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Her anger
When I asked the McBrides how each of them had disappointed and surprised the other, over time, Lynn reared back in her seat. It was almost as if I’d been playing catch with Carl and had suddenly thrown the ball in her direction.
“I know,” I said sympathetically, “that question’s a dog, isn’t it?”
“Boy, that is a loaded question,” she said. “Whew! Well, do you want to go first?” she asked her husband. Then she said, “You go first.”
Carl paused momentarily, as if to gather his thoughts. “Over time, the way in which Lynn disappointed me — going way back, and early in the marriage — was that she just seemed to have a lot of anger. So that I would feel that our relationship was going along quite well, and then something would happen — it was like some sort of spark — and she would jump all over me. And this went on for years and years, and it was really always iffy. Not that we didn’t have a lot of good times — we did — but there were a lot of things that weren’t working.”
“So you felt you had to tiptoe around her?” I asked.
He nodded. “Right. And the thing was ...” He hesitated before continuing. “I think that our relationship was really affected by things we brought to the marriage from our families of origin. And I don’t want to dwell on it, but I think there’s something that affected our marriage in a very significant way, and was at the root of the depression ... which was that I was sexually abused for six years while I was growing up.”
Taken aback, I murmured, “By whom?” My own thought was that six years, in the life of a growing child, is a very long time. And was it his anger, or his wife’s anger, that we’d been discussing?
Carl said shortly, “It was a neighbor,” and his tone of voice suggested that we’d better leave it there. I sat still, saying nothing.
After a few moments, Carl went on to say that he had held this secret to himself all the way through high school and beyond. “I’d told Lynn about it, and I thought that I had dealt with it, but I hadn’t. And that’s what ultimately made me so vulnerable when we moved here. And so early on, especially in the North Carolina years, one of the ways Lynn disappointed me was that I thought everything in my life was wonderful — that we had great kids and a terrific family and that she and I had a wonderful relationship — but it was clear that Lynn didn’t believe that. She kept seeing real problems and feeling a lot of dissatisfaction with me.”
Carl went on to say that he had re-created a situation that existed in his high school days: one in which he was seen as a kind of golden boy — talented, smart, much admired. “I hadn’t realized that that situation was actually very destructive. To me.”
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“You mean it was a fictional good life?” Both of them laughed and nodded.
Then I said, “But if I could stop you for a moment, I’m puzzled by the fact that you, Lynn, are the angry one and you, Carl” — I turned to him — “had a lot to be angry about, as an abused child ... ?”
“Oh yeah,” Lynn said, in a wry tone of voice. “It’s called Projective Identification.” And she gave me a knowing smile, which I returned.
In my first book on marriage — a book about couples ranging in age from late adolescence to their late forties — I had popularized the concept of Projective Identification. Despite its alarmingly complicated sounding name, this concept refers to a rather simple and quite prevalent psychological device in which one member of a pair pawns off on the other member whatever traits or feelings he or she can’t admit to — in Carl’s case, anger. He saw Lynn as all too prone to anger, while he was conscious of no anger within himself.
To put it differently, Lynn “carried the anger” for both of them, while Carl saw himself as completely devoid of angry feelings. Lynn was the “voice of anger” in their troubled relationship, and Carl felt critical of her even as he identified with her expression of his own disavowed, deeply buried rage.
Carl nodded, said, “Right.”
“Is that what was going on?” I asked the pair of them.
“Yes,” Lynn said. “Oh yes. Because Carl’s family do not do anger at all.”
A second-class citizen
I turned to Carl, who nodded in agreement. He said that he was now able to feel his anger — and assert himself, if necessary — but that getting to this point had been a long, hard process.
“I could never have owned up to this a number of years ago, but having this whole ‘perfect family’ thing blasted to bits when we moved north was ultimately good in the long run. Because it revealed all the bad stuff that I was contributing to the marriage, and it ultimately uncovered all this bad stuff that was inside me .... And this gave us the opportunity to work it through.”
Lynn was leaning forward in her seat, as though impatient for a chance to speak. “And I guess your disappointment was his marriage to his career? Is that right?” I asked her.
“Yes, the marriage to the career and the fact that I never felt that I was at the top of Carl’s priority list. I felt like I was down a ways .... And then, when the kids came along, I felt that I was even under them.” There was indignation in her voice at this moment.
Carl said that when they first moved into their new home in New England, they’d started having horrible fights, and Lynn kept saying that she felt like a second-class citizen. “I think that somehow moving up here made her realize that for many years, while we were in North Carolina, she’d felt like a second-class citizen and been treated like one. But when we were living there, she hadn’t been able to articulate it —”
“Because the culture, when we were in the South, supported the myth,” Lynn interrupted him. “Carl had people all over that community eating out of his hand, and that culture did not allow me to have equal status with him. And so by definition I was a few steps down, so anytime I tried to assert myself I just got smashed. Because I was being non-feminine or too ballsy or whatever.” She smiled and shrugged.
