FamilyLife Forums

Hi there,

Just wondering if anyone has read the book "The New Rules of Marriage" by Terrence Real?  I am interested in getting some opinions on whether men and women agree with his premises.

Thanks!!

Sorry, haven't read that one.  What are his premises?

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Happily Married to the World's Best Husband!! :)

I didn't know there were any new rules.  What do I do with the old rules?

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Proverbs 27:15 A nagging wife is as annoying as the constant dripping on a rainy day. 16 Trying to stop her complaints is like trying to stop the wind or hold something with greased hands.

He speaks about how women are expecting more and more from marriage in terms of emotional intimacy.  with the advent of the feminist movement and women's empowerment, women want more... while men are still expected to provide as before and now, with no additional guidance towards how to be emotionally present, men are expected to step up to a new level of intimacy.

He says in the past women have "nagged" or withdrawn... he speaks of relationship empowerment rather than self-empowerment that the feminist movement speaks of... "what do you need in order to give me what I need?"

It is a really interesting concept... obviously this is just an introduction... but I would love to discuss this with anyone else who is reading the book.

Princess,
                  I know this thread has been languishing at the bottom of the pile for almost 3 weeks. I've been a bit slow in getting on to it due to lack of time, plus I wanted to consider it a bit longer before I made a post. It has surprised me that it has not generated responses. When I first read your post I realised how important this concept is for marriages today.

 (Btw, I havent yet got a copy of his book, but have researched it online.) The broad drift of his premise is not entirely new, other's have written about these same ideas, so I am not entirely unfamiliar with them. But he does gather it all together very well..

He writes,
 "If you’re like most of us, your upbringing—that curious mixture of what you’ve picked up about how to be close (to your spouse ) from society in general and from your family in particular—has not only failed to give you the tools you need, but has actively filled your head with a bunch of unhelpful nonsense."

How true that is. Last year when I attended a men's event run by Gordon Dalby, he asked the 250 men present, " How many of you had your father come to you at adolescence and talk to you about sex, girls, and how to treat women"? Only 13 men - 5% - raised their hands.
Men are just not learning anything helpful from their families. And what they are picking up could well be detrimental to their marriage.

People may be successful in most areas of their life he says, but "fall short in the one arena that matters the most." (marriage)
On the precarious state of many marriages, he says, "The emergence of couple’s therapy in the 1950s has done nothing to change it. Self-help and psychology haven’t put a dent in it. Multimillion-dollar government programs and church initiatives have been helpless in the face of our current intimacy crisis. What is going on?"

"The reason why things have been so difficult between men and women in the last several decades can be pared down to this: In the last generation women have radically changed and men, by and large, have not. This is not a criticism of men. It is a simple fact."
" As a result, men are not all that unhappy in their marriages. They are unhappy that their women are so unhappy with them. Women, on the
other hand, want radical transformation. They want their marriages to be intimate ( a new paradigm), not companionable  (the old paradigm).

During the first half of the 20th century, husbands were the provider or the breadwinner, and wives were the caretaker at home. That worked very well for marriage. Many men still retain the notion that a marriage is still comprised of a provider husband and a caretaker wife.

On this, Terry Real says,
"The twentieth-century marriage was traditional in the sense that, like marriage for centuries before, happiness meant, above all, being good companions. Husband and wife pulled in harness together. Shoulder to shoulder, they faced life’s challenges, raised their kids, paid their taxes, and faced war and deprivation, good times and bad. No one seriously expected marriage to be passionate, or thought about long, complicated, exquisite communication. That was the stuff of romance. And romance was for kids, for the start of relationships..."

"Contemporary women want to be more than companions with their spouses; they want to remain friends and lovers. If the twentieth-century marriage was companionable, the new marriage is intimate—physically, sexually, intellectually, and, above all, emotionally."

" The fly in the ointment is that while some men might be thrilled if their wives remained sexually generous, the rest of the new package—particularly emotional closeness—leaves them feeling inadequate and mystified, if not downright put-upon. And while women’s new empowerment may well equip them to stand up for themselves, it does a terrible job of teaching them how to stand up for the relationship."

" By venting, criticizing, blaming and complaining - all in the name of honest expression - too many women provoke resentment, not sympathy, in their mates", he explains.  " The men respond by giving in to their worst impulses, like withdrawal, bullying, arrogance or stonewalling, hoping to ride out the storm."

Mr. Real blames " psychotherapy, in part, for the communication impasse: too many Americans", he believes, "have been encouraged to seek personal empowerment rather than relationship empowerment, putting themselves first, and not trying hard enough to appreciate their partner¹s good points."

He implies that this "empowerment" that the self-help fad and the counseling industry has majored on over the past 30yrs, has actually set people up to destroy their marriages. It has done what he calls, the "over-empowering" of individuals within a marriage.

He identifies five major pitfalls that trip up the over-empowered individual:
1) Unbridled Self-Expression,
2) Needing to Be Right,
3) Controlling Our Partner,
4) Retaliation,  
5) Withdrawal.

