Rabbi Haim Lifshitz

EMOTIONAL DYNAMICS

 SADNAT ENOSH:
The Human Workshop

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EMOTIONAL DYNAMICS
Compatibility in Couples

Rabbi Ze'ev Chaim Lifshitz

Translated from Hebrew by Dr. Sara Nathan

l'ilui nishmat Esther bas Mordechai

l'ilui nishmat Meyer Hirsh ben Laibel

We need: Tradition.
We want: Openness/Individual Freedom

"What was good enough for our grandparents should be good enough for the young folks as well."  This claim is often made by people who belong to traditional societies, feel loyal toward tradition and have been trained to religious values.

They cite the minimal divorce rate of previous generations.  This argument is persuasive and cannot be ignored.  Divorce rates of the past rarely exceeded one percent, whereas today’s young generation presents a divorce rate of such dimensions as to significantly threaten the stability of the marriage institution: More than one out of two couples gets divorced.

It is well known that broken marriages create hurt children who trust neither themselves nor others nor even life itself. In previous generations, the marriage institution was the proud product of the private space, a stronghold of individual sanctity, a fortified wall defending its family members against invasion by life's negative elements. Marriage was a vital institution, critically needed, in order to protect each family member's unique quality and in order to foster and protect basic relationships of love and trust among the family members: It cultivated the parent-child relationships, inter-parent relationships, and harmonious and healthy inter-sibling relationships.

When Freedom came, and pushed Belonging to the sidelines, the equilibrium between Freedom and Belonging was breached. Breach became the dominant feature of many of the phenomena of the secular era, which has turned Freedom into wantonness, to be trampled on by marginal people, who have assumed the reins of leadership in modern society. Wantonness, in the post-modern era, has become the Establishment.

Married couples' intimate needs underwent change as well, with the advent of this new phenomenon.  Rather than erasing individual needs, the new married couple's individual needs now enjoyed a heyday of natural expression.  This seemed to be a rather positive phenomenon in itself, on the surface of things, for there is no human situation more fraught with individual needs and sensitivities than the relationship between the two members of a couple.

Tradition pushes these needs to the sidelines and lowers the lovers' expectations. It is true that tradition serves to prevent open expressions of friction between the couple, but it also does not greatly contribute, to say the least, toward maximizing opportunities for self-expression between the couple.

We could summarize the difference between a traditional society and a modern society by suggesting that the lower expectations of traditional society reduced the divorce rate but also reduced opportunities for the deeper experiences of encounter between a couple.

From decades-long, in-depth research investigating over forty thousand couples from the Jewish religious and ultra-Orthodox sectors, we have consolidated a list of personal needs, which differ in degree and in kind from person to person. Some of these needs require a complementary opposite, while others require a parallel compatibility. (In another context, we dedicate a lengthy chapter to a full description of these needs.)

One vital need is the need for emotional initiative. Though it constitutes but one need (albeit a critical one) among the couple’s many needs, it seems to prove the urgent need for a methodology for classifying and defining couple needs. The more detailed and precise these definitions can be, the better.

Emotional Dynamics
Briefly stated, the problem is this: “Who starts up with whom?” Who initiates the connection? Who approaches whom, to express affection? Who employs body language (this is a critical issue) to convey the message of affection? Who is the more active and who is the more passive in the pairing connection?

The problem becomes more complex when we realize that being an emotionally active “initiative-taker” in pairing is not an automatic outcome of being an active initiative-taker in practical or social matters. Even an individual who is widely recognized as a "wheeler-dealer" in social organization, in counseling and leadership activities, and who is perpetually initiating interpersonal relationships in social settings will not necessarily express active initiative in the intimate sphere.

Classification Divides Couples into Groups
The Best Group:
On the surface it would appear that the best couple would be the one where both sides initiate. Here no problem of creating the connection can possibly occur. So it would appear. However, in reality, a one hundred percent connection only occurs when each side has an initiating capacity of fifty percent. When both sides’ initiating capacity exceeds fifty percent, this creates excess, which falls under the heading of: “Whoever adds, detracts.” Excessive initiating, bal tosif, is experienced as a sense of being pestered, nagged, or being denied breathing space. “He gets on my nerves.” “She’s a real nudnik,” etc.
The Worst Group:
When the initiating capacity of both sides taken together still cannot cross the one hundred percent threshold, this creates a void. It is the sort of void that evokes Rashi’s description of the pit into which Joseph was thrown by his brothers: “‘And the pit was empty; it had no water.’ Water, it had none, but snakes and scorpions it had.” In the gap that yawns in the void created by a deficiency in pairing dynamics, emotional snakes and scorpions proliferate, and these threaten the functional continuity of the couple’s sense of being paired.
Illustration:

He comes home after a long day of work or study. She is busy in the kitchen, or in the children’s room, or she has just come home from a long day herself. He anticipates that she will come to greet him warmly, and express – in body language if not in words – how much she has missed him. She anticipates a similar gesture from him. Emotional passivity expresses itself as anticipating and waiting, while taking no practical initiative.

Both of them are disappointed. He turns to the bookshelf, to the newspaper, to the telephone. She continues her frustrating wait in the kitchen, in the children’s room or in her study. This mutual disappointment repeats itself on a daily basis in the routine of their marriage.

Routine fills ninety nine percent of the life of a marriage. Routine is only broken only by unusual events that occur on the outside, which occasionally arouse the feeling of pairedness. A routine that is intrinsically frustrating eventually suppresses anticipation and expectations, to the point that the couple no longer take interest in rare events or opportunities. Bitterness accumulates, creating mutual suspicion; a creeping distrust eats away at their sense of pairedness.

