LIVING WITH TYPE A’s: THE “GOOD MOTHER- BAD BOY” PATTERN
This is perhaps the classic Type A marriage, the form that predominated before so many women joined the Type A ranks in contemporary times. A Type A man selects a Good Mother (usually a Type B) whose gentle and patient manner carries with it the promise of the unconditional nurturance that was lacking in his upbringing. Such a woman has usually been brought up to be a gentle caretaker. She is driven by a Pleasing Others old-brain message. Her Type A spouse's need for nurturance therefore fits nicely with her own personality dynamics.
Such couples typically develop a fairly traditional division of roles. The man earns the money, or the bulk of it, by working at a stressful job that requires considerable absence from home. In his absence, the wife takes over the multiple tasks involved in running the household and family. She parents the children, cooks and cleans, and generally runs the couple's domestic life.
The wife also functions as the stress absorber in the system; she is the family member in charge of soothing everyone else when nerves get jangled. She is also in charge of praising others to bolster their self-esteem. These women are often treated like junior business partners by their dominating Type A husbands. They are respected, but they are not recognized as equal in power to the big boss.
Such couples live with the underlying hope—and sometimes the openly expressed plan—that the woman's nurturing ways will gradually change the man's Type A tendencies. It is as though these couples had adopted a contract stating that the Type A spouse has simply not yet been loved and nurtured enough in his life to blossom into a mellow Type B personality, and that the woman's job in this marriage is to love her Bad Boy in ways that will change him into a patient, tolerant, relaxed, noncompetitive individual.
Guess what happens next.
Actually, this contract is sometimes fulfilled to a degree. Some Type A's do learn from the example (or perhaps from the exasperation) of their Type B mates. However, far more often both spouses in this relationship category end up feeling rather disillusioned and double-crossed because the original plan does not come true.
The woman in such a relationship often begins to grow tired of her subordinate position in the marriage and frustrated that her good loving is not changing the Bad Boy at all. He continues in his Type A ways and may even become increasingly Type A as the stress of mid-life approaches. She may gradually grow resentful about her relative lack of validation and recognition. The importance of her role in life and in the family may go unnoticed versus the glory claimed by and given to her husband for being the financial head of the household. She also may begin to feel neglected by her mate, who seldom notices or understands all she does to manage her share of their collective load. It is clear in such marriages that the man's stress is considered the more painful, and he is therefore treated as the partner more deserving of special attention and rest.
As time passes, the Type A husband in such a marriage typically reports a longing for the good old days when he had his wife's undivided attention and unending tolerance. He may have difficulty sharing this nurturing mother with others, even with their own children. He may also have much difficulty understanding his spouse's pain and her disillusionments with their marriage. Remember, Type A's have trouble seeing their impact on others. Such a man tends to attribute his wife's growing negative feelings to her excessive worrying about the kids, about her own parents, or about his health. It seldom dawns on him that the woman might be feeling depressed because of what she is not getting from him.
An interesting next step often seen in the operations of such couples is that the Type A man begins expressing anger with his wife because she is no longer as nurturing as she used to be. He is especially likely to accuse her of being unnurturing during a period when he has taken particularly poor care of himself with reference to stress management. In other words, he may work himself into feeling exhausted, isolated, and somewhat depressed and then blame these feelings on his wife. The amazing thing is that the wife often believes this criticism.
The wife often accepts the blame because of her own feelings of guilt, which have developed because she is aware of feeling resentful. Remember, feeling angry is not acceptable to a person who is driven by a Pleasing Others personality. Plus, the emotional "contract" did specify that she would be the never-ending source of nurturing in this marriage. If he is unhappy, it must be because she is not taking appropriate care of him; therefore, she must deserve the blame that he is dishing out.
These marriages typically function relatively smoothly for quite a while. The division of labors and responsibilities works well enough to maintain a functional balance in day-to-day living. However, this same division of life involvements tends to lead eventually to the sense of living separate lives. The couple may have totally separate friendship groups, interests, passions, and so on. They may share very few interests except on an abstract level. For example, he might vehemently express a shared concern for and interest in their kids but actually have little working knowledge of or involvement in their daily lives. She might express respect for and interest in his work but actually be rather bored with it.
At this point many such women go to their physicians complaining of vague physical ailments, or to counselors for help in feeling happier. These women have difficulty accepting that their feelings of discontent in their marriages are well justified. They therefore often mask these negative feelings by focusing on other physical or emotional concerns. In living as caretakers of others' needs, they have grown accustomed to discounting their own emotional needs. They often lament, "I should be happier. I have everything I ever wanted. What's wrong with me? Maybe I just need to grow up."
Maybe so. But such a woman also probably needs to come to grips, along with her mate, with the frustrating aspects of their marriage. The problem is that such honest coming to grips probably means giving the Type A spouse feedback that he does not want to hear, and examining her own frustrations and fears in a way that flies in the face of her Pleasing Others coping style.
One frequent realization of such a woman is the fear that her own caretaking behavior may, in fact, be enabling rather than modifying her husband's Type A patterns: As long as she plays the role of stress absorber, he may have less need to learn to manage stress for himself. As long as she serves as the sole nurturer in the family, he need not learn how to be more nurturing of others. As long as she keeps forgiving him for his many Type A transgressions, he may never change. The worried wife may check out this fear of enabling with her Type A husband, only to be assured by him that he would only be lost, and worse in his Type A-ness, if she did not nurture him so. (He's no fool; why change a good thing?)
For such a marriage to grow, at first the wife has to push for changes that the Type A husband will probably resist. Even though doing so goes much against the grain of her Pleasing Others personality, she must keep pushing for a healthier way of relating, rather than settle into forever being a partner in her mate's Type A dance.
Finally, I want to mention a factor that is very much hidden beneath the surface in many of these marriages. As much as they truly value their Good Mother wives, many male Type a's are haunted by a growing degree of boredom with their mates because they have locked in a limited perspective of them, seeing only their nurturing, tolerant, gentle side. Of course, according to the original contract, these wives often show only their Good Mother aspects in the marriage; they express the more spontaneous, earthy, and fun-loving parts of themselves only in friendships or other sibling like relationships.
The risk of extramarital involvements is relatively high for such couples. Because they grow apart in their lives, both of them become vulnerable to the infatuating experience of finding a soul mate—a member of the opposite sex whose values, interests, and styles of responding to the world more closely match and more directly validate their own way of being.
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