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December
John Hanley
Interviews Marty Feldman about Marriage
John: Ok, Marty, let’s talk about
marriage here. The first thing I want to ask you is
what do you think is the significance of marriage
itself as opposed to a so-called committed
relationship? What is the advantage of
marriage?
Marty: I think that’s a really
interesting question, a great question, because I
think that the advantage of marriage as opposed to
a committed relationship is very subtle. It’s
even a metaphysical question. I think that by
standing in front of whatever group of family and
friends and community and God and making a promise
and a commitment and having your heart exposed that
way, I think that there is a metaphysical change in
your own state and your own commitment that
happens. And so I believe in marriage for that
reason, among many. I want to say one other thing:
I think that the purpose of marriage and any
long-term committed relationship needs to evolve.
And part of what my work is and what my book is is
to clarify what might be a purpose that would work
for many people in the 21st century, as
relationships have gotten more difficult and their
purpose more cloudy.
John: Ok. So just to be clear, some
couple who says they’re committed to each
other for life but they’re not married, you
think they could be missing out in the sense that
there’s something that happens when you
declare it to your whole community that it’s
going to be for life?
Marty: Yeah. I do believe that, and yet
everybody has to make their own decision. But I
believe that declarations are very powerful and
that having a ceremony and a ritual, however you
put that together, is very powerful. And that
doesn’t mean a declared marriage is
necessarily going to last any longer. What I mean
is that the feeling and the commitment and the
stakes are higher, in my view, when you have a
ritual, when you have a full wedding, however you
define wedding. And at the same time, a person who
has a long-term committed relationship and
isn’t married, this is not to say that they
can’t have a good relationship. That’s
not really my point.
John: Uh-huh. Yeah. It’s just that
Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell looked so cute in
Four Weddings and a Funeral.
Marty: Yeah. I’ll agree with
that.
John: And when they committed to be with
each other, to not be married for the rest of their
lives, it’s just…it sounded very
beguiling.
Marty: Well, it is beguiling in the same
way that marriage is beguiling. And the truth is
those movies that we’ve grown up on are almost
always built on illusions and fallacies, just as
the magazines and books and the rest of the stories
we hear about relationships are fallacies.
They’re built on quicksand, and they’re
built on romantic illusions. I’m for romance,
and I like it. But to build a relationship on
romance, I think, is the height of idiocy. And
it’s caused so much trouble in our society as
our expectations are way out of line with the
reality of marriage. That’s why I was
suggesting earlier that what we need to do to
create long-term relationships and marriages in the
21st century is to clarify what the purpose of
marriage is now that we can leave marriage at any
time with very little censure from the community
and while many women have the economic power to
leave relationships. So, “Why be
married?” I think, is the question that we
need to grapple with.
John: And do you see that there is a
range of possible effective purposes, or do you
have one in mind in particular that’s going to
work for people?
Marty: I think that any high purpose that
brings a couple together in something greater than
their own selfish interest can work. For example,
having your relationship purpose be to travel the
world and uplift humanity through your work with
charity, I think that might work. However, the
purpose that I’m most familiar with and that I
advocate is different. And the purpose that I
advocate is to make your relationship become a
vehicle for personal, psychological and spiritual
growth and to use the challenges of marriage to
whittle away your ego and uplift yourself into
becoming a more loving and strong person. After
all, the purpose of life as you grow older and
begin to understand it is beyond survival.
It’s to have more love and to learn how to
serve other people. And I think marriage is a great
vehicle for learning that.
John: Ok. Now, when you think about most
people up at the altar or wherever and they’re
saying their wedding vows, do you think they really
get the content of what they are saying? Are they
really buying in to the words they are saying?
Marty: Absolutely not. I think even
people who have the very best intentions don’t
get the full import of what they’re committing
to, nor could they. The truth is you really
don’t know what marriage is like and what the
challenges are until you’ve been in it quite a
while. After we’ve been married for a while
the ego raises its ugly head, and our
partner’s ego raises its ugly head, and we
begin to have power struggles and challenges and
problems with children and finances and all the
rest of it that makes marriage such a challenging
proposition. And I don’t think there’s
any way we could know that fully when we’re up
there at that altar saying “I do”.
John: Yeah. So when people are saying
till death do us part they don’t really get
that. And so they don’t really take on the
posture of total surrender that that would entail
and then it’s no surprise it doesn’t work
out, right?
