Getting the Love You Want, 20th An. Ed. (23 page)

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Authors: Ph.D Harville Hendrix

BOOK: Getting the Love You Want, 20th An. Ed.
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ANNE AND GREG met in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1981. Anne, who lived in Dallas, was spending the weekend in Santa Fe with two friends. She had been divorced for three years and had dated several men casually, and was just getting to the stage where she wanted to remarry. “I wasn’t interested in casual relationships anymore,” she says. “I was looking for something permanent.” That weekend, however, Anne was not thinking about meeting men; she was mainly interested in having a good time with her friends Josie and Shelley. On Friday night the three women went out to a lounge. During dinner Josie mentioned that she wasn’t very good at meeting men. Anne jokingly agreed to be Josie’s coach. “You don’t have to do anything seductive,” she told Josie. “If you see an interesting man, just look his way when he looks at you and smile. And if anybody asks you to dance, get up and dance. Then the guy will know
that you’re willing to dance and will have more courage to come over.”
Anne was having a fun time giving Josie pointers on how to meet a man, when she glanced up and happened to see a lone man walk into the room. He was tall and slender, and he was wearing a corduroy jacket. Anne remembers thinking that he looked “rugged yet neat.” She also thought he had a presence about him, an aura of self-confidence and intelligence. Anne forgot all about her coaching job. “Now,
that
one’s mine,” she said to Josie.
Greg has an equally vivid memory of the encounter. He was in town for the weekend, celebrating his imminent divorce from his third wife. In fact, he had filed the divorce papers the day before. He was interested in having a good time but, with three failed marriages behind him, he had no interest whatsoever in establishing a permanent connection. He walked into the lounge and glanced around. He noticed Anne, a tall, animated blonde in her mid-thirties, and was immediately attracted to her. After a while he asked her to dance.
“We started talking right away,” says Anne. “A lot of guys don’t know how to talk to women, but we were going a mile a minute. I liked that about him.” Another thing she liked about Greg was the fact that he wasn’t daunted by her academic background. (She has a Ph.D. and is an associate professor of counseling at a Southern university.) Several of the men she had dated had been intimidated by her intelligence. To appear less threatening, she had learned to refer to herself as a “teacher.” “But I knew right away that I wouldn’t have to keep back anything from Greg,” she says. “He told me he had a Ph.D. himself—in engineering—and that he admired bright women.”
Greg and Anne talked and danced all evening, and Greg walked her back to her motel. The next morning they met for breakfast and went for a walk. The attraction was strong on both sides, but not overpowering. That weekend might have been the beginning and end of their relationship if Anne
hadn’t impulsively sent Greg a card the next week. When Greg opened the card, he telephoned Anne and asked if he could come to Dallas that weekend to see her. Anne had other plans, but rearranged her schedule so that she could spend time with him.
“That was it,” says Anne. “We were off and running. It was almost as if a drug took over.” When Anne reflects on those early days, she is amazed that she plunged so abruptly into the relationship. Greg had a lot of strikes against him. He had not one, not two, but
three
previous marriages, and he had four children from two of those relationships. Anne had written her doctoral dissertation on the difficulties of being a stepparent, so she knew exactly what she was getting into. On top of all this, she and Greg lived 250 miles apart and had well-established careers in their respective cities. “A sane person would have looked at those facts and run in the opposite direction,” she says, “but the attraction between us was too strong.”
 
