Why You Should Give A Damn!

Newsletter Archive

Newsletter #21, October, 2007

Altar-ed Reality

by Davina Kotulski, Ph.D.

Many of the same-sex couples who married in San Francisco, Canada and Massachusetts have already divorced. When I say divorced I mean ended their marriages, since access to an official divorce is still relatively hard to come by for gay people. Additionally, many couples who were joined in civil union or domestic partnership have also said “I don’t” or “I won’t any longer” and dissolved their legal status. It is a new painful milestone for LGBT people. But, should we be surprised when our marriages/unions/partnerships end painfully like 50% of heterosexual marriages? Why would our marriages be any different? In fact, without family support, and sometimes in the face of family contempt for our relationships, we may even lack some of the glue that binds heterosexual couples together during stormy times.

After the Honeymoon

Many of us who have taken the plunge into legally recognized relationships did so after being together for many years (eight years for Molly and I, seventeen for our friends Brian and Ted, thirty-plus for Shelly and Ellen, and fifty-one for Phyl and Del). We all entered our new legal status with a history. For many of the couples who said “I do” they had already experienced numerous conflicts over the years together, some of it worked through, some of it waiting for the next chance to rear its’ ugly head. Resources have existed for years to help heterosexual couples manage conflict. Most houses of worship provide counseling services and devote enormous resources to help keep a family together and the self-help section of your local independent bookstore is filled with titles about working things out in a marriage but same-sex couples have been absent from the pages.

Writing Ourselves In

Now that we are having marriages, legally recognized or otherwise, it’s important that we invest in our relationships and begin devoting time to learning skills that before now were not expected of us. We need to seek out ways to have not only legal marriages, but healthy, thriving marriages.

The Love Lab

In the 1970s, John Gottman created the “Love Lab,” a small apartment in Seattle with a beautiful view where couples would go for a weekend getaway while simultaneously having their marital interactions studied. Gottman then continued to study these couples over several years and was able to discern with amazing accuracy what factors lead to a couple’s staying together and what lead to separation. From this, he was able to identify what couples could do to make their marriages succeed and began offering workshops and writing books to get this information to the public.

We recently attended one of the Art and Science of Love Workshops and found it extremely useful. We were given exercises and time to talk, to improve our connection and work through conflict privately. There was no public sharing. There weren’t even nametags to maintain confidentiality. We were also not the only same-sex couple there. The heterosexual couples in the room had a variety of responses, but one man said to us “I’m really glad to be at a workshop that is ‘integrated’ it feels good to be in an inclusive environment working on our marriages together.”

If you’d like to know more about the workshops, go to: The Gottman Weekend Marriage Workshops

Davina Kotulski, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and author of Why You Should Give A Damn About Gay Marriage. She was the former Executive Director of Marriage Equality USA and has been involved with the marriage equality movement since 1998.

Visit her on the web at Davina Kotulski and sign her guestbook.