Marty: Well, I think that’s right.
And at the same time, I believe that often
people’s commitment level and understanding of
being together changes over time. For example, at
first when we have troubles and we get married, the
first few years of marriage we may say we’re
going to stay together until we get something
settled, or until we can’t stand it any
longer. And then if we have children, we say,
I’m going to stay together until the kids get
a little older and they can deal with us
separating. And then we say, I’ll stay
together just a little longer and then I’ll
probably leave. And then after a while we may come
around to the idea that, “I’m going to
stay together regardless of what happens, because
this is the path of my greatest challenge and also
the path of my greatest growth.” And you see
marriage then as an opportunity rather than just a
hassle. But it may take a while to get to that
understanding.
John: Yeah. Yeah. And if you think about
it, the whole notion of staying fully committed to
someone for one’s whole life, for the rest of
one’s life, really is alien to people because
you look at the families that don’t even stay
together.
Marty: That’s right.
John: Children lose touch with their
parents and their siblings. And how many friends do
we really stay in contact with over the long run?
It seems like we’ve grown to be kind of
nomadic about our relationships.
Marty: Yeah. I agree with that. I mean,
that’s certainly true as our society has
gotten more mobile and relationships have become
almost disposable in some peoples’ minds. And
as I said before, the forces that used to conspire
to hold marriages together, economic power, the
church, the society, the community, and others,
those forces are now so weak that for a lot of
people there’s no reason to stay together when
things get hard. And we don’t have good models
by and large in our society for people to stay
together a long time and make it work. People often
say, well, what about couples who are in that World
War II generation? They stayed together through
thick and thin, through the depression, the war,
and old age, and they were together for 50 years or
more. And it’s true. The baby boom generation
rebelled against a lot of those kinds of marriages
and values because we saw that behind the
continuity and the stability of those marriages
there often was a lot of misery. People played
these strong roles and yet they were many times
unhappy in their marriages. Yet they didn’t
feel powerful enough to leave them.
So we don’t really have very many role
models for what it looks like to have a
relationship of integrity and of mutual strengths
and strong bonds, a dynamic where one person is
changing one way and another person is changing
another way, and yet you stay together. I think
very often what people think is that a marriage or
long-term relationship should be based on mutual
interests. I mean, it’s funny to me when you
read many of the personal ads and people talk about
what they’re interested in. “I want a
person to go mountain climbing with, to have long
walks at sunset on the beach, and beautiful
candlelight dinners”, and so on… I mean,
who doesn’t want those things? But will they
really keep you together? Are they fundamental to a
relationship? I think not.
John: Right. And it sounds like in days
of old, the sort of ethical imperative to stay
together kind of forced people to stay with it. And
now as you say that’s not as prominent anymore
which in a way could be really a great opportunity
for people because staying together out of a
“should”, out of “I have to”,
as you say, it’s going to create misery
anyway. So it sounds like we have a great
opportunity now to be more responsible for our
choices.
Marty: It’s a great point. We have
an opportunity to create something that’s not
been created in most cultures around the world. And
that is relationships that are together completely
by choice over a long period of time, one’s
where there’s power sharing and growth as the
purpose of the marriage. And that’s new. And
those kinds of relationships will last if we want
them to last. But the only factor that will keep
them together is our own commitment, our own
understanding of the purpose of our marriage.
And, you know, if you look at it closely what
you see going on in many marriages right now is
that women are figuring out that relationships have
changed a lot and that they have a lot more power.
Their expectations are greater. They want
fulfillment. They want romance. They want
communication. They want intimacy. And men very
often want it to be like it used to be, where we
come home and kick off our shoes, and get into the
Barcalounger and grab the clicker, and we’re
off duty. We want it to be like the old days in
some ways where we have a lot of power and bringing
home the money at the end of the day is enough.
What we had to do before was simply to provide for
and protect our families. And our women took care
of us and our children and the household. And in
some ways, those roles were very stable and
sometimes even supportive. But in many, many places
now, especially on both the coasts, those roles are
dissolving. And I think men are really behind the
curve in that change. And my work is to alert men
to ways of catching up and making marriage work for
us instead of feeling like we’re being dragged
into this new era.
John: Right. So men are still stuck in
this pattern of having relationships as a kind of
convenience it sounds like. And is that because
we’re afraid of intimacy?
