month later, I rediscovered a dear friend I hadn’t seen in years. Tim had been on a similar path of self-discovery, and we renewed a deep and loving friendship. Slowly, it evolved into more. We took a long time to let our relationship grow into something we trusted enough to create a life together. We’ve now been together thirty-five years.
Of course, even after all the inner work we’d both done on our own, the human dilemma and all the struggles it brings to relationships knocked us around again and again once we came together. Still, we stayed with each other. We even gave the process a name: staying on the bronco. What bound us together — besides deep friendship and a mutual love of dogs, good books, crazy and wonderful passion, and wicked humor — was a shared belief that love and marriage are not places to hide from life. A committed relationship is a place to grow, to learn and inquire and challenge ourselves. It’s a way to better know the self and, even more challenging, to practice the arts of tolerance, forgiveness, and apologizing. Relationships are opportunities to practice wholeheartedness and, in magical moments, to fully experience it.
So after years of thinking both the best and worst parts of my relationships were all about the other person, I finally realized that love is an inside job. Many of the troubles we experience emerge from conflicts we ourselves contribute to, relationship behavior we simply tolerate (and which cause silent resentments to build), and the unexamined parts of our own psyche. The health of our intimate connections depends on how we deal with our own lingering demons and on our own motivation to actually grow and change.
As a therapist, I notice these principles are some of the hardest for clients to believe. When they finally get that all of it — the good, the bad, the ugly, and the most beautiful — begins and ends within them, they experience a sense of liberation. Certainly, we are not responsible for other people’s behavior and will feel pain if the people we care about hurt us, but what happens next is on us. Responding from a place of centeredness rather than reactivity will help us to choose when we need to forgive, when we need to hold to a bottom line, and when we need to face how we’ve helped create the conflict. Staying centered will also help us remember the unique strengths and gifts we offer in our relationships and help us select a partner who can recognize these as well.
What makes for a good marriage isn’t necessarily what makes for a good romantic relationship. Marriage isn’t a passion-fest; it’s a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane and often boring non-profit business. And I mean this in a good way.
— LORI GOTTLIEB, Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough
I made an important discovery thirty-eight years ago while working at a local agency as part of a counseling internship. I was sitting with a married couple whose love and commitment were strong, yet they couldn’t stop arguing about how to manage their money. Paul saw money as a ticket to freedom and pleasure — a chance to buy the sports car he wanted, enjoy the best restaurants, and purchase the latest climbing gear. Amy, whose priority was financial security, wanted to live frugally and put away as much money as possible. Each partner was scared of the other’s style. Amy was frightened of what she viewed as her husband’s recklessness with the checkbook, and she worried they wouldn’t have enough money socked away for the future. Paul, for his part, believed his wife was trying to leach all the fun and adventure from his life.
Their arguments were fierce and unrelenting. By this point, the blame and anger they were hurling at one another had become a bigger problem than their differences in spending styles. Even as a relatively new therapist, I could see these two weren’t going to resolve their conflict by just talking it over.
Meanwhile, I was teaching a class on interpersonal communication at Oregon State University and had recently introduced my students to “pillow talk,” a process in which two people discuss an issue they differ on. They begin by sitting on a pillow and stating their position. Then they move to the other person’s pillow, talking about the same topic from the other’s point of view. This gave me an idea. What if Paul and Amy didn’t need traditional couples therapy? What if they would benefit more from the simple practices I taught in my introductory communications class?
In our next session, I suggested that Amy and Paul try the pillow-talk exercise. I asked them to describe their feelings, beliefs, and concerns about their money issue, then shift sides and describe their partner’s perspective with as much conviction as they could, as though it were their own. Next, I suggested they think about how each side was right and how each side was wrong. In the last part of the exercise, I asked both partners to verbally acknowledge the truth in both positions.
Amy and Paul dove in willingly. Within a short time, I saw them make extraordinary progress. For the first time in their twelve-year marriage, they’d gained a genuine understanding of what it was like to be the other person. Although they still didn’t agree about money, something between them had softened; they were gentler with one another and had fewer arguments. Over time and with practice, the couple learned how to allocate money in a way that at least partially accommodated both of their needs and how to be a little more tolerant of their partner’s different way of doing it. Despite their ongoing disagreement, they managed to stay connected. In short, they were developing and honing their love skills.
The truth is, most couples don’t lack love; instead, they lack the skills to communicate compassionately while hurt, upset, or holding a different perspective. It’s usually the way we manage our differences — not the differences themselves — that causes pain.
Improving your communication skills is a familiar concept in the work world, but we tend to practice it less often in our love lives. After all, most of us “fall in love.” “Falling” doesn’t require competence, intention, or practice. It just happens. The necessary elements of a healthy relationship — making time to be together, pleasure in pleasing and listening to one another, acceptance of differences — come naturally at the beginning of a relationship. But over time, as the dopamine high of infatuation fades, we begin to experience our differences in a new way. Increasingly, they feel painful, more glaring, and sometimes impossible to navigate. We start to think something is terribly wrong. We may believe we’ve “fallen” out of love and conclude that we’ve chosen the wrong person.
The heart of my teaching — and the heart of Love Skills — comes from the Love Cycles model, which explains that relationships develop in predictable stages, each of which presents its own challenges. With knowledge, commitment, and practice, we can usually work through these challenges, even when they initially feel insurmountable. Contrary to conventional wisdom, people don’t meet, fall in love, overcome a few trials, and then live happily ever after — nor do conflict and dissatisfaction between partners necessarily mean a couple is headed for Splitsville. According to the Love Cycles model, lasting love develops in five stages: The Merge, Doubt and Denial, Disillusionment, The Decision, and Wholehearted Love.
Amy and Paul were stuck for a long time in the Disillusionment stage and were almost ready to give up on their marriage. With just a few skills, they were able to find their love for one another again and move on to a new and happier stage of their relationship.
The Merge
Doubt and Denial
Disillusionment
The Decision
Wholehearted Loving
Love Skills will teach you how to stay connected even when you’re