WHAT WAS THE source of this attraction? To find out, we need to know something about their separate childhoods. Anne was an only child. Throughout her early years, her father was in the service, so she saw him only when he was on leave. Her mother joined the navy when Anne was six months old, leaving Anne in the care of her grandfather and stepgrandmother. By the time her mother came back a year later, Anne had become very attached to her grandparents and once again had to sever close bonds.
This early pattern of abandonment was reinforced when Anne was seven years old and her mother and father divorced. Her father left town, and Anne didn’t see him again until she was thirteen and managed to locate him by writing to the Red Cross.
Anne has clear memories of her early years with her mother. Her mother was a flighty, social woman who frequently placed her needs above Anne’s. There were many times when her
mother stayed out all night and didn’t come home until late the next day. Anne would wake up, discover that she was alone, and stalwartly go about getting herself ready for school.
When Anne’s mother did happen to be around, she was not very nurturing, according to Anne. “I don’t remember being held or touched or stroked,” she said. But her mother was the source of some vital approval. “She really thought I was neat and was very confident in my ability. She didn’t say ugly things to me or criticize me.”
Partly because of the need to care for herself and partly because her mother praised her self-reliance, Anne became a responsible, independent child. She turned to her school and to church for the nurturing she missed at home. She denied the pain that came from the lack of security and warmth in her upbringing, because it was too overwhelming. To the outside observer, Anne appeared to be a self-confident, assertive young woman.
 
 
HER HUSBAND, GREG, the oldest of five children, grew up on a farm in Arkansas. What he remembers most about his childhood is that there was not much affection between his mother and father. “There was a lot of yelling,” he says, “mainly on my mother’s side. She was a real vocal person. She had a lot of anger. But she was also very loving.”
Money was always an issue in Greg’s family: “My mother would bitch about money, and my father would ignore her.” He describes his father as a kind, intelligent man, though without a lot of drive. “He worked hard, but he wouldn’t accomplish much,” says Greg. “He always seemed to be living in the future. He would say things like ‘If it rains in August, we’ll get seventy bushels of corn, and everything will be all right.’ Or ‘If it rains, the soybeans will make it.’ He was always saying, ‘Next year things will be better.’ He sustained himself with a vision that things were going to be OK.” One of the things that bothered him about his dad was that he had dreams that he
never realized. “He always talked about wanting a plane,” says Greg. “It was really important to him. But he never did anything about it. If I wanted a plane, I would make it happen. I would do whatever was necessary to realize that goal. My dad just let life slip by him.”
Greg’s parents were never abusive to him or his brothers and sisters, but, in his words, “it wasn’t a hugging family.” Greg played on his own a lot, spending a lot of time roaming around the farm creating vivid fantasies in his head. By and large, Greg remembers his childhood as being a happy period. “I was cheerful. Not much bothered me. But I was usually alone. Kind of aloof. I had friends, but I didn’t let them get close. I didn’t feel lonely, just apart. I had a sense that I was different from everybody else. Not worse. Not better. Just different.”
Greg didn’t break out of his isolation until late in life, well into his second marriage, and, surprisingly, it wasn’t his second wife who managed to get close to him; it was a male friend. Greg explains how this came about. “This casual friend of mine kept wanting to get closer,” he says. “I didn’t like the guy at first, but he kept moving in, moving in. He kept asking me to do things with him. When that didn’t work, he arranged for a foursome with our wives. I kept saying no, but he persisted. Finally I remember saying to myself, ‘I’d better get to know this S.O.B., because he’s not going to go away.’ He forced his way into my friendship. Kind of plowed his way in. He became my first intimate friend. It kind of broke the ice. But even though I finally learned what it was like to be close to someone, I didn’t seek it out. I felt pretty self-sufficient as I was.”
Greg’s first marriage was to his high school sweetheart. “That one was easy,” he recalls. “My first wife was more like a buddy or a friend. There never was a real strong love.” The marriage lasted eleven years. Greg felt that they lived on different intellectual planes and that they had little in common, but to him the fact that they were different kinds of people didn’t justify ending the marriage. “We had two kids,” he says, “and it
wasn’t considered proper in either of our families to divorce.” Eventually Greg got involved with another woman. “I think I was using it as an excuse to end the marriage,” he says. “In everybody’s eyes, an affair was a good enough reason to call it quits. You have an affair, you get divorced.”
The worst mistake in his life, says Greg, was marrying the woman with whom he had been having the affair. “She wasn’t a very kind person. She was smart, and I felt a strong physical attraction for her, but she wasn’t the kind of person I wanted to marry. We had a lot of problems. We had sexual problems, communication problems, and she was always suspicious of me. She kept accusing me of having other affairs.” Their stormy relationship lasted five years. During this time they had a child, and Greg adopted her son by another relationship. (Now he was the father of four children: two by his first marriage, two by this one.) When his second wife threatened divorce for the third or fourth time, Greg told her, “I’ve had it. I’m leaving and not coming back. Go ahead with the divorce.”
Greg was single for four years and then married his third wife, a woman from a wealthy family in Alabama. She was five years older than he and, in contrast to his second wife, a “high-class” woman. He says that he married his third wife largely because he wanted a mother for his ten-year-old daughter, the only one of his children who was living with him. “I thought she could give my daughter a lot of things that I could not, or would not, provide for her.” Greg and his third wife were good friends, and he had a lot of respect for her. There was nothing particularly bad about the relationship, according to Greg, but “there wasn’t anything really wonderful about it, either. The highs weren’t very high. The lows weren’t very low. And there was no communication. There was no intimacy. No sharing. She was intimate with me, but my intimacy would only go so far. So that was the end of number three.”
Greg’s casual approach to divorce and marriage might alarm some people, but in an age where divorce is easy and genuinely
helpful information on marriage is scarce, he was choosing one of the few options available to him. All he knew was that none of his three intimate love relationships worked for him. There was something missing in all of them—and in his life—that made staying married intolerable.
 