Marty: I think there are many reasons.
One is certainly that a lot of men are afraid of
intimacy. And we’ve been told since we were
children not to show our feelings, and we’re
called babies or sissies or even women or girls
which is one of the worst things that a lot of
little boys hear. So that is true. It’s also
true that men often don’t look at their own
relationships as a big priority in their life. That
sounds strange, and yet if you look at the way most
of us operate, we get excited about all sorts of
things other than our relationship. We get excited
about our work. And we pour our energy into that.
We get excited about sports, or building things, or
taking things apart or projects. But very few men
get really excited talking about or thinking about
their relationships. I often use the analogy that
relationships for men are like buying a
refrigerator. We go out and buy the refrigerator,
bring it home, plug it in, and then we expect it to
run without maintenance, year after year after
year. And we think that our relationships should be
like that: we want our relationships to run on
automatic. And that’s why men are often
surprised when their women come to them and say,
“Let’s talk about the relationship.”
And then the guys say, “Well, why talk about
it, what is there to say?” It’s like, why
would you talk about your refrigerator? And so we
don’t want to grapple with those kinds of
questions because we feel like we’re
inadequate, we don’t have the words or the
insights. As you said, we may be afraid of the
intimacy, of being vulnerable. But in a way,
perhaps there’s another issue: we really
don’t buy into the idea of shaping a
relationship over time, of doing the work
necessary. Most men don’t want to do the
work.
John: Right. One of my favorite authors,
the late great comparative mythologist, Joseph
Campbell, talked a lot about marriage. And he wrote
something about it. And one of the things I
remember him saying quite often is that marriage is
not a love affair; he said it’s more like an
ordeal. He didn’t mean that in a necessarily
negative way. But what do you think are the traps
of expecting one’s relationship to be this
always ongoing hot love affair?
Marty: I think it’s a recipe for
disaster and for feeling unfulfilled quite often.
And what the core of that is, what the fundamental
issue is, is expecting the other person to complete
us. Every human being needs to feel complete and
whole. The illusion of marriage is that that person
we married is going to make us feel whole. And when
they don’t and there’s not romance, and
there’s not these good feelings of wholeness
and love and completion, then we blame the other
person, and we feel cheated and hurt. It’s
very human to feel those things. And yet
they’re coming from, in my view, an
expectation of relationships that relationships can
never meet. We will never find our real happiness
and completion from another person.
And so what you said about Joseph Campbell
saying marriage is an ordeal, I think, in another
way he might have been trying to express that
marriage is a quest. It is a quest for learning how
to feel complete and full on our own and how to
love another person fully in that quest. And in my
view, it’s a terrific challenge. And it’s
a quest unlike the ones that we try so hard to get
now. People go surfing and mountain climbing and
repelling and bungee jumping and all those things
trying to find some kind of great challenge and
quest. And I think that marriage can be that—a
quest, a mythic journey. And yet, do we really want
to rise to the occasion?
I was on a plane a while back when my book
(“Straight Talk for Men About Marriage”)
first came out, and there was a man next to me who
was a very successful and distinguished professor
in a university on the east coast. And we were
chatting, and I showed him the book. He was reading
it and I fell asleep. When I woke up, he’d
gotten about a third of the way through it, and he
was really excited by the thought that he could do
something about his own marriage! And he began to
tell me about how terrible his marriage was and how
far apart he and his wife were and how alienated he
felt from his own wife and kids. He really
hadn’t seen before, he hadn’t gotten the
clarity, that he could do something about it. I
know that sounds silly, but so many men feel that
way, that that quest of having a great relationship
is not their territory. That it’s better left
to women. And I think that’s a real
mistake.
John: Or we live in the illusion that
we’re simply with the wrong person and despite
our best efforts we’re just not going to be
able to make it work.
Marty: Isn’t that funny. The grass
is always greener. We find another person. We
think, “This one will make me happy”. We
think, “Surely this one won’t bring up
our issues and make us feel terrible”. And
yet, I’m talking to a couple right now, and
the woman has been married, I believe, either 3 or
4 times, and has had multiple relationships between
those marriages. And each one of them had exactly
the same issues for her. Even though on the surface
the men had nothing in common, they each made her
feel left out and abandoned, and they couldn’t
communicate the way she wanted them to and so on.
