A Conversation with Judith S. Wallerstein

McSwain: Judy, how did you develop your interest in studying good marriages?

Wallerstein: This work has had a very long overture in my life. I've been studying divorce, especially its impact on children, over the past twenty-five years. My colleagues and I have seen upward of three thousand separated and divorced families at the Center for the Family in Transition, which I founded. Also, I have followed 130 children from divorced families from the time their parents divorced in the early seventies up to the present. Over the years I've become increasingly concerned about these children and many of their parents. The bottom line is that many of these children are in poor shape, psychologically, in all aspects of their lives. Their problems reach a crescendo when they enter late adolescence and young adulthood. It is very serious, because we're looking at 30 percent of the child population in this country. So it's fairly straightforward that I would begin to think about what goes into making a good marriage in what I've come to think of as a culture of divorce.

When I started to look at studies that had been done on the subject of happy marriage, I discovered that this area was almost a wasteland. There were long shelves of writings about failing marriages, based on expertise from treatment. But the interior world of the happily married couple was almost totally unexplored. I took this discovery as a challenge and began a study of good marriage—the first such study in this country.

McSwain: Who were the couples in your study?

Wallerstein: They were fifty couples who are, by their own estimation, happily married. Each couple that participated had been married at least nine years—because divorce peaks in the seventh year of marriage and I did not want to include couples who were still statistically likely to divorce. I was not looking for good enough marriages, nor was I looking for enduring marriages. Many marriages are lasting, but nevertheless are dying inside, of boredom, of loneliness, of a sense that “this is all that life has to offer and I might as well stick with it.” All of the couples in the study had children of the marriage, because throughout my professional life I'd only studied families with children. I deliberately did not impose a mental health definition of happy marriage, because a central question of my study was, What do the couples regard as “happy”? And I didn't want to begin with answers to the very question I was raising. The study began in 1990 in the San Francisco Bay Area. The man and the woman in each couple were interviewed separately for many hours in their home and then interviewed together. I recontacted all of them two years later and got 100 percent cooperation.

McSwain: One of the thoughts I had while I was reading the book and thinking about your previous work was that in both cases you looked at assumptions that were so strongly held by all of society that they weren't usually questioned. The first one was that divorce does not affect children, or does not affect them adversely. Your work dispelled that myth and changed the attitudes of the mental health community toward divorce. The other general belief the book addresses is that a happy childhood is somehow prerequisite to having a happy marriage.

Wallerstein: I think it would be fair to say that in all of my work I have tried to venture into territory that was exciting, because it was so little known and because there were so many assumptions that rested on very flimsy evidence. In regard to the effects of divorce on children, when I started to look at children, the overall understanding of the community, and especially the mental health community, was that if it's good for the parents, it's good for the children. And my work was attacked because I challenged this notion with my observations about the children. (Incidentally, before my colleagues and I started to

look at children in divorce, there were no such studies.) And the notion that children were not detrimentally impacted by divorce rested entirely on adult wishes that that were so. Similarly, in our understanding of what makes a good relationship, we've relied a great deal on reversing what we know about psychopathology and unhappiness. I have felt for many years that one cannot build psychological theory only on what one sees among patients, and that we cannot understand health by extrapolating from what we know about illness. I think it would be fair to say that we have only a partial theory if we explain beneficial outcomes by extrapolating from psychopathology. A good marriage is not the opposite of what makes the divorce. My data show that many people with seriously unhappy childhoods do go on to make fine marriages in adulthood. I think there's every reason to believe, from my work and perhaps the work of others, that we've underestimated the capacity of adults to bring about change in their own lives, especially around the central axis of the marital relationship.

McSwain: What makes your book so vibrant for me is the way that you approach people's struggles without pathologizing them, but, by reading between the lines with a fine clinician's eye and seeing the critical internal struggles that these spouses bring to each other, you focused on how they were able to use the marriage to achieve a much more successful resolution.

