Revelations

I’ve arrived at the second major revelation in the book Getting the Love You Want, by Harville Hendrix. The first was that we all choose our partners, not for how sexy they are, or how kind they are, or how smart they are, but for how closely they resemble our parents or primary caregivers. After some lengthy reasoning, Hendrix comes to the startling conclusion that the purpose of marriage is to heal our childhood wounds!

Some of you may think this is absurd. But I am absolutely confident that Hendrix is correct. Even before I read this book, I had an inkling of the same notions. And after some therapy with Dr. S, Hendrix has helped all of my ideas gel in my mind.

The second revelation is not so much new as it is a clarification of something that most people have closed their eyes to...

In a culture where serial monogamy is a way of life, the idea of a permanent commitment to one partner has a quaint, old-fashioned ring to it. The prevalent question of the 1950s – “Can this marriage be saved?” – has now become “Should this marriage be saved?” And millions of people decide that the answer is no. In fact, ironically, many of them have come to view divorce as an opportunity for personal growth. It’s not within marriage that people grow and change, according to this increasingly popular view, it’s when the marriage falls apart. People believe that this opens their eyes to their self-defeating behaviors and gives them an opportunity to resolve those problems with a new partner. But unless they understand the unconscious desires that motivated their dysfunctional behavior in the first marriage, and learn how to satisfy those desires with the new partner, the second marriage is destined to run aground on the same submerged rocks. The feeling of growth and change between marriages is an illusion: it is merely the pain that comes from exchanging one set of habituated behaviors for another.