Do you think it’s possible that she’s
choosing men over and over who will give her those
same challenges? I think it’s very likely.
John: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And what
do you think of this whole notion of the soul mate
and people so anxious about finding the “right
one.”
Marty: Yeah. Well, I think there is
something to finding the right person. Whether
that’s a soul mate or not, I don’t know.
I know in India when arranged marriages are put
together the parents consult the local astrologer.
And the astrologer casts their horoscope charts and
sees that they’re compatible. And if they are
compatible, then they find the right day to be
married, and they say it’s a perfect marriage,
and that they are meant to be together. But it
doesn’t mean in my mind that there might not
be other people in another village who might be
just as well suited. And I wonder sometimes if
that’s not the case, that in a way as long as
a person meets many of our criteria and can show us
the issues that we need to be shown that they may
be the perfect person for us. I wonder about that
soul mate concept. I think it causes a lot of
trouble for people because they keep looking for
the perfect person. And the funny thing is when you
“fall in love,” people seem like
they’re the perfect person. Every single one
that you fall in love with, get infatuated with,
seems like the perfect person. And then after a few
years of marriage, you realize how imperfect they
are. So I do wonder about that soul mate
business.
On the other hand, I believe strongly that karma
plays a big part and that your mate is somebody
that you’ve very likely have had past
relationships in other lifetimes with. And if you
want to look at it that way, then you can perhaps
call that person your soul mate.
John: Uh-huh. And, what about this whole
business of falling in love? Is that just
inherently mysterious and it just…it happens
of its own volition? Or is there some way to be
more open to it or attuned to it? What’s going
on there?
Marty: Well, I believe what’s going
on is that we see someone, we meet someone, we get
to know someone, who first feels like family. They
feel like home to us. And that’s why we often
pick people who bring out the issues we had with
our parents, because they may mirror for us those
feelings we had as children. And we feel like
we’re “home”. And that feels
familiar and somewhat cozy. Even if our home life
wasn’t so great, we feel like we’re home.
On another level, a less psychological level, I
think that a person who we fall in love with is
somebody who allows us to see the love that’s
already in us. I think it’s an illusion and a
fundamental misunderstanding to think that the love
we feel is from that person. The way I look at it
is that person triggers feelings of love within us.
And that’s a good thing. I mean, I believe
strongly that in marriage we can learn how to grow
so that we feel more love. But, I think, the second
part of your question is much more difficult to
know: how to create that experience of falling in
love. Isn’t that what you asked me?
John: Yeah. Yeah. More or less. Is it
just inherently mysterious? Or is there some way to
be, I don’t want to say to control it, but is
there some way to be more effective? I’m just
asking about this whole notion because, I guess,
what my question comes from is how you’ll hear
people say, “I fell in love”, and well,
now “I fell out of love”. And people, I
think, use that as an excuse sometimes.
Marty: Yeah. Well, I think, what
we’re talking about there is what used to be
called infatuation. You don’t hear that term
much anymore. But, I think, that’s perhaps
what it is because being “in love” is to
me an unreal state. It is a state of projecting
perfection on your mate. And we idealize that
person. And just thinking about them makes us feel
blissful, and that’s an unreal state. And, of
course, it doesn’t last. That’s not the
kind of love that I’m talking about, and,
truthfully, what’s really interesting about
marriage, is the feeling of love that we have for
our mate as we deepen and change and mature over
the years. And when we confuse adoration, that
feeling of perfection and of walking on air, with
that deeper love I think we cheapen what love is
really about. People think that the feeling of love
shouldn’t come and go in a marriage. And one
of the things that I have experienced, and others
as well, is how often there are times in your
marriage where you really don’t even like the
person you’re married to, much less love them.
You feel strong aversion to them because they bring
up so many difficult feelings in you. So I think we
have to have a more expanded understanding of love
rather than to think of it as that sort of
adolescent “being in love” business.
John: Right. So, do you see the power of
declaring love and in that sense generating it,
inventing it, creating it, rather than relying on a
feeling to overcome you?
Marty: Yes. I think what we declare is
our own love. And we declare our commitment to be
in relationship so that love is a purpose, so that
our activities and our struggles are meant to evoke
love. In other words, we stand in love when we
declare. And that allows us to grow in our own love
with our partner. And, of course, learning to love
one person and fully see their true self and fully
see them with love and accept them, that allows us
to learn how to love others fully—and just as
importantly to learn how to love ourselves.