ANNE’S FIRST MARRIAGE was similar to Greg’s in that it was fairly serene, traditional, and uneventful. Her husband, Albert, was a high school math teacher in a private school. The first ten years of their marriage were smooth and serene: “Albert was busy with his teaching job, and I was busy raising our two little girls.” Because of Anne’s unusual childhood, she didn’t have a good role model for married life. “I think I got my image of marriage from the television,” says Anne, “and from books and watching other people. I didn’t have any of the details. No skills. So my first one was all on the surface. But it didn’t feel superficial; we were doing the best that we could.”
Things went along fairly smoothly until Albert went through an emotional crisis in the tenth year of their marriage. It seemed to them that this was totally unrelated to anything that was happening in their lives. His suffering became so acute that he went to his doctor for help. The doctor told him he was suffering from anxiety and prescribed some sedatives to help him sleep. Albert dutifully listened to what the doctor had to say, and went to a pharmacy to fill the prescription, but when he got home his first words to Anne were “What does ‘anxiety’ mean?” She couldn’t explain it to him. “That’s how naive we were,” says Anne.
Albert went through the bottle of pills and still felt no better. Eventually he discovered a workable solution, which was to withdraw. He spent a lot of time by himself; when he and Anne were together, he wasn’t emotionally available, because he was too busy trying to maintain his own internal equilibrium. Anne was deeply troubled by his withdrawal. Outside of her awareness, it brought back memories of her early abandonment. She
struggled to break through to Albert, but nothing seemed to work. In desperation, she began to pull away from him. “I went back into my old childhood pattern of taking care of myself, that old coping mechanism of mine of being totally independent.”
In addition to the lack of intimacy between them, Anne and Albert began to have other difficulties. “He wanted me to be a good faculty wife,” Anne says. “I was friendly and outgoing and very involved, and the people at the school liked me. But there was a part of me that was not happy in this role.” She, in turn, was unhappy with Albert’s role as a teacher. “I wanted him to go back to school and get a degree in administration. I hoped that he would move into an administrative position at the school, which would spare him some of the pressures of teaching.” When Anne reflects on the situation today, she realizes that she had hidden motives for wanting him to change careers. “Consciously I was thinking about what the degree would do for him, but underneath it all I think I was projecting my own unfulfilled ambitions onto him. I was the one who wanted to go back to school. I was taking my own frustrated career drive and putting it onto Albert,” she says.

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