The couples arriving for marriage counselling at William Kir-Stimon's Chicago office must have done a double take: you want us to do what? Here they were, partners itching to vent about how one had lost sexual interest in the other, how he never did any housework, she was always so critical... whereupon Kir-Stimon, who died in 1994, would whip out a metronome and ask each to set it at the tempo they found most pleasing. The psychologist was pursuing a hunch that subsequent research, by himself and others, came to support: beneath whatever incompatibilities they thought were the problem, many couples had starkly different personal tempos – choosing metronome speeds of anything from 40 to 200 beats per minute – and literally perceived time as moving faster or slower. (Research suggests impulsive people and alcoholics, among others, experience time passing faster than more cautious, sober types.) Validating the old cliché, warring couples were often just marching to the beats of different drums. They were like smooth jazz aficionados and hardcore house enthusiasts, locked in an eternally dissatisfying, elbow-banging waltz.
There's a nasty catch here, notes couples therapist Peter Fraenkel in his new book Sync Your Relationship, Save Your Marriage. (Doubtless to his publisher's delight, he's also a former jazz drummer.) Early in a romance, we seem to be attracted to our "time opposites", then come to dislike that characteristic. The frenetic overachiever is drawn to the slow-moving dreamer as a source of calm... until he or she is transformed, without necessarily changing, into an undermotivated slacker. This isn't about rights and wrongs; I know my hyperpunctuality, say, can be as enraging as lateness. The challenge is to bring into the light what Fraenkel calls "the hidden dimension of intimacy" – time perception.
Not that recognising the problem solves it completely. In encouraging couples to find ways to align their tempos, Fraenkel writes, he collides with several unhelpful myths about time and relationships. There's the Myth of Spontaneity ("All couple fun, pleasure and sexuality must occur unplanned to be worthwhile"); the Housework/Fun Incompatibility Myth, which denies the reality that doing chores co-operatively can be a fulfilling way for some couples to "sync"; and, especially where children are involved, the stress-inducing Myth of Quality Time. (Children, a well-known 1999 study by family researcher Ellen Galinsky concluded, are just as hungry for unfocused "hanging-out" time.)
There's nothing new in the notion that time can be a tyrant. But that's generally held to mean that modern life moves too fast; in reality, if you're a 200bpm kind of person, constant exhortations to slow down can be just as potentially tyrannical. Sometimes what's more important is to know your tempo, and those of the people with whom you're trying to sync. Fraenkel quotes the anthropologist Albert Scheflen: "It is striking how belatedly we have discovered the obvious. Any dancer or musician could have told us that we must share a common rhythm to sing or play or dance together. So could any athlete who plays on a team. And privately we have always known that a common rhythmicity is essential to consummate sexual union… Are scientists always the last to know what artists and others have known all along?"
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
