You have probably entered relationships madly in love, convinced that your feelings for each other were so strong your dream would carry you through the tough times, but wound up feeling more like you were living in a nightmare than a dream, struggling with conflicting wants and needs. If you don’t know how to work together effectively to solve the conflict, the resulting frustration, anger, and battles make the relationship more and more unpleasant and difficult to sustain. As a therapist, I know that couples need to know how to solve problems together successfully, and to work together as a team rather than struggle. A major part of my life work is helping couples learn to work together to develop a partnership that supports love and intimacy. To reach people beyond my immediate area, I wrote two books on this subject: How to Be a Couple and Still Be Free (with coauthor Riley K. Smith) is a step-by-step guide to help you learn the skills of problem solving and cooperation. Money, Sex and Kids: Stop Squabbling About the Three Things That Can Destroy Your Marriage teaches couples how to solve specific problems using the skills of cooperation.
Couples without teamwork skills fight about money, sex, affection, time, infidelity, in-laws, raising children, housekeeping, or other problems, often repeating the same old arguments, without any resolution, or locked in habitual ways of relating that they think they “should” do, but that create dissatisfaction and struggle between them. Struggles like this are not inevitable.
Learning good relationship skills (communication, cooperation, knowing and saying what you want, overcoming destructive habits, breaking out of rigid patterns that don’t work, counteracting unrealistic expectations, and creating new ideas) enables you to:
- Make room in the relationship for individual differences, preferences, and tastes.
- Recognize and solve problems to your mutual satisfaction.
- Keep your individual emotional issues from creating partnership problems.
- Solve both individual and relationship problems.
- Identify old relationship patterns that were dysfunctional, addictive or abusive, and to develop healthy alternatives.
- Discuss changes and conflicts and find ways to accommodate them.
- Identify and examine the “traditional relationship” models to see what aspects of them are relevant to your partnership, and what you need to change to develop a new model of partnership that works for you.
With good communication and negotiation skills, any couple can create satisfying, loving intimacy. When you and your partner know how to cooperate, you can build a partnership in which you:
- Give and take equally.
- Are committed to mutual satisfaction.
- Face problems rather than avoiding them.
- Work together toward mutual satisfaction.
- Feel like a team.
- Treat each other’s feelings, wants and needs as important.
- Share thoughts and feelings freely.
- Encourage each other and create excitement as well as comfort and security.
- Feel comfortable, satisfied, stimulated, and thus secure in the relationship.
- Have confidence that your relationship will last.
There is a pervasive myth that somehow happy couples just agree on everything automatically all the time. Believing this myth, we enter relationships convinced that whatever problems or differences we have with our partners will be easy to solve. But, in reality, the individuals who make up a partnership will disagree frequently, and often struggle over even minor issues.
In the course of building and sustaining a lifetime relationship, every couple encounters many problems. Different backgrounds and experience, discordant perception of each other and events, unequal rates of education and growth, conflicting needs for self-expression and contact, and differing values and beliefs about relationships complicate and often block attempts at creating partnership together.
Relationship models based on the idea that one person must lead and the other follow, or one “win” and the other “lose” can easily become power struggles, where the partners fight bitterly. Each partner struggles to be in control, or they avoid disagreements altogether because it isn’t worth the struggle. Hence they spend a lot of their time either fighting for what they want or feeling deprived.
