Memory is a dynamic and ever-changing part of our thinking. This ever-changing memory for the story we tell ourselves about our partner’s character and the relationship’s history leads to the discovery of the “story-of-us-switch,” which is a litmus test of cumulative trust or distrust and a way of knowing with a high degree of certainty when a relationship is dying and will very likely end in dissolution.
We all like
having an expiration date on the food we buy—something like, “Do not use after the following date.” It would be nice if a neon light would start flashing: “ARE YOU CRAZY? DON’T EAT THIS! THROW THIS STUFF OUT!” Failing that, we’d like to develop a good nose for when milk is about to turn sour or meat is about to go bad.In a similar way, we psychologists would love to find a switch that goes off when a relationship starts turning sour and is harmful if ingested: “WATCH OUT! THIS RELATIONSHIP IS ABOUT TO SELF-DESTRUCT. IT WILL SOON TURN INTO A NIGHTMARE! DO SOMETHING FAST—FIX IT OR BAIL OUT!”
Many couple therapists are supremely reluctant to have such an “expiration date” or sign of hopelessness for a relationship. We therapists are creatures of hope. We root for love to win out over all obstacles, and we are aware of the tremendous tragedy of a relationship’s death. We are aware that when people begin a commitment, they are usually in a state of bliss or joyfulness, full of hope for their future.
On the other hand, we have also seen love that has turned into hate, and hope that has turned into bitterness. We know that sometimes it is best for everyone if these people part. We have helped many people through the tragedy of lost love and into a better place for everyone involved. We have helped divorcing couples do so more amicably and figure out what’s best for their children and their future lives as separate individuals.
I have seen many couples in my office in which one person is totally shocked that the partner wants out. She might say, “I want a divorce.” He might say, “I really had no idea you were that unhappy,” and she will usually say something like, “I have tried to tell you that for the past 9 years.”
It’s not always the man who is clueless. I have seen many couples in which the woman says, “Why didn’t you say anything to me about being unhappy? We could have gone for therapy sooner.” And the man usually responds with, “What was the point? It would only have led to more arguing, and it would turn out to be all my fault, as usual.” These are common statements many couple therapists hear.
The good news is that I have found such an “expiration date” switch when the relationship really stinks. I call it the “story-of-us switch.” As we all know, a switch is either on or off—there’s not much in-between. It’s not very often that one finds such a powerful switch in psychological research.
The switch we discovered comes from our oral history interview, (OHI) in which we interview couples about the history of their relationship and their personal philosophies about love and conflict in their own lives. The interview is actually quite innocuous. We ask people fairly standard questions, some of them just like questions you might ask of a couple you just met at a dinner party.
But our questions have been carefully worded based on decades of experience.
We ask partners to tell us how they first met and what their first impressions of each other were.
Then we go on to ask them what they recall about dating, how their relationship progressed, what they enjoy doing together, what a good time is for them. We ask them to tell us how their relationship has changed over the years. We also ask, “What led you to decide that, of all the people in the world, this was the person you wanted to marry (or move in with, or commit to)?” “Was it an easy decision?”
“Was it a difficult decision?” “Were you ever in love?” “What was that love like for you?” “Tell me about that time in your relationship.” We ask about the wedding or commitment ceremony if there was one, or the decision to join their lives together, if there was one, and the honeymoon, their first year together, the transition to becoming parents if they have children or stepchildren together, and what times stand out as the really good times. We ask them to describe and what fun, play, adventure, courtship, sex, romance, and passion are and were for them, and what a really great time was and is like for them.
We also ask them about their hard times. We ask: “Looking back over the years, what moments stand out as the really hard times in your relationship?” “What were they like?” “What happened?”
“How did you get through those times?” “Why do you think you stayed together?” “What was successful for weathering difficult times?” “What are your ideas about how people in general ought to get through difficult times?”
We ask them to tell us how their relationship is now different from what it was like at first. They create a kind of graph of their relationship and how it has changed over time. Then we move on to explore their philosophies about relationships, what they think makes them last and be happy. To accomplish this we follow the methods of sociologist Fred Strodtbeck,1 who in the 1950s traveled the U.S. in a van studying Navaho, Mormon, and Texas Anglo cultures. He found that in all the cultures he studied, couples loved to talk about how people were succeeding or failing at raising good children, and what the differences were between successful and unsuccessful families.
We ask couples to select another couple they know who have a good relationship and yet another couple whose relationship is not so good. We ask them what is different about these two relationships. We say, “We’re interested in your ideas about what makes a relationship work.” We ask them to compare their own relationship to each of these couples. We also ask them about their parents’ relationships and how they are similar and different from their own. We ask again about their happiest and least happy times and how their philosophy about relationships had changed over the years. Then we ask how much they currently know about their partner’s major worries, stresses, hopes, dreams, and aspirations (their “love maps” of each other). We ask them how they stay in touch with each other on a daily basis, asking about their routines for staying in and renewing emotional contact.
