Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin’s, ahem, “conscious uncoupling” has already received its fair share of ridicule. The snooty implication of the phrase is that they’re better at getting divorced, or at least more enlightened about the subject, than the rest of us. Paltrow is no stranger to cultural one-upsmanship, so nobody should be surprised.
But the term isn’t a creation of Paltrow’s advanced self-awareness; therapist Katherine Woodward Thomas created it.
Below the “uncoupling” announcement on her Web site, Goop.com, Paltrow posted an analysis of this different approach toward marriage and divorce by Drs. Habib Sadeghi and Sherry Sami, a husband-and-wife team (a doctor and a dentist, respectively).
To a woman getting married in six months, it’s an annoying read.
The doctors’ first point is that because we’re living longer, marriage is harder. “By 1900, US life expectancy was only 46 for men, and 48 for women. Today, it’s 76 and 81 respectively.” They conclude: “Social research suggests that because we’re living so long, most people will have two or three significant long-term relationships in their lifetime.”
Gee, maybe the rise in divorce has nothing to do with the length of our lives. Maybe the problem is a greater unwillingness to confront problems and give marriages the hard work that they require to stay healthy.
Blaming lifespan is a convenient dodge. Maybe it’s a way of taking the blame off both yourself and your spouse, or maybe a way of not being honest about whether you were truly suited for each other in the first place — two very difficult things to confront. Better to invoke science and blame human nature.
Sadeghi-Sami’s next insufferable point: Problems in your relationship are occurring because of past pain. “Because present events always trigger pain from a past event, it’s never the current situation that needs the real fixing. It’s just the echo of an older emotional injury.”
Another dodge. This one takes accountability off of either party, and pretends there’s no real conflict at hand, nothing you actually have to work out between you.
Never the current situation that needs fixing? Forget about working through difficulties and building an even stronger bond.
Yes, old wounds can get reopened. But in my mind, the only thing more unfair than holding an old argument over a partner’s head for years is letting a problem from a past relationship get in the way.
If you’ve gone as far as to get married, I’d hope that you’ve recovered enough from old “couplings” to move into a new one.
And if the past pain was caused by your spouse, isn’t working through it part of the deal when you get married? That’s what I’ve signed up for, anyway.
I’d rather do hard work with the one I love than constantly start fresh with someone I don’t.
But, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The very rich . . . are different from you and me.” Paltrow and Martin won’t have to wage legal war over money. If the split is as amicable as the couple implies, then custody won’t be an issue either. So they have the luxury of taking a more “sophisticated” approach to splitting up, free of the hard realities and embittering struggles that most divorcing couples must face.
And then they have Sadeghi and Sami to massage all the problems away. The doctors explain that it’s nobody’s fault when things don’t work out. They write: “The idea of being married to one person for life is too much pressure for anyone.”
Oh, dear, pressure. Funny, they cite America’s 50 percent divorce rate in their introduction, skipping right past the obvious: For the other 50 percent, marriage is not too much pressure. For many, it’s the greatest gift for facing all the other pressures of life.
I understand that my excitement and happiness are what nearly everyone feels as they enter a marriage, and that Paltrow and Martin probably had the same good intentions. I also understand that the high usually fades after a honeymoon period.
But I don’t feel pressure. It’s a weight lifted, knowing that we’ll work and grow together in the long term.
Fine, marriage for life isn’t for everyone. But why do Paltrow and her enablers feel the need to persuade us that it’s not for anyone?