What You Can Learn about Relationships from Watching the Obamas

What You Can Learn about Relationships from Watching the Obamas

When Americans elected President Barak Obama, we did so for numerous reasons. His grace under the fire of the presidential debates. His charisma and ability to inspire hope in a grim time. His articulateness. His accomplishments. And his obvious intelligence.

Now that we Americans have elected him, we are the beneficiaries of an unexpected perquisite. President and Mrs. Obama provide a role model of a good marriage.

What does it take to make a good marriage? Current divorce statistics tell us that over 50% of Americans apparently don’t know. Those whose parents did not model an intimate, cooperative, and mutually supportive and satisfying marriage are disadvantaged. It’s hard to know what such a marriage looks like.

I’ve practiced marriage and family therapy for over three decades, after completing my post-doctoral training.

So when I look at the Obamas, I observe their connection on many levels. What I see so far is a couple:

• with obvious and genuine affection for each other;

• who are unabashedly interdependent, each able to function well as independent individuals who are unafraid to acknowledge their need for each other);

• who share mutual support and respect for each other;

• who each possess authentic personal power as individuals;

• who are synergistic, each making the other stronger than they would be by themselves;

• who lack brashness or harshness;

• who are committed parents but they do not sacrifice their love and affection for each other in favor of their daughters;

• who are relationship-oriented in their approach to parenting, work, and leadership.

America is the beneficiary of the Obamas’ “marriage premium.” And, because the American President is arguably the most powerful person on planet earth, the world benefits by extension.

What is the “marriage premium?” Many family studies researchers have studied the connection between happy marriages and employee productivity. Although they have not investigated the impact of good marriages on presidential effectiveness, we can hypothesize a link. Here is the bottom line of their conclusions.

A Harvard University researcher looked at the traits that make superior, average, and poor CEOs. He found the attribute separating superior CEOs from the others was they were in happy marriages, while the other two groups were not (Erickson 2008). In other words, it was their happy marriages, not their academic degrees or business experience, that made them the most valuable, effective, and productive leaders.

The apparent strength of the Obamas’ marriage can give us even more reason to hope than we already had when we elected him.