WHY I WROTE “LOVEWORKS”:
What motivates someone to write a book?  Good question.  If other writers are like me they have no idea why they are writing but are driven to do so.  It is only in hindsight one can see the reasons for writing a particular work.  Such is the case with my participation in LOVEWORKS:  Coming to Terms with Intimacy and Equality. 

In the early 90’s, a mutual acquaintance had come to know me as a conference workshop presenter for an international organization for divorced Catholics.  She also knew my co-author, Mary Ann Massey, in the same way; but Mary Ann and I did not know one another.  This woman asked us to jointly keynote an up coming conference in Dayton, Ohio in 1991 and we were pleased to oblige. 

I wrote Mary Ann an introductory letter and we communicated by phone after that.  On one or two occasions we met at an airport when Mary Ann was traveling through my home city on her way to and from other destinations.  A day or two before the conference we worked out our plans for the keynote talks and made our presentations.  The attendees responded so strongly to our material that Mary Ann, on her way home on the plane, thought about writing a book on the material we presented.  I was thinking along a similar line; thinking this material had some real value.  I was looking for a way to share my thoughts with a larger audience other than my therapy clients. 

Mary Ann suggested we write a book.  Since we were both busy in our private practices we thought we could simply transcribe the audiotapes from the conference and we would have most of our book.  This seemed simple.  The first version was called, “Let’s Talk, You First.”  The transcription, while good at a conference did not hold up as a text and we moved on to other editions, the third or forth edition eventually becoming LOVEWORKS. 

A number of forces were at work inside me.  The first was a reservoir of things to say which had been building up for a number of years, but had not had expression due to my concerns about how these thoughts would be received by women and men.  I remember writing to Mary Ann in that first letter this way, “You know, Mary Ann, women keep saying they want the men in their lives to open up and start talking; but if they do,” I cautioned, “women are not going to like what they hear.”  I needed to publicly talk about intimate relationships from a man’s point of view and was pretty sure women, not knowing the truth about men’s lives with regard to relationships, would be highly offended and probably provoked.  I was also concerned that men, especially those who identified themselves as part of the “men’s movement,” would be highly critical of my observations.

Almost everything I read about intimate relationships seemed to come from woman’s point of view.  As we know, men are pretty silent on the subject matter.  The popular literature on relationships was full of books mostly written by women for women.  The men’s books were about men’s issues focusing on their need to be more intimate with each other, not women.  There were no books written jointly by men and women about heterosexual relationships.   Additionally, I thought professional books did not sufficiently address the problems I was seeing in marriages.  Therefore, as a clinician, I was formulating my own means of helping couples with their problems from an eclectic point of view; colored of course by my own masculinity. 

I was also finding that men were very happy to let me speak for them.  They seemed to be at a loss for words.  Every time I gave a workshop on “men”, the guys would come up to me and thank me for putting into words what they had been thinking and feeling.  They seemed so relieved to have a voice.  To my surprise, the women thanked me too because they felt they were understanding their men better.  The men were grateful for me being their lightning rod.  The women were just glad to have some information from a male about intimate relationships.  A saving element for women in my presentations was my unmistakable commitment to equality between men and women.  This being the case, I had their ear where others failed. 

In the late 60’s I was very much part of what was then called “The Women’s Movement.”  To be honest, my involvement was not so much on behalf of freeing women as it was on freeing myself.  It was clear to me that women’s liberation also meant my liberation and I was definitely interested in that. 

I never wanted to be “the head of the household.”  I wanted a true partnership with a woman who would share equally in the responsibility for everything.  I saw being the head of the household as a rather lonely place to be.  Besides, if I were to carry all that responsibility why would I want to carry someone else as well?  Why shouldn’t she carry her weight?  I wouldn’t mind caring for a family by myself as the father, by why would I want to be responsible for the other adult in this family also?  No, I wanted a true 50/50 partner who would share equally in all aspects of family life.  If that meant I lost my supposed superior position in the family, so much the better.  It was a fair trade.

While my support of the women’s movement was self-serving, it also gave me credibility with most women who, at the time, were jumping on the equality bandwagon right and left.  Here was a man willing to talk openly and intimately about his experience of being in relationship with a woman on the basis of equality.  Who could resist?  I was mobbed at the conclusion of our first conference in Dayton, Ohio by women AND by men who saw a man “come out” on stage right in front of them.  The men felt affirmed and the women felt emotionally engaged, a very rare combination.  I was in a strange but alluring place.

