In the madness of 2020, can the Enneagram, or such a tool, be used to manage a growing, private problem: the effect of pande-mania on marriage?
We think we know our spouses – after all, we are married, which indicates that the mere matter of sharing an address would translate to talking, connectedness, knowing and understanding. But we still wonder … Do you really not hear the dogs scratching at the door or see them pooping on the floor? Don’t you already have 27 pairs of jeans? Why are you already offering solutions to fix the problem I have yet to fully explain? Why are you seriously upset about that silly thing? WHY CAN YOU NOT READ MY MIND ALREADY? Even though the book was published a hundred years ago, one spouse is still on Mars and the other hasn’t left Venus.
With calendar-clearing COVID we found ourselves with a single repeating event: time with each other. For months, there was no dinner out chatting with the other couple across the table, there was only pulling up a chair with our other half. Again. And again. That one person needing to be all the people we have been used to. Reports show it may not be going so well. Since COVID, one source projects that new divorce filings will increase somewhere between 10% and 25% in the second half of this year.[1] Further, more than one-quarter of adults said they know a couple likely to break up, separate or divorce when the pandemic ends.[2]
But in the pre-pandemic rushing world, didn’t we think more time together would help us stop feeling so far apart? Prior to COVID-cation, it was easy to think that was the solution to simmering discontent. But what if time – on its own – doesn’t always heal; and instead exposes what is broken. While we can get away with loving the person we used to pass like ships in the night, learning to re-like them when we are docked all day at port is an altogether other thing.
Perhaps starting with sharing what can we learn about ourselves from a personality test like the Enneagram is a good place to jump in the water.
Maybe, if we use this time to screw up the nerve to ask questions, to answer honestly, to listen, and ask another question and listen again, we can line 2020 with a silver sliver. Our other person may begin to understand why we need to tell the same story thirty times, with three-hundred flavors of integral nuance. Or, our other person may begin to understand why we have said everything that needs to be said the first time around.
I do recognize the inherent risk. It’s fun to share results freely with friends and laugh our faces off about the things we already knew, but it’s a lot more vulnerable with a spouse. Many of us are devotees of Brene Brown and her wizardly work on vulnerability. We agree with her studies and voraciously gobble up her words and practice her principles — with everyone except the person we vowed to give our very best to. What are we afraid of? It’s scary to be fully seen for fear we may find we are not fully loved. But if Dr. Henry Cloud is right that, “Couples often live out years of falsehood trying to protect and save a relationship, all the while destroying any chance of real relationship,” [3] not “going there” is a bigger risk.
With time for conversation – especially that which can spring from an innocent jumble of assessed numbers and needs and defy the rising odds, using the opportunity to cling and cleave and comfort, to feel a little more understood and a little less judged in our most important human relationship, that was intended not to be ignored until the kids graduate, but to be bound by a protecting, trusting, hoping, persevering brand of love in which we can bring our whole selves to the table for two.
[1] Anne Marie Chaker, “The Strain that the COVID pandemic is putting on marriages,” The Wall Street Journal, August 3, 2020.
[2] According to an Ipsos poll of 1,005 people conducted at the end of July.
[3] Dr. Henry Cloud, Boundaries in Marriage.