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The Marriage Safety Net
By Chuck Millan
Whether you are single for life or married, to be healthy and happy you absolutely must have a sufficient and stable network of people who share life with you. Borrowing a concept from Dr. E. M. Pattison, this network of people acts as a psychosocial kinship system. To better understand this idea, imagine that you were on the third floor of a burning building, and firefighters were standing below the window holding a safety net to break your fall. Hopefully there would be people on all four sides, and hopefully they would be strong enough (and sufficiently committed to their jobs) to catch you. In the same way, you need people in your everyday life who are there to catch you if you fall. Like the firefighters’ net, this safety net works best when it is supported on all four sides.
The main factors to consider in identifying those in your relational net are strength of the relationship and mutual commitment. These are people who would visit you if you were sick or would cross the street to say hello and not just smile and wave as you walked by. They are committed to being a part of your life far beyond that of a mere acquaintance. It’s also important that these people come from the four categories of relationship: immediate family, relatives, friends, and associates from work or church.
The people in your safety net don’t just know you, they also know each other. When the members of your support team know each other, they naturally do a lot of the work to stay connected. That effort is naturally multiplied throughout the network when one member tries to connect with another through ordinary things like passing along a piece of news or a prayer request, or inviting a friend to have lunch. For example, among a network of friends, an invitation to play singles tennis can easily turn into a doubles match. By reaching out to one friend, you end up reconnecting with three.
The At-Risk Relational Safety Net
A person with less support will struggle with his or her relational health. A person who is at risk will have a relational net with only eight to twelve people and not many of those people will know each other. This is a fragmented community, and there are many holes pass undetected or unmet. Because so few know each other, there is a much greater amount of stress and responsibility put on each individual to maintain their many relationships. Com- pare this with a healthy system, which allows a person to enjoy a much more restful existence because the community naturally stays connected.
The Dysfunctional Relational Network
An even more dangerous relational situation exists when a person has a relational net of only four to eight people. This situation is considered dysfunctional because 100 percent of the people know each other, but they are not necessarily in community. More likely, they are what some counselors call “enmeshed.” They function as caretakers for a person who, for whatever reason, is no longer able to function well on his or her own.
A dysfunctional relational safety net is a frazzled community due to the endless work required to deal with one person’s dysfunction. Many of our elderly suffering from strokes or Alzheimer’s disease experience this challenge, as do the families of the mentally ill and physically handicapped. People with social disorders, such as severe anxiety and obsessive-compulsive dis- order, also tend to fall into this category.
Even for an otherwise healthy individual, staying in this relational condition is a recipe for disaster and often requires getting help from professionals to deal with the issues that led them to become so isolated. Those who are caretakers may need to press the issue in order to get such a person moving in the right direction.
Adapted from
We're Just Friends and Other Dating Lies: Practical Wisdom for Healthy Relationships, by Chuck Millan.
Copyright © 2011 by Chuck Millan. Published by New Growth Press, used with permission.
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