the thorniest issues and learn how two imperfect people can love one another as perfectly as possible.
The Case of the Dirty Dishes
Over the three decades that I’ve worked as a therapist and couples coach, I’ve participated in countless training programs and acquired numerous certificates and degrees, but my primary source of knowledge — especially when it comes to the cycles of love — is my own thirty-five-year marriage.
When Tim and I began our relationship, we never expected that the qualities we most loved about each other would become the ones we were most determined to change. I was infatuated with Tim’s strong moral compass, his idealistic commitment to living a meaningful life, and his reliability. He, in turn, was charmed by my spontaneity, my bubbling enthusiasm for life, and my relaxed attitude toward time and money (my motto: “Don’t sweat either; there will always be more”). We had no idea this initial magic was a euphoric but temporary state caused by a biochemical cocktail. We had no clue we were in Stage One of the Love Cycles model: The Merge.
Five years after we rekindled our relationship, he had sold his veterinary practice and his boat and arrived at my house with a well-packed trunk filled with clothes, books, and two silver candlesticks from his grandmother. We got married and adopted our dream child: an Alaskan malamute we named Sylva. We had pulled it off: we were together forever now. We believed we were off to Soulmatesville and a lifetime of magic and wonder.
But that’s not what happened. Instead, within a short time, I began to see his reliability as rigidity, his moral compass as self-righteousness, and his idealism as ridiculously naive. He began to accuse me of being impulsive and financially irresponsible; on dark days he reclassified my enthusiasm as infantile, pie-in-the-sky optimism. We argued over everything: how to celebrate Christmas, how to spend money, and — the original power struggle — how to do the dishes. I didn’t know it at the time, but we were entering Stage Two of the Love Cycles model: the Power Struggle, also known as Doubt and Denial.
When Tim and I first met, I was living in an old New Zealand farmhouse. We met in a sheep paddock and immediately began to talk easily and with a sense of familiarity, as though we’d known one another forever. He’d followed me inside to the kitchen, still talking, where I began to wash dishes. After watching me for a moment, he asked why I was washing them “excessively” under hot water before putting them in the dishwasher. Lightly, I countered that even the best dishwasher wouldn’t remove all the food. He grinned while informing me that I was “wasting hot water.”
At the start of our relationship, we thought the other’s dishwashing practices were charming, however misguided. We teased each other about our differences and laughed about them good-naturedly. But once we started living together and washing the dishes daily, side by side, we quickly moved from annoyed to exasperated to righteously indignant. It may sound like a small and even silly problem, but it quickly escalated into a major one. At first, we tried to win over the other with somewhat calm logic, but before long we were hurling insults at one another. The dishwashing problem encapsulated a situation in which the qualities we loved about one another had become the very traits that drove us crazy.
The conflict came to a head one night when we had dinner guests we barely knew. After Tim and I cleared the table, we started to load the dishwasher and quickly spiraled into a spiteful argument in front of them. We went so far as to individually present our own dishwashing points of view to our guests and demand they be the judges. Our voices were hard, unyielding, and self-righteous. Our guests looked stricken. At that point, our problem had nothing to do with the dishes and everything to do with our intensely negative reactions to each other’s differences. Blame and anger had become our default strategies in the face of conflict, and now we were performing them in front of other people.
We walked away from the dispute feeling hurt and angry. Both of us began to wonder whether our relationship was the biggest mistake of our lives. This is a classic symptom of Stage Three of the Love Cycle, when disillusionment sets in and connection is replaced by ongoing disenchantment.
Here’s the good news. Today, Tim and I generally stay out of each other’s way when one of us does the dishes, and we (usually) end up laughing when we bump heads over this. Tim still does them wrong in my opinion, and he feels the same about my style. However, I no longer show him dried dishes that have some nasty pieces of food stuck on them to prove my point, and he has ceased leaving statistics about wasting hot water on my dresser.
How did we get there? After an unusually vicious argument with Tim, I reflected on the craziness of it all. I remembered Amy and Paul from my counseling internship and how something as simple as the pillow-talk exercise had helped them. Like Amy and Paul, my husband and I needed love skills.
When I told Tim the story of Amy and Paul, he got it — to my great relief. We didn’t want to lose each other. Yet neither of us had the slightest idea how to escape our agonizing arguments. So we set out to learn. That’s when we entered Stage Four — making a decision to stop the pain. We began to seek a new relationship road map while letting go of the old one, which had insisted that in the face of differences someone had to win — and therefore someone had to lose.
Tim and I attended relationship workshops all over the country. We participated in Dr. Lori Gordon’s renowned PAIRS psychoeducation program in Washington, DC, which teaches that all couples have unresolved issues — about ten on average! — that are resistant to change. The key to relationship happiness is learning conflict-management skills that preserve love and respect. We also trained in Imago relationship therapy with Dr. Harville Hendrix and Dr. Helen LaKelly Hunt, who teach couples how to use arguments and differences as opportunities for healing and growth. We soaked up all we could from educators, psychologists, and interdisciplinary teachers about how to make a relationship thrive, how to manage differences productively, and how to discover empathy when it seems impossible.
Wanting to share all we learned with others, I created a curriculum that included the best information, skills, and practices from our finest teachers. Once Tim and I learned how to manage our own conflicts and move toward mutual compassion and, eventually, delight (at least most of the time), he and I began to teach a Love Skills class to other couples. The program, which we’ve taught for the past twenty-five years, draws from many sources: my longtime counseling work with couples and individuals; our training with the pioneers of interpersonal therapy; wisdom found in ancient mythology, poetry, music, and spiritual traditions; and, of course, our own marriage.
When we started the Love Skills class, I began by teaching long workshops and added weekend seminars for individual couples later. Currently, I travel around the country offering two-day intensives that combine love coaching and psychoeducation for individual couples and families, and I also work online with people around the world. Passing my knowledge on to others has brought me great joy. I have been amazed and heartened at how education and coaching can free people from destructive patterns and help them rediscover a relationship filled with mutual love, understanding, compassion, and just plain fun.
For Tim and me, learning love skills was an enormous undertaking. We practiced, failed, and tried again. Each of us worked hard on taking responsibility for our own parts in the conflict — the stubborn need to be right, the underlying triggers stemming from events in our past, and our individual personality traits that tended to escalate our disagreements. Practicing acceptance, learning to be kind to one another even when we were upset, and letting go of self-righteousness made a huge difference in the texture of our relationship. Eventually I could feel us softening, just as I’d witnessed with Amy and Paul. We still disagreed, but most of the time we remained openhearted in the face of conflict.
We also experienced a second, surprising benefit: in the process of healing and enhancing our relationship, we were becoming healthier, more wholehearted human beings. Each of us developed more self-respect, needed less validation from one another, and could manage our differences
