Therapist to couples: Marriage no picnic but worth effort

FRANKLIN PARK, Pa. -- "Our culture has really done a magnificent job of convincing people that good marriages 'just happen,'" according to marriage and family therapist Larry Badaczewski.

Many experts caution against this romantic, magical view of marriage, "but somehow we have got it in our heads that it shouldn't be that hard," he said. "It's almost as if we refuse to see how complex we are as individuals, and that when you take two imperfect people and have them live together, you still somehow expect them to have a perfect life." But the reality is much more complicated, said Badaczewski, who has worked with Pittsburgh area parishes for 21 years. He is on staff at St. John Neumann in Franklin Park, Pa., and an auxiliary staff member at St. Sebastian in Ross Township, Pa. Married couples fight over issues that "will be with us till the end of time" - money, sex, parenting, social life, extended family relationships, division of labor in the household, and how they practice the faith, he told the Pittsburgh Catholic, the diocesan newspaper. The best form of therapy is to "normalize" the conflict, to put things into perspective, Badaczewski added. "If couples just know that what they're experiencing is not unusual, they can calm down and begin to work through things." But when the romance "chemicals" in the brain begin to wear off a year or two into the marriage, the couple can begin to "see (their) differences become more glaring," the therapist added. "It's not exactly what we expected, we get mad, things are not working out the way we thought they should," he added. One way that things go bad, he said, is when people begin to think, "This is too hard, and the reason is that it's the other person." "We build this catalog of offenses against them, put all of our energy into building a case," Badaczewski said. "I see it over and over again. At that point, the marriage is in deep trouble." This is where the differences between a civil marriage and a committed, sacramental one can be seen, he said. A sacramental marriage "withstands physical and emotional demands," he added. He recalled the sermon at his own wedding, when the priest said, "It all starts at baptism." The priest told the young couple, "You are marked, and called to follow Christ, and marriage is a moral occasion where you are really called to recognize Christ in another person, with that kind of love." In today's society, "we're not being reminded of God's love," Badaczewski said. "It's a different kind of love than society promotes. We're up against those images." Divorce, he said, "just kills me. If I lose sleep it's usually when I'm working with people who are dismantling a relationship, especially when you can see any number of ways to make things better. "They don't understand the promises they made," he added. "Just because they're not 'in love' at the moment, they think if they're in pain at the moment it's a bad marriage." Look at the gospels, he said. "It's in pain that we see the face of God. Marriage is such an important and holy vocation because it can get to be so messy. That's where Jesus reveals himself -- in the mess, in those everyday things, that hidden life. "My message is it doesn't have to be this way, and to infuse hope," Badaczewski said. "Marriage is our last and best chance to grow up. If we're good at it, it makes us stop thinking of our own self, reach out to another and see how we can be Christ to anyone, and that it has to be to our spouse first." Copyright (c) 2006 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops

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Copyright (c) 2007 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops