Rituals of Greeting and Parting

In one of the books I recommend often, "Take Back Your Marriage" by William Doherty, he defines a ritual as a repeated experience that has meaning. If we do something often, but we don’t care about it and wouldn’t miss it if it stopped, that is not a ritual. If we do something, even something very small that only takes a moment, and it feels important, and we do it regularly, it’s a ritual.

Successful married couples usually have many rituals that support their partnership and romance, often without really noticing that they are doing important things over and over again. When their relationship is going well, they are just doing what feels natural to them. Examples of marital rituals might be: calling each other every day just to say hi, watching a favorite TV show together every week, telling each other that they look nice when they dress up, saying “I love you” before they go to sleep each night, etc. There is no list of necessary marital rituals, and what works for some couples would not work for others.

When routines are interrupted in some way, their rituals may not happen. That’s not a big deal, but they both notice and miss their little moments of closeness. When something gets in the way of their normal ways of showing their love for each other, I encourage couples to complain together. Without blaming or being needy they acknowledge the importance of their marriage and its rituals.

When the relationship between a husband and wife starts to deteriorate, it is not unusual for their rituals to diminish. That change, in turn, leads to disappointment and distancing, further pushing their romance toward failure. When I am working with couples in marital therapy, I often encourage them to turn that process around consciously by agreeing to upgrade their rituals. Anything they can do to recapture the little moments of affection will help them rebuild their marriage.

I often focus especially on improving their rituals of greeting and parting. When couples are in the excitement of courtship, they greet one another with enthusiasm, and they say good-by in a way that says they will miss each other while apart. When years together have made it all seem routine, and the stresses of bills, jobs, kids, etc. turn their attention away from romance, couples may stop greeting and parting rituals entirely. In fact, the ways they say hello and good-by may communicate a negative message..

Hopefully avoiding gender stereotypes, here are some examples of failed rituals of greeting and parting:

He leaves early for the office, the job site, or the fitness center and never comes back to the bedroom to say good-by to his sleepy wife with a quick kiss. He runs to the store on the weekend without detouring through the house to tell her where he is going and say good-by like he means it.

She arrives home at the end of the workday, hangs up her coat, goes through the mail, and starts on the tasks of the evening, never taking a moment to tell her husband that she is glad to be home, with him. She returns from visiting her ailing mother on the weekend and immediately gets on the phone with her sister, perhaps later telling her husband how her mom is doing.

I encourage couples to notice what they do when someone leaves or arrives, reminisce about what they remember doing when their marriage was at its best, and decide what they will do now to rekindle their warmth and affection. Improved greeting and parting rituals are easy to do, require no time or money, and happen several times a day. If spouses agree to do a better job with this part of their relationship, and they both do it, there are two important consequences.

First, it shows that they are both trying to make their marriage better. Couples can put up with a great deal of dissatisfaction in the short term if they believe that they are both motivated and working hard to improve things between them. Second, even little moments of warmth and contact remind both of them of the very special feelings that they can generate in one another by being close. A quick kiss is a sign of a special, close relationship. A brief hug or touch of hands is a hint of the profound delight that couples can find in bodies touching and hands caressing.

If a marriage can be compared to a bank account, then a rich marriage is one in which there are many more deposits than withdrawals, more positive interactions than negative. Good greeting and parting rituals are small, frequent deposits, and over time they can add up to a lot. Usually when someone says, “if I had a dollar for every time you…” they are criticizing the listener for doing something often that never works. But if a married couple had a dollar for every time they expressed their love when coming or going, they would be rich indeed.
Copyright Gregg Dana 2007