Couple Support

Steps to a Better Marriage - the Vision, Part 1

A vivid picture of the relationship that you and your partner want, new skills and a strong, shared commitment to the work will take you a long way toward a better life together. How do you develop that vision? Here is one way:

Each of you make a list of the different aspects of the marriage that matter to you and how you would like each to be – e.g., connecting at the end of the day, making plans for the future, caring for the kids, being affectionate, supporting each other’s work life.

Don’t aim for encyclopedic completeness – just enough to get you started thinking about “how I would like us to be with each other”.

With lists in hand, get together and share what you each have so far. Begin to develop an “Our Vision” list compiled from the contributions of each of you.

This meeting is important: It sets the tone for the whole enterprise. That tone should be – cooperative, positive, future-oriented, mutually supportive, accepting – definitely not competitive, fault-finding, fixated on dark times in the past or blaming.

Emphasize general goals that both of you are likely to embrace. Do not demand or expect equal enthusiasm for each item on the couple list that you are developing. For example, if one of you says, “I want us to share some affection every day,” don’t get into an argument about what sort of affection, how much or when. Whatever either of you proposes goes on the “our list,” excepting items that one of you clearly can’t support – to any degree.

Remember: You are at this point producing the general outlines of your shared vision for the relationship as you both want it to be – nothing else. Except, you are also building trust in the possibility of working together. At the close of the meeting, thank each other for being positive and participating.

What’s next? See the following post.

To Build a Better Marriage, Start with a Detailed Image of What You Want

If you and your partner set out to make your relationship better, it would be understandable if you focused primarily on the problems that you wanted to solve. It would be understandable but not the best approach.

To improve your marriage, you need to focus beyond the problems and difficulties that you have with each other. You need a picture of the relationship as you want it to be - the more detailed and vivid a picture the better.

To see only problems is to focus exclusively on the negative. Of course, attending to problems is essential. However, in the absence of a clear direction, it is risky: Couples can easily get lost in their troubles, when troubles is all that they can see.

The “clear direction” that is needed is the picture of the life together that you really want. That positive vision carries energy and hopefulness, which will be very useful when you tackle the difficulties you have been having with each other. From the perspective of the vision you want to realize, problems are obstacles in the way that you are determined to remove – much easier to deal with than problems with no clear vision of anything better.

A vague, general picture of a desired relationship carries little weight when the marriage is in trouble and the problems are large. What you need is a vision so clear and so detailed that someone could practically walk into it and start living.

How can you possibly develop such a vision? We will explore that question in the next post.

Couples Counseling Needs Less Focus on Problems

Unhappy couples often come to me for counseling weighed down with a sense of failure and on the verge of giving up their marriage. Despite their considerable difficulties, these couples are still hanging on, still clutching a tattered shred of hope that they can turn the relationship around and rebuild their marriage.

They come with problems and grievances seemingly without end. If I give them half a chance, they will recount those grievances to me vividly and passionately right up to the minute that we run out of time, and the session ends.

I can’t blame them: Grievances are largely what is left of the marriage they have shared. Grievances are what they know intimately. Grievances are where passion still lives for them. Also, in me they sense a receptive ear. I won’t take sides. I won’t play judge. But I will listen sympathetically and care about their pain.

These couples assume, like most, that the counseling process is fundamentally about problems – describing, discussing, analyzing, understanding, assigning responsibility for problems – and, when possible, solving them.

When a couple I’ve been working with comes for a session, I often ask them how things have been since I saw them last. “Basically fine,” they tell me, “except for this fight that we had last Tuesday.” Then they proceed to tell me in detail about the fight, as if it is what really matters, and all those days of “basically fine” aren’t worth mentioning.

To be fair, maybe this couple figures that I consider the occasional lapse to be more important than their days of success. I don’t. In fact, I am convinced that for all couples repairing or rebuilding a relationship what needs to be central is not problems but their vision of the healthy, whole relationship that they want.

When problems are the focus of the work, you talk about problems. In the process, they become more prominent – and sometimes more intractable – rather than less prominent and smaller. The “you get more of whatever you notice” rule seems to apply here, as it does in so many areas.

This is not to say that problems don’t get solved. They do, at which point counseling typically ends. Fine – except that the couple with diminished problems isn’t necessarily closer to realizing the relationship’s potential than they were before.

What is needed is a healing method that focuses on developing a positive vision of the desired relationship and working to realize it. I’ll explore that approach in the next post.

