My Multimedia Marriage
[These personal reflections first appeared in The (Boston) Pilot newspaper.]
Introduction
My marriage consists of a million memories. In many ways they almost constitute a multi-media experience. Like multiple slides simultaneously hitting my consciousness, I see the many things we’ve shared…
A camera has recorded much of it. My husband’s passion for photography preceded our marriage vows, but his talent threads its way throughout our life together, leaving behind a permanent pictorial record.
These photos form a backdrop. They serve as “sets” (much as TV props do), for we, ourselves, do not appear in most of the pictures. They reflect our interests, though, and they document a personal relationship still growing in openness and freedom.
The soundtrack is pure Rogers and Hammerstein, for our first date took place in a Boston theater where “Oklahoma” was being premiered. Now, of course, it’s on TV, but then the movie offered a young couple a dazzling account of how a new life could be built by people with courage to forge across frontiers. As we lost ourselves in the movie’s power, we couldn’t imagine the frontiers that lay ahead for us – as individuals, as partners, and as people.
So many media-laden words were unknown to us then. However, in the next few years together we would marvel at TV broadcasts from the moon. We would agonize through media funerals when watching two Kennedy and Martin Luther King laid to rest. We would angrily watch Watergate hearings. And we would react to the “ding-a-ling” actions of Archie Bunker’s wife and, in contrast, the aggressive antics of Maude.
Before our marriage was to take place my husband and his camera visited Paris –recording visuals we still have not experienced together. But the slides still hold out a promise… After this separation, while he served in the Army, our shared documentary began.
How Media Mold My Marriage
Almost as if we are viewing slides, I can see the screen reflect … the charm of Nantucket Island, our honeymoon site … my husband’s pictorial essay of Bishop Sheen, done in the TV studios where I work … the title slide he made for my weekly TV show “The Woman’s Viewpoint” … the many schools we’ve visited and photographed, from simple little red schoolhouses to tradition-laden Oxford University … publicity photos taken for my book … audio-visuals used when my husband teaches photography basics … religious values we share, reflected in the photo of the little Michigan church I went to as a child … or the church where my husband now teaches religious education … the silhouette of a Civil War soldier’s statue, symbolic of my husband’s love of history…
We didn’t buy a television set until almost a year after we were married; but that’s how I knew the honeymoon was over. Media had moved into our marriage. Ever since, much of our communication as a couple has been molded by the communication media.
The term mass media includes any means through which someone sends out a message to a lot of people. The most obvious example is the TV set.
We have never established the habit of watching Johnny Carson together, but we have shared many other shows. Some of the TV programs have prompted us to communicate with each other as we react to the show’s content. Like many other American couples, we have reexamined our own relationship as we witnessed Archie Bunker’s treatment of his wife, Edith. (We’ve reexamined many other values in response to Archie’s stand on various issues).
We’ve shared serious documentaries and educational TV shows. We’ve experienced the ecstasy of Kenneth Clark’s televised look at civilization and we’ve known the agony of the Viet Nam war. We’ve laughed at Lucy and we’ve been saddened by the suffering of human beings caught up in the civil rights struggle.
Our TV viewing habits reflect our commitment to let each other grow freely. My husband’s love of history is reflected in his TV choices. I honestly don’t resent it when he watches football games – probably because he cheerfully endures my passion for programs on drama, education and theology.
In addition to a couple’s personal viewing habits, television has a further impact upon relationships. My work usually has kept me away from afternoon soap operas, but having studied them, I have reflected upon their impact on millions of American women. These daily dramas demonstrate a communication link – tying lives together. They show human beings coping with joy and sadness. Through them, individuals vicariously experience life’s secrets.
In addition to soap opera relationships, situation comedies have offered a variety of marriage models throughout TV’s history. Lucy and Desi were among the first; Jackie Gleason and his TV wife, Alice, provided another model. Maude has been a recent controversial model. However, family relationships have an interesting model currently in the Waltons. (We have even had a real-life documentary on the Loud family – a televised record of a relationship deteriorating before our eyes.
Other media tools offer communication links also. This was probably best demonstrated to me several years ago when my brother was stationed in Viet Nam. My husband’s electronic know-how made it possible for us to record and uniquely edit a special audio tape for my brother’s birthday.
We had a vacation trip planned to Michigan, Iowa, Indiana, and Kansas, where other brothers and a sister lived with their families. We packed recording gear into our car and at each house we recorded a portion of my family talking to my brother in Viet Nam, and they sang “Happy Birthday” to him.
Later, blending all the birthday recordings, a half-hour audio cassette went to Southeast Asia. On this edited cassette almost twenty people sang “Happy Birthday” in unison, although they had been recorded in four different states. In addition, we had included telephoned-in recordings from California and Florida. My brother said there wasn’t a dry eye in the mess hall in Viet Nam when the cassette was shared with everybody over the loudspeaker.
Media offer a bridge upon which relationships can build. But, of course, some families today communicate less because they watch TV more. Symbolic of this frustrated communication, probably, is the resentment felt by wives over the competition they get from TV sports.
There is a tragic irony, certainly, when communication tools prevent communication. This problem deserves special attention.
Love in the Machine Age
Coming into focus now is an interesting sequence of visuals… the nude majesty of Michelangelo’s “David”, photographed by my husband. (As a work of art this colossus seems to make one ashamed to view a naked machine) … a photo of Eugene O’Neill’s Boston gravestone – reminding us of this dramatist’s tormented search for love’s definition … the proud power of Boston’s Prudential Tower building, with the Catholic TV Center’s transmitter crowning it … New England foliage slides, contrasted with the scientific daring of scenes from NASA’s Cape Kennedy site in Florida …
The high priest of media analysis is, of course, Marshall McLuhan. Almost everybody’s heard of him – even if we are still trying to give meaning to his message.