Well, that's a thumbnail introduction. Plenty of food for thought, and more!  If your still posting Princess, there are some exercises and strategies that he presents in his book ( which I don't have access to) that you could comment on.

   

Fascinating:

 

Alpha, I’m sure you noted that this is a strange coincidence close to some comments I had made at the end of the marketing thread. I’d go there and see if there is anything new but I’m struggling this morning with my wireless and want to post while the posting is possible.

 

I wonder how this premise will go down here. I like it because, well, I think its dead on, but also because except those who take offense no matter how its packaged, no one should be bothered by it, and its conclusions seem intuitive and obvious.

 

A few people keep coming at this point from a few directions, trying on various approaches and seeing if there can be traction. So far I have yet to see serious traction.

We’ll advance a certain amount then someone feels they are being held too long in the light and it stops.

 

For example, the part about men not being taught at home will go down nice and easy…its very very true, I was not taught and I am ashamed to say I often pray in tears about the inadequacies of my relational teaching to my boys. This is obvious. But as we progress on into the guys premise I expect we will encounter blow back, primarily in the form of anecdote where someone points out they know a man who craves his marriage be all those things listed and therefore feel put upon if it refered to women and toss it as a result, leaving it unexamined.

 

I just hope that those who reject things this quickly will at least do a short online research. I noted that the group here of men and women who rejected J and K all stated they went and had a look. I wondered at that time why it is not so common to see everyone, given the thumbnail of a ministry, don’t behave the same at they did with J and K. Several folks said they would go and look then comment. I often see those people rejecting other concepts immediately without even the façade of having checked into it.

 

 Yes DIC, it is where it's at. But I think many men - I was there myself - either don't get this shift, or don't want to get it, because they only know the old paradigm, and this new way of understanding marriage puts them out of their comfort zone.
As to whether marriage ought to be this way today can be debated, and some men may say they don't like it, or it's not biblical or whatever, but at the end of the day we have to deal with what is, not what we wish things were like.

A christian book I read a couple of years ago, "Getting Marriage Right" by David Gushee, covers some of the same ground that Terry Real does. David Gushhe said that marriage became more difiicult after about 1965.

The reason 1965 was selected as a  watershed year re marriage, is because it represents a tipping point when the balance of  power moved in favour of wives. There was a seismic shift in the marital landscape. A trend was on the march. The arrival of hormonal birth control, economic independence aided by equal pay, and calls for  no-fault divorce, meant that wives no longer felt obligated to stay in a marriage that was not delivering the desired outcomes.

Prior to this, marriages were maintained irrespective of their harmony or happiness, because tradition and dependence kept wives at home. The new freedoms that self-empowerment brought beckoned them to leave and taste all the excitements that had eluded them.
Wives were changing, but husbands wondered what hit them. The exiting wife would lambast the husband because of his "failures". Husbands had lost their former leverage, and did not now how to reclaim it. In a real sense they were largely incapable of changing, in part because they did not know what they had done to cause this. Ironically, it was because they had done nothing that they were in this dilemma.
Husbands had become boring, and had not changed with the times, was the chorus from disillusioned wives.

Fueling the dim view of  their marriages, was their heightened expectations of what marriage should deliver. Though many men can tolerate a lowered level of marital satisfaction, women cannot and will not. Television was piping romantic sitcoms and soap operas into their homes, and they wanted that in their marriages. Never mind it was mostly fantasy, saddled with "stick in the mud" husbands, these idealised fantasies drove them to find romance elsewhere. They parrticularly idolised them "hunks"  who were the obligatory central characters in the romance movies and novels. These men were  handsome, wealthy, intelligent, witty, athletic, suave, socially adept, charming, and loaded with sexual appeal. The dour husband reclining behind the newspaper was caught with his pants down - figuratively speaking - and was totally unaware of the secret desire-ridden machinations simmering in the heart of his wife.

All of this hints at the path by which women have come to demand more out of a marriage than a lot of husbands seem able to deliver.

    Alpha I do not know if you are comfortable to communicate via email, but I'd enjoy an exchange or two with you at divorce_in_the_church@yahoo.com

I have an author and web site to recommend and prefer to do it over direct emails.

Please just let me know if not. I believe you will find it fascinating.

 No one seems to have asked why there are new rules to marriage, how they were developed, and whether the new rules are based on a premise that we all oght to adopt. The assumption is that because female expectations have been redrawn, men just have to get with it, regardless, or they will be discarded.
In this post  I ask those questions. Terry Real, as a non christian, probably wouldn't see the biblical ideas as having any relevance. First I will look at some well established male/female differences, and see how those may have contributed to the altered views.

Because men are visual when it comes to females, the first port of call will be to take a look at that.

