Chapter 4: Parallel Marriage and Grandeur Peak

(This chapter contains good, solid marital advice for emotionally healthy individuals. It is not good advice where physical, verbal, emotional, or sexual abuse is involved. If the abuser is not willing to get help, the advice that follows isn't enough.)

            Our back living room window looks at Grandeur Peak, which is east of Salt Lake City, where we have lived for more than forty years. From time to time family members have lamented that Grandeur Peak was not more like Mount Olympus, which is about a mile to the south and grander than Grandeur Peak in every way. Mount Olympus is about eight hundred feet higher, has much more vegetation with thousands of stately pines, and has a noble-looking summit. In comparison, Grandeur Peak is barren, rounded, and plain. However, an imperceptible change has incrementally been occurring, and last fall it became a topic of conversation. For the first time, our family and visitors looked out the window in awe. The formerly desolate landscape of Grandeur had every so slowly been filling in with layers of foliage, and last fall, dressed in autumn colors, it was truly grand.
            These subtle changes in Grandeur Peak contrast sharply with the rapid changes that happen in Rachel Joyce's fictional story: The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry.
            Harold Fry, a retiree, and his wife, Maureen have lived in a small English village for many years. It is not a happy home, especially since the suicide of their only son. “Marriage” would not be an accurate label for their living arrangement. They co-exist under the same roof but live separate lives. Maureen finds most everything Harold does an irritant, including the way he butters toast. Harold lives colorlessly as one predictable day blends routinely into the next, that is, until a letter arrives for Harold.
            Harold doesn’t recognize the shaky handwriting or the return address, but upon opening it he sees it is from a former co-worker of twenty year ago, Queenie Hennessy. The short letter thanks Harold for being a good co-worker, asks to be remembered to Maureen, and tells Harold good-bye for she is dying of cancer. As memories come, Harold feels guilt as he recalls an incident wherein he let Queenie take the blame for something he did at work. But being practiced at detached emotion, he composes a brief response and walks to the mailbox to mail the letter.
            As he walks, he has an experience that causes him to feel an overwhelming need to compensate Queenie and decides to walk the six hundred and twenty-seven miles from his home in Kingsbridge to the hospice facility at Berwick-upon-Tweed where Queenie lives. He believes, as long as he is walking, Queenie will live. As he walks he meets fellow human beings that help him on a journey of self-realization.
            When he has been walking about six-weeks, Maureen realizes she truly misses Harold. Later she decides to drive to Berwick-upon-Tweed to pick him up and has her own excursion in reconciling her past. In these separate journeys of discovery and healing, painful memories are challenged and opened up to expose them to the fresh air of understanding. Happy memories surface as balm to heal, allowing both Maureen and Harold to resolve loss and regret. Sweetly, their parallel lives merge into a mutually satisfying love. Of course, it's fiction, and the ending is a little abrupt and too good to be realistic.
            Yet, there is truth that deserves consideration: Emotionally healthy individuals who live in parallel marriages can become closer. And in my association, most couples live, to one degree or another, parallel lives, which probably explains why the book has been on the bestseller list for years. Unfortunate couples like Harold and Maureen go on day after day, year after year, desperately trying to satisfy themselves as singles because they don’t know how to find emotional fulfillment in marriage. They may live emotionally separate throughout their entire marriage. Couples like this can delude themselves into thinking this is the best marriage they can have. The story encourages couples who live parallel lives to look for commonalities that can produce at least some unity.
            It is a most fortunate couple that enjoys fulfillment and richness in mutually satisfying ways. Reality tells us that no marriage is perfect but as the years advance, some get pretty close. Gordon and Marjorie Hinckley gave examples of their way of interacting with mutual respect, concern for each other's wellbeing, never dominating, and encouraging each other to develop their own talents. Sister Hinckley summed the freedom she felt to be herself: “From the very start he gave me wings to fly” (lds.org/.../chapter-10-nurturing-the-eternal-partnership-of-marriage?).
            Most couples are somewhere in the middle—not experiencing all the happiness they could, but neither are they annoyed and resentful at each other all of the time. And living parallel lives is so much better than divorce because it leaves the door open for improvement.
            Stephen Covey wrote about how to upgrade marriages that exist in parallel with the concept of emotional bank accounts. Regular bank accounts are all about money. Withdrawals can only be made if enough money has been deposited previously in the account. Emotional bank accounts are the equivalent but not with money.
            The currency of the emotional bank account is the trust that accompanies a healthy relationship. The emotional bank account requires regular deposits of personal integrity, expressions of confidence, understanding the other’s point of view, saying I’m sorry, being sorry, speaking kindly, being kind, not overreacting, being patient, being a friend, showing actions that are a by-product of a loving heart, watching for the good, sincerely complimenting, turning toward rather than turning away, and creating a culture of appreciation.
            Withdrawals always depend on the amount deposited. Emotional bank accounts can be overdrawn just like regular money accounts.
            Emotional withdrawals come in moments of discourtesy, betraying trust, disrespecting, overreacting, being impatience, criticizing, being secretive, attacking, talking down, name-calling, stonewalling, lacking ability to look at life through the spouse’s eyes, tuning out, watching for mistakes, turning away rather than turning toward.
            There are two truths about marriage because life is life: Regrettable interactions inevitably come and every marriage experiences conflict. When hard times come, the detached couple can become still more detached, or the attached couple can become more attached.
            Harold and Maureen allowed their son’s suicide to tear them apart emotionally, but through the intervention that came in the letter from Queenie, we could call it the Queenie Factor, the wedge that could have caused them to draw further into their separateness, became the bond, the magnet, that drew them closer.
            In real life, the Queenie Factor can be any illness, accident, financial reverse, and death, etcetera, that jars a parallel-living couple into the reality that they need and love each other. The Queenie Factor can also be something exterior to the couple such as an unexpected promotion or a good thing happening to one of their children. It can happen internally within the marriage, sweetly and simply, when one of the spouses chooses to make a deposit in the other’s emotional bank account with a kind look, compliment, a helping hand.
            The Queenie Factor can be any type of loss or gain that turns the couple to each other. The Queenie Factor comes to a couple as they pull the load together. You may recall Elder Bednar’s conference talk about the pickup truck that was stuck in snow. It was the heavy load that gave it traction. If that’s true, you may be wondering, why didn’t Harold and Maureen pull the heavy load of their son’s suicide together?
            The answer is that as is most often the situation, it wasn’t the suicide of Harold and Maureen’s son that caused them to live in parallel. Those established patterns were already in place. They didn’t have crucial conversation skills to share confidences and verbally work through difficult situations on any more than a perfunctory level.
            You don’t have to walk the length of England to repair a parallel marriage. Most marriages can yield more love and mutual satisfaction without a Queenie Factor intervention. In fact, the better way just might be the Grandeur Peak way—nothing dramatic just simply getting a little better and a little better and a little better with the passing years.
            Like Grandeur Peak, the tiny, incremental, almost unnoticed improvements become more obvious with the passage of time. The couple celebrating anniversaries of ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, perhaps even sixty years will be able to look back in thankfulness as they have learned to meet each other’s needs and kept a healthy reserve in each other’s emotional bank account.


(c) Marilynne Todd Linford, 2018