180 • FLOWthe commitment that an old-fashioned marriage demands, and having
made it willingly instead of being compelled by tradition, a person no
longer needs to worry whether she has made the right choice, or whether
the grass might be greener somewhere else. As a result a great deal of
energy gets freed up for living, instead of being spent on wondering
about how to live.
If one decides to accept the traditional form of the family, com
plete with a monogamous marriage, and with a close involvement with
children, with relatives, and with the community, it is important to
consider beforehand how family life can be turned into a flow activity.
Because if it is not, boredom and frustration will inevitably set in, and
then the relationship is likely to break up unless there are strong exter
nal factors keeping it together.
To provide flow, a family has to have a goal for its existence.
Extrinsic reasons are not sufficient: it is not enough to feel that, well,
“Everybody else is married,” “It is natural to have children,” or “Two
can live as cheaply as one.” These attitudes may encourage one to start
a family, and may even be strong enough to keep it going, but they
cannot make family life enjoyable. Positive goals are necessary to focus
the psychic energies of parents and children on common tasks.
Some of these goals might be very general and long-term, such as
planning a particular life-style—to build an ideal home, to provide the
best possible education for the children, or to implement a religious way
of living in a modern secularized society. For such goals to result in
interactions that will help increase the complexity of its members, the
family must be both differentiated and integrated. Differentiation means
that each person is encouraged to develop his or her unique traits,
maximize personal skills, set individual goals. Integration, in contrast,
guarantees that what happens to one person will affect all others. If a
child is proud of what she accomplished in school, the rest of the family
will pay attention and will be proud of her, too. If the mother is tired
and depressed, the family will try to help and cheer her up. In an
integrated family, each person’s goals matter to all others.
In addition to long-term goals, it is imperative to have a constant
supply of short-term objectives. These may include simple tasks like
buying a new sofa, going on a picnic, planning for a vacation, or playing
a game of Scrabble together on Sunday afternoon. Unless there are goals
that the whole family is willing to share, it is almost impossible for its
members to be physically together, let alone involved in an enjoyable
joint activity. Here again, differentiation and integration are important:
the common goals should reflect the goals of individual members as