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The only real essential is to carry on the conversation you started.1 – Libby Purves
Liz and Steve met through their careers in the police force and were married shortly afterwards in 1997. They went on to have three daughters, with Liz running the family home in order to support Steve in his role as an undercover police officer, leading an armed surveillance team working to infiltrate gangs in South London.
Despite their relationship looking ideal from the outside, the strain and trauma of Steve’s job soon began to take its toll on their marriage. Steve recalls, “I wouldn’t talk about my work at all. I thought the best thing for my family was to protect them from all the stuff I’d see – the murder scenes I’d go to. When I got home and Liz asked how my day was, I’d say it was fine. I began to stick everything into little compartments.”
This was when everything started to unravel. Instead of sharing her feelings about Steve’s intense workload and the effect it was having on their family and marriage, Liz would bottle them up. She reflected, “I wouldn’t put any expectations on him whatsoever. I wouldn’t complain about his long hours. I would just deal with it all. I was the true martyr.”
Although she was wanting to avoid putting any additional pressure on Steve by taking on everything to do with the family, she later realised that her actions inadvertently communicated that he wasn’t needed. With Steve feeling superfluous at home, he began to stay even later at work, and the downward spiral of their miscommunication increased. Their lack of understanding towards each other was constantly simmering beneath the surface. Liz said, “We began to talk only about basic things to get through life. We were living quite separately, only occasionally getting together for family events.”
It was at this point that the various pressures of his work, his lifestyle and his marriage began to mount for Steve. Following the sudden death of his twin sister in 2007, Steve suffered a heart attack and was taken into hospital.
He relayed, “The one good thing that I was ever any good at was being a policeman, and I couldn’t do it anymore – it crushed me. I couldn’t be a father; I couldn’t be a husband. That’s when we decided, right there in the hospital, to firm up our separation.” Steve moved in with his parents, with Liz staying in the family home.
As time went on, Steve describes how he hit rock bottom and was planning to end his life. At a critical moment, he was visited by their local vicar who listened at length to Steve’s problems. Before leaving, he offered Steve one piece of advice: “Try reading the Psalms.” Steve weighed up his choices and decided that the Psalms might be the better one to try first. The impact on him as he read was profound. He said, “I found a God I could shout at and be angry at with all the different things that had happened, and I found a God who loved me despite the mistakes I’d made. Soon after, Liz came over and knocked on the door and said, ‘I still love the man I married and I’m here until you find yourself again.’ And, from that moment, we started falling in love again.”
Steve describes the changes they have made since they moved back in together: “I think it’s been a process of us learning how to communicate deeply, not just on a surface level. This means that we know where our weaknesses are and where we have a tendency to fall down. Allocating dedicated time each day to being present with each other has really changed things. It was gradual, but putting space in the diary and making sure that we kept on doing so really made the difference.”
Liz added, “We learned through that time that we really needed to work on our marriage and that we needed to make it our number one priority. It’s so easy, especially when you’ve got young children, to just get on with your own stuff. We realised that we needed to work hard on each other, concentrate on and listen to each other, respect each other and seek to understand where the other was coming from.
“Quite often, even now, we just stop for a moment and say, ‘We don’t feel we’ve connected for a few days. We need to connect.’ We can recognise now when we’re starting to drift away from each other and we need to regroup and come back together.”
What was true about Liz and Steve’s difficulties in communication is true in many marriages. To communicate is not just to exchange information but means, literally, to “make common” our thoughts and feelings. In this way we make ourselves known to each other.
Even though Winston and Clementine Churchill spent much of their fifty-six years of marriage apart owing to the demands of politics and two World Wars, they constantly communicated by letter, notes, telegrams and memoranda, of which more than 1,700 still exist.2 They maintained the habit of making common with each other all that they were thinking and feeling. This constant communication must help to account for their lifelong love for each other.
In the best marriages there are no secrets between husband and wife. In a television drama about Queen Victoria there was a conversation between the queen and her prime minister, Lord Melbourne. The queen was seeking advice as to whether she should talk to her new husband, Prince Albert, about affairs of state with which he, as a German, might disagree. Lord Melbourne’s reply was very wise: “In marriage, disagreements are not nearly as dangerous as secrets. Secrets breed mistrust.”
Of course, we may need to learn how to communicate with one another. An article in The Mail on Sunday, describing the break-up of a celebrity marriage, quoted the husband as saying, “When we went to marriage guidance counselling, I was shocked to find we had never really talked. I heard my wife telling a complete stranger about feelings I never knew existed. And I heard myself doing the same. We could only communicate through a stranger.”
Professor John Gottman, who runs the Family Research Laboratory at the University of Washington and has been analysing marriage relationships for more than forty years, has observed:
What typically happens is that one person reaches out to the other to get the person’s interest and it falls flat. The basic problem is emotional connectedness . . . people are asking their partner
to “show me you love me”. Many people live in an emotional desert. That’s why they are so needy.3
Excerpts taken from ...'The Marriage Book' by Nicky and Sila Lee
