Every 16 seconds, a marriage takes place in the United States — more than 2 million each year. Yet every 42 seconds, a divorce happens — nearly 750,000 annually. In the time it takes a couple to recite their wedding vows, nearly three marriages end. During a typical romantic comedy, more than 170 couples will divorce. Why do so many marriages fail? And could most of them have been saved?
Perpall is a former divorce attorney and former nurse — and she says something surprising: during her decades practicing family law, over 90% of the divorces she handled were preventable. Most couples weren’t ending their marriages because of betrayal, abuse, or a single catastrophic event. Instead, their relationships were slowly deteriorating from what she calls “emotional malnutrition.”
In her new book,
The Malnourished Marriage, Perpall combines her legal and medical backgrounds to explain how marriages fail — and how they can be saved. She compares relationships to the human body, arguing that just as physical health depends on essential nutrients, so does marital health.
She identifies five essential emotional nutrients every marriage needs to survive:
• Communication (water)
• Sexual connection (protein)
• Humor (carbohydrates)
• Compromise (healthy fats)
• Trust (multivitamins)
When one or more of these emotional nutrients is missing, she says, the relationship weakens — often slowly and quietly — until couples believe divorce is the only option.
Ironically, Perpall says she often tried to talk clients out of divorce, which ultimately inspired her to write the book and create what she calls a “marriage health checkup” to help couples identify problems before it’s too late.
I had a chance to interview her to learn more.
Tell us about your book.The Malnourished Marriage: 5 Emotional Nutrients For A Healthy Relationship uses the communicative power of food as the universal language for what a corrosive effect on the relationship avoids intense bickering and cold standoffs that lead to contempt, the biggest predictor of divorce. A relationship needs to be healthy. Anyone who's been married or in an intimate relationship knows that you can’t take words back once they’ve been said or screamed. They also know that harsh words have a way of permeating all aspects of the relationship. Sex? You want me to have sex with you after what you just said to me? This book explains that a relationship is a separate entity that needs certain emotional nutrients to be healthy, just as the human body requires certain physical nutrients. By using the metaphor of food to describe to a spouse or partner what you feel is missing in the relationship can reduce anxiety about thee topic. On the other hand, using harsh words can have such a corrosive effect on your partner that they begin to question why they’re in the relationship.
What led you to write the book?
After watching clients proceed with divorce over verbal misunderstandings that caused them to act out by treating the other with disrespect, disdain, mockery, name-calling, aggressive humor, and sarcasm, I knew there had to be a better way for a couple to communicate what is bothering them.
What was the hardest challenge in writing it?
Doing all the research to make sure that my theory that a relationship becomes how you think about it was backed up by neuroscience – and it is. Using your brain to change a relationship is not a quick fix, but it is a permanent one.
How do you feel your background as a nurse and a family law attorney made you uniquely qualified to tackle this subject?
As a nurse, I saw love die in hospital rooms, and as a divorce lawyer, I saw it die in courtrooms. As a nurse, I learned about the physical nutrients needed to maintain the body’s health. As a family law attorney, I learned the emotional nutrients that it takes to maintain a healthy relationship.
Why might so many people not realize that many divorces are preventable?
Because of the intense social focus on romantic love, when the early feelings of romance fade, partners feel as if they have fallen out of love. I believe this is due to the unrealistic romantic expectations of a long-term commitment to the same person fostered by the “Happily Ever After” myth. Many couples are not taught how to navigate their disagreements, modeling how their parents resolved or did not resolve theirs. Unfortunately, with the rise of no-fault divorce, too many couples view their inability to resolve a conflict as a sign of incompatibility, rather than realizing that love is a long-term commitment that requires active ongoing effort, and their conflicts could be resolved by changing relationship patterns, by changing the way they think about the relationship. That is, as a separate entity. By treating the relationship as an independent, shared project, partners can reduce personal blame and focus on the health of their connection rather than just individual needs. Just as the body is one unit connected by different parts, the relationship is one unit connected by the parties in it. Each part of the body serves a different function, just as each need of the relationship serves a different function.
Why do you compare relationship skills to nutrients?
What I’ve seen in my practice as a family lawyer is that when I connected the advice I was giving to a client to something they already knew, it gave the advice an instant attention-grabbing ability and made it easier for the client to remember the advice when they were in a situation where it could be applied.
For example, a client came in for a divorce consult, explaining that he “couldn’t take it anymore.”
“The way my wife talks to me. She knows there are words that she uses that trigger a reflexive response of anger on my part, but she doesn’t seem to get it.”
Nodding my head, I responded, “I get it. The thing is, words are a lot like water; they can crash, or they can flow. A relationship needs communication just like the body needs water. A human can only live three days without water, and while a relationship can last more than three days without the parties communicating with each other, the relationship becomes dehydrated.”
His face softened as his lips turned up slightly at the corners. “Yeah, when you put it that way, I’m parched.”
“Well, you came in here looking for information about getting divorced. Would you like some suggestions about how to avoid getting one?”
“I’ve been studying the reasons couples give for getting divorced. I’ve learned that a marriage breaks down when there’s not enough communication, sex, humor, compromise, or trust. These are the emotional nutrients the relationship needs to be healthy. Just like the body will break down when it doesn’t get enough water, protein, carbohydrates, healthy fats, and the right vitamins.”
“So you compare the emotional nutrients a relationship needs to the nutrients a body requires.”
“But how does that work?”
“In a relationship, I compare water to communication, protein to sex, carbohydrates to laughter and play, healthy fats to compromise, and trust to a multivitamin. “Indeed, of using words like ‘We need to talk,' which sounds like a demand, you say something like ‘I feel as if our relationship is dehydrated.’ Instead of saying something like, ‘We never have sex anymore.’ Which sounds like a complaint, explain that semen is pure protein, and say something like, What do you think about having to have some deep protein therapy. It’s better than taking collagen for your skin.”
“Can I read more about this?” he asked.
“Well, it just so happens that I have a draft of the book I’m writing about it, so if you are interested, I’ll give you a copy if you’ll agree to give me your feedback. What’s good and what needs work.”
“If you’d like to proceed with the divorce, my secretary will make another appointment for you.”
He waited a long moment, rubbed his chin, and said, “I’d like to read this first and think about things.”
“ Good plan, since I’ve seen a lot of clients start and then stop a divorce to see if they can get back together. But once you start the process of divorce without addressing what caused the divorce, like communication, sex, incompatibility, lack of trust, no matter how much you may want to get back together, you will be back together exactly where you were before the divorce. I personally haven’t seen it work very well.”
In summary, using emotional nutrients as a metaphor for a relationship's emotional needs avoids the word triggers that often lead to misunderstandings.
Which of all the nutrients is the most important and why?
Communication is by far the most important emotional nutrient in a relationship for the same reason water is the most important physical nutrient for the body. Without water, the body will die, and without communication, the relationship will become malnourished and die.
Why is it important for couples to identify problems early?
Identifying problems early in a relationship is crucial because it allows the couple to address issues before they become entrenched habits. Many relationship researchers agree that our relationships are governed by the underlying experiences we had in childhood. The theory is that, based on the experiences we may or may not have had as a child, these experiences will play out in the emotional patterns that grow out of our “core childhood wounds”. The argument is that we often let too many bothersome things go in the initial stages of a relationship because we are unaware of the significance of these core wounds in how we will relate to our partner. The metaphor used to explain this relationship dynamic is that the traits we bring to the relationship are like concrete– they can be shaped when the concrete is still fresh but quickly becomes rigid and almost impossible to change once it sets.
