Falling in love … and staying in love

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GRAPEVINE: ‘Falling in love’ sounds like something you might do on the edge of a cliff … 

CLAYTON: Yeah. Like falling in a hole on the way to work. We use strange terms, don’t we?! Other people make it sound like diarrhoea: “I’m in love, and I just can’t help myself!” … as if they’ve gotta run to the bathroom!

GV: But when we fall in love, we do become helpless – don’t we?

CLAYTON: Oh no, no, no! Love’s not an emotion – it’s a decision! It requires commitment of the will. Imagine if it were just an emotion; the moment I’m angry at my wife or she at me – suddenly we’re ‘NOT in love’? You’ve got to be kidding …

I spent years searching for a good definition. And the best I came up with was Thomas Aquinas. He said, “To love is to want the good of the other.” And for me, that really nails it. Someone who loves me like that is never going to harm me. They’re going to try and understand me, see things from my point-of-view.

Love, defined that way, survives – no matter what emotional or sexual or physical problems arise.

GV: So, if love doesn’t make us helpless –does it make us happy?

CLAYTON: Well, I don’t think we can live satisfactory lives without love. But when people say to me, “I know few happily-married couples,” I always ask, “How many happy single people do you know? How many happy widows?”

The point is, marriage isn’t for happiness any more than being single is.

I have a friend with cancer. She and her husband aren’t happy about that. It’s worried them sick and screwed up their lovemaking. But they do have a successful marriage! And that’s why they can face one another and the future with courage and faith and hope. 

GV: But come back to ‘falling in love’: those things that first attract us to someone else – are they really that important?

CLAYTON: I don’t think so. I mean, put it this way … 

A fellow comes to see me, 18 months married, and tells me his wife is “sloppy, careless, and irresponsible.” The sink is full of dirty dishes, she forgets appointments, the house is a mess … He goes on and on about it, ‘til in the end I say, “Shut up!” (Which I’m allowed to do because I’m a therapist and have a license. When I do it, it’s called ‘therapeutic intervention’!) 

I say, “Now calm down, lighten up, breathe deeply. Run a movie in your mind. Go back to when you first met her and give me some positives. What was it that most attracted you to her?”

After some reflection, he says, “Well, she was so spontaneous and carefree!”

Now ‘spontaneous and carefree’ describes exactly the same behaviour as ‘sloppy, careless, and irresponsible’! But the difference is, he’s now married to it!

GV: You’re making this sound terribly unromantic …!

CLAYTON: I know. And romance is important. But you see, truth has now entered the picture. When they first met, he turned all those negatives into positives – so whatever she did was perfect! But life has to move on from there …

My first wife cured me of that before we got married. I made some remark about how I thought she was perfect. And she responded, “If you keep saying that, I’ll slap your face!”

GV: What? She threatened to slap your face?

CLAYTON: Exactly! And being a romantic lover, I was stunned! But she explained: “I’m not perfect. I’m an ordinary, everyday human being with all of the ordinary person’s failings and faults – so you’d better not put me on some pedestal of perfection. Otherwise, when I behave like an ordinary person, you’ll be disappointed. Or, worse, I’ll try to live up to your impossible ideal!” 

On another occasion I made the mistake of saying, “I need you!” (Romantic love, see?) And she retorted, “Well, I don’t need you! Yes, I love you passionately. I want to marry you and have your children and spend my entire life with you … but I don’t need you. If you get killed” (in Korea, where I was about to go with the US Army) “I’ll still manage to live successfully.”

So, I was thereby rapidly educated about what real love – conscious loving – was. And it did not consist of unrealistic images of the other. Nor did it consist of neediness.

GV: Well, you went ahead anyway and got married. Which leads to another question: Do people put too much emphasis on the ceremony – the wedding – and not enough on the life-long relationship?

CLAYTON: Yeah, I think so. For too many couples, the wedding is what it’s all about. But that ceremony just enshrines one thing – a VOW! By contracting to create a marriage, they’ve said “yes” to a lifetime of getting to know one another.

GV: Which is much more than a guy and a girl shacking up together, “while this good feeling lasts” – right?

