Conventional couples). By contrast, Spiritual Peers are old hands at egalitarianism and the dance of competence. Through the years, both husband and wife have demonstrated their desire to never take each other for granted, and so scorekeeping and marital chicken are distant memories.
A silly example might help clarify how a couple going up the Relationship Pathway grows in competence and egalitarianism. The Shipwrecked wife might rather die a slow, torturous death than change a lightbulb if she considered it her husband’s job, but she would exhaust three hundred times as much energy nagging him to do it. The Conventional wife would change the bulb, if her husband didn’t get to it when she asked, but she would secretly resent his dereliction of duty for the rest of her life, or at least for the rest of the day. The Partnership wife changes the bulb without a second thought. The Peer wife would not only change the bulb without thinking about it, but also might have the whole house rewired—to code—by the time her husband came home.
Likewise, the Shipwrecked husband would consider watching his children “baby-sitting.” He is loath to do it and looks for the earliest opportunity to sack out on the sofa. The Conventional husband knows that he should want to watch his kids, but it would only be a matter of time before he got bored and sent them to play in the basement so he could get some work done. The Partnership husband would eagerly play with the children and would be happy to give his wife a break whenever she asked for it. And the Peer husband would be begging his wife to go out so that he could get some alone time with his kids (and the house would be immaculate when she got back).
This couple is so good at taking care of themselves and each other that to outsiders their marriage just seems to happen magically. They are the highest functioning examples of what Dr. Don Jackson and William Lederer of the Palo Alto Mental Research Center described as “collaborative geniuses.” Of course, a great deal of very hard work goes into making these marriages work, but it is most definitely a labor of love. Spiritual Peers are each other’s best friends, have virtually no secrets from each other, and have achieved a level of spiritual sexuality that is truly enviable. Unlike couples in less-good marriages who go through periods of boredom with each other, the Spiritual Peers’ relationship actually becomes more vital, exciting, fun, and fulfilling as the years go by.
If they struggle with anything, it is their relative social isolation. Spiritual Peers are too busy loving each other and living their own lives to have the energy for the Sturm und Drang that comes with having too many acquaintances. This is in contrast to Shipwrecked couples, who avoid others because they fear them, and Apprenticeship couples, who gorge themselves on a frenzy of casual acquaintances and social commitments.
Abraham Maslow, developer of the Hierarchy of Needs, researched self-actualizing people and his findings apply to all the Exceptional couples, especially to Spiritual Peers. They are accepting of themselves and others, are at peace when life becomes unpredictable, are spontaneous and creative, have a good sense of humor, value their privacy, can take care of themselves, are capable of deeply intimate relationships, and have an open, positive attitude about life. They are the couples—indeed, the people—we all want to be when we grow up.
Can Your Marriage Be Exceptional?
After reading about Exceptional couples it would be possible to despair of ever achieving such a lofty status, but be encouraged. This book is mostly concerned with helping you find your way into the first of the Exceptional marriages (the Traditional and Modern Partnerships). From that point, every couple must find their own way to actualization and Spiritual Peerdom. Likewise, it is important to note that the majority of Exceptional Partnership couples started out in more Conventional relationships. Only after developing their marital imperative and clinging to it through the storms of life did they find themselves—often unexpectedly so—at a more gratifying level of marital intimacy.
A perfect example of this growth through struggle would be Kenny and Bobbi McCaughey. They began life together as an average working-class couple with a strong connection to their community and church. Eventually they became parents of their daughter Mikayla and the famous McCaughey septuplets.
In one book, Seven From Heaven, Kenny McCaughey describes his dramatic walk down the road toward what I would call Exceptional husbandhood through the pregnancy and subsequent birth of the couple’s septuplets. While his wife was confined to extreme bedrest from the earliest weeks of gestation, McCaughey found himself challenging all the comfortable rules of Conventional married life. He was forced to challenge his competencies more quickly and more pervasively than you or I will probably ever have to, and through his labor he developed what I would consider to be Exceptional gratitude toward his wife, whom he reports he always loved dearly, but without really appreciating the full value of her gift to the marriage until their blessed crisis compelled him to walk in her shoes for an extended period. Through that tumultuous pregnancy and the chaotic months following the septuplets’ birth, the only thing the McCaugheys had to hold on to was what I would call their marital imperative, the theme of their marriage, summed up by a line in song they sang to each other at their wedding: “And the world shall know that we are a household of faith.” As the world today can attest, they are.
Not knowing the McCaugheys personally (and considering that their book was mostly about their children and not their marriage), I cannot say if they would consider themselves to be an Exceptional couple as of this writing, but I can say with confidence that they are traveling down that road, and if they continue to cling to their marital imperative as a way of life, they will surely reach their destination.
And so will you, because as difficult as the journey to Exceptional couplehood is, it is also the journey for which each and every one of us was made. Every particle of every human being—body and soul—cries out to made whole by love: by being loved by others, by loving others, and by love itself. What better opportunity to pursue this most natural of callings than the opportunity presented by your marriage, which is nothing if it is not a “school of love” in every sense of that phrase.
The remaining chapters of this book will help you discover the skills and resources you will need to complete your journey up the Relationship Pathway toward Exceptional couplehood. I invite you and your beloved to begin your adventure with the next chapter by developing a vital, compelling, and challenging marital imperative.
3
Designing a Marital Imperative
Marriage... transforms a human action into an instrument of the divine action.
—JACQUES LECLERCQ
MAX AND SHELBY have been married for sixteen years. The thing that Shelby says she likes most about Max is his ability to “keep her focused.”
“When I was in college, I was struggling to figure out what I wanted to do when I got out. Around that time I took a philosophy class that changed my life. The professor tried to make the subject more relevant by asking us to focus on not just what kind of work we wanted to do but what kind of people we wanted to be. He asked us to consider our assigned readings from the perspective of finding some guiding principles—a ‘worldview’ he called it. This way, regardless of what we decided to do with our lives we could define success by how we conducted ourselves. I guess I kind of ran with that assignment. I came up with a list of qualities that were important to me, things that I knew would keep me centered regardless of how much or how little money I made or where I ended up in life. I decided to gauge my definition of success by how well I was living up to my principles, and rather than letting these be pie-in-the-sky ideals, I really tried to keep them in mind as I went through my day. I even weeded out potential boyfriends based on whether or not they brought out more of those particular qualities in me. I wanted a marriage partner who was going to help keep me focused on what was really important.
“A lot of times, guys would look at me like I had two heads when I would talk about this stuff. They accused me of ‘thinking too much’ and told me there’d be plenty of time to worry about all that later on, and I should just relax. My friends kept telling me that my standards were too unrealistic. I was beginning to think that I would have to choose between my value system and getting a steady boyfriend. I know that sounds hopelessly shallow of me, but what can I say? It’s how I felt. Thankfully