Mixed orientation marriages, torture, divorce busting
Marriage Debate links an article in the New York Times on mixed orientation marriages:
One hour into “Brokeback Mountain,” Amy Jo Remmele began to cry, and not just for the woman on-screen, standing in a doorway in Riverton, Wyo., watching her husband embrace a man.
“When I saw that look in her eyes, I thought, ‘Oh, yeah.’ Even though I never saw my husband with another man, I knew exactly how that woman would have felt,” said Mrs. Remmele, a respiratory therapist in rural Minnesota.
…
Mrs. Remmele — now married to a farmer who raises cattle, corn and soybeans — is one of an estimated 1.7 million to 3.4 million American women who once were or are now married to men who have sex with men.
The New York Times article, in turn, leads me to a case study in the Psychotherapy Networker by Joe Kort, with an accompanying critique by Michelle Weiner-Davis, discussing the counselling of a gay man in a heterosexual marriage. The marriage breaks down, and, from the sounds of it, I doubt any therapist could have held it together, since husband “Eric” requires sex with other men, while wife “Ann” requires a husband who is faithful to her. Major irreconcilable difference, here. Still, Kort and Weiner-Davis do find some disagreement regarding the handling of the wife, Ann.
Joe Kort writes:
Spouses in all marriages—gay or straight—choose partners, in part, to meet certain unconscious needs. I tried to explain to Ann that straight individuals rarely marry gay people accidentally. Either they have sexual issues themselves or they need emotional distance from their partners. Ann didn’t want to hear any of this. Instead, she projected all of their problems as a couple onto Eric.
And Michelle Weiner-Davis responds:
Also, I suspect that marital work may have been doomed from the start because of a theoretical belief held by Kort—that mixed marriages can only work if straight spouses are willing to examine the underlying dysfunctional reasons they marry gays. I know many, many people who simply don’t have “gaydarâ€; they don’t pick up on their spouses’ homosexual tendencies. And I don’t think this means they have an unconscious need for emotional/sexual distance in their relationships.
Intuitively, it seems to me as if Joe Kort ought to be half right and half wrong here. Most of us, by the time we marry, have had other relationships, and, on the one hand, don’t most of us have mistakes we make only once and don’t repeat? On the other hand, don’t many of us have some sorts of things we do over and over, that others wouldn’t do? (For me, it was the way I would keep investing all my romantic feelings in a “just friends” relationship, when most of my friends seemed quicker to go look for someone else.) Same thing with marriage: I don’t think we foresee, let alone choose, all the ways that we’ll disappoint each other in the course of our marriages, but some of them are flip sides of what drew us. I’m not sure what that means for therapy – if some people really do marry gay spouses accidentally, and others find something about the gay spouse particularly desirable, then Kort’s approach may well keep working for some straight spouses, while not fitting others.
Psychotherapy Networker turns out to also have some interesting articles in its current edition. First, there is the Clinician’s Digest, with articles on therapists getting stalked (in a survey, nearly 20 per cent reported being stalked at some point), the limitations of Viagra, and, my favorite, “Does Torture Work?” on a pragmatic anti-torture argument by social psychologist Jean Maria Arrigo.
Then there’s Couples on the Brink, an article by William Doherty on marriage therapists surrendering their neutral stance to divorce. (Several other marriage therapy articles are in the current issue, but either not currently available online or else only available online if you’ve paid to subscribe – I didn’t check which.)