CLAYTON: Yes, right. Numerous studies have shown that the only thing living together before marriage proved, was whether or not you could live together before marriage.

GV: But what about couples who make a serious commitment and have children? Does that make any difference?

CLAYTON: Yes, of course. But it’s still not the ideal. I mean, take a typical case I see all too often. Some guy has just walked out on his three-year girlfriend and their small child.

As far as she was concerned, in her own heart and soul, she was ‘married’. But not him! He persuaded her three years ago that the ceremony was meaningless – “just a bit of paper”. And anyway … “we want to be free!” So, they didn’t bother getting married.

But now? He’s exercising his ‘freedom’ – and she’s suicidal! 

GV: Someone once compared marriage to a ‘work of art’ – 

CLAYTON: That was me! Because no two human beings are ever exactly alike. Even if we could clone people, the moment they emerged they’d start responding to life in different ways. And that response is what creates us.

So, when any two of us get together in a marriage, it’s like no other marriage on earth. WE are the ones who are going to decide how this marriage looks and functions.

GV: Can you show us how this works?

CLAYTON: Well, I had this couple referred to me. Married just three months, they now wanted a divorce. The celebrant told me, “I’ve known them … they were going together four years before their wedding … very much in love … and now they’re tearing each other apart!”

When the couple came to see me, I asked them: “Did you guys talk together about the kind of marriage you wanted to create?”

They looked at me like I’d just arrived from Mars!

So I said, “Imagine you both go to build a house, and the contractor says, ‘Well, we don’t have any plans for this building …’ So here, she’s designing a kitchen in the very place where you’re digging a hole for a swimming pool! And you’re nailing up a door right where she wants the picture window!”

That’s what was going on, at an emotional level, with the two of them. Each was sullenly waiting for the other to deliver the goods on this thing called ‘happy marriage’. They didn’t realise they had to plan it together! 

So, I told them I wanted them to talk for the next week about what they wanted from each other – what their visionof the marriage was. And 10 days later, I saw them for their second (and last) appointment. The moment they walked in the door I knew things had changed for the better!

GV: So how do you respond to people who say, “Oh, I was married once, but it didn’t work!” …?

CLAYTON: It’s funny, eh. The factory must’ve had poor quality-control on marriages that day! Or maybe they got a dud – one with flat batteries or a faulty mainspring!

When people talk about marriage like an external ‘it’, you know immediately what the problem is. They thought it was something outside themselves – off over there somewhere. However, what they should have said is: “I was married once but WE didn’t work at it.” Or “I was married once but WE didn’t know what we were doing.”

It’s a relationship, it’s an ‘us’ or a ‘we’ – not an ‘it’ off there in the distance.

GV: We all know that being unfaithful to your marriage partner means having sex with someone else. But is that all that infidelity means?

CLAYTON: No way! There are people who wouldn’t dream of sleeping with somebody else, but they constantly, verbally, tear down their partner. That’s being ‘unfaithful’ to their vows.

And there are other people who commit infidelity with, say, a golf club.

I had a case once – a retired couple, lived next to a golf course. She told me, “He’s always out there practising … always has time for that. And when he’s home, all he ever wants is to watch the golf on TV. He flies to Hawaii or Scotland for golf – leaving me here!”

So she says to him, “You love golf much more than you love me!”

He thinks for a moment and says, “I guess you’re right.” Then with a hopeful look he adds, “But you’ve got to admit, I love YOU more than I love football …” 

GV: Isn’t a work-a-holic guilty of the same thing?

CLAYTON: Absolutely. The guy who’s married to his work instead of his spouse is being unfaithful to his wife and family. And that’s why (years and years ago!) someone by the name of Clayton Barbeau said on national television, “Where you place your time, you place your life … and where you place your life, you place your love!”

GV: Great quote! Can we use it?

CLAYTON: Sure. But just let me add something here about fidelity. Fidelity’s not a dead word – it’s actually very powerful. Being faithful to each other isn’t just ‘not doing’ certain things. It’s being faithful to that vow, faithful to the commitment you made – to love each other into life and fullness.

And I tell you, when you’ve got two people doing that, their whole lives are GIFTS to each other!