Why You May Not Experience Your Partner's Love

“What do you want most of all?” the relationship coach asks the wife. “I want to experience that my husband really loves me,” she answers. The coach turns to the husband. “Do you?” he asks. “Of course, I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t,” the husband replies, frustration in his voice. “He says he loves you,” the coach says to the wife. “I know,” she responds, “but…” Her voice trails off.

Why doesn’t the wife experience her husband’s love? Here are some possibilities.

• The husband really doesn’t love her. However, he is unwilling to jeopardize what the marriage gives him by being honest and saying, “It’s true; I don’t love you.” The wife suspects that he doesn’t love her, but she is unwilling to jeopardize what the marriage gives her by pressing him for an honest answer. Both prefer unhappiness with each other to putting the marriage at risk.
• The husband loves her, but the ways that he shows it are not important enough for her to feel loved.
• He does love her, but the life they are living together is so tepid, so fundamentally devoid of emotion, that of course she doesn’t feel loved. Basically, she doesn’t feel anything with him, nor he with her – except boredom.
• He does love her, but she doesn’t feel loved because she is so wedded to feeling unloved that what he gives never reaches her. She doesn’t know how to receive and feel loved.
• He does love her, but he keeps his love for her to himself. Because of her persistent dissatisfaction with him, he feels like a failure whenever the subject of their loving comes up. In the relationship, he makes himself as invisible as possible.
• He is quite willing to be more demonstrative about his love, but waits for her to ask, fearing that she will turn him down if he goes first. In turn, she refuses to ask for what she wants, believing what whatever she asks for has little value because “I had to ask for it.”

Assuming that these unhappy people do in fact love each other, how do you suggest they get unstuck and find some pleasure in their loving? Please share your thoughts. Click on Comments below.

Helping Each Other Avoid Responsibility

Partners that fight all the time feel divided and alone – one against the other. Each feels victimized and demands that the other accept responsibility. The irony is that their behavior both unites them and guarantees that neither is going to give what the other wants.

They are a well-functioning team – working together to insure that neither has to accept any responsibility. Amazing irony.

It is all done through mutual blame. We are in trouble. I blame you, you blame me, each of us denies and defends. As long as we keep it up, we stay stuck. But, hey, it’s better than saying, “Yes, I’m partly at fault here, and I going to take responsibility for my part.”

At least that is the way most couples in conflict act – better this than looking hard at our own behavior.

The way out is simple but challenging. Mutual blame is a two-person activity: It ends when one person stops participating. Deliberately ceasing to blame your partner is a courageous act – and a powerful one that shifts everything.

Try this: You and your partner are fighting, each doing your “yeah but” best to defend yourself and nail the other person.

You stop. You say, “I can’t hear you and fight, too. What do you want me to understand?” Your partner tells you. You rephrase what your partner has said to you, to make sure that you get it. (“You feel that I…”) Then you say some version of  – “I think you are at least partly right. I apologize for my part in this.” Period.

You don’t say any anything in defense of yourself. If your partner still wants to fight, you don’t participate. You are finished. The end.

There is a worthy experiment here. Try it out. Then let us know what happens.

Think “Soft Moments” and “Hard Moments”

“Soft” and “hard” are useful distinctions for understanding – and improving – your relationship. “Soft” is open, accessible, cooperative, friendly, gentle, vulnerable. “Hard” is closed, remote, combative, unfriendly, harsh.

Most likely you and your partner – in personality and mood - are each mixtures of hard and soft. Your behavior toward each other is sometimes hard and sometimes soft.

An always-soft somebody would be always present in a “whatever you want” sort of way – having little separateness, lacking in boundaries, unprotected. An always-hard somebody would scarcely be in relationship – all separateness, all rigid “I” – no “I’m available” to relate to.

Troubled relationships are frequently hardened ones. Partners, having hurt each other a lot, have learned to hide their softness and vulnerability from each other. These couples are mostly either remote from each other (“Staying separate is the best way to stay safe”) or harsh and combative (“Anticipating attack and ready to defend yourself is the best way to stay safe”).

Here are some tips for making your relationship more safe for softness – i.e., more open, more friendly – more loving:

• Nurture your own vulnerability so that you don’t have to be hard and harsh when you are with your partner. E.g., stay separate and seek rest when you are exhausted.
• Be sympathetically aware of your partner’s vulnerable areas and avoid behavior that threatens them unnecessarily
• Become aware of the pattern in which one of you, perhaps inadvertently, says something that hurts the other person, who immediately closes up and becomes defensive and combative.
• Be sensitive to those communication moments in which your partner is relatively soft, open and reaching out to you. At such moments do your best to do nothing that would cause your partner to shut down. See how long the openness beween you can continue.

What are your tips for couple communication that stays soft and open? Please comment.