If you and your partner have an area of life in which you are having difficulty expressing partnership, you very likely have assumptions that are limiting your view of yourself, your partner and your partnership.  The purpose of the exercise below is for you, as a couple, to identify some of your limiting assumptions that are holding your current circumstances in place, to challenge your assumptions, to create new perspectives and then together to take a new stand for what is you are co-creating in that area of your life.

Together, first identify a specific area of your life that is not working as well as you would like it to (e.g., household tasks are not getting done, overspending your budget every month, not having any time for each other, etc.). This exercise for couples has been adapted from Byron Katie’s work on challenging assumptions (Katie, 2002).  Have fun with this!

1. Identify the specific area of your life together that is not working as well as you would like it to.
2. Taking care to focus on only this one area, share an assumption you have about yourself, your partner and your relationship. As you share your assumptions, write them down. Share back and forth until you have all your assumptions written down.
3. Next, jointly examine each assumption you have identified and ask yourselves, “Is this assumption really true?”
4. Then, examine each assumption by asking this question, “How do I (we) react and/or what happens when I (we) have this assumption operating in the relationship?’
5. Next, ask yourselves, “Who would I (we) be without this assumption?”  Consider, “What new future emerges for us in this area of our lives without these assumptions?”
6. Next, together, create an empowering perspective or place to stand in this area of life.  An example might be: “We are a powerful housecleaning team!” or “We stand for open and honest communication!” Then, speculate how that area of your life might transform over time if you were to take on this perspective or stand together.
7. Lastly, share with each other, “What actions am I (are we) committed to take in this area of our life?”

In the next few weeks, if either of you find yourselves making those old limiting assumptions, let them go, be bold and take that new stand for your partnership!

Reference

Katie, B. (2002). Loving what is: Four questions that can change your life. New York: Three Rivers Press.

In marriage, couples encounter many problems, including difficulties in communication, misalignment around parenting, conflict about money, inequality in sharing power, problems in intimacy and loss of trust. When such difficulties remain unresolved for periods of time, it is sometimes easy to get discouraged and start questioning your commitment to your marriage. It can be attractive to think that you would not encounter these difficulties in another relationship. Creating partnership requires the courage and the resolve to keep all four feet in the marriage when you are having difficulties and stay committed to your vision of a successful life together.

For people who have one foot in and one foot out of their marriage, it becomes challenging, if not impossible, for them to create partnership. At best, they will find themselves sitting on the fence, waiting to choose, “Am I in or am I out?” “Are we committed or not?” Having all four feet in the relationship is a prerequisite for creating partnership. Many couples that go into marital therapy do so to resolve the fundamental issue of whether they will keep all four feet in their marriage or not.

If having a successful marriage is learning to negotiate effectively, communicate honestly, resolve conflict fairly and work together, doing any of those activities while one or both partners has one foot out of the relationship is very difficult. Imagine two boxers in a heavyweight match where one of the boxers has one foot completely out of the ring. No matter how good the other fighter might be, he does not know whether to move in closer, lay back, appeal to the referee or stop all together. Without each partner having both of their feet firmly in their marriage, working on their effective interaction or “learning to fight fairly” becomes hard to do.

It could be said that, when two people have all four feet in their relationship, the couple “stands together” for their partnership and for their marriage. When you and your partner share a clear commitment to your relationship and your life together and are playing by an agreed upon set of rules, you can see more clearly what’s going on in your current circumstances. Your circumstances may be challenging, at times, but you can assess what is working and not working and take effective action. You both can work together in strengthening your relationship out of your choice to be in the relationship fully. This allows you both to create whatever future you envision, be in action and work out difficulties as they arise.  In other words, you are able approach life as partners.

At the core of a successful marriage and/or partnership is friendship.  Fowers (2000) writes that the best marriages are “partnerships in which spouses are devoted to creating a shared life that is larger than the emotional payoff of the marriage.”  He suggests that one of the important virtues in a partnership marriage is friendship where spouses focus on creating a vision for their life together, appreciate each other for what each person contributes to the relationship and work as a team to build the life they want.

Here are great questions to ask yourself if you want to explore your unique friendship together.  Get together with your partner and simply have a conversation with each other focusing the following questions:

• When did you first know you were friends?
• What is the central focus of your friendship?
• What is the most important to you in your friendship?

The dictionary definition of “friend” is “a person whom one knows, likes and trusts.” In the derivation of the word friend, “frēond,” the Old English word for friend, was the present participle of the verb frēon, “to love” (www.dictionary.com). A friend literally is a person you love.

