European Stars And Stripes (Newspaper) - February 27, 1989, Darmstadt, Hesse                                Love is never enough in  Baltimore Suni t s the marriage myth we learn in childhood the Prince and Princess fall in love get married and live happily Ever after. And so we grow up believing that happiness Ever after is the natural result of love and marriage. But that s not necessarily so says or. Aaron Beck professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania and author of a new Book on marriage love is never enough. People do have differences he says different expectations different needs different ways of looking at the world and one another. What a husband Means As an affectionate hug May be perceived by his wife As a demand for immediate sex. Her feeling that the time and place Are wrong can become in his mind evidence of rejection. Or she s insecure frightened of rejection. So she tries to attach More firmly. But he s afraid of domination. He pulls Back. She s devastated. He s angry. She clutches tighter. He rebuffs More firmly. Love says Beck does t automatically meet their needs for caring consideration empathy Trust communication problem solving. Couples say we love each other but we re fighting All the time their differences Lead to conflicts conflicts Lead to attacks counterattacks  in the 1950s, Beck created a new kind of psychotherapy based on the theory that depression anxiety and other emotional upsets Are the result of distorted thoughts or cognition misinterpretations about the present unjustified negativism about the past and unrealistic pessimism about the future. Caught up in this Cycle people regard the world and everything in it including the depressed psychologist Judith Wallerstein probing the aftershocks of individual As a catastrophe. Cognitive therapy therefore focuses on the faulty cognition. Patients learn to recognize the irrationality of their negativism and to look at life More realistically couples in distressed marriages also can be tied up in cognitive knots Beck and other therapists have found. They Only see the bad in their marriages not the Good he says. They have bad memories of the past and see destruction and deterioration in the future " there is however one major difference depressed people blame themselves for their problems in troubled marriages each partner finds the fault in the other. In other words each one considers himself or herself Good and right and reasonable. You Are always the victim your spouse is always the villain. In Beck s View both parties Are victims and one of the goals of therapy and of his Book is to teach marriage partners to resolve their differences in a no fault manner that brands neither of them As villainous. That s the Way it is in courtship after All. In the first flush of infatuation people Don t find fault with one another. Under the influence of a positive Bias they think of the other person s idiosyncrasies As part of the Charm. But when they get married the Bias begins to shift. Once you get married you be entrusted your happiness to another person says Beck. Since it is so very important everything gets exaggerated. The slightest Rebuff becomes a major rejection. The slightest difficulty becomes an insuperable obstacle. You go into a marriage looking for absolute Security you find you Are absolutely  and even though you re behaving in a Way that seems right and proper to you your spouse seems to want More or less or something else. He or she does t understand How you feel or what you want. And you might believe a person who really loved you would commitment love does t automatically meet individual needs for caring consideration and Trust. Know How to fulfil your needs. You of course Are being exemplary helping out pointing out ways this or that Job could be done better or More efficiently you be even jumped in and done a task your spouse has been procrastinating Over. And now he or she is acting insulted As if you re making accusations of incompetence. A person who really loved you ought to know better than to make you wait for  re beginning to worry if things Are bad now they be got to get worse in the future. Your mate s stubbornness intransigence and Lack of consideration always spoil everything you can never Trust your spouse again by the time they come to a marriage Counselor for consultation they feel the marriage is dead Beck has found. They say they can t get along they hate each other they have nothing in  that May be True. When a couple has been fighting from the beginning even during the courtship when they Are so obviously mismatched that even their parents know they re wrong for each other the marriage cannot be saved he says. The marriage is also doomed when one of the partners has a serious personality disorder like hostility selfishness narcissism he says. Many of these people have multiple marriages but they Are incapable of an enduring giving  and there s also the marriage that might have been saved if one of the spouses were not already involved in another relationship. That person no longer has any real interest in working with the spouse to rekindle the old relationship. Otherwise Beck believes if you were Happy once you can be Happy once  couples can learn techniques for re establishing a caring sharing mutually satisfying relationship. But they la have to develop procedures for settling disagreements perhaps by quantifying the importance of what they want on a 10-Point scale or by finding a Compromise in which both spouses Are satisfied or by agreeing to a behaviour that provides what one of them wants this time and gives it to the other next time. They have to learn to communicate to talk without blaming to request without complaining to find out what the other one really wants and then to provide it. They can learn to look for the distorted assumptions that underlie their own anger or defensiveness to ask themselves whether those thoughts Are reasonable and then to establish More realistic