Guessing can harm marriages

Editor's note: This column discusses the challenges of marital communication about intimacy.

Why do marriages break up? Arguments about the children, about money, about religion, about sex; personality conflicts, incompatibility, bad conflict resolution; all these things are true, and all are incomplete.

When President Kimball told us that any Latter-day Saint couple of good will could make a happy marriage, he was right — but he didn't mean that it would happen automatically.

Quarrels over child-rearing or money or ambition or scheduling are rarely caused by those issues — though the issues are usually real enough, and need to be resolved.

Often the reason they can't be resolved is that spouses are so filled with resentment or anger or loneliness or despair that the subject under discussion is merely an excuse for lashing out to hurt the other person — or another reason to withdraw and move farther apart.

Some marriages fail because one of the partners is, in fact, utterly weak or completely evil: Desires and impulses cannot be controlled, with destructive results; or prideful people are determined to get their way no matter what the cost to someone else.

Such people are incapable of sustained partnership of any kind, and any marriage they're pretending to be a part of is doomed. But such people are rare. Chances are your spouse is not?one of them.

Most of the time, marriages fall apart despite the fact that both people are basically good and want to make it work.

Their marriage falters because, in their hearts, they have either the cold stone of disappointment and despair, or the boiling cauldron of resentment and anger, caused by a failure of intimacy; as long as such deep pain persists, nothing else goes well.

One of the meanings of marriage is "bringing together two unlike things to achieve a common purpose."

Men and women are unlike — deeply, profoundly different. And nowhere is this more apparent than in matters of physical intimacy. Male and female bodies have radically different hungers and are satisfied in very different ways — yet throughout the animal kingdom, their natural behaviors do result in the propagation of the species.

In a vast number of marriages, even ones that seem to be working rather well, times of intimacy leave one or both spouses feeling either the stone or the cauldron.