A cooler head prevails

Psychologist Robert Firestone rejects the quick fix for bad marriage.

By Fred Branfman

Nov. 16, 1999 | Marriage counseling is a growth industry in which the quick-fix expert reigns supreme. John Gray, of Mars and Venus fame, repairs marriages on Oprah. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, in private performance of therapeutic miracles, helps patch up the first marriage. In cozy offices and giant workshops around the country, couples rage before couples therapists who chant "I hear how much you love one another," often to no apparent effect. Spouses share feelings, listen, repeat what they hear and pledge to continue the process until next time.

And yet.

Divorce is a growth industry, in which the weapons spouses use against each other -- restraining orders, allegations of abuse -- have become more varied and more extreme. Quick fixes fail to produce lifelong happiness, and the stats show not a dent for our earnest efforts at "active listening."

So why, exactly, do people continue to get married, to invest in the fantasy of happily ever after? Is it the pastel spell cast by the special wedding edition of "Martha Stewart Living"? An abiding belief in Tom and Nicole, nifty, go-go role models for the perfect marriage?

Santa Barbara psychologist Dr. Robert Firestone offers no instant or easy solutions for troubled marriages. He is often the first to suggest that it makes no sense to stay married or even get married in the first place. His painstaking brand of existential therapy has little in the way of sound bites to recommend it.

But his ideas -- that success in marriage often requires changing oneself at a cost of emotional pain; that spouses must respect each other's personal, professional, and sexual rights and boundaries; that maintaining a marriage by way of "emotional bondage" is more tragic than ending it -- have gained currency in the rush to save the institution. Call it a backlash -- the slow but steady tack is back in grace.

A collaborator of R.D. Laing, Firestone has written seven books, including the newly released "Fear of Intimacy," which looks at marriage and relationships For the last 20 years he has led associates and numerous friends in a group interaction that functions as a living laboratory for his approach. These unscripted sessions -- in which members hash out the issues in their own marriages -- are featured in Firestone's instructional videotapes.

As HMOs put time limits on therapy and therapists respond with instant solutions and medication, Firestone's approach -- classic talk therapy -- and his philosophy -- tough existential reckoning -- are offbeat in their connection to orthodoxy of the past.

He believes it works. A genial, tough-talking man with 40 years of clinical experience, Firestone spoke with Mothers Who Think about his work.

Dr. Firestone, marriage today appears to be in peril. Why?

People use marriage to support a destructive fantasy process. When two people want to get married, they really intend to make a go of it over a long period of time. But they can't really make an emotional commitment for all time, because it is impossible to predict how we will feel or whom we will meet in the future. So the tendency to make it into a fantasy of foreverness is, I think, the dangerous issue.

In trying to approach relationships in a more realistic way, people should realize that while [relationships] appear to offer potential fulfillment, they very often have disastrous effects. Nearly 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, and according to the National Center for Health Statistics, the average length of marriage in 1993 was seven years. So the picture for relationships in general is relatively negative unless people can challenge their defenses and develop to the point where they have more tolerance for love and intimacy.

You've also written that the couple creates an illusion of connection or "fantasy bond" to ward off the existential pain of aloneness and death's eventuality. What do you mean by that?

We all protect ourselves from the pain of separation anxiety and death anxiety, the ultimate separation. We unconsciously withhold loving feelings from our partners in order to protect ourselves against the pain of their potential loss. But we pay a heavy price by doing so, ultimately developing a reduced level of aliveness -- that is, emotional deadness, a lack of spontaneity, the dulling of interests -- and retreat into an inward posture characterized by a reduction in emotional exchanges.

Are you saying that most married people don't really love each other?

They don't necessarily, if you go by any reasonably objective definition of love. Loving operations include such observable things as overt affection, companionship, honesty and integrity, a genuine concern for the other person rather than only seeing them in relation to our own needs. But often people's personal relationships are ruled by an inner sense of desperation and an intense need for fusion which seriously interferes with the development of love, respect and concern for each other's humanness.

Next page: The "fantasy bond"