Marriage: Gives Rise to the Co-Creation of Self

by Martha S. Cohen, Ph. D., LP

No one party [to marriage] can be solely in charge. What you alone think it ought to be, it is not going to be. Where you alone think you want it to go, it is not going to go. It is going where the two of you -- and marriage, time, life, history and the world -- will take it. You do not know the road; you commit your life to a way. - Wendell Berry.

We do not exist in isolation. Who we are emerges in our interactions with other people. We may think we exist separately, apart from the relationships in our lives, but that is an illusion.

It is in our relationships that we create ourselves, and provide our partners with an "other" in whose context they create themselves. Our "self" exists not in our head or body, but in the space between us and the people with whom we connect. Who we are depends on what we bring to our relationships, whom we choose as a partner, and the nature and quality of the connection between us.

I'll meet your needs if you meet mine.

This concept of mutual self-creation represents a profound shift in how to think about our relationships. Most of us have been raised in a culture in which the emphasis is placed on self-gratification and self-actualization. We choose friends, teachers, and lovers, who can meet our needs and they hope we will meet theirs. These expectations become the basis for a relationship. Such a model of relationship is based on the myth of the separate self, a myth that pervades our science, psychology, religion, economy, politics... and our marriages.

Marriage, in this model, is based on an agreement that I will meet your needs if you will meet mine. Pre-marital counseling focuses on compatibility of needs, values, lifestyle, priorities. Couples divorce when they discover that they have made a mistake in judging that their needs were compatible, or when one of the pair stops living up to his or her side of the agreement. What many divorcing individuals fail to see is their own contribution to the supposed incompatibility, or how they actually reject their partner's attempts to respond to their needs.

We each bring to our marriages a range of potential traits, feelings, and behaviors-in- relationship. These are derived from our past experiences in intimate relationships, both with previous partners and with parents, siblings, and others in our family of origin. They are actualized as we interact with our partner. Our partner's behaviors partly determine which of these potential behaviors show up as the "self" we become in that marriage. This is not to say that our partner "causes" our behavior, but rather that his or her behavior elicits some particular feelings and behavioral patterns from us rather than others. In turn, our actual behavior elicits certain traits, feelings or behaviors-in-relationship from our partner.

We each draw out the other's real self, the ugly included. Romantic love, that mysterious "chemistry" that draws two people together, is a matter of mutual transference. We fall in love with someone who is similar to our childhood caretakers; we are drawn to such persons not because they are familiar, but because we are unconsciously trying to finish childhood, to get from our new intimate relationship the love we didn't get from our old ones. Our beloved has our caretakers' positive traits, and so we bond to this person. And as we interact with this person, a self emerges that we experience as our "true" self. We are smarter, wiser, funnier, sexier, more of everything that we most want to be, and that is affirmed by our partner. We love the self we are in the presence of our beloved, as well as the self that emerges in our partner in our presence.

But the similarities between our chosen partners and our childhood caretakers extend to defensive or negative behaviors. Sooner or later our partner does something that triggers a childhood wound, and we react defensively. Our defense is likely to resemble something negative that our partner's parents did, and so our behavior hurts our partner. That increases the likelihood that his or her reaction will be defensive and hurtful to us.

Gradually, the self that emerges in interaction with our partner, that is elicited by our partner's presence, becomes the defensive self, responding out of fear and pain rather than love and joy. This shift is often experienced by the partner as a puzzling and unexpected change in personality.

To the extent that we are aware that we are changing, we attribute the change in ourselves to the changes in our partners. We fail to recognize, that the changes in our partners are responses to the changes in ourselves. Partners in couples' therapy will sometimes verbalize this as: "I don't like the person I am becoming around you." Each person believes that the other has a separate and independent self, and that he or she is changing in response to the other. And so they decide that they are really incompatible, and didn't know it, or they decide that the other person is no longer living up to their side of the agreement.

Someone has to change first.

The way out of this impasse is for partners to recognize their own contribution to eliciting the "self" in the other that they don't like, and to do so without judgment of self or other. What we do that elicits the defensive self in our partner may not be bad in itself, but it is a behavior that is hurtful or frightening to him or her, because of his or her particular vulnerabilities.

We can make it less likely that your partner will be hurtful to you by changing the things we do that threaten or hurt our partner. But typically we want our partners to change first. And our partners want us to change first!

Someone has to agree to change first in order to find a way out of this impasse.

If we choose to stretch against our own fear of getting hurt, and change our own behavior, we make it easier for our partner to manifest a different self with us, a safer and more loving self. This, in turn, will provide a context in which we can manifest a safer and more loving self which will be the new context for our partner. The vicious circle of impasse can be transformed into a healing circle, a cycle of circular causation in which each person once again brings out the best in the other.

Suggested Resources

Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples , Keeping the Love You Find: A Personal Guide, by Harville Hendrix, Ph.D. We Have to Talk: Healing Dialogues between Women and Men, by Samuel Shem, M.D., and Janet Surrey, Ph.D. The Healing Connection: How Women Form Relationships in Therapy and in Life, Jean Baker Miller, Ph.D., and Irene Stiver, Ph.D.

Martha S. Cohen, Ph.D., LP is a clinical psychologist in private practice at the Minnesota Institute for Relationship Therapy, in Minneapolis. She trained extensively in Imago therapy with Harville Hendrix, Ph.D., and has studied with other authors and psychotherapists who have contributed to the development of the relationship paradigm within psychology. She offers ongoing couples' therapy and intensive weekend "Getting the Love You Want" couples' workshops. She can be contacted at 612-379-5360.

Reprinted from The Phoenix, Volume 20 Number 5, May 2000.