Marriage 101

Shortly after we married, I found my husband savaging my window treatments. "What have you done to the swag?" I asked, eyeing a mess on the living-room floor that would never, ever again hang in crisp folds across a decorative rod. "I figured it was time to let the drapes do some work," he said. What drapes? Even the cat knew we had nothing hidden up there. Just the, uh, former swag.

I cried. How could I have married a man who would make a drape assumption? He was confused; he didn't realize he had married a woman who sobbed over swag (which he always thought was something burglars made off with).

I wish I knew then what I know now. Instead of assuming that the wedding was a terrible mistake and that we would have to return all those silver-plated cake plates, we could have addressed the real problem: our different expectations about marriage.

I know this now not because I am so wise in the ways of matrimony but because I've been talking to Norman Epstein, a researcher at the University of Maryland who surveyed more than 1,000 married couples to try to understand why they fight. "Something trivial will set off a couple," he explains. "But underlying the fight is a more basic issue: whether the spouses hold the same standards for the relationship."

Having studied 1,000 squabbling couples (if you can imagine that!), Epstein and colleague Donald Baucom of the University of North Carolina determined that the roots of most discord lie in three key areas: autonomy vs. togetherness; emotional investment; and the issue of control.

So when my husband and I argue over who has to do the dishes, we are really questioning each other's emotional investment in our marriage. Whose turn is it to take out the garbage? Could be that old control bugaboo again. Do we both need to visit the accountant at tax time? Autonomy, pure and simple.

Of course, some people who know us have suggested that in our case the underlying problem may be pure laziness. To them I retort: That wouldn't explain the swag situation, would it?

Epstein says that if the swag snafu had come up in the course of therapy, he would have asked, "What went through your mind when you saw what he did to the swag? If he was careless about that, does it seem to have some implications for how your relationship is or might be?"

Now I get it.

But when I asked my husband (by instant message) what was going through his mind when he tore down my swag, it just reopened old wounds.

"I was sick of that fabric being all bundled up there," he IMed back. "What an idiotic idea: 'Let's fling a little fabric on a pole! That'll warm the place up!'"

"I suppose you don't think there's such a thing as commitment, either," I messaged back.

"Not to fabric."

Don't worry; we'll muddle through. Luckily, a marriage is not doomed even if spouses have conflicting expectations. The important thing, Epstein says, is to recognize those disparities and negotiate compromises acceptable to both. In our case, that turned out to be: 1) he does the dishes; 2) I take out the garbage; and 3) Venetian blinds.

You can e-mail Michelle at mslat@well.com .