The Nine Phases of Marriage: How to Make It, Break It, Keep It

by Susan Shapiro Barash

Overview

From the author of Toxic Friends-a groundbreaking look at how to understand your marriage and create a more satisfying relationship
Every marriage goes through nine phases. It is only by understanding the course our marriages run that we can truly begin to craft the perfect relationship. In The Nine Phases of Marriage, Susan Shapiro Barash breaks down and analyzes these phases, which are:
- Phase One: Passion and Longing
- Phase Two: Conforming: The Perfect Wife
- Phase Three: Real Life: Child Centricity
- Phase Four: Tension: One Bed: Two Dreams
- Phase Five: Distance: Two Beds: Two Rooms
- Phase Six: Fracturing: Midlife Divorce
- Phase Seven: Second Chances: Remarriage and Renegotiating
- Phase Eight: Balance: Concessions
- Phase Nine: Successful Coupling
With this essential knowledge, spouses can successfully navigate the natural pitfalls and perils of their marriages and embark on a true partnership.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250017239
Publisher:	St. Martin's Press
Publication date:	09/04/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	290
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

SUSAN SHAPIRO BARASH is an established writer of nonfiction women's issue books and has written thirteen books. She teaches gender studies at Marymount Manhattan College. A well-recognized gender expert, she is frequently sought out by newspapers, televisions shows, and radio programs to comment on women's issues. She also blogs for The Huffington Post and Psychology Today. She lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Phase One

Passion and Longing

• Are you a die-hard romantic?

• Did you have to have this man as your husband?

• Were you raised to believe your husband would be your prince and savior?

• Did you have a big storybook wedding (or do you feel cheated that you did not?)

• Do you consider yourself one half of a romantic entity?

If your answer to any of these questions is yes, then passion is an important component of your marriage.

You and your husband fell in love six years ago, when you first met. In many ways, it was like a dream: You couldn't take your eyes off him and there was the promise of what was to come. After a steady, respectful courtship you moved in together, which was thrilling, a milestone. You both were in a romantic mode, and after a year of living together, you became engaged.

The wedding plans took on a life of their own; they were consuming, almost breathtaking, as you moved closer to the most important day of your life. Every aspect of the wedding mattered to both of you — you vetoed your mother's and grandmother's advice when you knew your vision with your fiancé trumped their vision. At times during the engagement period, there were a few dramas — a friend who was offended she wasn't asked to be a bridesmaid, your future mother-in-law who wanted the wedding shower her way.

Throughout, your husband-to-be was a rock and it made you feel incredibly protected — you were a couple, united no matter what and madly in love. It was as if you shared a notion of passion as primary, determined to hold on to that intoxicating feeling. Although you've heard enough women say "the honeymoon is over," it isn't like that for you. On the eve of your second wedding anniversary, you've never lost sight of the goal — to be happily married to this man with whom you are in love.

"Proper" Passion + Love = Marriage

I can honestly relate to the composite above, since both times I married for love, totally sold on the idea that being in love meant one should be married. My first wedding day was choreographed by my mother, and I had very little input. It was a thrilling time, as if I were walking on air. I was also not very discerning; in those days, the mother-knows-best concept had some weight. My mother had eloped during the war and my first wedding was the wedding she'd never had. My first husband, who was thirteen years my senior, had been married before, and for me there was this lingering sense that he'd already done the wedding go 'round. I remember being at Bloomingdale's together to enlist in the bridal registry. I was keenly aware while picking out china and flatware that he'd seen it all.

We were married on a Sunday afternoon at the now-defunct Tavern on the Green in New York City. I had a few friends there, but mostly the guests were friends and family from my parents' and in-laws' guest lists. My parents were the hosts, and my in-laws had hosted a rehearsal dinner the evening before. Everything was by the book, including when my closest friends and I all crammed into the dressing room at the end of that fateful afternoon. My friends unbuttoned the delicate silk buttons on the back of my high-necked organza-and-lace gown, loosened the bustle, and helped me step out of my peau de soie bridal shoes. One friend whispered in awe, "That's it. Now you're his wife." I entered the arena gladly.

