Expectant Fathers
Lesson 6: Is He Ever Going to Help With the Housework??
How to Make It Last 50 Years...The Relationship, Not the Pregnancy!
We’ve all had the pleasure of knowing couples that have celebrated 25 or 50 years of marriage. Most of these precious pairs have had children and then grandchildren. My own parents were together 55 years and although there was turmoil at times, they never left any problems unresolved and never left each other. In interviewing many of these successful couples, it is striking that their recipe for making a marriage work are so similar. They consistently mention that a “good” marriage brings with it the attendant need to keep the relationship ongoing and satisfying. Hundreds of books have been written on the topic, and many fads and have come and gone. Marriage is an extraordinarily complex human institution in psychological terms, and no easy answers are available. One thing is clear: Every successful marriage involves hard work. So what are the secrets to double digit success? Some characteristics of happy and enduring marriages that often get mentioned by the gold and silver couples are:
- Ability to change and tolerate change (flexibility)
- Ability to live with the unchangeable (know when to seek change and when to look the other way)
- Assumption of permanence; commitment; determination that “your marriage will last”
- Trust, which is the basis of real love and intimacy
- Depending on one another equally (power)
- Enjoying each other; sharing a sense of humor
- A shared and cherished history
First is the assumption of permanence. There is no doubt that the attitudes and expectations one brings to a marriage are influential for the success of that marriage. If one assumes going into a marriage that “this is it,” this attitude alone leads to actions that favor marital permanence.
On the other hand, if one goes into the marriage with an “I can always get out of this if it doesn’t work out” attitude, you may want to begin researching divorce attorneys. For several years, prenuptial agreements were all the rage because they seemed to signify the independence of the two people getting married. Once the politics of reason prevailed, tradition was again restored and the legal advisors had to content themselves with one less contract sale. An attorney friend of fine said that if a client requested a prenuptial agreement, he knew that he’d be representing one of them in the ensuing divorce case.
Second marriage and family life must be built around much more than the romantic feelings between two people. If for no other reason, these feelings fluctuate over time. While working with expectant fathers 25 years ago, I conducted a study to determine the characteristics of the soon-to-be adaptive dads (as parents and partners) from those that didn’t make it past two years of marriage.
The fathers were categorized into three groups based on various psychological tests. One group was termed the “romantics”. These men saw their relationship as remaining the same after pregnancy as it was before their wives conceived. Their image of family life was captured by a fireplace, two glasses of wine, the baby quietly resting on a blanket on the floor, and romance being as hot as when first married. The second group of men was called “the providers”. This group pictured family life as requiring serious changes to their schedule, spending more time at home, and making compromises when it came to the choice of car or where they were going to live.
Like the “romantics”, they saw themselves as being happy and content with family life. The last group was called the “worriers”. These new dads pictured family life as a series of struggles. They expected their living expenses to soar, their salaries being inadequate, and life being too busy to enjoy. But even with all these worries, they saw a happy family in their future; they would just have to work harder to support it.
So which of the three groups did the best over the next few years? All of the “romantics”, which made up 28% of the ninety-three men involved with the study, were either divorced or separated from their wives. They had constructed an unrealistic expectation of family life and each told a story of disappointment. They had continued to “date” their spouses during pregnancy, which most of the women found delightful. But these men weren’t prepared for the adjustments a family requires. It was difficult for these couples to find 10 minutes alone together much less time for a fire and cocktails.
The second least successful group of men was the “worriers”. Half of them, 37% of the group participating, were no longer with their spouses. For those that separated and divorced, family life was a continuation of the stress they felt during pregnancy. After a couple of years, they found they couldn’t cope with what one father called the “chaos” of raising children. Their worries became increasingly intense because of their need for control and order in their lives. They discovered that family life is not necessarily orderly.
The most successful group, the “providers”, began adjusting to family life during the pregnancy. They took an active interest in prenatal classes, listened attentively to information their wives shared about child rearing, changed their decision making styles to better include their spouses, and remained calm while starting their families. This group had the same increasing levels of stress and anxiety, but little to no depressive symptoms. They were also a group that described themselves as being emotionally close to their wives’ families. The personal friends of these men remained close to them for many years even though the physical distance had grown. They nurtured their social support system. Interestingly, most of them also had some experience taking care of young children. It may have been a sibling, a cousin, or a neighbor. Whatever the experience, they had no fear of babies and almost a natural love for children.