attitudes. Passi0w time changing ingredients aspects of love grow at different rates and vary in their ability to endure. Not by John Barbour associated Presse very year More than 2 million americans in some degree of desperation seek a second Chance in life through divorce. But a new look at this phenomenon finds that things Are not necessarily better the second time around and the chances of Success Are More elusive than was thought. And society often forgets to think much about the million or so children a year who Are involved in divorce most of whom sense a loss of Protection and fear of the future. Furthermore the study shows the aftershocks of divorce Echo through the personal lives of All concerned at least a decade later. Judith Wallerstein a psychologist at the University of California and founder of the Center for the family in transition has studied in depth 60 families for More than 10 years. Her findings Are to be published in february in a Book second chances men women and children a decade after divorce written in collaboration with science writer Sandra Blakeslee. The sub sub title is even More provocative who wins who loses and Why. Among the findings that Wallerstein discovered As new scientific and unexpected was that in most instances one person was much better  one person is very important in life she says. But the other member was on balance either in the same place or not doing too Well. You re looking at a much greater divergence after divorce and that s entirely  who gets the major Benefit of the second Chance boils Down to who wanted the divorce whether male or female. Wallerstein says she is not against divorce. Divorce is much More than the coup de Grace of a stressful marriage she writes. It is a new beginning that offers people second chances. It is no More and no less than an Opportunity to rebuild lives. And there s the  the Book tells of the Pitfalls the expectations the denial and the quiet dramas through the voices of those involved and Wallerstein has obviously won the Trust and the understanding of these people with whom she has been involved these Many years. In the Book there Are three major families we built on she says. I think those people started off equal. We ask Why did you get married almost All of them Tell us they married for love. They thought they were equal. They weren t Shotgun marriages because someone got pregnant although some of them were. By and Large they knew each other. In some of the marriages that we see there never was a marriage however one defines marriages in terms of love intimacy Friendship. There was unhappiness loneliness or violence whatever from the Start. But in a whole group of these marriages there was at some Point a real marriage and then it did t endure for a whole lot of different  in fact Wallerstein says we re almost at the Point in America where we Are beginning to know More about divorce than we know about  she is tempted next to write about what it is that makes marriages break up. In investigating the aftermath of divorce she found that each participant has a different View even the children although they Are almost unanimous in thinking that the divorce was a Good thing for their parents. Not so for the children. You re in a mine Field of moral issues because the children feel they Are worse off Wallerstein says. I m not sure they were but they feel they were and that s an important distinction. I think in Many ways they were better  nor is it a passing thing again this was a finding i did t expect. I was startled when i first looked at it. It crescendos As they move into Young adulthood As they Are looking at an important love affair an important commitment. That s when they really worry am i going to be locked into what happened to my mom and  the children envy their friends who have two parents Wallerstein says. They have an idealized sense of a two Parent family. They feel those other children Are better protected. But they worry on behalf of themselves and their future children about the possibility of betrayal. There is a lot of premarital living together yet these children of divorce Are basically conservative not believing in open marriage against what they see As cheating in search of a Long term commitment. Now this is what they want Wallerstein says. What they do is often at Odds with what they  Young women tend to get involved with a lot of Young men apparently unafraid of getting Hurt Wallerstein says. It s a Complex picture we re looking  ironically when they Are most in need of outside support the process is crippled. One Parent or another May simply abdicate just when co parenting is most important. That in fact is one of the prime remedies that Wallerstein would like to see set in place by the divorce process. A lot of the children she studied frequently the children of upper Middle class professionals never get to College because child support ends at 18. It s not fair she says. In these families very few fathers helped their children after age 18. They did t All plead poverty. It was a sense that they had Dorte All that they were legally obligated to do. I was surprised. I was very distressed. It was t that they weren t seeing their children but often there was a sort of blunting that had occurred Wallerstein would like to Call this phenomenon to the attention of society. Divorce is in Many cases necessary and the Best thing for everyone concerned. But the sequels need to be addressed. We saw As much anger Between the parents 10 years later As there was at the outset. It was not a cheerful finding. The co parenting was disrupted the relationships Between fathers and children were disrupted although a major finding was that at adolescence there was a rising need for the father. The divorce can become a remedy a very important remedy for one Parent. But what s not recognized is How hard it can be for the children and that is something that can be  Page 14 the stars and stripes monday february 27,1989 the stars and stripes Page 15