Marriage - Growing Together

I had heard the "cycle" before from other readings. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross was the first scientific person to ask people what they were experiencing when facing death. The stages of the cycle as she published in On Death and Dying were experienced in this sequence: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance. This was not new to me as I continued ready Dr. M. Scott Peck's book The Road Less Traveled and Beyond. What was new to me was this cycle being applied to a successful marriage.

He wrote "Someone in an audience once asked me whether long-term marriages go through these stages, and I said they do indeed. Initially, as differences between partners emerge, our first tendency is to try to deny those differences and to deny that we have fallen out of love. When we can no longer deny that, we get angry at our spouse for being different from us. When that eventually doesn't get us anywhere and our spouse doesn't change, we try to bargain in some manner or another - 'I'll change in this way if you'll change in that way.' When that doesn't work, then we tend to bewcome depressed and the marriage looks very doubtful. But if we can hang in there - often for a period of many years, and in the case of my marriage to Lily it was close to twenty years - we can finally learn how to accept our spouse and can come, as Lily and I have done, to a relationship that is better than romantic love and even seems to partake of glory. But many people seem to believe a marriage that experiences these stages is not a good one at all, as if long-term relationships must be totally smoot sailing. ... Indeed, despite all the ups and downs - through the death of illusions and the rebirths of trust and acceptance - that Lily and I experenced, we have emerged with a greater degree of understanding than either of us could have ever envisioned."

I don't know if I could have understood this all years ago, but, especially for those of you who have not been married nearly 42 years, that Dr. Peck's analysis is absolutely true. At any time in the "cycle" (denial, anger, bargaining, depression or acceptance) many couples decide it is not worth the effort and file for a divorce. In fact, for some marriages, that is the only workable solution. BUT, if you can navigate the "cylce", the end result is incredible. Making a marriage "work", does indeed require "work".