Now, using the questions below to structure your conversation, share with each other about what you know, like, trust and love about your relationship:

• As a friend, what do you “know “ about your partnership?
• As a friend, what do you “like” or appreciate about your partnership?
• As a friend, what do you “trust” about your partnership?
• As a friend, what do you “love” about your partnership?

Fowers (2000) suggests that there is too much emphasis on happiness and emotional gratification in today’s marriage.  Partnership marriage is really about mutual empowerment, co-creating a life in which the dreams, intentions, visions and goals of each individual and those of the marriage are the priority.  Happiness and satisfaction in your marriage are the by-products of working together as a team, in partnership to build the future together.  That is an expression of true friendship.

Now, share with each other your individual and shared dreams, intentions, visions and goals.

References

Fowers, B. (2000). The Myth of Marital Happiness. San Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass, Inc. Publishers.

According to the Pew Research Center, just over half of the adults in the United States are marrying today (Cohn, et. al., 2011). Fifty years ago, 72% to 80 % of adults got married. It is expected that the current marital rate may drop below 50% in the next few years. Compared to previous generations of Americans, fewer and fewer people are tying the knot. What is interesting, though, is that the divorce rate is declining as well. Although fewer adults are getting married today, those couples that do may be getting more successful at it.

Unlike the young adults of the 1950s and 60s who typically married in their early twenties, couples today are putting off marriage until later. They are choosing instead to co-habitate, live together with their single friends or stay at home with their parents. Some women are choosing single parenthood to marriage. Today, unlike the 1950s, women have greater economic power, greater social independence and higher educational status, all of which has impacted marriage rates (Cherlin, 2009).

That 61% of adults see themselves definitely getting married someday and that another 27% of adults would like to but are unsure they ever will suggest that many young people still see marriage as an important life goal for themselves (Cohn, et. al., 2011). It is a choice that many individuals are making, however, after they have completed their education, have clarity around their career choice or have attained other important life goals. Compared to the 1950s when young adults viewed marriage as the main pathway to adulthood, many people today see marriage as one possible path among many to a fulfilling and happy life. For couples that choose this pathway, marriage can be an expression of an extraordinary commitment to grow as individuals and develop a partnership in co-creating a life of shared values and meaning.

References

Cherlin, A.J. (2009). The Marriage-Go-Round: The state of marriage and family in America today. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Cohn, D., Passel, J., Wang, W., & Livingston, G. (2011). Barely half of U.S. adults are married – A record low. Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center.

Getting married and sharing life with a loving partner remains one of the most important and compelling dreams for young people today. Harrar and DeMaria (2007) found in their survey of attitudes about marriage that 96% of those people who were polled say that they want to get married someday despite the fact that so many marriages in the United States result in divorce each year.  85% of those people who responded said that marriage is fundamentally a partnership in which two people are co-creating their lives together.

Men and women as well as gay and lesbian couples who are able to get married today are looking to co-create a marriage that is mutually satisfying and that allows each partner to not only fulfill their own personal and professional goals, but also the goals of their partnership.** Toward this end, everything in marriage must now be negotiated. Society’s institutions, laws and customs largely determined the rigid roles and responsibilities of the 1950s; today’s roles and responsibilities are being re-thought and determined by the couples themselves (Coontz, 2005). Couples today have to be partners in having their marriage work. Coontz (2005) writes that married couples today “need to be more intentional about their lives and about the reasons and the rituals that help them stay together.”

What many couples want today are the choice and the responsibility to co-create and design their lives together. In today’s marriage, it is important for both spouses to have choice over their career, their lifestyle, their family aspirations and their future. They don’t want their roles and responsibilities to be dictated by societal institutions. Women, like men, want to be free to pursue a career. Many more men, like women, want to participate in raising their children and in the routines of the household. Both individuals in the marriage also want to know that they are equal contributors in their marriage and they have equity or fairness in their roles and responsibilities. In this context of choice and responsibility, couples today must actively engage with each other in how to build, sustain, and deepen their commitments over time (Coontz, 2005).

References

Coontz, S. (2005) Marriage, a history: How love conquered marriage. New York, New York: Penguin Books.

Harrar, S. & DeMaria, R. (2007) The seven stages of marriage: Laughter, intimacy, and passion, today, tomorrow, and forever. Pleasantville, New York: Reader’s Digest.

**Same-sex marriage became legal in the United States on June 26, 2015, when the Supreme Court struck down all state bans on same-sex marriage in all fifty states.  The Supreme Court also required all states to honor out-of-state same-sex marriages.

