lit,
ashington — It's a tall order, sav-
ing the marriages of America.
And it isn't as if there is a lack
of competition in the field; womens'
magazines are chock full of helpful articles
on calming turbulent matrimonial waters,
and bookstore shelves groan under the
weight of books promising whole new
strategies for conjugal bliss.
Bonnie Maslin doesn't shrink from the
immensity of the task. She is one of a new
breed of public figure: the therapist-as-
celebrity. Maslin and her colleagues in this
select circle — Dr. Ruth Westheimer and
Dr. Susan Forward are among the best
known — bring their soothing strategies to
the masses, not just a limited list of clients.
They are glib, funny, and thoroughly at-
tuned to the demands of the electronic
media. They write like demons; their books
Overcoming
Marital
Gridlock
The way out is to attack
the patterns, not the
symptoms, say Bonnie
Maslin and Dr. Yehuda Nir,
the authors of Not Quite
Paradise: Making
Marriage Work.
JAMES DAVID BESSER
Special to The Jewish News
42
FRIDAY, JULY 3, 1987
seem to stake out a permanent home at the
top of the various bestseller lists.
Unlike some, Maslin seems very aware
of the limits of her role. She doesn't at-
tempt to mass-produce the intimacy of a
therapist's inner sanctum, or pretend to
offer specific remedies for the infinite
permutations and combinations of marital
misery that have bloated America's divorce
rate.
Instead, she views herself as a conscious-
ness raiser, a catalyst for change. "In a
sense, what I'm doing in my books and
public appearances is hitting people over
the head with a board," she says. "I'm try-
ing to get their attention, and make them
think about these problems."
Her current attention-getter, coauthored
with her husband, Dr. Yehuda Nir, a
psychiatrist, is Not Quite Paradise: Mak-
ing Marriage Work, published by Double-
day under the Dolphin imprint.
Like Maslin herself, Not Quite Paradise
- THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
is outspoken and direct. It is written in the
snappy style favored by womens' maga-
zines, with short, punchy sentences and
lots of questions followed immediately by
the answers. What it lacks in elegant prose
it makes up for in ease of reading and
something most writers resist — getting
right to the point.
Maslin is not shy about explaining how
her book differs from the competition in
the burgeoning marital self-help market.
"It's grounded in a very solid, unchanging,
unfaddish view of the kinds of problems
that people struggle with," she says. "It's
different because it's not the latest
cookbook of recipes on how to make a mar-
riage better. Frankly, that kind of approach
just doesn't work."
In a general sort of way, the book reflects
the approach that both Maslin and Nir use
in their individual practices. "In some
ways, our approach is very Jewish," she
says. "We ask a lot of questions — and we
tend to answer questions with still more
questions."
What they do is nudge people — readers
and clients alike — to ask the right ques-
tions, and then to use the answers as a
starting point for uncovering the broad
patterns of behavior that produce the
symptoms of discord. .
Nowhere in the book do they offer quick
fixes or shortcuts. "If you go into a
therapist's office and get the feeling that
this person knows how to live life better
than you do, and that he or she will be
dispensing this insight, my advice is to get
out. Run. And I'd say the same thing
about books that make promises like that."
A central theme in Not Quite Paradise
is Maslin and Nir's concept of marital
"gridlock." Like drivers caught in impene-
trable traffic, gridlocked marriage partners
often can't see the source of the bottleneck,
or any way out of the mess. What they do
see with agonizing clarity is lack of move-
ment. Quickly, anger and frustration build
to the breaking point.
"When a marriage is gridlocked," Maslin
says, "there is no growth, no change. It
seems like you're playing the same tapes
over and over again. The sources of frustra-
tion may change from day to day — one
day it's the dirty socks on the floor, the
next it's 'why don't you help me around the
house' — but the basic patterns are a con-
stant. Somehow, you have to get out of this
self-destructive cycle."
And the way out, they say repeatedly in
the book, is to attack the patterns
themselves, not the symptoms.
Most truly gridlocked marriages, Maslin