Couples almost always love the OHI. In this interview they are the experts about their relationship. We are genuinely the ones learning from them, and we genuinely believe that every couple is unique.
Although these questions may seem simple and obvious, it took us many years to develop this interview. It is based on the interviewing methods of Studs Terkel. He was the best interviewer I have ever heard. Terkel had a unique perspective that came from his being a radio man. He was interested in creating great radio programs, so he invented an interviewing style that is very different from anyone else’s. He avoided the usual “um-hmms” that most therapists use, because these are extremely annoying to hear on the radio. At the end of people’s long monologues, Terkel, smoking his cigar, would respond with great energy and emotion, saying things like, “Wow! That is truly amazing!
That’s incredible!” Then he’d ask another question and become quiet. He could then splice himself out of the tapes and have a long segment of just the subject talking. Long monologues were what made Terkel’s radio programs fascinating to listen to. For example, I absolutely loved his interview of an older woman going through her attic with him. She found dusty old objects and through these treasures she described the memories of her lifetime. I remember her finding a small teddy bear, which she said was given to her by the only man she truly ever loved. Terkel asked her if this man was her husband.
She said, no, she loved her husband in a different way, but she was never “in love” with him. She had given her heart only once to a man when she was 16 years old, and her heart broke for the first time when he was killed in a car crash. Terkel wept with her in that attic as she poured out her life story to him. What a great storyteller she was in Terkel’s hands.
Our OHI was developed over a period of more than 2 years, using trial-and-error, with my talented student Lowell Krokoff. It began as an interview that lasted many hours and was eventually pared down to about 1 to 2 1/2 hours.
It turned out that there were no quiet people. Our amazingly capable interviewers always found the key that unlocked the many stories people carry inside them and privately tell themselves over and over about their partner and their relationship. Everyone we talked to was a great storyteller. People seem to need to tell their stories. In fact, in one study I did with Robert Levenson, we decided to save time and money, so we decided not to use the OHI. It later turned out that our subjects themselves insisted on partaking in an OHI. They were frustrated that we hadn’t asked them these important questions about their lives together. They wanted to tell us that story to complete our research study with them. That was as true for happy couples as it was for unhappy couples. They poured out their memories and their stories.
But memory is not a static videotape of history. Modern neuroscience is teaching us that memory is continually being rewritten by current experiences and that it contains a shorthand of experience organized by personal meanings. The stability of our identity endures only because some neural networks continue to endure and evolve, and most of our memories are actually highly malleable. As Lewis, Amini, and Lannon wrote, “memory is not a thing…memory is not only mutable, but the nature of the brain’s storage mechanism dictates that memories must change over time”.2
We generally have two kinds of memories, explicit and implicit. Whereas explicit memory is entirely conscious, implicit memories may not be. When confronted with repeating kinds of experiences, the brain intuitively extracts rules without knowing why. When confronted with anomalies and cognitive dissonance, the brain rewrites history so that it makes more sense and can be more easily retained. The same process holds for the ever-changing story we tell ourselves about our partner’s ever-changing character and the ever-changing story of our relationship’s history and meanings.
When I first arrived in Seattle in 1986, I started working with a talented employee in my lab, Kim Buehlman, to develop a set of dimensions for quantitatively describing what people said during the OHI and how they said it. We settled on some basic dimensions that we thought would describe
the incredibly rich stories we were hearing. I believe that the Buehlman scoring of the OHI3 reveals the “final state” of trust or distrust in a relationship. Here are the major dimensions we came up with, along with some transcripts of actual interviews that illustrate these dimensions.
Dimension #1. The Fondness and Admiration System. Perhaps the most fundamental aspect of the tales we heard was about love and respect, or their absence. If the couple’s story about love and respect was positive, either verbally or nonverbally, the couple expressed positive affect (warmth, humor, affection), emphasized the good times, and offered spontaneous compliments toward the partner. The contrast was the absence of this “fondness and admiration system.” Here are some examples of transcripts from couples demonstrating fondness, affection, and admiration.
H: I’ll tell my version. I was in the military and got assigned to Baltimore to go to school. And I was down on East Baltimore Street, which is the raunchiest street in town. I was drinking a beer, and all of a sudden somebody kicked my beer right over and I looked up and there sitting behind this bottle was her.
