LIVING WITH TYPE A’s: THE “READY, SET GO!” PATTERN
This is the pattern that emerges when two exceptionally competitive Type A's marry. This pattern is often manifested by dual-career couples, though I have also noticed it in couples who live on only one income.
The meaning of life in this type of marriage seems to be competition. These partners compete both openly and subtly. They may make mental or verbal comparisons regarding anything and everything: how much money each one earns, who's in better physical condition, who's a better tennis player, who's more or less Type A, or who has the better relationship with the children. Because they both are so addicted to stimulation, they tend to fill their lives with activity. They even choose vacations that involve high levels of stimulation rather than relaxation.
I have noticed an interesting result of this kind of competition. When the Type A man is in some way losing in the overall competition for status and power in the marriage, he sometimes one-ups his mate by becoming intent on developing a more nurturing relationship with the children than the wife has. Because the Type A woman is driven to do all things perfectly, including being the perfect mother, such a development in her family fuels her insecurity and drivenness.
With all this competition and frenzied pace of living, no one is available in these marriages to act as stress absorber and nurturer to the other mate. These couples therefore sometimes settle into a suffering contest. Interactions revolve around indirect requests for support and nurturance. Conversation becomes filled with complaints about busy schedules, fatigue, and stress. Power struggles often result over who will grace the other with relief of domestic responsibilities so there will be some free time for doing more work or for trying to recover from another exhausting week. Because both spouses end up feeling similar degrees of stress, a spouse who grants such nurturing breaks does so at the expense of perpetuating his or her own exhaustion. Often, neither spouse has the energy to give the other a nurturing break.
These couples live out the Type A stress nightmare that, indeed, there is not enough nurturing, love, time, attention, or resources in general to go around. During their frequent periods of exhaustion, such couples tend to long for a simpler life. They harbor fantasies of slowing down and quitting their high-stress jobs, buying a small country store (or an equivalent fantasy), and settling for less "stuff" so they will have more time to live. However, each assumes that the other would never be satisfied with such a life. Actually, probably neither one would be. As one such woman once told me, "Sure, we might buy that little country store and enjoy that life for a while. But after six months, one or the other of us would be talking about opening a franchise of these little, relaxing places. I guarantee it."
This longing for more soothing nurturing in life sometimes gets displaced onto others, leading to the development of infatuations with strong, nurturing-seeming members of the opposite sex. Such seemingly Good Mother (or Good Father) types represent a solution to the Type A's drivenness: the possibility of securing help in developing a more comfortable balance in life. The risk of infatuation is particularly high if the other person's style conveys both nurturance and a little bit of feistiness; too much gentleness may be too boring a contrast to the frantic pace that has become a habit for Type A's who have lived in this form of marriage.
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