The Case of Character
by June Saunders

Good morning. I'd like to start my presentation out with a little story. A friend of mine recently went to one of the best marriage enrichment seminars there is-Marriage Encounter-where she and her husband learned communication skills. Well, it was a wonderful high. She and her husband fell madly in love again, their marriage was transformed, and all was right with the world-for about two weeks. Then they found they were back in the same old marriage again.

What happened? They'd been taught communication skills, but they hadn't practiced them. They needed not only communication skills. They needed the character strengths to carry them out. They needed perseverance, diligence, and commitment that could supercede their busyness, their tiredness, their television-watching. It was rather like buying an exercise machine and then letting it sit in the basement. One doesn't get fit that way.

From this I could see how easy it might be to become marriage skills seminar "junkies"-going from seminar to seminar to give one's marriage a "fix," unless the need for character strengths or virtues to apply the skills learned was recognized and addressed.

This need applies to marriage preparation courses for young people, too, which are sprouting up all over the country. As you know, in 1999 Florida mandated marriage education for all ninth and tenth graders. In 1998 judges and lawyers in Oklahoma succeeded in getting a marriage preparation program into all their high schools. South Dakota adopted a statewide relationships course, and Minneapolis high schools now require a one year program before graduation. Courses in universities are also popular.

However, marriage preparation, like marriage enrichment, is most effective when it goes hand-in-hand with character education, or education in the virtues, because marriage skills and marriage success depend upon certain character strengths.

George Washington said that every marriage eventually resolves itself into regard and esteem, or disgust. Indeed, Judith Wallerstein, the modern-day marriage and divorce researcher, has found in her longitudinal studies that happy and successful marriages always include admiration for one another's characters. The partners genuinely consider the other to be a good person, a good parent, and admirable friend-a person who is worthy of love and devotion. Wallerstein stated in the conclusion of her study, The Good Marriage, that morality played a surprisingly significant role in the happiness of happy marriages.

Conversely, the main reason people gave for wanting to divorce was that they had lost respect for their partners.

Now we live in a culture that is full of myths about love, and we are being inundated with these false messages. Love, we are told, depends upon finding that special someone, preferably someone very good-looking and sexy. Love is a spontaneous, irresistible feeling that springs up between two lucky people who are right for one another. It's chemistry. It's kismet. You've only to meet Mr. or Miss right to enjoy lasting love.

But these are the premises of a divorce culture. Marital experts know that couples inevitably fall out of this kind of love. Sexual attraction invariably changes and fades. Chemistry runs dry, kismet looks the other way, and Mr. or Miss Right turns out to be all wrong. If indeed, love is vested in finding that right special someone, what is one to do but change partners if the partner turns out to be less than perfect-to cut one's losses and run?

More mature and responsible people turn to marriage experts to school them in how to build emotional intimacy and longevity into marriage. Usually this is done through communication skills. But then other experts say that communication itself is only 7% verbal. Of course, we know about body language, but there are also the invisible elements of one's inner vibrations and attitudes-qualities of heart and character-that come across in communication, and very loudly too. These emanate from a person's character.

Gary Smalley said in his book Hidden Keys to a Loving, Lasting Marriage, "When courage, persistence, gratefulness, calmness, gentleness and unselfish love are in a person's character, it is easier to receive his or her words."

Furthermore, the attainment and practice of communication skills depends, as we've said, on a whole array of character traits. In Lori Gordon's wonderful PAIRS seminar, which I attended last year, her husband Morris made what I considered to be a rather telling joke. Now, they are a wonderful couple, and a delight to watch, and they were going to demonstrate a cycle of communication wherein through expressing her feelings, hopes and fears, Lori was going to get Morris to change a particularly annoying habit. Morris quipped that he knew Lori would feel good after going through this communication cycle, but he was not sure how he'd feel.

Actually, such communications techniques call upon the listener to exercise restraint of heroic proportions. Morris had to listen for a long time without interrupting; he had to agree that his behavior was wanting without arguing or defending himself; and he had to promise to change. In short, he had to be a hero of objectivity, selflessness and consideration.

If you listen carefully to many of the programs, you will hear the language of character strengths or virtues peeping out from under the surface. In his keynote address yesterday, Terry Hargrave mentioned trustworthiness, respect, sincerity-even humility. This is not the language of skills. This is the language of virtues.

Reflective listening, the mirroring technique, empathic listening-whatever one calls it, it is the most widespread and relied upon marital therapy tool around. It requires patience and a willingness to give of one's attention and time and concern to another. Bernard Guerney of Relationships Enhancement even used the word "selflessness" in the pre-conference seminar, and he emphasized caring, compassion, empathy and trust-qualities of heart and character.

Trust, for instance, is built over time through commitment, sincerity and fidelity. It is a virtue or character strength, and it depends upon other virtues.

Guerney also enjoined people to practice their skills over and over again until they became second nature-he likened it to practicing scales in order in order to learn how to play the piano. In other words, it requires discipline. John Gottman also recommends this. As Blaine Fowers pointed out in his essay Psychology and the Good Marriage, this is Aristotle's recipe for acquiring virtue-you become brave by acting brave, virtuous by acting virtuous.

At their best, these skills programs school people in the virtues of patience, the courage to self-disclose and reveal one's inner self to another, the kindness that must tempter honesty, the diligence and willpower and selflessness needed to make a marriage work. The skills programs help engender virtues of heart and character which are all-important-for ultimately, it is virtues that build and sustain love.

Marriage has been called a "passionate friendship" by Harville Hendrix, and "a deeply intentional friendship" by author Catherine Wallace, who maintains that we learn the foundational virtues of marriage-loyalty and fidelity-from friends in the schoolyard. Some abstinence-based preparation programs emphasize platonic friendships rather than hot dating as the best preparation for successful marriages. Aristotle considered friendship itself to be a virtue, and certainly to make and maintain friendships require the virtues of loyalty, forgiveness, commitment and trust. The virtues that make up friendships are virtues that strengthen marriages. Platonic friendships are excellent training for the loyalty and fidelity that underpin a good marriage. Les and Leslie Parrott devote an entire segment of their marriage preparation course and book to examining friendships and the qualities that sustain them.

Hence, we can see that character education-education in the virtues-is a necessary component of marriage education. Conscious attention to the building of character strengths or virtues can only enhance marriage education. Indeed, marriage education is already predicated upon people possessing or being willing to acquire and develop certain virtues.

Relationships do indeed resolve themselves into admiration or disdain for the other person's character. We find that in the end, love is not chemistry, not kismet-it's character.

Perhaps I can end with a quote from Ovid on love: "To be loved, be lovable."

Sources:

James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man, (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1974).

Judith S. Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee, The Good Marriage (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995).

Gary Smalley, Hidden Keys of a Loving, Lasting Marriage (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988).

Blaine J. Flowers, "Psychology and the Good Marriage," American Behavioral Scientist, January, 1998, Vol. 41, Issue 4.

Harville Hendrix, Getting the Love You Want, A Guide for Couples (New York: HarperPerennial, 1988).

Catherine M. Wallace, For Fidelity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998).

Drs. Les and Leslie Parrott, Relationships (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1998).