There is evidence that the effect of pornography on men indicates that they become progressively dis-satisfied with their wives. She does not measure up to the idealised, airbrushed fantasy of the porn image. A consequence of this may be that the wife feels neglected and the marriage is in trouble. Some men may even have an affair with a woman who is more akin to the porn images.
(There is also stats showing that 20% of women are now watching porn.)

But the female eqivalent of porn does not consist of imagery, but lies in the field of romance and emotion. That highlights one of the basic differences between men and women. Men are primarily visual when it comes to women. Women are relational and emotional. To understand the magnitude of this we need to examine what women have been absorbing over the past half century. The proliferation of romance novels and romantic movies and TV soap operas is one area we need to take a look at.
Women love these because they engage them at the level of their emotions. They get transported, carried away to a world of make-believe where there is wall-to-wall happiness.
Some years ago, I had a conversation with a woman. She told me that she was about 15 when the movie Dr Zhivago was in the cinemas. She went to see it a whopping 24 times. Now why would she do that? Was she trying to memorise the script? Did it take all those viewings to be able to grasp the plot? No, the reason she went was for the "experience" . It was an escape, but not any old escape, it was an escape into a world where her emotions were engaged, were hieghtened and eventually satisfied. All she wanted was more of the same. Repeat screenings gave her that opportunity to wallow in knee deep romance, be swept off her feet again and again. She could live for days off that experience.
That explains why women love those movies and novels. As soon as one is history, another romantic movie beckons ,and they have and endless supply of romantic experiences on tap via the cinema or TV.

But what is happening as they are exposed to all this romantic fantasy? They are being shaped. Their expectations from marriage are being fashioned. By the time they get married they have had drilled into their souls an expectation of men and marriage that does not equate to what is on offer in the real world of humans. Just as a man's view of women is skewed by porn, so a woman's view of men has been also skewed by romance movies.

Now apply this to the "new rules of marriage". I have yet to see a marriage book proclaiming that for marriage to succeed all wives have to look like an airbrushed, cosmetically enhanced, digitally altered  female porn star. And that if they don't, they are solely responsible for their husbands disenchantment with them.

Yet we have endless marriage books that have adopted the unrealistic idealised product of romantic movies as the default way of defining how a man should be in marriage.
In the same way most women would be in despair over the requirement to look like a porn star to satisfy their husband, so men are in despair over the new expectation of women that their husbnads must be like these celuloid fabricated men. Admitteddly, some men will match that ideal, just as some women will approximate the porn image. But the vast majority will be out of luck.

Now back to Dr Zhivago. The central plot is about a married man falling for another man's wife. This is typical Hollywood. This is why the church and Hollywood were on opposite sides of the fence.( But not any more.) Almost without fail, the romance movies that have women swooning, have cunningly woven their stories around illict love. It's almost like there is a subliminal message that is being absorbed by the viewer without the viewer fully realising it. The underlying message is that morals are not important. At least not important when it comes love, men, marriage and sex. What matters is the experience. Women are wanting to recreate in their lives the experience they had in the movie theatre.
 As the charismatic voice of Andy Williams crooned, the women in the dimly lit theatre swooned;
"And there are dreams, all than your heart can hold"...
" You'll turn to me out of the long-ago
Warm as the wind, soft as the kiss of snow
Lara, my own, think of me now and then
God's speed, my love, till you are mine again"

Then they returned home to husbands who belonged on a differnt planet!

Is that how the New Rules of Marriage was born.

I am so glad to see this point raised again. Recall I made a post called “the porn of romance novels” several months ago, and if I recall the posts went into nearly 50 pages.

 

There were all kinds of opinions of course, but pretty much the usual suspects had zero agreement that there was as much wrong with romance novels as porn….:”its different” they proclaimed, that being a group of women, and a couple of men here. Sure it is, but I made the exact same point about it raising expectations and leading to women not finding that husbands measure up.

 

Alpha you have astutely added that we are now counseled along the lines of moving men in the direction that these romance novel-esque expectations have taken women’s ideas about how a husband should be. That conclusion is obvious and true.

 

Lets see….the rebuttals….

 

1.“ I know 6 women who filed divorces and none of them ever read romance novels”

2 “ I just don’t believe it’s the case that women gain these expectations from these novels”

3. “ Women ARE told to look like that…have you seen Cosmo and those mags recently?”

 

 

.Fact is, one needn’t literally read the novels or watch the movies to pick up the expectations. This is not a claim that women are wanting the silly aspects of the men in those books and movies…clearly not, just the uber sensitive guys who communicate their hearts and are romantic….not in a soft light beach scene  kind of way. Even the counseling and how marriage is even taught in church etc., leads to the same unrealistic expectations.

 

2. I can’t help what an individual believes because they want to believe it…..changes nothing

 

3.This is an oft cited one. BUT women own these magazines and put this pressure themselves. The biggest critic and cause of insecurity on womens looks are other women or ones own self image problem….thus the constant asking “this make me look fat?” Besides this is also the deflection again where alpha is trying to discuss the romance novel angle.