Wallerstein: Certainly, as a clinician, I'm very much interested in people who are in difficulty. In fact, my colleagues in the university community sometimes feel that I see too many shadows. But I am also very much interested in education, in public policy, and in prevention. And I've been concerned that the knowledge we bring to social policy, and to an overall perspective on society, is too much rooted in unhappy outcomes and is insufficient to our needs. For example, there is the prevailing view in some quarters that conflict between husband and wife leads to divorce. In fact, there was a great deal of conflict in these happy marriages, and the marriage contained it, provided it with a holding environment. Many of the people said they felt safer within the marital relationship than at any other time in their lives. People also have the view that in happy marriages the man and the woman have been born under lucky stars, or have enjoyed good childhoods and followed their parents' good example. One of my most interesting findings is that only five of the hundred people in the good marriage study wanted a marriage like their parents had. Some of them loved their parents; others were friendly to their parents; some were angry at their parents. In any case, they wanted a relationship different from the one they observed while growing up. Several couples, in fact 15 percent of the sample, had been brought up under very traumatic conditions, including abandonment, severe untreated mental illness, incest, and abuse; and yet they managed in adulthood to put together a very good marriage for themselves. They were particularly proud of the children they raised and in providing for their own children the kind of happy and loving environment that had been denied to them. It was, in their view, their major triumph.

McSwain: I remember in one of your previous books you addressed the importance of marriage as a continuing source of the adult's self-esteem. But this is a new idea, the idea that a marital partner is such a powerful catalyst for change.

Wallerstein: Well, the marital relationship is, without doubt, transformative. It can catalyze regression; it can be very destructive; but it can also catalyze growth, maturity, expanded conscience, greater empathy, and greater capacity for love. In the same way that a mature sexual relationship has all kinds of ramifications for the individual, I think there's a psychological intercourse that goes with the marriage. Marriage can promote growth and maturity, it can keep development at a standstill, or it can lead to regression.

McSwain: How did you decide to pursue this particular research model?

Wallerstein: It's my favorite model. It's one I know a lot about. I know how to interview, and I know how to think about and analyze clinical data. I interviewed each person for several hours, and then I saw the couple together. It was important for me to see them in their home so that I could see them at their most relaxed. And so I could get some idea of the world they had created together. Early on, I hit on the idea that I would assure each individual that what they told me would be kept confidential, not only from the community but from each other as well. This turned out to be very useful, in part because they believed me and I was privy to information in a number of instances that the other partner did not possess.

McSwain: Tell me about the people who participated in the study. How did you find them?

Wallerstein: The couples were mostly white middle-class; some were very wealthy, including CEOs of important companies. Others were graduate students at a university. They were a well-educated, articulate group. And they were excited at participating in what they understood to be the first study in the country of happy marriage; they were eager to cooperate. I had no trouble finding participants. I have a certain amount of visibility in the San Francisco area, and I went to different groups and asked for volunteers. Obviously, for this kind of study one could only use volunteers capable of a good degree of self-reflection. This is, strictly speaking, a hypothesis-generating study, and whatever ideas I've come up with need to be tested on other populations, including other kinds of communities. For example, it would be very interesting to compare marriage in this group with marriage in a community where the extended family is more influential in the lives of the couple.

McSwain: What were some of the questions that you asked?

Wallerstein: I began with the question, What's happy for you about this marriage? My second question was, What's disappointing about this marriage for you? And then, What would your husband (or wife) say? What would the children say? And from there, I roamed widely and fully over their family of origin, their relationship with their parents, their relationship with siblings, their adolescent relationships, and the roads not taken, including important sexual or love relationships as adolescents and young adults. And then, of course, the whole history of the courtship and the marriage, in great detail, including sex, friendship, work place, developmental changes in themselves in and in the other, relationships with their children, issues of infidelity, how they handle conflict and crises, their plans for the future, and so on. They were very full interviews and resulted in a mass of data that was fascinating in its richness. I was able to ask very directly, Tell me about sex, tell me about love. One very useful question was, What would break this marriage? Another was, What would happen if you lost him (or her)? My final question often asked for advice for a young couple starting out.

McSwain: How did being married to an analyst affect your choices?

