effort to work out their differences, they decided to try marital
counseling. At first they got nowhere. When Lisa tried to be
conciliatory toward Rory during their first session with a marital
therapist, he was unable to respond in kind to her repair attempts.
But their marriage's hidden hope was discovered when the
couple agreed to be taped in my lab for a segment of Face to Face
with Connie Chung. The interviewer asked Rory and Lisa about their
early years together. As Rory began to recall their first date, his face
lit up. He explained that Lisa, unlike him, came from a traditional
Armenian home. She was very sheltered by her parents and very
inexperienced when it came to dating. Rory knew that getting her and
her family to accept him would take a long time, but he was willing to
hang in there. Here's a little of what they recalled:
Rory: I think she was very nervous, and I had some background
about why she was nervous, some cultural things that she was
trying to live with. And because of this I knew this was going to
take a long, long time. So I wasn't nervous at all. I figured this
was stage one of a five-year marathon....
Lisa : You mean you had a five-year plan on our first date?
Rory : Maybe that's exaggerating, but I knew it would take more than
one lunch.
Lisa : Wow.
Rory and Lisa actually held hands while they discussed this.
Lisa was beaming--he had never before recounted his campaign to
win her heart. This little vignette may not sound very dramatic (in
fact, the TV show edited Rory and Lisa down to a snippet of air time),
but to a trained observer there was much in this couple's interaction
that offered hope for their marriage. Rory and Lisa's fond memories
of their early days were evidence that underneath their mutual
antagonism there were still glimmerings of what I call a fondness and
admiration system. This means that they each retained some
fundamental sense that the other was worthy of being respected and
even liked.