Then she explained that while she and her husband were both classical pianists, she was a much stronger performer and he was a much stronger intellectual. But when they lived in North Carolina, neither of them was ever asked to do major performances in the university’s concert hall. Regardless of this fact, Carl enjoyed widespread respect and had the reputation of being a fabulous performer. “I didn’t get recognized at all for what I could do in music. It was subtle but it was a really macho atmosphere, so people in our social circle simply couldn’t accept the fact that I was good.”
Surprises
I asked the McBrides about the ways they had surprised each other, over time.
“Maybe this is a terrible thing to say,” responded Lynn, “but my biggest surprise has been the way that Carl has turned himself around. Since the depression. Not just in terms of his mood, but the way he is in our relationship. Because, frankly, to be perfectly honest” — she paused and addressed Carl directly — “I don’t think this is any news to you” — then turned back to me — “by the time the kids were teenagers, I thought this was going to be over. I was prepared for that, because I thought, ‘Nothing is ever going to change.’ And I was not content to live in a one-, two- or three-down position for the rest of my life.
“So when we came here and Carl got depressed and wanted to go right back to North Carolina, knowing that I had been aching to get out of there for the past fourteen or fifteen years . . .”
“That’s kind of a low estimate.” Carl laughed.
“So when the first thing he says to me, almost literally, is that he wants to go back there, I could not believe my ears. So I thought, ‘This is over. This is just over.’ ”
Lynn’s big surprise, she reiterated, was her husband’s capacity to surmount what had happened to him, and where he had come from. But he has, she said, with a smile.
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What had surprised Carl was far less sweeping, and it had happened slowly as he began to feel better and the relationship was improving. “I would say some trivial thing that in the past Lynn would have jumped at me for, and she wouldn’t jump at me. And that’s happened any number of times, and it’s been a pleasant surprise. 
Sept. 4: TODAY hosts talk to author Maggie Scarf and psychologist Dale Atkins about ways to keep your marriage strong.
“I didn’t really register this early on, but I’ve felt for many years that she was incredibly dissatisfied. That somehow things weren’t working right for her ... that she was capable of a far more intimate relationship than I was. Part of it was her own personality, part of it was that I was just so frightened and terrified after the six years of abuse that I just couldn’t give, emotionally. In that way, the depression was a good thing, because I have learned how to do that. I mean, I don’t want to speak for her, but I do think we have an excellent relationship now.”
I turned, met Lynn’s gaze. “Well, would you agree?”
“Yes,” she answered, without hesitation.
This time of life
I asked the McBrides what name they would give this particular phase of their lives.
When neither of them responded, I prompted them by saying, “Adolescence has a certain mood-tone associated with it. A time of some turmoil, and of changes — in bodies, in outlook, in a variety of external circumstances — and this time of life is similar in certain ways. So if you think of it in terms of a movie or a book, what would you call it?”
Lynn said, “The New Beginning.” I nodded, thinking that for her, at age sixty-one, this was true in many ways.
Carl said, “Peace, I think.”
“So for both of you, it’s in the positive range?” I asked him.
“Yes, very strongly so.” He smiled, and his wife nodded her agreement.
The bonus years
As I sat there, I reflected that before the remarkable shift in health and longevity that this past century has witnessed, a couple such as the McBrides were likely to have been in their elderly/ill/dying years.
After all, Carl was now in his late fifties and Lynn in her early sixties; but here they were before me, looking healthy and content. It was clear that Carl had benefited greatly from the extended therapy he’d received in the course of his depression, for he had exorcised the demons of childhood sexual abuse that had haunted him throughout his life. Although early on he’d believed that he had “dealt with those events” by repressing them, they had prevented him from being a real, authentic human being, capable of being truly intimate with his wife.
And Lynn had sensed this but had been unable to reach him. She’d had “my own problems with mild depression,” she admitted in the course of the interview. These problems had been due to a chilly, disapproving mother and an emotionally distant, frustrating husband; in short, to an inability to make real human contact with those who should have been closest to her.
At the outset of the twentieth century, it occurred to me, this pair would have been unlikely to outlive their mutual dissatisfaction — not only with the course their individual lives had taken but with the lives they had lived together. So, despite the pain the McBrides had endured as they underwent so many major life upheavals—his job change, their move north, his depression — these extra decades of health and well-being had become a “bonus,” in every possible sense of that word. For it was time that had allowed for this profound transformation in the couple’s relationship.
Excerpted from “September Songs: The Good News About Marriage in the Later Years.” Copyright (c) 2008 by Maggie Scarf. Reprinted with permission from Riverhead Books.
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