
The book is fifteen years old, and it does feel a bit dated at parts. Carter bases a lot of her idea on normal couples on boomer couples, and compares them to her own marriage. She has stories from her clinical practice of couples who came to her for counselling, and the men, to me, feel like old men. They act like old men. Is it because men have changed more in the past ten or twenty years than women have? Women are still trying to be supermoms, but I think younger men aren’t as threatened by the idea of being co-parents as the example men in this book are. It’s odd to me to have her speculate as to what kind of parents the Gen Xers are going to be, when so many Millenials are procreating already.
Carter has a distinctively feminist slant. One gets the impression, after reading this book, that the only couplings that aren’t doomed to a non-stop struggle and likely failure are lesbian couples. A position she states and reiterates firmly and repeatedly is that women absolutely must retain autonomy in a marriage, and that whoever has the gold makes the rules. That is, a woman who lets herself become financially dependent on a man is setting herself and her marriage up for failure. I’m not sure about that. It would be wonderful if everyone got flex time and part time and Swedish-style family planning, but the fact is that “traditional” marriage is traditional because, for all the flaws, they work at some level.
It’s an interesting book because it talks a lot about important issues that we tend to ignore, like power and dominance and the detrimental effect they have on what should be a democratic relationship. It’s a depressing book because while it delves into the myriad problems that mixed-gender couples have, it doesn’t discuss how great it can all be when everything works. Also, while it started out swiftly, in the end she lapsed into a lecture on her ideas for how society must change, which I didn’t enjoy.
It’s a useful book for any married person or single person who might get married, but because of its slants, it shouldn’t be the only book you read.
1 comments
I don’t know if I agree with you “‘traditional’ marriage is traditional because, for all the flaws, they work at some level.”
I think it did work in a type of environment but that environment doesn’t necessarily exist anymore (at least in the United States). Just like the tradition of marriage existed at one point in time for a whole slew of reasons that aren’t applicable anymore. That doesn’t mean people stopped getting married when those reasons disappeared but it also mean different problems arose because those previous reasons are absent.
I do think that some traditional marriages work but only in certain situations. I would more agree with the author that with divorce, self-fulfillment, longer lives, less children, retirement, etc on the table that a woman with financial means of her own tends to have an equally weighted voice in marital conversations and therefore will have an easier time in a marriage. I’m not sure it dooms one’s marriage not to have that but it certainly makes sure that an advocate for the wife when it seems to be a “financial” decision (like who stays home with the kid, do we pay for childcare, do we move to a different city).