HOW MY PERSONAL LIFE INFLUENCED WRITING “LOVEWORKS”:
Why did I think women would not like what I had to say?  Well, my answer is connected to my personal life with an intimate other.  This is the second strong force impacting my decision to write LOVEWORKS.  In 1980, I got divorced.  Not only was I divorced, but also was well into struggling with my subsequent relationship.  I was finding my “new” relationship not going very well.  I was learning to be more intimate with myself as a way to be more intimate with her.  I was taking better care of myself in this relationship than the first.  Still, we were in great difficulties.  Conflict continued to threaten our stability and left us dissatisfied.  My needs and her needs were no better met and it seemed like the more we knew of each other, the less we liked each other. 

I was very puzzled by what was going on in my personal life.  Here I was, a much healthier person than in my previous relationship and yet things seemed to be worse.  How could this be?  It was also clear to me that my partner, too, was more emotionally healthy and yet we had all this conflict.  She and I needed to make sense of what was happening to us. 

By the tenth year of our relationship, we had finally found our way back from the brink of disaster.  We found the road back to be long, very irregular, fraught with setbacks, emotional spinouts, and personal crises.  Looking back on the way we had come, I realized we had discovered a process of tremendous value.  I wanted to try it out on the world to see if we were alone or in very good company.  LOVEWORKS, my book, became one vehicle for doing so. 

A third factor motivating this writing had been bearing down on me for a number of years - I needed to understand the essence of marriage.  Most everyone I knew was amused by the fact that I was not married, even though I had been with my new partner for many years and had two children together.  Every time this would come up people, mostly women, would look askance and wonder about my partner, not me.  Somehow they could accept I did not want to be married, but what about that woman in my life?  It was impossible for them to comprehend how a woman could live with me, have my children, and not insist on being married!  Was she REALLY willing to be with me without a “commitment?”   What they did not understand was that we knew we were far more committed to each other without the institution of marriage than we would have been with it.  

MY FIRST MARRIAGE:
Like so many other young people I did not first marry with the expectation of being divorced.   (People who think young people marry with this expectation are misinformed, but perhaps I should only speak for myself, therefore I shall.)  I was married when I was 21 years old and had just graduated from college, like so many others of my peer group.  It was the right time to be married; but the truth be known, I did not want to marry when I did.  I loved the person I was with and because SHE wanted to be married, I consented.  I did not have strong feelings one way or another and since this seemed so important to her and it did not seem important to me, I figured why hold out?  Therefore I married.  Of course my partner did not fully comprehend my status for two reasons.  One, it was difficult for me to identify then what I can now see so clearly; and secondly, she did not want to make much of my reticence because of the ramifications for her.  She had a different agenda than I.  She wanted a family.  I just wanted a partnership.  If I was willing to go ahead, she was all too willing to take up the offer.  

DIVORCE, CONFUSION, AND MY SECOND PARTNER:
Leaving out the details, we parted ways upon my initiation.  This experience had a big impact on me.  It was not the events themselves but what they represented that hooked my attention.  As a professional Marriage and Family Therapist, I concluded in my 30’s that I had no idea what marriage really was.  By the time I was with my second partner I felt I could not publicly adjoin myself to something (“marriage”), that I knew nothing about.  I only knew I could not identify myself with what others seem to claim as their “marriage.”  The word “marriage” to me was polluted.  Yet I knew we were sincerely committed to each other and I would cringe when others would comment that I was “afraid to make a commitment.” I knew all too well we probably were more committed to each other than those who were judging us.  I wisely kept this to myself.  We knew our commitment to each other and our children knew it.  Our commitment was all that mattered to me.  However, I wrestled philosophically about “marriage.”  

WHY I DIDN’T MARRY "OFFICIALLY" THE SECOND TIME AROUND:
Please keep in mind we were also fighting for our lives.  After our first child was born we were in terrible turmoil for at least 5 years.  Nevertheless, we were in it together and trying to work something out.  We were committed to making a healthy relationship for our children and ourselves independent of marital state.  Actually, our marital state was never a consideration for us.  Since I saw and experienced our commitment to each other, but also knew neither of us wanted or even cared about “getting married,” I kept asking myself, “what makes up this thing called marriage that everyone else seems to want us to take on as if we do not have this already?”  In some sense, I considered myself more “married” than some of the folks around us, yet we had no formalization of this phenomenon nor cared to make any.

