The Exceptional Seven Percent. Gregory K. Popcak

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      2

      The Relationship Pathway

      The relation between any two decently married people changes profoundly every few years... every change causes pain, even if it brings a certain joy. Marriage is a long event of perpetual change in which a man and a woman mutually build up their souls and make themselves whole.

      —D. H. LAWRENCE

      WHY ARE you married?

      Your answer to this question has everything to do with the longevity, happiness, and fulfillment you can expect from your relationship. While there are many possible responses, they all break down into discernible categories or themes, if you will, which guide the overall course of the marriage. For example some couples build their marriage around the theme of escape, hoping to use each other to avoid dealing with a world which they believe is either too overwhelming or too uninteresting. Other couples build their lives around achieving their basic needs, attempting to guarantee financial or emotional security for themselves—often at the expense of true intimacy or love. For most conventional couples, the primary motivation for marriage is companionship, cheering each other on as both partners seek their place in the world at large. Finally, there are those Exceptional couples who construct their marriages around fulfilling a marital imperative, a deeply held, clearly defined set of values, ideals, and goals. Over the next few pages, you will become more aware of the advantages and disadvantages of your own marital theme and discover the incredible benefits of building your relationship around a marital imperative, the only theme which all but guarantees the lifelong relevance, happiness, and success of a marriage.

      That different marriages revolve around different themes is a fairly well established fact, but to date, no one has been able to show a meaningful connection among these themes. For example, based on available research, a marriage therapist could probably identify your marriage as, let’s say, a “blue marriage” and likewise tell you that it was not as desirable as a “green marriage.” But the same therapist would be hardpressed to tell you exactly how to move from your marriage into the more desirable one except perhaps to suggest that you need to “communicate better” or, “hope for better luck the next time you marry.” Until now, there was simply no meaningful way to tell couples what specific issues they needed to address to move to the next, more satisfying, stage of their lives together.

      The Relationship Pathway is a model I have developed to explain how marital themes (and, in turn, marital satisfaction) can evolve over the life of a marriage. The Relationship Pathway illustrates the skills, attitudes, and behaviors a couple must learn in order to move from one major marital type to another. Further, it suggests that most marriages are basically good and can likewise become exceptional if a couple takes the time to learn what to do and practice what they know.

The Relationship Pathway (Figure 2.1) organizes five major categories of marriage (and a few subtypes) along a continuum of identity strength. (Readers with some psychology background may note the correspondence between the Relationship Pathway and Abraham Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs.”) Each marital type on the pathway is rated as being Impoverished, Conventional, or Exceptional, and as a couple moves up the pathway, the potential for marital happiness and longevity increases. Though every couple starts out at a different point on the Relationship Pathway, they all move along it one stage at a time. There is no skipping grades because not only does each stage of the pathway represent a shift in relational attitudes and the mastery of different skills, but each stage also reflects a change in the way the couple view their whole life. As such, it often takes a major crisis—the kind that makes us say, “I don’t know anything, anymore”—to motivate us to make the personal changes necessary to move from one relationship stage to the next. A person can move up the pathway without going through such a crisis, but he would have to be seriously and consistently attentive to his psychological and marital growth. Frankly, most of us are too lazy and distracted to do this, and it takes our lives falling apart before we are willing to take the steps necessary to move toward greater identity strength and deeper intimacy with our mate.