Soon enough, frustration consolidates into a search for reasons, to supposedly offer an objective explanation for the deterioration of their sense of being a pair. From here, the way is short to dismantling their state of pairedness entirely, out of bitterness and mutual accusation, based on causes that are beside the point and usually imaginary: He/she doesn’t understand me/consider my needs/ is selfish. Her mother/his mother, etc. All of this has usually followed many wearing attempts at compromise and counseling, which have taken the couple far away from the real cause.

When the couple’s various counselors have all despaired, the couple arrives at Sadnat Enosh, our counselling center, loaded with bitterness to such an extent that the simple explanation of passivity has a very difficult time penetrating their mutually accumulated bitterness, hatred, and firm conviction that they were never really a compatible couple after all. Indeed it is difficult to expect a simple couple to transcend their painful and anguished state in order to gaze down upon their relationship from the heights of theory, which provide an amazingly simple explanation for it all.

When No Routine Exists

During the courting period, no routine exists, and it is difficult for the couple to understand a condition of routine. During this period, there is instead a condition of the emotional exertion of mutual attraction. This attraction is further nourished by the tension of curiosity, about the realization of yearning, which beckons in the prospect of pairedness. The couple is unable to fully understand the dangers that lie in wait for them in the form of creeping routine, once they have finally attained their heart’s desire. After all, won’t they deserve some rest from the tension of “before”? They have difficulty accepting the fact that a future threat exists that could destroy the idyllic state they have attained at such great effort.

On the other hand, when dealing with senior couples who are laden with descendants, it is no simple matter to break apart their state of pairedness. One must instead make them conscious of the dangers of passivity, while dismantling their frustration to expose its roots, which are embedded in a pairing formula that is deficient in the element of mutual initiative.

One can hope for success with couples who have a high level of intellectual and human insight, that is to say, who are not imprisoned in a primitive mentality. Primitiveness for our purposes means a hardened and inflexible approach that impedes transition from an old, habituated track to a new track built on new and consciously created foundations.

In another, bleaker scenario, a couple’s lack of understanding can reach rodef proportions. Each side becomes “a persecutor” of the other, causing the other side to deteriorate mentally and physically.

The number of cases in which pairedness deteriorates on the basis of a lack of emotional dynamics is far greater than estimated, and often not visible to the eye. Attributing malevolent intentions is misleading. It has nothing to do with the real complaint, and causes a search for guilty parties that only leads the couple further away from exposing the real cause.

An Existential Tragedy
It is common among couples that the wife is endowed with considerable initiating potential, and is easily capable of arriving quite naturally at a point of encounter with her passive husband. However, due to a certain type of traditional upbringing, this blessed abundance of initiative is held back. From grandmother to granddaughter, provisions are supplied for the long journey into pairedness, to guarantee her happiness: Protect your own honor, granddaughter dear, don’t court him, courting him will make him despise you. He will take you for granted; you will be cheap in his eyes. Let him exhaust himself to bitterness courting you, until you finally accept him; then your husband will hold you dear, etc. etc. In such cases, an artificial gap is created, yet this artificial gap causes a frustration that is no less painful than the one experienced by a couple genuinely deficient in mutual initiative.
A typical example is the couple where the woman is blessed with a free-flowing, bubbling, initiative-taking personality. Truth to tell, it was this initiative-taking personality that first attracted her dry and passive husband to her, while she admired him for his high level of intellect, or scholarship, or professionalism. Yet lo and behold, after their marriage, the lady envelops herself in utter, infuriating passivity. She has become the inhibited wife.

They are married fourteen years, they have three children. The husband is an outstanding, God-fearing Torah scholar, immersed in his learning. She is constantly harassing his friends, avreichim like himself, study colleagues. She harasses his teachers and rabbis as well: Her husband is unfaithful to her! Countless hours spent attempting to persuade her that this is not true have only intensified her frustration.

All else having failed, their despairing counselors send the couple to us. She opens her case with a furious attack: You men lack a woman’s sharp senses. For years now, I have not been fulfilling my obligation to purify myself in the mikveh, just to test him. He never once bothered to comment, never once asked why I was not pure. There can be only one reason for this: There is another woman in his life.

After allowing her to compose herself, having vented her fury, I discreetly pointed my finger in the direction of her husband, who sat silent and frozen, the tears flowing from his eyes. Rather than suggesting to the husband that he defend himself, I answered in his stead: Your husband is passive, of an aristocratic nature. He is too shy to express his personal needs. I pray that Heaven will forgive you for your cruelty, which has caused him suffering to the point of despair.

I then turned to him and requested that he confirm or deny my statements, but he had begun to weep uncontrollably, and could only nod his head in agreement. The woman leaped from her chair and began to kiss him and beg his forgiveness, at which point I terminated the meeting, which had lasted approximately twenty minutes, suggesting that they continue their reconciliation in their home.

Had this incident been a one-time event, it could be rightly attributed to a supernatural miracle. The numerous instances of such "miracles" points to a much needed approach, supported by an intrinsic logic based upon awareness of the components of emotional dynamics.

This particular component of the ability to initiate a connection -- among all the other factors that comprise the formula for pairedness -- may not be taken lightly, for its role is decisive . What is interesting about its lack is that it is invisible to the eye, and works its insidious and destructive effect behind the scenes. The above remarks may be understood as a word to the wise.