An easier-to-digest book has recently offered a review of the impact of technology on human lives. Author of the best seller The Secular City, Harvey Cox has written a new book entitled The Seduction of the Spirit: The Use and Misuse of People’s Religion (Simon and Schuster).
Cox defines his title and then applies it to media. “The seduction of the spirit, in short, is the calculated twisting of people’s natural and healthy religious instincts for purposes of control and domination. It is the cruelest abuse of religion because it slyly enlists people in their own manipulation … We have used (technology) to control and master nature, not to meditate on it or to enjoy it. ‘Machine’ has meant manipulation”.
One thinks, for example, of Jacqueline Susann’s novel The Love Machine. The love machine is Robin Stone, a TV-network titan, a hero-heel who is “an unappealing cold fish”. Cox warns: “(Machines) lure us or coerce us into becoming like them”.
The oil crisis, too, is a barometer of man’s current dependence on technology. And the latest scare headline is brought – by the media – right into our homes daily.
Cox notes both problem and promise in media and machines. “Media may broaden our purview and supply us with more data. But under present conditions of control and technology, if they do alter our consciousness, it is to make us feel more helpless and overwhelmed. Still, there is enormous promise in television, film and other new media”.
Today’s family is obviously caught between the promise and problem of machinery. We use our cars, our food blenders, our washing machines, and we don’t want to give them up. But more than one wife can be heard complaining that at times she becomes the servant of her household gadgets.
Harvey Cox significantly reflects upon how machines separate us from people and human bonds. “We design technologies to insulate us from human contact (cars taking the place of trains, self-service devices). Insulated, we then begin to miss human relations”.
He justly condemns lack of communication as a barrier to personal relationships. “The present technology of the mass media prevents dialogue and emphasizes one-way communication … People are encouraged by the present technology of media to be ‘listeners’ and ‘watchers’, consumers, not creators. Close neighbors can be reached by CBS more easily than they can reach each other. Present mass media not only fail to congeal community, they even increase people’s isolation from one another at local levels”.
Cox concludes: “What we need … are simple easy-to-use means whereby small communities, minority groups, neighborhood unions, and other groups can communicate effectively with one another”.
Ironically, this type of communication is possible when we use the appropriate machinery – portable media equipment. (Remember, one of the best tools for communication is a mechanical one – the telephone). Portable videotape machines will, in the next decade probably, become as common as audio cassette recorders are now. Permitting “grass-roots” television, this equipment will let teenagers and senior citizens “do their thing” on TV.
When I think of the difficulties of merging machines and mankind, I am saved from hopelessness by humor. In this connection I remember a somewhat disrespectful “trouble slide” designed by a TV producer I worked with. Obviously, it was never used on the air, but the slide showed the well-known Dürer drawing of Erasmus at work in his sixteenth century study. Instead of the usual message, “We are experiencing technical difficulties; please stand by,” this slide flippantly says: “Keep the faith, baby; we’ll fix it!”
Becoming Partners
These slides renew lived experiences for us. We see, once again, the discoveries shared on our tenth-anniversary trip to Europe … the majesty of Roman ruins (which appealed to my husband), and the glory of her churches (which thrilled me) … a restful Florence interlude where we shared the love story of the Brownings … The fun of photographing police giving traffic tickets in several different countries … romantic Heidelberg, which my husband re-experienced, now with someone with whom he could share its magic … a Schubert Mass in Vienna, shared with Viennese friends…
Do you feel, sometimes, drowned in marriage data?
Preferring people to statistics, my reading in the relationship area tends to follow those who reflectively meditate upon the potential of people forming bonds. The factual data are a foundation, I suppose; I just feel more comfortable away from the whizzing calculators which document the facts concerning modern marriages. I suppose this is another example of trying to look beyond the machine to the humanity the technology ticks off.
I have especially enjoyed the people experiences related in a recent book by the eminent psychotherapist, Carl Rogers. Its simple title tells it all: Becoming Partners (Dell). I don’t always agree with Rogers, and he’d be the first one, I’m sure, to protect my right to disagree with him.
I valued his reflections concerning permanence and enrichment in relationships. Based on seventy years of personal experience, and based, too, on the relationship reflections shared with him by many couples, Rogers cites four elements that are basic to open and growing relationships.
The first is commitment. Such a pledge to another person “views a partnership as a continuing process”.
Significantly, the second factor is communication. (An educator recently said to me: “Virtually every educational problem is rooted in a communication problem”). Noting that there are many levels of communication, Rogers defines this aspect specifically. “I will risk myself by endeavoring to communicate any persisting feeling, positive or negative, to my partner – to the full depth that I understand it in myself – as a living, present part of me. Then I will risk further by trying to understand, with all the empathy I can bring to bear, his or her response, whether it is accusatory and critical or sharing and self-revealing”.
Rogers, like woman’s lib proponents, urges the dissolution of roles as a third factor. “To live by role expectations seems consistently in opposition to a marriage which is going somewhere, which is in process”.
Finally, and ironically, you become partners, says Rogers, by becoming a separate self. Urging growth for each, he says “… it is so rewarding to be in process of becoming one’s real self, (helping) your partner in the same direction … It is fun to grow together, two unique and intertwined lives.”
My apprehension about machinery began years ago when I read the novel Brave New World. There I discovered the horror of a conditioned, consumer Utopia. Relationships had been replaced by thought control and the word “mother” was considered obscene.
The marriage relationship potential is enormous. The challenge in today’s media-molded world is to exhaust the rich potential in a humane and loving way.