And after listening to the young wives for this chapter more than thirty years later, it's obvious that the way I felt on my first wedding day is how most brides still feel. What I brought with me to my second wedding was an acute sense of hope and determination, wisdom and romance. My present husband and I had both been married once before and were on equal ground, entering a second marriage together. We planned everything as a team: We chose my engagement ring together, mulled over the font and wording on the invitations, the songs for the band, the venue for our wedding, the menu. In retrospect, both experiences were loaded with anticipation and reflective of the decades in which they occurred.

By the time I was remarried in 1997, brides, whether first-, second-, or third-timers, had become more hands-on about their weddings. Demure weddings devised by proper mothers, as my first wedding had been, were no longer in vogue. Brides had developed strong opinions and a specific vision of how their weddings should be, including the gown. I wore a long, slinky, cream-colored scoop-neck, sleeveless fishtail dress that was not from the bridal department but straight off the rack of generic evening gowns. This had become the style — less demure, a more sexy bride (this look would last until April of 2012, when Kate Middleton would marry Prince William in a long-sleeved lace gown that combined pristine with form-fitting), and I was part of the crowd. My second husband-to-be and I pooled our friends for the guest list, orchestrated the entire affair, and split the cost.

Marriage, the last vestige of church and state, is testimony to our commitment to each other and the culmination of profound love. According to the U.S. Census, today more than two million marriages take place each year. For women, as reported by the Pew Research Center, the median age of first marriage is 26, and for men it's 28. The average cost of a wedding "soars to $26,327," according to an article by Grace Wong for CNN Money entitled "Ka-ching! Wedding Price Tag Nears $30,000." The cost of wedding gift registries is $19 billion per year, and the cost of weddings themselves is $72 billion, according to the Web site The Wedding Report.

The Passion "Sale"

Erotic love has a hold on us in ways we can't explain or imagine until it hits us. We know this deep, passionate feeling as love at first sight — an overwhelming desire. In our society, we take this passionate, sexual longing (think Romeo and Juliet) and move it forward so that what begins as eros — an immediate sexual attraction — now incorporates other, more practical, aspects of a love relationship — intimacy, friendship, trust. Women learn early on in their lives that having a serious boyfriend is a means to an end. This is what is sold to us; these passionate feelings we share are expected to kick into marriage.

It rings true in fairy tales, especially Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella, where the justice of it all, in the form of passion, longing, and bliss, rules the day. Novels for centuries have offered happy endings, too. Jane Austen's nineteenth-century novel Pride and Prejudice gives us Elizabeth Bennet, in search of a husband. When she meets Mr. Darcy, who is eligible, attractive, and wealthy, she initially mistakes his aloof manner for disinterest. This is why this book is evergreen; the discovery of an underlying attraction and passion between two people that results in marriage is quite the draw.

Moving into the twenty-first century, the packaging of passion with marriage is underscored in the ABC reality show The Bachelorette (a spin-off of The Bachelor, which first aired in 2002). Here we have one attractive young woman who gets to choose her potential husband from twenty-five young, eligible men. Not only are these winsome men eager to be chosen, but the bachelorette, who has all the power, "dates" and romances several men at a time, eliminating them as she goes along. While this could be viewed as a female fantasy, the goal of finding your mate in the most glamorous and romantic settings is also the way that most women hope, perhaps on a less lavish scale, to begin their romances that lead to marriage.

Choreographing the Wedding

Along with more outspoken brides today is the daunting task of creating wedding as theater. Brides are on a quest for a flawless wedding — they have a specific vision, spun partly from the media, the family, and the culture at large. When Kate Middleton's engagement to Prince William was announced in November 2010, we had a firsthand look at a couple in love and very involved in their wedding plans with a relatively short engagement of five months. The fact that Prince William and Kate Middleton had been dating since 2003 and had lived together in North Wales at the prince's home makes it all the more familiar for many brides-to-be.