Over the years, the same success has been seen with other men that are “providers”; and the same dismal failure among men that are “romantics”. Does this mean that there is an ideal “father type”? Well, yes and no. The natural provider type appears to become the most adaptive parent and partner. However, the others are capable of the same positive outcome when they have someone to guide them through the critical transition to parenthood. The men who don’t adapt well to family life attempt to apply the same relationship rules and the same expectations they used before pregnancy. When stress and agitation increases, they look to someone or something outside of themselves to blame. They don’t recognize that their life is undergoing significant change and so is their relationship to their wives. The old pattern of boldly attacking a problem doesn’t work when the problem is you.
The “providers” may be better referred to as the “communicators” because each of them mentioned the benefit of talking about their feelings with their spouses. One young man said, “Talking with my wife throughout the pregnancy was like clearing my throat. We were interested in raising a family before we became pregnant, and became totally involved as a result of getting to know each other better during the pregnancy. Those nine months brought out the worst in us and the best in us. The best in us was recognizing and changing the worst in us.”
Could the “romantics” and “worriers” have achieved the same result? Of course! They too could have grown and matured with the experience. They could have taken the opportunity to reacquaint themselves with their spouses as mothers as well as lovers and partners. The complaint that therapists hear most often from men struggling with pregnancy is that they don’t know how to change. They see their partners becoming moms, but they don’t feel in sync with the process. They don’t know how to cope with this life altering event.
There is one simple fact all men should find comforting: expectant fathers may feel more stress, anxiety, depression, worried, wild, or just plain weird during pregnancy. This is part of the normal change process. They will feel better if they share these feelings with you from the start. Allowing these feelings to build until they reach some critical level and then unloading or dumping them won’t feel good for either of you. Pregnancy is a process takes nine months. Use this time wisely to develop romantic and realistic attitudes about each other and the situation.
Another trait of the successful “provider” dads was their appreciation for tradition in a family. They discussed with their wives what family holidays would be like, how time with the extended family would be enjoyed, and the kinds of customs they most appreciated. They also shared a sense of humor and language with their spouses that would lead to a strong sense of family identity and feelings of family pride. The more that can be done to build a sense of family solidarity – us apart from the rest of the world - the better. This usually requires strong linkages with persons outside the immediate family, especially close relatives and friends on both sides. They should all have the understanding that yours is a unique and important social unit; and they should have the expectation that it is incumbent upon them to help the family prevail.
All successful marriages, of course, have been through tough times. Their success comes from the manner in which the tough times are overcome and, perhaps, forgotten. While interviewing the successful senior couples mentioned in the opening of this chapter the question was asked of them: “What makes a happy marriage?” One husband was quick to answer, “A bad memory.”
“A lasting marriage results from a couple’s ability to resolve the conflicts that are inevitable in any relationship,” concludes the social psychologist John Gottman, who has studied more than two thousand married couples over two decades. “Marriage lives and dies by what you might loosely call its arguments, by how well disagreements and grievances are aired.” “The key is how you argue - whether your style escalates tension or leads to a feeling of resolution.”
In one of the few recent in-depth studies of happy marriages along with the consequences of failed families, social psychologist Judith S. Wallerstein and science writer Sandra Blakeslee find that “a good marriage is a process of continual change. . . [and] is built on a series of sequential psychological tasks that the man and the woman address together.” These tasks, we can call them life's challenges, include forming and reforming your expectations of each other separating from the families of childhood, becoming parents, maintaining a rich sexual relationship, and keeping alive the early romantic ideal. “If the issues represented by each psychological task are not addressed,” they report, “the marriage is likely to fail.”
The greatest psychological task faced by most young couples today is the birth of their first child. Following the baby’s arrival, gender roles change, family relationships are altered, sexual patterns shift and the family group is transformed from two persons to three persons.
Some final thoughts
During pregnancy couples lose the exclusive relationship they had with each other while encountering new responsibilities for which neither are completely prepared. But most couples do fine to super with the transition! It requires changing your perspectives (assuming that of the other party), reforming your loving relationship (finding the strength within your two person bond to enlarge the relationship to accommodate three), and aligning your expectations (about yourself and your partner).
In many cases today, neither husband nor wife has had much if any experience with infants. Sometimes relatives and friends aren’t available to lend a hand. Dealing with the psychological challenges that occur over the course of pregnancy is something that can be learned and taught. If people understand in advance what is coming, they can anticipate problems and take steps to resolve them. They can learn to envision the marriage over the long term, to realize that times of stress are followed by times of happiness and that the eventual reward of having a successful marriage is enormous.
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