How I saved my marriageWith titles Mariolina Ceriotti, an Italian child neuropsychiatrist and psychotherapist for adults and couples, is one of the most renowned authors in the field of family relationships and especially marriages, with her books "The imperfect couple", "Marry me... again" and "Parents and children", and the numerous conferences she gives every year all over the world.
Ceriotti talks to Omnes, in this interview, about the complex reality of marital relationships and some points of "tension" that every couple experiences throughout their life together.
Before talking about marriage, we have to dwell on courtship, sometimes a "forgotten topic". How is a good preparation for marriage carried out?
- On a psychological level, I believe that the most important thing nowadays when preparing for marriage is to reflect in order to understand the meaning of the promise that one is going to make.
With marriage, we do not promise the other person to feel the same "in love" feeling forever; instead, we promise a presence that can withstand the onslaught of life.
Emotions and feelings are something changeable, which we cannot control simply with our will; therefore, we must realistically foresee that towards the person we have chosen and love we will feel many mixed feelings over time; sometimes, inevitably, even negative ones, because in life together differences are, for everyone, a potential source of fatigue and conflict.
With marriage, we promise each other that even at times when feelings struggle to sustain us, at times when we will struggle to get along and be tempted to give up, we will instead be there and strive to find all the good in our relationship.
But in order to be able to make such a demanding promise, it is necessary to understand and recognize that the other, even with his or her inevitable limitations, is a truly "unique" person. The other represents our existential challenge, the one we need to become fully ourselves. For a believer, the other is the person "chosen for me" and is an integral part of my vocation.
The seriousness of this promise is the only guarantee in a relationship without guarantees. In marriage, we perform an unprecedented act of mutual trust, because we say to the other: "I trust you because I trust your promise".
This trust is unconditional and without guarantees; it is a free gift, the true and great gift of marriage.
Therefore, in order to prepare oneself well for marriage, one must seriously reflect on the scope of this promise, which gives us to each other. Of course, it is not something that can be understood once and for all... but it is of great importance because it represents the heart and specificity of the conjugal relationship.
Is it true that every five years there is a turning point in married life?
- I'm not a big believer in these kinds of statistics, but marriage is certainly not a static relationship, because it's about maintaining a relationship between two people who change and evolve over time.
The challenge of marriage is to continually find a balance between continuity and change. Each one of us, even if we are in a couple, is the bearer of a personal vocation and it is right that we strive to make sure that our talents flourish and continue to grow over time. I change and the other changes: we should not imprison him in the relationship, but try to become allies, working together for him and for his human, professional and spiritual success. So that he fulfills his vocation and becomes the beautiful person he is.
In the concrete development of life, in order for both of us to truly grow, adaptations and sometimes even renunciations will often be necessary on the part of one or the other, but within the framework of the alliance we will be able to live the different options in a positive way, making the best decisions together.
What do the man with his masculinity and the woman with her femininity bring to the conjugal relationship?
- It is difficult to give an answer to this question, because masculinity and femininity decline in a personal and different way in each of us.
Generally speaking, fully developed masculinity leads men to paternal competition, just as femininity predisposes women to maternal competition.
The maternal and paternal represent the maximum development of the feminine and masculine; they are dimensions that require overcoming the narcissistic position, because they imply expanding one's own center of gravity, in order to take care of the good of the other as well.
If he develops maternal competence, the woman learns to be welcoming, to care for the other as a person, to take concrete care of him, to protect his vulnerabilities. If she develops paternal competence, the man can use his skills and strength to generously promote the good of the other, to encourage and support him, to foster his growth without fear of rivalry.
The paternal and maternal skills that we know how to develop in ourselves make us generous and attentive to others, not only towards possible children, but also in our work and in the couple: they help us to take concrete care of others, going beyond ourselves and the satisfaction of our own needs.
The arrival of children is a small "earthquake" in the life of every family. What to do so that parenthood does not replace married life?
- The arrival of a sonEven if it is desired, it is not an easy challenge, especially for women. The child unites us in a powerful way and often challenges our priorities; its birth is a great joy, but it is also something that generates discontinuity in our lives and asks us to find new balances. If for fathers the birth of a child is first and foremost an organizational complexity to be faced and resolved, for mothers the child represents a Copernican revolution, which goes far beyond organizational issues. It is necessary to understand this difference between the masculine and the feminine if we do not want excessive tensions to arise in the couple after the birth of a child.
The mother needs time to find a new balance and to distribute her energies in the way she considers most suitable for her, and she needs her husband to support her in this search with patience, to be able to listen to her anxieties without wanting to replace her or rush her. More than pre-established "solutions", the woman in this phase of her life needs the baby's father to really listen to her.....
But it is also necessary to always keep in mind that the best guarantee of well-being for our children is that the couple's relationship is as stable and rich as possible; for this to be possible, we must always take care of them, without forgetting that the "we" of the couple must be cultivated, keeping communication, sexuality and the sharing of interests and vital moments alive, even if there are children.
You talk a lot about "imperfect", is there a misconception that the perfect marriage has no problems?
- The limit is the normal figure of the human being, and with the limit is of course the imperfection. It is not a matter of "settling", but of learning that patience and good humor are always necessary in relationships, which allow us to deactivate many situations of fatigue or conflict and start again.
Love can start over every day: recognizing that we are all a little imperfect is not an excuse to adapt or to impose our faults on others, but a way of acknowledging that difficulties are inevitable for everyone, and that the presence of misunderstandings and tiredness does not in any case mean failure or lack of love.
In the West, almost 40 % of marriages end in breakup. What's going on?
- What happens is that we are no longer able to understand the potential beauty of a forever relationship.
Marriage is an extraordinary adventure, involving all the dimensions of the person: his body, his history, his thoughts, his plans, his relationships. It is an adventure that requires courage, creativity, patience, good humor.....
It's like reading a valuable novel: there are pages that envelop you, excite you, thrill you and you would never want them to end, but there are also boring pages that you would like to skip; there are pages that make you laugh and others that make you cry. But to really understand the beauty of the book, its richness, its message, you have to get to read it to the end.
Nowadays, most people prefer the less demanding dimension of the short story, to avoid the fatigue of more demanding pages... But they don't realize how this impoverishes their lives.
Is it more difficult today to lead a lifelong marriage than in the past?
-I do not think that it is "per se" more difficult to carry on a marriage for life, because relationships have always been something complex. Today, however, we have the possibility of breaking up a marriage very easily, and that makes it necessary for the man and the woman to have a greater awareness, a clearer will.
In the past, if something didn't work out, it was not so common for people to work on their relationship to improve it: often the idea was to adapt, to put up with it, to bear the cross....
Today, if something does not work out we are more clearly at a crossroads: we can either end the relationship or, if we want to, we can try to relaunch it, possibly with the help of another person. The real possibility of separating makes the possibility of a choice clearer and thus more clearly invites us to take a stand.
To the question "What makes a marriage last?", the answer is, therefore, that the first condition for a relationship to last forever is, quite simply, to really love it?