And while there has always been the attitude that one's engagement and wedding make the bride a kind of "princess," the influence of Kate Middleton as fiancée and bride is tremendous. In March 2011, during the countdown period before the royal wedding on April 29, 2011, an article entitled "The Ultimate Reality Show" ran in The Wall Street Journal announcing that two billion TV viewers would be able to watch the coverage of the wedding ceremony at Westminster Abbey. "Add an expected 400 million for online streaming and radio and the number would swell to nearly 35% of the world's population," wrote journalists Amy Chozick and Cecilie Rohwedder.

In the case of the young royals, their wedding was all about romantic love. Romantic love has such sway that Prince William was able to choose his bride and resist an arranged marriage (unlike his father only a generation ago). This popular view of modern marriage obliterates the long-standing historical doctrine that marriage was for political and financial gain. Marriage as a "business" has fallen by the wayside and love affairs — where passion and longing rule — are at a premium, launched with the wedding. Wedding plans are artfully threaded, carefully constructed, and filled with promise. What has become de rigueur for brides today are the following:

The Ring

For decades, the ring has represented eternal love. By the mid1950s, according to Barry B. Kaplan's article "Forever Diamonds," "A Diamond Is Forever" was the official De Beers slogan that strongly influenced brides-to-be. To this day, diamond rings are considered deal sealers — 81 percent of brides in the United States receive a diamond ring to finalize their engagement, according to the Diamond Information Center. The search for the ring has become a popular joint activity for bride and groom. As for Natalia, twenty-six, who has been married for a year, her engagement wasn't official until she had a diamond ring.

I knew that we were secretly engaged, but until my husband and I had gone shopping for the ring, I wouldn't tell anyone. We weren't making the kind of money to pay for a ring and a wedding. My mom had never had an engagement ring, just a wedding band. She thought I was being ridiculous. But I wanted it, and when I got it, then we began to make plans for our wedding.

The Blips

The engagement period can create a few "tests." Many wives stated that the first major stress of married life is foreshadowed during the wedding preparations, fraught with family feuds — on both sides — and ongoing misunderstandings. Miranda, thirty-one, married for three years, believes that her protracted engagement made family problems all the more pronounced.

I come from a family where my father loves big parties and lots of money spent on good times. My husband's family is also like that, so I figured we'd all be on the same page about the wedding. Instead, my mother and my mother-in-law fought about everything, from the time of the ceremony to the color of the tablecloths. They were sharing the costs, so they both wanted it their way. Now I'm pregnant and my parents and my husband's parents are already fighting over where the christening will be.

Almost 60 percent of my interviewees said that their vision of the wedding clashed either with their fiancé's vision or that of his family. Unless the bride and groom are paying for the wedding themselves, the bride's and the groom's parents begin to exert their influence. Consider Mara, thirty-three, who comes from a different culture and religion from her husband of eight months.

The start of our engagement was great, until we realized we couldn't agree on how to be married, or how to raise our children. I think his mother secretly wanted us to break up. We just had to stop having this dreamy engagement and figure out how we were going to deal with these issues. It took us months to sort it out. We decided to be married by two clergy and to raise our kids in both religions. In a way, we were ahead of most couples who are engaged or first married because we knew we had a problem before our wedding and we solved it.

Bride Wars: Competition and Rivalry over Weddings

In the romantic comedy Bride Wars, Anne Hathaway as Emma and Kate Hudson as Liv have grown up as best friends obsessed with their wedding day, including the fantasy that it will be held at the Plaza Hotel. When they learn they've unwittingly been booked for the same day, it becomes a fight to the finish. There are brides who tell me it isn't just the competition between two friends, as in Bride Wars, but conflict churned up among groups of friends who happen to be planning weddings in similar time frames. This rivalry, if it isn't reeled in, can be over venue, gown, flowers, bridesmaids, gifts, hairdressers, makeup artists, and honeymoons. For example, when Elise, thirty-four, began to plan her "low-key" wedding last year, she had already been to a dozen "over-the-top" weddings.