W: And you know that’s a fault of his. ( both laughing) We were dancing and my girlfriend told everyone about me. I was raised in Massachusetts and he was in the military and my best friend worked at the military base, and she said she had met this very charming soldier. And she was going to meet him at this weekly dance. And she called me at work and said, “I don’t want to go by myself, you have to go with me.” I said no, no, no, but finally she was so nervous she didn’t want to go alone—that’s why I went.
H: I don’t know why I was so sophisticated at the time, but I began to realize that they all come here because of her—that even though she doesn’t talk very much, she must be the really interesting one in the group. And so I started to focus in on her.
W: That I was the center.
H: She was the leader of that group.
Here’s another couple high on this love and respect dimension:
INTERVIEWER: We’re gonna go all the way back to the beginning. Tell me about the first the time you two met and got together.
W: You want to hear it from me because that’s my favorite story.
INTERVIEWER: So that’s a good place to start. Why don’t we start with you?
H: Okay. This is true and in a way is rather unusual. I was…Phil worked at a lady’s ready-to-wear store. I did not know him at the time. The other person there was the window trimmer, and I went in to buy a garment one time and the garment I wanted was in the window. Later on the saleslady said that the window trimmer asked her to get my phone number. So anyway, to make a long story short, I dated this fellow for a while. His name was Frank. Every time I went anyplace with Frank, no matter where we went all he talked about was this fellow who worked at the store named “PK.” So one time Frank and I were at the Press Club having a drink. Phil lived downtown at the time. Anyway, the conversation gets to PK again—he’s supposed to be a very intelligent fellow, it was all about PK—and I said, “Well, Frank, I just don’t think anyone can be that great. You told me he lives downtown. Why don’t you call him up and see if he can join us?” So Frank went to the phone and he said PK couldn’t join us, but why didn’t we come over to where he lived? He lived in a hotel just a couple of blocks away. So Frank came back and said, “You want to do that?” So I said, “Sure.” We went over there. Well, he lived on the third floor, and when we walked down the hall Frank was behind me, and he reached over me to knock on the door. And Philip opened the door and he looked at me and he took my hand and kissed my hand, and I was a dead duck.
Conversely when fondness and admiration are dead, partners will express negative affect toward their partner. They may chose to describe an unfavorable first impression, or they may be cynical, sarcastic, or critical of their partner. Here’s an example.
INTERVIEWER: What was the first thing you noticed about Peter? Is there anything that made him stand out? What was your first impression?
W: The wine was watered down.
H: I had a friend with a bottle of wine, that’s what she means.
W: Yeah, uh-huh. You know, I was late for the ski bus, I had the wrong date, I was rushing on, I was the last one, I didn’t know a soul. And I just wanted to go skiing. So he’s with this group of people who were obviously already a group. So I don’t really know that I had an impression of him as much as the group. Probably the next evening we all met and sat in one of the people’s rooms and partied. We were all supposed to go out for dinner together and he never made it because he and his buddies drank a little too much and I ended up having dinner with one of his friends and we went back to sit in his friend’s room. This guy’s wife had just left him. So we get back to their room, and on course Pete was there. He had been sent to bed by the Canadian Mounties on his way to the restaurant. And I woke him up and said, “You know, I just don’t think you’re a very nice person.”
Here is another couple:
INTERVIEWER: Anything else you can think of about that time?
H:…there was the one time when I really got mad at you on your birthday, and that was…
W: Oh yeah, that was ridiculous…
H:…that was in October of ’95. Had to be.
W: Yeah, that was stupid, that was the most ass-i-nine thing.
H: I really got mad.
W: Your behavior was just a total duffus. H: I went berserk.
W: Yeah.
H: I yelled at her because she was….
W: It was my birthday because we’d gone out….
H: I spent like $200 on her in presents.
W: Right, and his friend was sitting in the next room. You know we’d come back from going out to eat and whatever, and his friend was sitting in the other room with me, in the living room talking. And I was having a really heartful conversation and I felt like I couldn’t just say, “Well, sorry Harry, you gotta go home now.”
H: Meanwhile I was preparing to go to sleep. I was in my pajamas.
W: He was making this big production and I felt like well, yeah, I’d like to get Harry out of here.
But I felt I had to be nice to him, polite, generous. And then Bill just had a complete tirade, and my feeling was “just forget him.”
H: Yeah, I just didn’t understand that. To me it was just she’s totally being oblivious to the fact that this is supposed to be time for us.
W: And I wasn’t oblivious at all. I just felt like I was being sensitive.
H: It was really a miscommunication. I did kind of go ballistic.
W: Yeah. I was really angry. H: I don’t get mad very often.
W: No, he got really angry with me and I ended up leaving and came back the next day.
H: Next day or the next same night?