One of the patterns that couples can get into in their relationship when things are not working is to make each other wrong and then start blaming each other. Ultimately, there is no real responsibility in blaming another person. Blaming your partner is not being responsible for either what happened or for the way that it is. And the impact of blaming and finding fault is usually to trigger defensiveness, disconnection and conflict.

Rather than making yourself, your partner or the circumstances wrong when things aren’t working, it is more effective to step back to look at “what is so” or “”what is going on” between the two of you or in your circumstances. When you both can see what is going on, you are in a better position to examine together what is working and what isn’t.  Haim Ginott, a famous child psychologist, wrote and spoke about effective parenting. He said that, rather than finding fault in your child by saying, “You spilled the milk!” say, “Whoops, the milk spilled.” In the first instance, the parent is blaming the child for the milk spilling; in the second instance, the parent is dealing with the facts of the situation. In that moment, the parent is focused on what happened and is better able to engage the child in learning from the situation by seeing what worked and didn’t work.

In a committed relationship or marriage, a couple who can suspend blame and fault is able to co-create greater peace and harmony in their lives and deal effectively with the difficulties as they come along. An effective orientation to problems as they occur is to suspend judging anything as wrong or finding the person to blame and assess what is not working and how can you address it together. Blame and fault disconnect you as a couple, while being responsible for and accepting what happened allow for you both to feel connected and in partnership. Each of you is better able to see where you need to focus to deal more effectively with the circumstances. This stance allows you to attend to what is important in your relationship and to take the action necessary for the situation to work for both of you, rather than remaining disconnected, angry and unable to work as a team.

Everyone has a valid point of view. Every person’s point of view has a particular ‘rightness’ to it. The difficulty in a relationship often begins when one person holds too tightly onto their point of view as the only ‘right’ point of view. At that point, the person is ‘being right about being right.’  One partner has locked onto to his or her point of view as the right one. “I’m right and any other point of view is wrong.” Or, in one’s relationship, “I am right and you are wrong.”

“I’m right, you’re wrong” creates problems in a relationship. In fact, at the moment this occurs, people report that their experience of relationship is impacted negatively. When one person in the relationship is made to feel wrong because the other person is being ‘right,’ the cost to the experience of relatedness can be great. The costs can include a loss of affinity, a breakdown in communication, an expression of negative emotion, a lack of happiness, a cap on personal expression and a loss of connection. In other words, it is difficult be right about being right and have an experience of love and connection at the same time. At the moment this occurs, there is little understanding, compassion or appreciation for the point of view of the other person. They’re just wrong.

The world of ‘right-wrong’ creates a world of ‘you or me.’ There is little commitment to understanding each other. Understanding in a relationship, however, is the real prize; being right is the ‘booby’ prize. In his book, The Art of Listening, Nichols (1995) writes that the essence of understanding is empathy, which is achieved when we suspend our preoccupation with our own point of view and seek to appreciate the points of view or experiences of other people (Nichols, 1995). We must first acknowledge that the other person has an internal world and we can understand it, validate it and affirm the person’s experience. Such understanding and validation is crucial for sustaining a meaningful connection and a sense of respect and trust in a relationship.

So, what can you do when you see yourself being right and the quality of your relationship appears to be suffering (e.g., there’s loss of connection, self-expression and happiness)? You give up being right about being right. You don’t have to give up your point of view; you just give up having to be right and attached to your point of view. You very well may have a valid point of view, but holding tightly to it gives you no room to hear or understand another valid point of view (i.e., your partner’s). When you give up your attachment to being right, you create room for both points of view to be heard and considered. At that moment, you are powerfully related to each other. Neither of you has to be wrong. The impact of your understanding each other’s points of view will be greater connection and affinity, feelings of love and respect and an enhancement of the quality of the relationship you experience in your marriage.

 Reference

Nichols, M.P. (1995) The lost art of listening: How learning to listen can improve relationships. New York: The Guildford Press.

When you and your spouse have an important choice to make that will have major ramifications for your lives, give yourselves ample time to clarify and align on each specific scenario that you are considering. Using separate pieces of paper or large flip chart paper, write down each of the scenarios you are considering at the top of different sheets of paper. For instance, when buying a new home, your three scenarios might be to buy a colonial home in the suburbs, to buy a Victorian home in the city or to simply stay and redecorate your country house. Draw a line down each page making two columns for considering the “pros” and “cons” of each scenario.

Once you have identified the scenarios of the choice you are making (e.g, where to live), discuss all the “pros” and the “cons” of each scenario. It is important that you allow yourselves to say anything and everything you need to say in this process. Under each scenario, list all the positive aspects (pros) and all the negative aspects (cons) of choosing each scenario. Giving yourselves permission to express your deepest fears, persistent worries and greatest hopes allows you to be honest, truthful and fully self-expressed. When all the pros and cons have been communicated for each scenario, sit back and consider your choice together: “Which possible future are we going to choose?”

