When a couple forms, there is first the phase of attraction. We discover each other, we seek each other out, we are under the spell of this other person who stands for a land of promise, of adventure, of exploration, of future or of play. That other person may also symbolically fill a lack in our life, or an existential need.

It is in this phase that a representation of the other is built: from what seduced us, from what we glimpsed of their potential, from what we imagined — and sometimes constructed in spite of ourselves. But is that other person really compatible with the image we created of them? What crises follow from that projection? And through what process does one leave the idealised image behind to enter another dimension of couple life?

Let us remember that these forces of attraction are only one of the three types of forces that produce a couple, alongside cohesion and coercion.

An event, a process

If someone took the trouble to invent a word, it is precisely because it names a reality different from that of marriage.

There can therefore perfectly well be married couples in whom mariation never took place, and unmarried couples in whom it was fully achieved.

Mourning the ideal

Mariation is the process by which one moves from the ideal to the attainable. Put differently: it is the process by which one carries out, quite literally, a mourning — that of the fantasised image one had created of the other, which in the end has little to do with who they really are. Its endpoint is a state of conjugal alliance in which one takes the other for who they are, and not in relation to the idealised image one built of them.

One thus meets couples married for decades who, after all that time, keep reproaching each other for not being the ideal they had projected. Yet it is important to see that this image was built by two: it is not a pure product of the imagination, nor a mere fantasy. There is a form of co-responsibility, since the illusion is created between the one who seduces and works at maintaining the image, and the one who helps to maintain it.

When mariation does not take place, the mechanics are fairly predictable: if the other is not the idealised image we projected, we are disappointed; if we are disappointed, we criticise or voice reproaches; those reproaches are experienced as powerful disqualifications; and there is every chance that the other will answer in turn with disqualifications. The vicious circle sets in, and becomes a genuine poison for the couple.

Three areas where mariation is played out

The process does not unfold in a single space. It takes place in three distinct areas, and one of them may be far more advanced than the others.

The bipersonal area

Some situations speed the process up, others slow it down — and this is very individual: the same difficulty, money problems for instance, will accelerate mariation for one person and hold it back for another. On the other hand, everything belonging to betrayal, lies, disqualification and humiliation slows the process down or stops it entirely. If those wounds are played down, kept silent or never really treated, they come back: in therapy, this narcissistic wound is seen as a virus that affects mariation. To treat it, there must first be genuine recognition of the wrong committed, then an appropriate act of repair.

The bifamilial area

The process is obviously affected by the legacies of the families of origin. When these see a fundamental incompatibility in the forming of the couple, seeds of poison are inoculated into it: an underlying loyalty to the family of origin sets in and, even if it is resisted at first, it becomes a small litany that returns again and again throughout the life of the couple. This does not prevent mariation from happening, but it puts spokes in the wheels. In therapy, the work may consist in demystifying those prophecies.

The bicultural area

When two cultures fit together with difficulty, what can happen is a desire to colonise the other’s culture in order to impose one’s own. A favourable development is something else entirely: creating a shared culture, different from both, borrowing elements from each and belonging to a more global level — what the jargon calls a meta-culture. The therapeutic space is conducive to its emergence, and that is where the couple therapist will work.

These three areas do not advance at the same pace. Mariation may be well achieved bipersonally and not at all bifamilially: the prognosis is then somewhat more guarded. And if it is achieved personally but not culturally, it is the meta-culture that will have to be built.

Two people, two rhythms

There is one thing that is very important to notice and to name in session: it is entirely normal for the two members of a couple not to be at exactly the same point in this process. One may believe it is indispensable for it to advance at the same pace for both, but that is almost never the case: in the vast majority of couples, one of them is always more involved than the other in the conjugal alliance — and this can change over time.

It is an illusion of the same order as the one, frequent in young couples, which holds that it is up to the other to make us happy: we will then tend to reproach them for the moments when we do not feel happy ourselves. Mariation can also be considered differently: as the act of choosing each other again over time, through the various stages of the life cycle.

That is what makes this concept so valuable: once you have it in mind, you see these movements in the couples you receive — and you can accompany the process far more effectively.