Four questions: Marital therapy by acid and microscope

After reading some of Esther Perel’s anthropological, New Yorker-ish, historical, Gottman- and TED-ish and Holocaust-based wisdom on marriage, and choking on these clouds, I have to land my cleats in the mud and splash it on your forehead. So here is how to help with a marriage (male pronouns used for convenience):

Ask yourself: “Am I too psychologically messed up to love anybody?” You may be. Most adults are still starved children who need a given-to relationship: “Be there for me.” A couple decades later and they’ll have an empty, sucking spirit which cannot give or love, but manipulatively.

A big Inner Child, can you put some of your absolutely critical need for unconditional love aside to give of yourself to your spouse? That means: Can you leave your hospital prematurely, stand on the shared earth, find some inner molecules of actual objective appreciation for the here-and-now despite your remaining bleeding, feel your spouse as a person worthy to live completely apart from your need? That is very, very hard. Can you do it?

Are you ready to leave her if, after you’ve apologized and mercilessly named your flaws (which is different from admitting flaws, which assumes her coloring of them), she refuses to see hers? Remember that she, too, comes from a childhood that later needs revenge, and may see you solely through the eyes of an injustice victim. If so, she will be a lost cause while you are there.

How will you answer the conflict between your abject need for a person who seemed to once look at you with love or understanding, and your eventual starvation by her? Is it a matter of shrinking yourself down to nothing, canceling yourself out? Is it better for you to be nothing than to have nothing?

These are the questions you need to ask yourself to know about your marriage. Any other therapy that assumes there is an adult apart from its child, a tree of love apart from the salade de merde from which it grew, will be a fantasy, and you will have to fantasize for it to work.

It’s clouds or mud, and mud is solid.