Differences- with Gary Moore

0:00Welcome to Life Point Plus, a program dealing with marriages and family. We are so glad you're listening. Here's your host, Pastor and Teacher Gary Moore. Welcome to Life Point Plus. I'm your host, Gary Moore. We're looking at Dr. David Augsburg's book, Sustaining Love, Healing and Growth in the Passages of Marriage. We're going to begin our look at David's four marriages within a marriage by looking at the topic of differences. David describes marriage number one in the area of differences as accommodation. Marriage two, he describes as eliminate. Marriage three, he describes as appreciate. And marriage four, as celebrate. He introduces us to Lisa and Larry. As I read their descriptions of their marriage, see if you can identify with them.

1:00Lisa, I don't know this man. I once thought I did, but then we agreed on at least a few things. After nine years together, I feel completely misunderstood whenever we try to talk and I can't imagine why he feels the way he does about me. How could a marriage with such high hopes become so empty? We dated two years, we thought we had everything in common. We married with both families blessing. We each had good jobs and liked our work. Sure, it was a demanding schedule, but we had time for ski trips in the winter and camping in the summer. The time off from work for three years when Joey and Jen were little was frustrating for me. Larry was traveling a lot and not very available. When I went back to work, we both buried ourselves in our jobs and when we talked it was always about the kids.

2:01We didn't have much conflict until last year. Now he says it's day, I say it's night. He says it's winter, I say it's summer. We don't see eye to eye on anything. When things go wrong, we can get into blaming each other for days. He's become a stranger to me. Larry says, our problems are all in Lisa's mind. She's got this idea that I don't love her anymore just because we often disagree, but that's the way life is. So what? My father and mother never agreed on anything. They stayed together for 63 years. So I don't see what all the fuss is about. We get along pretty well compared to them. Lisa complains about my work schedule, but I think it's better if we're not in each other's hair so much. A couple has to adjust if they want to get ahead in life.

3:03My work really keeps me running, but it pays well. She criticizes my travel schedule, but she's away at her job every day too. She says I put my job ahead of the family, but that's not true since I'm doing it for all the family. She gripes about my golf, but I have to get exercise. And besides, it's usually with clients that I need to entertain, so it's part of my work. If she would just lay off, we wouldn't have any real problems. I feel like this is a different marriage than we've had all through the years. She's like a different person the last year. Now that our youngest is in school, you'd think there'd be less to worry about. Well, the first marriage of accommodating has ended. The second marriage of seeking to eliminate differences in attacking has begun. Someone has written, we marry for our similarities.

4:05We stay together for our differences. Similarities satiate, differences attract. Differences are rarely the cause of conflict and marriage. The problems arise from our similarities. Differences are the occasion, similarities are the cause. The differences may serve as a triggering event as the issue for debate or the beef for our hassle, but it's the similarities that create the conflict between us. The very same differences that initially drew us together later presses apart and still later may draw us near again. Differences first attract, then irritate, then frustrate, then illuminate, and finally may unite us. Those traits that intrigue in courtship begin to chaff in time and infuriate in the conflicts of middle marriage.

5:09But maturation begins to change their meaning and the uniqueness of the other person becomes prized, even in the very differences that were primary irritants. David says that it's not that we differ, but how we go about differing that makes the difference between happiness and unhappiness. When we differ with each other in similar fight styles, we get hooked, entangled, and baited into a hassle. We bait each other, we hook each other's needs, we dance together. The similarities of our individual dance patterns connect, coordinate, and then collide. We get into symmetrical, similar positions, a blaming, feeling blamed, then defending slash feeling, accused, followed by explaining slash feeling lectured, or withdrawing's feeling distant.

6:09The paired combinations are individually tailored by our inherited fight patterns from the family of origin, yet become remarkably similar after a few years together. However, the first few years are most frequently characterized by a pattern of avoiding differences in order to establish and maintain the primary bond between the two. This denial frequently lasts for five to seven years before the real drive to eliminate the differences is expressed in the second marriage within a marriage. This passage from the first marriage into the second is recognized in popular idiom. As family therapists, Karl Whitaker notes, nowadays most marriages pass through serial impulses. The ten-year syndrome or the seven-year itch are both indications of our social concern with this kind of lock between two individuals and two states of being.

7:14The seven-year itch signals the rise in anxiety that ushers in the ten-year syndrome of reconsidering one's choice of partner, revising one's expectations and renegotiating the marital contract. If that is, the relationship has sufficient durability and integrity to weather the storms that accompany the stormy passage between marriages. Seven years into marriage, most people are also dealing with leaving behind the youthful security of their twenties. I'm still finding myself, my way. I'm free to experiment and explore. And entering their thirties, I'm in the middle of my own life now. I'm the adult generation. I have to take final responsibility for my life in destiny. Authority is internalized as full responsibility and accepted in the thirties.

8:14Parents become peers. Children reveal their inner-nature so that their person discovers himself or herself through their eyes and actions. My new vision of the self initiates a different view of the marital partner. Life looks different, decade by decade, and each transition triggers either disruption of a marriage or new discovery of why we married and what we can become with and for each other. At twenty, I thought we would accept each other freely and obviously totally. In the warmth of early love, such unconditional appreciation of each other seems so utterly inevitable and right. But by thirty, I was at a very different place. I felt I had already adjusted to the limit of my flexibility and I wanted some change from my spouse.

9:14People change if they are welcoming growth. And so the marriage must evolve as well. However, the need for security while making personal change may lead people to resist marital change. Inevitably, three different growth processes are simultaneously unfolding, interweaving, and intermeshing. Yours, mine, and ours. Not only are each wife and each husband moving through an individual process of adult growth and change connected to the passage of time and the successively shifting circumstances of adult life, but the marriage itself is undergoing similar periodic challenges and demands for adoptive change. A good way of conceptualizing this is to think in terms of his life cycle, her life cycle, and the marital life cycle as a kind of supra entity, a whole which is more than and different from the sum of the two intimate partners involved in it.

10:24The relationship itself goes through a series of sequential phases has its own set of internal dynamics and its ongoing agenda. My personal struggle for identity, my discovery of central values and life commitments, evolves decade by decade as does yours. Each of us has a life to live, not as isolated individuals, but as centered, responsible persons. And our marriage has a life of its own. It is composed not only of the contributions from our lives, but also from our families of origin, our sustaining community of co-travelers, our children and their respective worlds of individual development, and our connectedness to the community of the Spirit, the Church, and the faith, hope, and love that directs our pilgrimage together. The marriage is bigger than both of us, more than the sum of its parts, a third presence when we are together, a third body.

11:32Poet Robert Bly speaks of this relationship as a third body, which is prized by, precious to, separate from, yet continuous with each partner, to become one without loss of their tunas in the oneness that unites them. The marriage is not owned by either, but shared by both. So he pursues his own development journey through the male life cycle. He is becoming a human with maturity, and she travels her unique developmental path through the life cycle as a woman. She is becoming a woman of integrity. Well, our time is gone for today. And as I close, I want to encourage you that if you don't have a home church, we'd love to have you visit us. We have three services on Sundays, eight, nine, thirty, and eleven a.m. And we're located at 3755 South Cloverdale Road. Have a great weekend. God bless.

12:39Thank you for listening today. This program is brought to you by Cloverdale Church of God. If you would like to reach Pastor Gary, please email him at, Pastor Gary at CloverdaleChurch.org. If you know more about the church, go to our website at www.coverdalechurch.org. Thanks for listening and be blessed.