Reaching For Greater Intimacy

A Good marriage offers the most favorable opportunities in our culture for fulfilling the will to relate. Gibson Winter declares, "Marriage is intended to be an intimate relationship. This is the one opportunity for sharing one's whole life with another person." Because marriage is potentially the most intimate of human relationships, it is both the most difficult relationship, on the one hand, and the most rewarding, on the other. It is the place where most adults have the opportunity to lessen loneliness, satisfy their heart-hungers, and participate in the wonderfully creative process of self-other fulfillment.

The importance of achieving intimacy in marriage is enhanced by the scarcity of depth relationships outside the family. The slope of the psych-social continent on which we live is away from close relationships; hence the gravitational pull is toward passing without really meeting - like ships in the night. The minister who told his psychotherapist, " My life is characterized by a plethora of contacts and a poverty of relationships," was describing most of us. Many factors in our society militate against depth relationships - the frenzied pace of our lives; the frantic pressures to get ahead which encourage using rather than relating to people; the constant mobility of many families which contributes to rootlessness and noninvolvement in community life; the anonymity of megalopolis where people do not know the names of even those in adjoining apartments. Furthermore a majority of males in industrialized societies is involved in some form of bureaucracy - a corporation, a union, the government, the military, a church political machinery, a large university, etc. and bureaucracies tend to be inherently depersonalizing, creating manipulative I-It relationships. Basically, it requires time and face-to-face, nonmanipulative interaction deepening relationships to grow. For most of us both of these are in short supply outside the family. From his long experience in working with emotionally disturbed children, Bruno Bettelheim declares "The more we live in a mass society, the more important are intimate relationships."

The importance of achieving an intimate marriage is further increased by the power of the partner in monogamous relationships. Martial partners become the key resource persons for supplying the basic foods of the spirit. Each spouse has considerable power to nourish or to starve the other's personality. The covenant of marriage is a commitment to the mutual responsibility for fulfilling the deep personality needs of the other - "to love and to cherish" by so doing. It is not that one is responsible for "making my mate happy." No one can make another person happy. But when two people commit themselves to a kind relationship which necessarily excludes many other sources of personality-feeding, they have an obligation to do all within their power to provide the interpersonal food the other needs. In taking our marriage vows, we agree to become key resource persons to each other. We can fulfill this mutual-nurturing function only by developing a relationship deep enough to provide channels for satisfying personality hungers. As Gibson Winter says, "Intimacy is the crucial need in marriage today. It is, consequently, the focus of marital difficulty."

The nurturing of one's partner is much more than an obligation derived from the marriage covenant. It is an open door of opportunity to participate in the creative process by which the God-given potentialities of two human beings are progressively fulfilled; it is a way of satisfying one of the fundamental needs of every person - the need to give as well as to receive love.

Alone a man marks time and becomes very set in his ways. In the demanding confrontation which marriage constitutes, he must ever go beyond himself, develop, grow into maturity. When marriage is reduced to mere symbiosis of two persons essentially hidden from one another, peaceful though such life may sometimes be, it has completely missed its goal. Then it is not solely the marriage which has failed but both husband and the wife. They have failed in calling as a man and a woman. To fail to understand one's spouse is to fail to understand oneself. It is also a failure to grow and to fulfill one's possibilities.
Here one encounters the fundamental principle of reciprocity in relationships - it is in the process of interaction, of giving and receiving, the one's basic needs are satisfied.

Modern marriage, with its robust emphasis on companionship, communication, and equality, offers unprecedented possibilities for the growth of depth relationships. But the democratic model of marriage also offers more opportunities for conflict and progressive alienation, It puts more demands on the partners than did the older patriarchal model. Roles are changing rapidly and in ways that are threatening to husbands and to wives. The increased communication, mutual sharing, and openness which are at the heart of the new model mean that both partners are asked to give more of themselves to the relationship. There is little place to hide. Inadequacies in our abilities to relate cannot be hidden in relationships which put a premium on transparency. Even the normal need for "distancing" at certain times may be misinterpreted by the spouse as rejection.

Such are the dilemma and the challenge of modern marriage. The same factors - openness, equality, communication, companionship - which create new potentialities for conflict also present us with the opportunity to develop relationships of unprecedented depth and mutual fulfillment. Eric Berne describes what we regard as the goal of modern marriage:

For certain fortunate people there is something which transcends all classifications of behavior, and that is awareness; something that arises above the programming of the past, and that is spontaneity; and something that is more rewarding than games, and that is intimacy. But all three of these may be frightening and even perilous to the unprepared.