Wallerstein: Well, I didn't marry an analyst. Bob was planning a career in internal medicine and had spent several years as intern, resident, and chief resident in medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital before he became interested in psychiatry. I have to confess that I was not at all happy with this change, nor did I understand it. Nor did he, at the time. I was eager to get on with our life, and not go into three years of residency in psychiatry. Nor was I especially excited about moving to Topeka, which, as I described in my book, I could hardly find on the map. But despite my misgivings, I loved it. Our three children were born there, and it was a wonderful place to bring up young children. The Menninger Clinic in those days was an international enclave, set in the middle of the Kansas prairie. It was a tremendous intellectual center, one which attracted visiting scholars from all over the world, who came for several months at a time, including such people as Konrad Lorenz, Margaret Mead, and Jean Piaget. And, of course, Anna Freud and many of the major figures in psychoanalysis visited on several occasions.

McSwain: And much of your career was really formed there.

Wallerstein: I was trained there and learned a tremendous amount about clinical work. At the time I was there, the Children's Division was a mecca. Families whose children presented diagnostic problems came from all over the world, from as far away as Bombay, from throughout South America and all over the United States and Europe. We saw a tremendous range of clinical conditions. I had very difficult patients in long-term treatment, ranging in age from six to seventeen. Also, I had a lot of excellent supervision with psychoanalysts trained in both Europe and America.

McSwain: And then the big move was to California.

Wallerstein: Yes, and that was my move. Bob was reasonably content at Menninger, which was very good to Bob. He was very valuable to them, and he was well rewarded. He rose quickly to become director of research, which was exactly what he wanted. Over the years, he received offers from all over the country, which he consistently refused. Then in 1964, we came out and spent a year at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Bob and I did a lot of talking about our future that year, and we also considered the needs of our children, who were moving into adolescence. He was debating between accepting a major professorship at Harvard and becoming chief of psychiatry at Mt. Zion. I was ready in my own personal life and career to open doors. I had a sense that the time had come, and he agreed that it was fair, and that it was my turn—that I should guide this decision. So there was a major shift for me at the time, and a shift for him, and a shift in the marriage. In the same way that my life and world shifted when we moved from New York City to the Midwest, a major shift occurred when we moved to California.

McSwain: Do you see some correlation between the ideas that we're developing now, about the subjectivity of the analyst and its effect on the patient, and the mutual influence between marital partners?

Wallerstein: Yes, I do think the ideas about subjectivity represent a step forward. I think there is a lot to be explored in the complex interactions of patient and therapist and relationships within the family. I think we need to know a lot more about the vicissitudes of memory. For example, one of my observations is that early memories may become greener and more vivid at certain periods in our lives, such as in aging. I think the persistence of courtship memories and early courtship fantasies are very important in maintaining the excitement of the marriage. I think there is value to maintaining certain tensions in the marriage, and that a good marriage is far from serene or conflict- or tension-free. It's a very lively relationship. There are a great many aspects of the man-woman relationship that emerged in my work that need to be further examined.

McSwain: Judy, let me shift the subject. Now that your name is becoming a household word and you are being interviewed on Good Morning, America and Eye-to-Eye, I'm curious both how that feels to you and what you hope the popularity of this book will accomplish.

Wallerstein: Well, I'm very ambitious for this book. I really want to shift the level of discourse in this country from this vapid talk about family values to something more substantial. I want to move the focus of discussion from deploring fatherlessness and marital breakup to what we can do to improve marriage and what knowledge we can bring to bear that will improve marriage.

McSwain: I think you used the analogy of a map in the book.

Wallerstein: Yes, a map. This is not, as I've said, a how-to book. And I've had disagreements with many of the women's magazines because they want a list from me of exactly the steps that should be taken by their readers to improve their marriage. But I think people need understanding and knowledge of what marriage is really about, and it's these principles that I'm interested in elaborating.

McSwain: The people in this book are very real, and their struggles are very palpable, and they are victors.

Wallerstein: Yes, they are victors. And they have a right to feel triumphant. They were very aware that divorce is all around them, and aware of the perils along their way. This was a much harder book to write than my books on divorce. In a sense, when you write about tragedy, the stories are poignant and the quotations profoundly moving. It's harder, much harder, to write about relationships that are working. You see, Tolstoy was absolutely wrong. There are many patterns in unhappy marriages that can be discerned, and there are many similarities among unhappy marriages. But each good marriage is distinctive in its own way.