John: Right.
Marty: And I think that the declaration
not only has to be done at the beginning of the
wedding, but it has to be done frequently
throughout marriage. That’s why so many
marriages get stale as the children grow up and
leave, or as you have financial troubles, or as one
person goes back to school and the other one
doesn’t. So many things can happen to take the
freshness out of a marriage. And each of us, I
think, has to declare not only that we want to be
in relationship and not only that we want love but
that our lives are alive and that we want more from
life, and that we’re willing to go for it full
out. And that’s something I know you talk
about a lot and help people with so much, John.
Marriage is something that has to be kept alive.
I mentioned earlier that my work is mostly with men
to understand marriage and with women to help them
understand men, and we men often sell out on
ourselves. I’m saddened to see how many men
have put on armor around their whole life and
particularly their marriages because they are
afraid to make that declaration we’ve been
talking about.
John: Right. Right. Let me ask you kind
of a tricky question here. One of the paradoxes
that I frequently run into is that on the one hand
I want to encourage people to be happier and be
more excited about life, and on the other hand I
often see that the key to doing that is to, in
fact, embrace the inherent suffering of life. So,
in marriage I wonder if the same principle
applies?
Marty: Very much, absolutely. In marriage
we have a tremendous opportunity to see our
shadows. We see the dark side of ourselves. We see
the part of ourselves that we’d rather not
grapple with. And there’s so much suffering in
that. And ultimately the suffering that we
experience in marriage is really not about the
other person. Most of the time, it’s suffering
about our own darkness, our own miserable patterns
and emotions that we would rather not face, that
our partner has allowed us to see. Marriage is such
a great mirror that way. One of the things that I
strongly recommend for men especially, but also for
women, is to use every challenge in marriage as
your inner work. When your wife says to you,
“Why aren’t you taking responsibility for
cleaning the dishes?” you know, it seems like
a simple thing and we can get defensive about it or
just ignore it. But why not look deeper and see?
And so, I think that the work, the fundamental
work, of being in a relationship, and in a
marriage, is facing that suffering as you’ve
called it, and taking responsibility for your own
issues in the context of a relationship. And then
we have breakthroughs, then we have opportunities
to grow and move to the other side of those shadows
into the light.
John: Right. But I wonder even when we
break through, even in the best of times, there is
still going to be an element of suffering. In fact,
it seems to me the deeper you are in love, the
deeper you cherish someone, the deeper also is a
kind of poignant suffering, I suppose, may not be
the right word, but that’s the one I have,
because, of course, they won’t be with you all
the time.
Marty: That’s right. Well, the
suffering comes from attachment. And the truth is
that marriage has attachment. Of course we’re
attached to our mate. And yet learning how to love
more deeply is really learning how to let go. And
it’s a tremendous paradox.
John: Say more about that. You’re
saying that the deeper you love the more willing
you are to let go. What do you mean there?
Marty: Well, for example, we become more
willing to let go in the way our spouse has to be.
We become more willing to let go of the way our
relationship has to look, and the way we spend time
together, or whether we sleep together or sleep
separately. There are so many attachments that we
can let go of. We want things to be a certain way
and that’s usually what keeps us attached as
opposed to learning how to let go and allow things
to evolve. And yet at a deeper level, I think your
question is about the deeper attachment we have to
another person who we know is going to die and get
sick and so on or may leave us. And that’s why
I said that it’s a paradox: of course
we’ll be attached and we want that person in
our lives, and yet the truest love is a love that
doesn’t hold onto another person, doesn’t
grasp at them, doesn’t try to make them ours.
You know, that sense that “You belong to me,
you are mine”, that whole sense of
relationships is really deathly. And it’s
deathly not only for the relationship but for the
individual who holds onto that
attachment…because they don’t belong to
you. So it’s a paradox that we, of course,
love and want to hold onto our mate, and yet truly
loving is learning how to let go and learning how
to experience love in ourselves instead of
expecting to get it from another person.
John: Um. Yeah. I still wonder, though.
Let’s say people come to you for coaching and
I think in the back of their minds they want you to
coach them about marriage in such a way that when
the coaching is all complete their life is going to
be happier and just easier to deal with…
Marty: Sure.
John: And more exciting and all of that.
