Fixing Marriages
I consulted a relative of mine, Dr. Sara Brandt, who is a registered Marriage and Family Therapist about whether she sees differences regarding divorce and happiness in egalitarian vs. hierarchical marriages. She claimed to not be an expert on the subject as she does not get many couples who have a hierarchical marriage due to religious teachings, a category of clients who would probably choose to see a Christian counselor and she does not bill herself as such specifically.
She does, however, get strongly Christian couples in her office, but they tend to be egalitarian in their determining of roles and responsibilities. In many couples, the issues stem from the woman feeling overwhelmed by chores related to the home and a need to shift that stress. She has found most husbands to be highly receptive to those needs, even though different couples certainly end up with different amounts of responsibilities per spouse. So, even though their teachings may say that the man is the head of the household, he is responsive to his wife and willing to alter his behaviors to assist her.
In couples where hierarchical marriages not based on religion occur, Dr. Brandt does find a higher rate of dissatisfaction and subsequent divorce. However, having hierarchical religious teachings appears to either allow women to reconcile their emotions or to keep them from reaching out for help as that would be contrary to their beliefs.
Dr. Brandt has a rapidly growing practice and feels her success is due to her newly developed approach to therapy. She gives three reasons for her success: 1) She works well with men. Men want to fix things and don’t want to ramble all around the place about feelings. She helps them discover what new behaviors will have positive reactions in the marriage, and the men are excited about taking an active role in figuring it out. Women are startled, surprised, and happy at their husbands’ responses to the therapy and problems get fixed quickly. 2) The average number of sessions that couples attend is about five. She deals only with the practical complaints as presented, unless there is a disagreement between the two about the moral framework from which they operate. Once the goals of the sessions are reached, they are done. 3) Medical doctors and insurance professionals hold her in high regard. When marriages get fixed quickly, the individuals’ health improves and the cost is less to the insurance company. She’s fixing marriages, not superegos and ids.
Dr. Brandt sees many categories or elements entering into the mix of what makes marriages work. She’s not into changing morality or moral frameworks unless that is necessary for the couple to get along, and even that change would have to be couple-initiated. Couples, or individual members of a couple, can say they believe something — say, a theological precept about marriage — but they may not in reality operate that way. So how important a certain idea or belief or model is to a person definitely affects the way they interact in a marriage.
There is a limited amount of research out on the effects of the new egalitarian and complementarian doctines on marriages, but more research is needed because it takes awhile for the teachings to filter down into the pews and get implemented in marriage relationships. My mother-in-law reports that in her complementarian church that the men get so much hammering on loving their wives and taking charge in their families that she feels sorry for them. There have been complaints that Christian couples in complementarian churches act more like egalitarians. We need to know, on an ongoing basis, what effect these new teachings, both egalitarian AND complementarian, are having on Christians. This is important because what marriage and family research does continue to show is that unless both parties of a couple feel they are having an adequate imput into the marriage, that marriage will not be happy and eventually is likely to head into serious trouble.