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“I thought it would be better this time around,” Sheila told me, referring to her second marriage.
“What tells you it isn’t?” I asked.
“I’m seeing the same patterns as with my first husband. At first, I figured I’d made that classic mistake of subconsciously choosing someone just like him, but that’s not it. I think it’s mostly me,” she explained.
Several years into her second marriage, and with the honeymoon phase in the rearview mirror, Sheila found herself playing out many of the same interpersonal “dances” that characterized her first couple. And, as before, these were undermining the relationship.
“I’m pretty critical of him, have a lot of pet peeves, get suspicious sometimes, and I expect a lot more communication than he’s used to, which was pretty much the deal with my first husband,” she explained.
“After your first marriage ended, did you assess what went wrong so you could learn from it?” I asked.
She had not. In my experience, few folks in this situation do. Upon exiting a dysfunctional liaison, most of us assign the lion’s share of blame to our spouse or partner, or simply assume we chose poorly (“We just weren’t right for each other”). Unfortunately, absent some measure of ownership, those like Sheila rarely pause to contemplate how they contributed to what went awry. Without this marital postmortem assessment, there’s no opportunity to recognize and correct the interpersonal tendencies that made a mess of things.
After Familiarity Sets in
Of course, that’s not always the case. So-called “selection errors” occur, those in which one fails to accurately perceive some personality-based poison pill in the other person’s character before it’s too late. Early in a romantic pairing, many folks play nice. Only later, after familiarity sets in, do they display their true emotional colors. However, this scenario was not true in Sheila’s second marriage.
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“I took time to size him up,” she told me. “Nobody’s perfect, but he’s a good man overall.”
A well-designed study from Canada showed that Sheila has plenty of company. The researchers followed over 500 people for eight years, all of them in their second marriages. They examined several relationship characteristics, including overall satisfaction, frequency of sex, emotional openness, expressions of appreciation, mutual trust and confidence in the strength of the bond. The study measured these elements during the participants’ first marriages, as well as the second ones, providing a reliable before-and-after comparison.
As you might expect, because the initial marriages ended badly, at first, most of the subsequent ones showed improvements in all these relationship elements, but only during the honeymoon phase. Once business-as-usual set in, the interpersonal dynamics largely reverted to those present in the first marriage. One exception was frequency of sex, which increased in second pairings. However, most participants expressed the same level of sexual satisfaction with partner number two as their prior mate.
In keeping with the adage that failing to learn from history dooms us to repeat it, many relationship experts strongly advise would-be spouses or partners to explore and compare their respective interpersonal tendencies before committing fully to each other. This proves essential when these folks have a track record of unsuccessful couplings. By examining what didn’t work and constructively modifying dysfunctional patterns, we can avoid a circular cycle of same old, same old.
“I don’t think you should pursue couples counseling right away,” I told Sheila after she suggested it. Instead, I recommended she engage in individual therapy to increase her self-awareness and expand her range of interpersonal behaviors to alter the ingrained patterns undermining the relationship.
The bottom line? The expectation that finding a new partner will cure what ailed a prior liaison, while true in some instances, often proves a wild goose chase. If you don’t want that second time around (or third, etc.) to leave you running in circles, first look back to learn from your interpersonal past. Then, look in the mirror.
For more, visit philipchard.com.
