House of Eratosthenes

Now here is a step in the right direction. William Doherty, a marriage therapist with the University of Minnesota, has started a registry of marriage counselors. The idea is that if you & yours are considering marriage therapy of some kind, you get to sweep over a number of potential counselors, figuring out what each professional is all about, before settling on one. This caught my eye when I was staying in Tacoma, Wash. this week, and I’ll tell you why.

Personally, I don’t think we need to work harder at saving marriages. Marriages should be easy to get out of, harder than hell to get into in the first place, and it should take something just short of an Act of Congress to transfer property rights away from one divorcing spouse into the control of the other. Any conservatives who worry about what’s happening to the “institution of marriage” should turn their attention to the practice of using short-term marriages as a vehicle for committing fraud and theft. That’s destroying marriage quicker than anything.

But as much as I detest gold-digging marriage-minded paramours, I detest marriage counselors even more. Little known fact about me: When I was a teenager just starting to become aware of the adult world around me, I did not know anyone who wasn’t involved in marital therapy in some way. Not a single person. That’s sick, isn’t it? Everyone I knew…every single adult…was going to therapy to save a marriage. Or going to therapy to “strengthen” a marriage. Or going to therapy to give a “good start” to a marriage. Or sending someone to therapy by cheating on them. Or going to therapy to remember events of sexual abuse. Or to forget them. Or just for the hell of it.

It was the early eighties, and it was very, very fashionable to go see a shrink. About anything. This is about the time I first started to build a livelihood on computers, software, building applications, generally making things work.

So I had this weird thing going on where any time I was trying to do something, it had to do with “left brain” stuff like…defining goals, investigating tools and applications to see if they would meet the goals, figuring out what wasn’t happening that was supposed to be happening, trying to find out why. As my paychecks got larger, this effort became more intense, until it started to shape the way I interacted with everything. I became a nerd. Well, you know, I didn’t exactly become one. Let us say that nerds are a different breed entirely from adult nerds, and I became an adult nerd.

And as far as family, friends, other interpersonal relationships…everybody I knew was into feeling things, or hopelessly entangled in someone else who was into it. Everybody was involved in therapy or knew someone who was.

I never breathed a word to a soul about this during this time, but between the ages of fifteen and about thirty I was waiting for one person…one single, solitary person…to step forward and say “I went into therapy to accomplish x and I accomplished x and now I don’t have to go into therapy anymore.” You know, like I did with computer hardware, tools, software or applications. I sat down to write a program that did y and now it does y and now I don’t have to work on it anymore. Like that.

Never happened.

Not a single time.

Not once.

Ever.

Oh, tons and tons of people declared their therapy sessions a success. But it was not lost on me, that success came in the form of altered goals. “My therapist/counselor helped me to realize that what I really wanted to do was…” — so, to put it simply, I noticed there was never any tracking of established goals.

So assuming this registry is what it looks like, it’s a good thing.

Most couples probably don’t know that there is a long-standing debate among practitioners over whether therapists should actively try to save a marriage or whether they should remain neutral and treat the couple as two individuals for whom divorce possibly could be the best outcome.

William Doherty, a veteran marriage and family therapist at the University of Minnesota, is among those who take the marriage-saving view. He believes therapists have been too neutral, particularly since the 1970s, and have focused on the individual. He blames the period for the trend that he believes has rendered therapists so neutral that they are sabotaging marriages.

Yeah they’re sabotaging marriages, but anyone who calls them “neutral” probably needs to evaluate their own relationship with reality. That’s like putting the kitty-cat in charge of the fish counter and calling Mister Whiskers “neutral” when he starts chomping down on the steelhead. Natural, sure, but instinct-driven or not, trust me when I say kitty has an agenda. Therapists make money when people are messed up in the head — usually by the hour! If the marriage is saved, prince & princess live happily ever after, but if it crumbles everyone’s going to be walking around in a fog. What in the hell do you think most therapists are going to do?

I can’t imagine the feeling a man gets if he and his bride fail to make use of a resource like this, settle on a benevolent-looking counselor, and then when it’s too late to back out, find out the hard way the counselor bears a strong pro-divorce, anti-male bias. There must be no lonelier feeling on the face of the globe.

“The registry is about training and competence and about values, because most couples assume the therapist is pro-marriage, but many therapists feel they have to be neutral,” he says. “The values thing comes into play when there seems to be a discrepancy between somebody’s personal happiness and their commitment to the marriage.”

So if the marriage-counseling industry must stagger on, I say put this thing up. If Doherty’s database isn’t what it looks like, start another one. And another one.

But at the same time, count me out of it. Any woman who would send me into marriage counseling — of any kind, for any reason, with her tagging along or not — that’s a woman I don’t want to know, let alone marry. Besides, I’m on the dark side. I think before I feel, therefore, therapy — notwithstanding the number of people who probably think it could do me some good — is not in the cards. I’m far too obsessed with seeing the world as it is, not as the way I want it to be or the way it makes me feel.

And my thoughts tell me, if we want marriages to last longer, take the money out of them. Make it just as hard to get cash out of a spouse through a divorce, as it is to get it out of a complete stranger through a lawsuit. Do that one thing, and ten years later you’ll be amazed at how the divorce rate plummets. But I got a gut feeling that the weddings-per-year is going to slip down a few notches too. For that reason, my idea will never catch on.

Brides & grooms are just people, no better than the rest of us, no worse. And the fact is, half of all people have no scruples. It’s just a fact.

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Define The GoalSaturday, June 25th, 2005

Define The Goal
Saturday, June 25th, 2005