GV: But what do you say to couples whose marriages are drifting into a sort of boredom?

CLAYTON: I call them ‘stale-mates’. They’re marriages of strangers. And, often, underneath it all is the disillusionment that follows the ‘hot relationship’ of early days.

They settle down, the baby arrives, and they fall into routines. Into clichés. ‘Monday’ could be videotaped in their lives – and they’d never have to live Monday again. There’s nothing new, no excitement.

They now only meet at the outside rim of their personalities. They’re functioning like two gears in a machine. It looks okay superficially – meals are on time, and they go through all the motions. But there’s no real vitality at the heart of it.

GV: So how do they get that vitality back?

CLAYTON: Well, many of them don’t bother. They head into a divorce crisis, because the ‘glue’ holding them together is so thin that any outside force coming along just breaks them apart.

Maybe one of them has an affair. Or he or she loses a job. Maybe they’re staying together ‘for the kids’ … but the kids grow up and go to uni. And once that happens, they can’t see the point in sticking together any longer.

GV: That ‘glue’ just dissolves?

CLAYTON: Right! And one of them finally says, “I’m not putting up with this. I’m getting out!” And the other’s stunned: “But I’ve been the perfect wife/husband!” So next, they come to see someone like me.

I say, “How can I help?” And they say, “We want to know if we should get a divorce.” And I say, “Well, I’m sorry, but I don’t have a crystal ball …”

Having cleared that up, I then ask, “I guess you feel that you’ve either got to accept the status quo in this marriage or break out of it – right?”

GV: By which stage they’re nodding – right?

CLAYTON: Yeah. So then I say, “Have you ever thought that since it’s your own creation you can re-create it?”

Now, for 85% of couples, that divorce crisis is the moment of greatest growth in their marriage! Sometimes I even introduce them to each other! It’s like they’ve never really met – they’ve just been going through all these routines.

Sometimes I say: “I’m going to leave the room for 10 minutes. While I’m out, I want you guys to brainstorm about fun things you could do in the next six months. Don’t argue about them – just write them down as each of you gets an idea. Make a couple of lists …” (And I usually make the guy the secretary – we don’t want to be sexist about this!)

So they do it. And pretty soon they’ve got 20 or 30 things on those lists. Then I pop back in and say, “Now, combine any ideas that are on both lists.” And I leave the room again.

Then I say, “Choose three that you could do in the next month.”

And finally, I say, “Choose one that you agree you’ll do, and name the date and hour you’ll do it – this week!”

GV: You get them putting fun back in their marriage.

CLAYTON: Sure. Coupled with other input and therapy sessions, it’s very effective. And exciting to watch. Frankly, my work involves helping ‘corpses’ – lifeless marriages – come to life! Who wouldn’t be energised by seeing that?  

GV: But what about couples who’ve been together for a long, long time. Can marriages stay alive and vital right into those twilight years? 

CLAYTON: Absolutely – so long as they don’t settle back like the task is finished and slip into routines. They’ve got so much shared history. They know one another so well. But that doesn’t mean they can’t still surprise each other! 

When we routinise our lives so that our dialogue at breakfast is the same every morning – or our lovemaking is same every week or month (and lasts four minutes before he goes to sleep!) – then you just kill the marriage. It’s in a rut, the same old script being played over and over, and it has nothing to do with what’s going on inside. 

But when you have two people who are still holding hands at 80, and he’s still saying, “The best thing I ever did was marry you!” … well, they’re really in touch. 

GV: Their love just keeps growing and growing … 

CLAYTON: True! I’ve got a very dear friend. He’s now 83 years old. His wife died 18 months ago, and I helped him a little during the grieving process.

He gave me some poems he’d written after she died, and those poems were great testaments to the fact that these two had grown ‘more married’ every year of their lives together …

And that’s what it’s all about. You’re constantly ‘getting married’. The vow is always, in a sense, being re-validated with every loving act … or broken by every unloving act.

These two were just a fantastic team! One another’s very best friends. True intimates. Soul mates.

When that sort of love keeps growing through the years, your partner becomes somebody you can trust – literally trust – with your life!