The Intentional Marriage: Going Beyond Commitment

Pastor John Rume

Going beyond Commitment: The hard, cold truth of marriage is that staying together can be tough at times for almost any couple. Most of us probably know wonderful, intelligent, thoughtful people who—despite all the evidence of the harmful effects of divorce on children —are divorced anyway. Why is it so hard for couples to stay together?
William Doherty is a professor and director of the marriage and family therapy program at the University of Minnesota and author of numerous books, including Take Back Your Marriage: Sticking Together in a World That Pulls Us Apart and Soul Searching: Why Psychotherapy Must Promote Moral Responsibility. As you can probably judge just from the book titles, Doherty is not your typical psychotherapist.
Further evidence of this is provided in the introduction to Take Back Your Marriage, where Doherty explains why he wrote the book:

“Research has demonstrated convincingly what most people have known all along: that a stable, loving, two-parent family is the optimal environment for children’s health and development in our society… Children do better in homes with stable marriages even if their parents aren’t particularly happy together, as long as the parents are reasonably cooperative.
“I wrote this book because I believe that the core social and personal challenge of our time is how to make loving, permanent marriage work for ourselves and our children. I fear that no social program, no educational achievement program, no job program, no anti-crime program, and no amount of psychotherapy and Prozac will solve our society’s problems unless we figure out how men and women can sustain permanent bonds that are good for them, their children and their communities.
“I wrote this book because, even if we have an unbending commitment to our mate, most of us are blind to how we lose our marriages by slow erosion if we don’t keep replenishing the soil.”

I decided William Doherty would be a good person to supply the answer to my question.
Doherty believes part of the problem is that the consumer culture in which we live has affected our attitudes about marriage. We expect our mates to fill needs for us, and to bring us happiness and fulfillment.
We’ve internalized the notion that it’s okay—and even psychologically healthy—to be looking out for number one even within the context of marriage. We ask ourselves during stressful times, or boring times, or just from time to time whether we’re getting what we should from our marriage.
As Doherty puts it,

“Our culture teaches us that we’re all entitled to an exciting marriage and great sex life; if we don’t get both, we’re apt to feel deprived. What used to be seen as human weakness of the flesh has become a personal entitlement.
Steadfastness and self-sacrifice aren’t in this picture of therapeutic consumption. When the marriage relationship becomes psychologically painful or stunts our growth, there are plenty of therapists around to serve as midwives for a divorce.”

Doherty believes that the two key ingredients for a successful marriage are commitment and intentionality. Commitment may sound obvious and clear-cut. But in his years of therapy, Doherty has come to recognize two distinct kinds of commitment couples make. One is what he calls “commitment-as-long-as.” It means staying together, “not as long as we both shall live, but as long as things are working out for me.”
The other kind is what Doherty calls “commitment-no-matter-what.” He describes it as “the long view of marriage in which you don’t balance the ledgers every month to see if you are getting an adequate return on your investment… You’re here to stay.” This long-term kind of commitment is essential, according to Doherty, but can lead to stale marriages if not accompanied by intentionality.
By intentionality, Doherty means making one’s marriage a high priority. During courtship, a couple’s relationship is front and center, as he puts it. After marriage, other things often take priority: careers and children, to name the most common. Having an intentional marriage means being conscious about maintaining a connection through, among other things, “a reservoir of marital rituals of connection and intimacy.”
The main way to resist the forces that pull us apart —the natural drift of marriage over time and the insidious pull of the consumer culture —is to be a couple who carefully cultivates commitment and ways to connect over the years. Simply stated, the intentional couple thinks about their relationship, plans for their relationship, and acts for their relationship, mostly in simple, everyday ways and occasionally in big, splashy ways.
Doherty gave me an example of a simple ritual that he and his wife developed during their child-rearing years. Every evening after dinner, they’d have coffee together —without children present. Their children knew they had to leave their parents alone for these few minutes.
Years later Doherty asked his grown daughter what she had thought of that ritual as a child. She told him that it had made her feel safe because she knew it meant that her parents liked each other. Doherty believes there’s a tendency for parents to think that it’s okay to sacrifice their relationship for the children. There’s no question that having children involves sacrifices, but, as Doherty told me, “Sacrificing your marriage for the sake of your children doesn’t help anybody.”
If marital counseling is needed, Doherty advises that this is a time when being a good consumer is important. Selecting the right therapist can make all the difference. He suggests talking to people who can make a recommendation based on successful personal experience. He recommends asking questions and making it clear that you want to hold onto your marriage and make it better.

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