My husband and I talked a lot about how to get married when we were first engaged. In the end, we got married at my cousin's house. I was happy with it, but all along, my friends acted surprised. They thought it wasn't good enough: It wasn't enough of a party — I didn't wear a veil, although I wore a gown (and everyone talked about the gown, since I had it made). I felt like I was being judged. I knew that their weddings outshone mine. So I was okay with my wedding for who I am, who my husband is, but I felt like it was compared to all the others — and they won.

Boot Camp for Brides

After several of my interviewees spoke of going to "bridal boot camp," I Googled it and found more than a million hits. What better way to be motivated to lose weight, have killer abs and calves and a flat stomach, than to do it for your wedding day, and the pre-wedding parties as well: the shower, the bachelorette party, the engagement party. The appeal, of course, is that the bride will be her thinnest, fittest, finest on her wedding day. As Alice, twenty-seven, who went to boot camp for a six-week session at a gym near her home, put it:

I am not athletic, and the only thing that ever made me want to work out was to fit into my wedding gown. I lost eleven pounds and looked amazing on my wedding day. But having to train, work full-time, and plan the wedding — since I wanted to be in charge of every detail — was a lot. Now that I've been married for a year, I don't work out as much. It's a good thing my husband doesn't like the gym either. When I say how great I looked after boot camp, at the wedding, he says he loves me this way too.

The Bachelorette Bash

Frequently consisting of a weekend-long debauch that involves travel to an exotic place, the bachelorette party may replace a bridal shower in terms of importance (although those too can be extravagant affairs). Perhaps because the average age of the bride has risen from the age of 23.5 to the age of 26 in the past fifteen years, a bride today, with more single days under her belt, knows how to punctuate this part of the engagement. Consider Amanda, thirty-seven, who had dated several "frogs" before becoming engaged to her prince, and feels that every event surrounding her wedding was meaningful.

I just wanted as many celebrations as I could have when I finally decided to get married. I knew it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I was older than most brides who wore a gown and walked down the aisle; the part I was most excited about was the bachelorette party. My friends and I decided to do a long weekend at an upscale resort. There were ten of us who actually could go and we planned every minute. I was saying good-bye to my single days.

Themed Wedding Showers

Wedding showers are often three-generational: the bride and her friends; the mother of the bride and mother of the groom and their friends; and the grandmothers. Emily Post online points out that today there can be several showers, taking place in various parts of the country and hosted by assorted family members and/or bridesmaids over the course of the engagement period. The conventional themes of a bridal shower include lingerie showers, handkerchief showers, and kitchen showers; more hip showers include sushi showers, chocolate showers, stock-the-bar showers, stock-the-pantry showers, wine-tasting showers, and room-of-the-house showers. And the etiquette today extends beyond inviting the mother of the bride and mother of the groom to include inviting stepmothers from both sides. Rachel, twenty-six, thought a wedding shower wasn't her style when she got married two years ago.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Nine Phases of Marriage"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Shell Toss LLC.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Advance Praise for The Nine Phases of Marriage,
Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Epigraphs,
Preface: What Is the Twenty-First-Century Deal for the Wife?,
PART ONE How to Make It,
Phase One: Passion and Longing,
Phase Two: Conforming: The Perfect Wife,
Phase Three: Real Life: Child-Centricity,
PART TWO How to Break It,
Phase Four: Tension: One Bed/Two Dreams,
Phase Five: Distance: Two Beds/Two Rooms,
Phase Six: Fracturing: Midlife Divorce,
PART THREE How to Keep It,
Phase Seven: Second Chances — Remarriage and Renegotiations,
Phase Eight: Balance/Concessions,
Phase Nine: Successful Wifing/Companionate Love,
Afterword: Your Journey as a Wife,
Questionnaire Responses,
Acknowledgments,
References,
Reader's Guide,
Also by Susan Shapiro Barash,
About the Author,
Copyright,

Editorial Reviews

"Captures the reality of a lasting relationship and imparts the insight, understanding, and most essentially, the skills to enhance your connection with your spouse." —Dr. Jane Greer, author of What About Me? Stop Selfishness from Ruining Your Relationship

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