Oblique Divorce Strategy #1: The pot finds the lid.
Either immediately — or after brief reflection — most people will apply this saying to disharmonious marital relationships, especially if they are being dissolved. If you think you know what it means and you are enduring a divorce, consider how it applies to your own case. If you already understand how it works, reading the following explanation may diminish rather than enhance your understanding.
If the meaning of the statement is not apparent, I don’t know if more words will help. It may be something that you either get or don’t get and that’s that. But I’ll give it a try.
The pot finds the lid is a piece of folk wisdom that came to me from my grandmother. Her name was Mary and she was occasionally referred to as Mary, Queen of the Mother Load, but we called her “Mammy.” She was a miner’s daughter born and raised in Angels Camp, Calif., where you have to be strong to survive the nasty cold winters and the hellish summer heat. Mammy was big, strong, bold, opinionated and profane. Those she encountered who didn’t know her found her frightening. Those who knew her loved her because she was kind and very funny; she was a pistol.
She would have said that the pot found the lid with respect to her own marriage to my grandfather, Tom. We called him “Pappy.” When my mother or uncles talked about their parents as a couple, they referred to Pappy as “Poor Pappy.” Mammy lived her adult life in the Bay Area, but for most of her 92 years she “vacationed” by returning to Angels Camp for June, July and August. Pappy stayed behind.
My mother was a dutiful, loyal and discreet daughter. I recall only one conversation with her — shortly after Pappy’s death — about her parents’ marriage. She summed up the relationship with a single sentence: “At least Poor Pappy had his summers.”
The notion that the pot finds the lid implies we are able to detect a critical level of mutual attraction with a partner who will stay with us long enough to do an intricate psychological dance. Mammy would take an extreme position by saying that in marriage there are no victims, only collaborators.
I’m not so sure about victims and collaborators, but during a divorce the behavior of one spouse doesn’t take place in a vacuum. There’s a strong presumption that what partners do during a divorce is systemic. When, for example, Sarah and Sam both say they are really ready to get rid of the other, but Sam does something to delay the process, it’s likely that he’s acting on behalf of the couple or the family.
By far the most common reason for “delay” is an appreciation, conscious or not, of the fact that the grieving process has not been adequately completed by both parties. Grieving is an essential prerequisite to a settlement in which each party has an abiding belief that the overall effect of complete agreement was in his or her own best interest.
The aphorism applies to those cases where it’s necessary to reconcile one party’s action with apparently inconsistent statements, or where it is necessary to overcome a partner’s reluctance to act in a way that’s in the parties’ mutual best interest. It is almost universally true that, notwithstanding a determination to end the marriage, each partner knows the other better than anyone else. If one partner doesn’t understand something about the other that is necessary to complete the divorce, he or she has the greatest potential for reaching that understanding when he or she is willing to do the work.
This is true even where one spouse acts in unusual ways that are considered symptomatic of an identified form of mental illness. The pathological compulsion to control is associated with narcissistic personality disorder. Both make it difficult to navigate a divorce.
If, for example, Nancy wants a satisfactory divorce and believes that Nick is a “narcissistic control freak,” she can’t turn over the case to the “professionals” and join with her friends in the peanut gallery. She knows more about how she can and cannot effectively deal with Nick than a professional will ever know about how he can or cannot effectively deal with Nick. So if the case is to be successfully navigated, Nancy can’t be an observer; she has to be the pilot.
I doubt that family systems theory originated in Angels Camp, but it’s an expansion on the relationship between the pot and its lid by seeking to explain the behavior of one member of the family in terms of the family as a whole.
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Oblique Divorce Strategy #2
Tell the same segment of Your Divorce Story:
» To three different people,
» In three different ways, and
» To deliberately evoke three different responses.
— Brian H. Burke is a certified family law specialist practicing family law and mediation in Santa Barbara. A researcher and educator in the field of divorce and family conflicts, he is also the creator of the Legal Road Map™. Click here for more information, call 805.965.2888 or e-mail info@burkefamilylaw.com. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.