And I’m sure you can provide that in some
sense. But I guess I still subscribe somewhat to
the notion of no pain, no gain.
No vulnerability, no love. And where there is
some vulnerability, there’s going to be an
element of pain or hurting that’s just going
to be there. And, I think, people would be a lot
better off if they just learned to accept that.
Marty: I completely agree. And the pain
that we feel is very often about our own issues,
our own, as you said, our own vulnerability, our
own inadequacies. And my point is facing those in
the context of marriage allows us to go to the
other side and we get to rise up above the ocean,
put our head above the water for a little while and
breathe the fresh air, and then we do feel that
happiness that we want. But what most people think
is, “If only she would change, then I’ll
feel happy”. And what they want to talk about
very often is how do they get the other person to
change, and how bad that person is instead, of
being willing to look at their own pain and their
own vulnerabilities. So it is painful. And I think
the intimacy of marriage is inherently painful that
way because that person sees us like no one sees
us, and they bring up issues in us that no one else
can bring up in us, issues that have been shelved
since childhood and left unexamined.
John: Right. Well, let’s pursue this
a little bit further because I think there might be
agreement here. There might be a certain
disagreement which, of course, is perfectly
acceptable. I know you’ve followed a spiritual
path in your life for quite some time, which you
can talk about it if you want. But I would say
it’s along the yoga, Buddhist side of things.
And so when you talk about, you know, nonattachment
I wonder if that’s connected to your spiritual
quest? And if so, I guess my fundamental question
is is that approach different from the sort of
romantic poet approach of a Shelley or a Byron or
others, who were saying just give it all and,
“You need this woman or this man like your
life depends on it. And that’s what makes it
so great.” Is your approach different? Or do
you subscribe to that?
Marty: It’s somewhat different. You
asked about my spiritual path. I’ve been
practicing Siddha yoga for about 30 years, and
it’s a path of meditation and devotion to a
spiritual master. And through the devotion to the
master and the spiritual practices that the master
gives, it’s a path of understanding oneself
and becoming more of who you really are.
Back to the question about the Romantics’
view of love and marriage: I think that, again,
there’s a paradox here. I think that we can
rejoice and accept and embrace romance as it comes
to us and as we can express it appropriately as
long as we hold it lightly. When we believe that
those kinds of romantic ideals that Bryan and
Shelley and the rest of the Romantics held up as
the purpose of relationship, I think that it
creates much more pain than it creates happiness. I
think the important work is inner work, work to
open up our own ability to love. It’s not
ultimately about the other person. Of course we
want companionship. Of course we want closeness and
good sex. And we want our mates to be our best
friend. And we want intimacy and all those
wonderful things. But, again, the highest purpose
for marriage is to use all of that as a context and
a catalyst for learning to love more deeply and
learning to become more your true self. Learning to
love another person and holding them out as an
ideal in the way that the Romantics held out beauty
and so on as an ideal seems to me to be a path to
real pain. And that is that pain of attachment that
we spoke about before.
John: Ok. And would you say that your
beliefs in that regard are influenced by your
spiritual pursuit?
Marty: Sure. And when I think of
spirituality, I am looking at it in as broad a
posture as I can, meaning that the spiritual work
is the work we do to understand our true natures,
to understand and feel our own love and God’s
love. And my path is working at seeing those as the
same, that our greatest self and our greatest love
is God’s love. And using marriage as an
opportunity is a huge part of one’s spiritual
path, if we choose it that way. When we have the
same purpose in mind for a relationship that our
mates do, and we have the same basic values about
life, and we have a reasonable degree of
communication skills, we have every chance, a
wonderful chance, to stay together for a lifetime
and make a marriage that’s happy and
fulfilling.
John: Alright. Very good. Well,
let’s lighten things up a little bit. When I
was a kid, the first band I came to enjoy was KISS.
And, of course, their lyrics are just completely
sexist and there’s male control and all of
that. But you never really pay any attention to
that when you’re a kid. Now I don’t know
if you hear this guy, but Gene Simmons is telling
everyone he can tell that he thinks marriage is a
complete crock and that the problem with marriage
is that there are men in them. And he makes the
point that, you know, men produce billions of sperm
a day, I think, and women produce one egg a month.
So it’s just…men are inherently not going
to be non-monogamous. You just can’t stop the
ravenous craving of men. What do you say to
that?