FORM AND PROCESS: 
As a child of the 60’s in graduate school an intimate friend and I were identifying what we eventually called the tension between “form and process.”  When we looked into the culture around us we saw a whole lot of “form” and an oblivious inattention to “process.”  We saw this in the university, the media, and literally in every community institution.  Institutions had buildings, people who worked in them, rules, paperwork, customs, ethics, norms, etc.  It was easy to identify the “form” or container of the institution.      However, the processes of the institutions were far less obvious.  Moreover, no one seemed to care about what was going on within those institutions.  Here I was in graduate school to earn a degree and most people genuinely seemed to care that I walk away with a degree.  But few ever expressed any concern about my becoming educated.  The assumption was if I got the degree (form); I was becoming educated (process).  I knew first hand that was a rather large and misguided assumption.  It was easy for me to get a degree.  Getting educated was quite different. 

FORM AND PROCESS EXAMPLES:
The biggest and most glaring example between form and process was the Vietnam War.  We were being asked to support a war on the basis of being “good and loyal Americans.”  However, many of us at the time could not see a legitimate reason to kill people. Plus, our government could not convince some of us as to why we should be in Vietnam.  I am proud of all the efforts that the men and women of the armed forces did to protect democracy.  I respect the many people who gave their lives for this great nation in which we live.  The “form” of being a good American was pressed upon us and seemed more important to mainstream America at the time than the “process” of democracy.  This blew some people’s minds!

 In like manner, I saw the popular conception of marriage was all “form,” and no “process.”  Everyone agreed to say, “Love, Honor and Cherish,” but no one seemed to know what those words actually meant in behavioral terms, and neither did I.  I needed to know the “process” of those constructs before I was willing to state to the world, “I am married.”  I also needed to know what “Love, Honor and Cherish” meant if I was going to have integrity and continue to work as a Marriage and Family Therapist.  My struggles with my new partner paid off and I learned the meaning of those vows.  LOVEWORKS is the articulation of that answer.

WHY WE EVENTUALLY GOT "OFFICIALLY" MARRIED:
Eventually my mate and I did take on the form of “marriage,” but when others realized why we did “get married” they were even more horrified than when we were “just” living together.  We married so she could be on my health insurance plan, could get my Social Security benefits should I die, and make us eligible for tax breaks.  Those were the only reasons for us to “marry.”  Even now neither of us knows our wedding date, except to remember it was sometime in late December before the end of the fiscal year.  What year did we get married?  I do not know.  

WHY I DON’T LIKE THE WORD “MARRIAGE”:
The fact that others could not see the process of our commitment simply because we did not take on the form confirmed my suspicions about the current state of marriage.  The emphasis is on form rather than process.  It took me many years to see this as the problem even though the birth of the notion had taken place many years earlier for me during graduate school.  Even now, I still hate to use the word “marriage” because it does not convey what I mean by it.  The world hears “form.”  I mean “process.”     

I hasten to add at this point, I do not think “form” is unimportant.  I think it is very important.  The problem, however, with the current institutional form of marriage is that it is simply not big enough to contain the ferment (process) of what is going on between the partners who make up contemporary relationships.  It is not inclusive or malleable enough to contain the levels of intimacy (processes) required by modern couples for them to feel their relationship is rewarding, fulfilling and “working.”   (For a better understanding of this notion see the LOVEWORKS “Synopsis.”)
 

SUMMARY:
Claiming the legitimacy and truth of my own personal life, getting divorced, and struggling to work out a new relationship as well as developing a personal and professional definition of marriage all congealed my current notions of intimate relationships which begged expression in LOVEWORKS.

A final motivation for writing LOVEWORKS came from the maturational phenomenon of wanting to leave something behind to better our world.  We are living in a time when intimate relationships appear to be drastically changing.  By writing LOVEWORKS, I am sharing with the world what I see as honestly as I can. By doing so I hope to encourage others to do the same.  I believe by being honest with ourselves, resolving inconsistencies within, and dealing respectfully with others while resolving interpersonal differences will promote not only better intimate relationships, but also a better world.  To this end I live my own life and leave LOVEWORKS for you and future generations to learn from. 
Learn from my life experiences - Buy LOVEWORKS.          

BOOK ORDERING INFORMATION:
email me , call 315-492-1082, or mail us at the address below - 
Syracuse Mediation Network
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