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The Purpose of Marriage - Part I
By David C. Roche
So why do we get married? We say it is because we fall in love.
Actually, we don’t fall in love to get married; we get married to fall in love. We get married to buckle down and do the work necessary to develop true love with our partner. We find true love by fulfilling the real purpose of marriage- completing childhood. More specifically, each of you needs to help your partner heal their childhood wounds. In order to accomplish this, each of you must grow and develop to become the complete human beings you were born to be.
So let’s go back to the beginning: childhood.
When we are born we are totally complete, joyful human beings. We’ve had all of our needs met for roughly nine months in the womb and now we are ready to face the world. We begin our journey of development with the help of our caretakers (usually our parents, but they could include grandparents, older brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, etc.). We have six very distinct stages of development and we have very specific needs in each stage. These stages are:
- Attachment (0-18 months)
- Exploration (18 months-3 years)
- Identity (3-4 years)
- Competence (4-7 years)
- Concern (7-13 years)
- Intimacy (13-19 years)
At each stage we depend on our parents to meet all of our needs and help us successfully develop and therefore progress to the next stage. When we need affection, we need it now. If there is too little affection, we feel abandoned. If there is too much affection, we feel smothered. If our parents don’t get it exactly right, our needs go unmet and we develop what psychologists call a childhood wound. We are all wounded to some extent at each stage of our development but there is almost always one particular stage during which we get particularly stuck (this is usually the same stage at which your parents got stuck when they were children- yes, it is a vicious circle). The healing of this major wound becomes a top priority in our unconscious mind. Our unconscious is relentless in pursuit of this goal because it believes that this wound must be healed or we will die (no, I’m not being dramatic, our unconscious really thinks like this).
In addition to the six development stages, we experience socialization. This is the process through which our parents take us so we can survive in the world. As I mentioned earlier, we are born fully joyful, complete human beings. Our “core” self is complete and intact. This core self can be divided into four functions: thinking, feeling, sensing, and acting. These are our avenues of connection to the outside world. As long as our thoughts are free, our feelings flowing, our bodily senses intact, and our muscles flexible, we are whole.
But this wholeness doesn’t last. With the best of intentions our parents teach us the ways of the world in their words and in their deeds. We see or hear societal rules: men don’t cry, sex is bad, women shouldn’t be too smart or too athletic, and much more. Our unconscious takes these messages very seriously as a matter of survival and we shut down some parts of our core self. Males shut down the ability to express feelings because they learn that expressing feelings is wrong for a man and they will die if they continue. Females shut down natural athletic talent because girls aren’t supposed to be doing that. Many children, male and female, are told that parts of their bodies are bad or naughty so they decide to suppress their natural sexuality in order to survive. These are but a few examples of the thinking, feeling, sensing, and acting areas that we bury so deep we forget they even exist.
With unmet childhood needs causing our unconscious mind major pain and socialization causing us to bury parts of our true selves, we take on certain additional positive and negative character traits to protect us from further wounding and to compensate for the repressed parts of our original selves (these repressed parts are called the lost self*). So the personality that we present to others includes certain characteristics of our original being that were not lost and new character traits that we developed to fill the void. We identify some of these new compensatory characteristics as negative and defend ourselves against them by burying them or simply denying their existence.
So we leave our childhood with unfinished business (a childhood wound that requires healing) and our unconscious mind enters adulthood with a very specific agenda (to heal that wound and become the complete human beings we were born to be). Along the way, we have cut out and buried major parts of our true personality and adopted other personality traits (some so negative we deny them) to help ensure our survival.
The solution to all of this lies with the partner to whom we are attracted and will eventually marry.
My next article, “The Purpose of Marriage Part II” I will examine the effect that our childhood has on the selection of our partner and on our own behavior during this very important relationship.
David C. Roche is an Imago Educator and is a member of the Board of Directors of Imago Relationships International. David is currently a marketing consultant and lives with his wife Diane in the Chicago area. He has held many sales, marketing and general management positions in his career in the USA, Canada and Mexico.
* Harville Hendrix defines and discusses the concept of “lost self” in his book Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself be Loved
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