Marty: Well, it reminds me of the old
joke: why, out of all the thousands of sperm cells
does only one reach the egg? And the answer is that
all except that one refused to stop and ask
directions! I think there’s something to that.
And there are some scientists whose work I have
briefly read who would say the same thing. And not
all scientists but there are some who say that men
are on this earth to “scatter their
seed”. I think there is something to that,
that we are built to prorogate the species, to look
for mates. And in my mind, the only way--especially
now when relationships are held so much more
loosely, and society gives more permission to split
up than it does to stay together--the question is:
what do you want in your life? Do you simply want
to go out and have sex with a lot of women, or do
you want something greater? And if that’s what
you want, to have sex with a lot of women, then
fine. That’s what your life will be about. But
fierce commitment part of that, to me, is remaining
monogamous, and not because I have a big moral
stance about it, but because I think that having
one partner gives you a much greater chance of
going through that eye in the needle and finding
less suffering and more lasting happiness. It
allows you to focus more on your own challenges.
And, again, you’re not using marriage just as
a place to get your rocks off and feel happy every
night.
John: Right.
Marty: If that’s what you want,
there’s a very good chance that you’ll
find a woman at work or somewhere else that
you’ll have sex with. And, again, it’s
not that I think that there’s something
inherently wrong with that and bad about that, but
I think it’s just beside the point, at least
from my point of view.
John: If you can say one thing to a
married man that he could start doing that would
change his marriage for the better, what would that
be?
Marty: I’m going to say two things,
and they’re related. The first one is whatever
comes up take responsibility for it. And the reason
why I say the two things are related is that the
second one is to listen and be present. Invariably,
what women complain about in their marriages and
what makes women leave—and, by the way, about
two-thirds of divorces are initiated by women--is
that men are not being fully present, energetically
there. And to listen well and be with your wife you
have to be fully present. You can’t listen in
a half-assed way. When you listen, for example, to
criticism the best way for a man to get less
criticism and more sex is to listen and take full
responsibility, and as you listen and open up you
can gradually become closer and more intimate and
more authentic. That builds intimacy. And it’s
tremendously rewarding. It will allow you to have a
wife who is much more satisfied, and allow you to
have a much richer life, married or otherwise. But,
of course, it’s tough and challenging and it
doesn’t stop. You don’t get to say,
“I’m done.”
John: Ok. And if you could give one piece
of advice to married women that would help them to
better get along with their man, what would that
be?
Marty: It’s to allow men to be men.
In the last say 30 or 40 years there’s been a
strange evolution of women thinking about men, and
much of it has been to want men to be, in a way,
more feminine. We men have been challenged to be
more open, more intimate, more forthcoming, more
able to talk about our feelings, be gentler, and so
on. And all those changes have been long overdue
and they’re very positive and useful. But what
men have often heard is that we have to be like
women instead of like men. We men need to feel
again that it’s great to be masculine and that
we’re not broken or “one-down” in
our own homes. Often men tell me that they feel
like they’re wrong all the time and that
everything they do is wrong. So what I would
suggest to women is to stop criticizing. Stop
making your man wrong for being a man, and start
taking responsibility for your own needs. Stop
expecting your man to make you feel healed and
better about everything, and start simply
requesting in a loving and specific way what you
want. Men really do want to please their wives. Men
really do want to know what to do and how to feel
successful and feel like heroes. And very often we
men don’t know what to do. We feel like
we’re wrong way too often. And that’s not
a way to have a happy, masculine man, to make him
feel like he’s a failure.
John: Right. Ok. Thank you very much for
an excellent conversation, Marty.
Marty: This was a wonderful interview,
John. Thank you for such interesting questions.
©2007, Marty
Friedman
* * *
Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is
threads, hundreds of tiny threads, which sew people
together through the years. - Simone Signoret
Martin
G. Friedman is the author of “Straight
Talk for Men About Marriage—What Men Need to
Know About Marriage (And What Women Need to Know
About Men)”. For
many years, Marty Friedman taught corporate
managers how to create good relationships at work
before tackling male/female relationship
issues--and applying what he learned to his own
marriage. The founder of Men in Marriage, Marty is
regularly interviewed on radio and television, and
talks to organizations and individuals from a
unique, inspirational and humorous perspective.
Find out more at www.meninmarriage.com
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