Choosing after complete consideration of all the pros and cons of each future scenario is a very powerful act. When you have taken the time to make the choice deliberately and consciously in partnership, it will be easier for you both to accept and deal with any difficulties that arise after you have committed to one particular future. There will be less regret or remorse over life paths not taken. Take some time and share with each other both your enthusiasm and your fears about the new path you have chosen for your lives together.

If it is hard for you to make the choice together, it is advisable that you continue to discuss your hopes, desires and concerns for various scenarios. You can put off making any commitment until some later time after additional thought, consideration and discussion. By giving yourselves more time and by not forcing the choice when you find yourselves not aligned, you may discover other possible life paths you can consider. Important choices and commitments require your time, energy and dedication to arrive at a choice with which you can both be happy and for which you can both be responsible.

Many multinational corporations, non-governmental organizations, foreign-service agencies and educational institutions are increasingly sending their employees to work and live internationally (Miser & Sjodin-Bunse, 2012). Additionally, many employees who choose this path do so with their spouses and partners. Of the thousands of expatriates employed at the 118 international organizations surveyed in the most recent Brookfield Relocation Trends 2011 Survey Report, 68%, or just over two-thirds, were married (Brookfield, 2011).

The degree to which an expatriate couple experiences a sense of well-being on assignment in a foreign country impacts not only each person in the family, but also their friends and colleagues. International organizations have a lot at stake in making sure that their expatriate employees are effective and satisfied and that the company’s return on investment is substantial (Corporate Leadership Council, 2002). The importance of a successful adjustment for an expatriate’s accompanying spouse and their children cannot be ignored: Spousal and family dissatisfaction is a significant factor in a couple’s early return from an international assignment (Brookfield, 2011).

Accepting an international assignment together with one’s spouse is not for the faint of heart. To choose an international assignment takes courage and a willingness to risk. Expatriate couples, though, usually consider such a bold choice to be a wonderful adventure that holds the promise of new and exotic experiences. For many couples, it comes as a great surprise when they find out that their adjustment to international living is a lot more difficult than they ever expected. Couples discover very quickly that, to be successful in moving one’s family to a new country, one key ingredient must be present: Partnership.

Living in a country where the customs and norms are at first unfamiliar provides an expatriate couple with great learning opportunities not only to achieve a cross-cultural understanding of their host country, but also to develop a deeper appreciation for their humanity, no matter what the cultural differences are. Not only can living abroad foster the couple’s increased understanding and acceptance of the people in their new culture, but it also offers them an unparalleled opportunity for personal growth and for building the inner resources necessary to confront the challenges that are unique to being expatriates.

Miser & Miser (2009) have made the argument that couples could greatly benefit by having access to couples coaching, if requested, before, during and after an international assignment. By offering couples coaching to expatriate couples, multinational companies make a sound investment in the success of international assignments. When couples have the tools they need to have the important conversations that are required to be successful on an international assignment, they will be able to meet each new challenge with resilience and build the life they envision for themselves and their family.

References

Brookfield Global Relocation Services (2011). Global relocation trends: 2011 survey report. Toronto, Canada: Brookfield GRS.

Corporate Leadership Council (2002). Expatriate programs: Staff selection process. Arlington, VA: Corporate Executive Board.

Miser, A. & Miser, M. (2009). Couples coaching for expatriate couples: A sound investment for international businesses. In M.C. Moral & G. Abbott (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to International Business Coaching (pp. 203-217). New York, N.Y.: Routledge.

Miser, A. & Sjodin-Bunse, O. (2012) Adventures in International Living: The Imperative of Partnership. Unpublished paper, presented at the 2012 annual conference of Families in Global Transition, Washington, D.C.

A recent survey found that 96% of those people who were polled say that they want to get married someday despite the fact that so many marriages in the United States fail each year (Harrar & DeMaria, 2007). After questioning 1,001 people about their attitudes and beliefs about marriage, 93% of them said that having a happy, healthy marriage is an important personal goal for them. 85% of those surveyed said that marriage is fundamentally a partnership between two people and 75% said that the commitment of marriage is life-long (Harrar & DeMaria, 2007). With such survey results, it is disheartening that around 40%-50% of first marriages and closer to 60% of second marriages end in divorce. Today, in America, there is an enormous gap between what people say they want in a marriage and what they seem to be able to have.

Fowers (2000) writes that the best marriages are partnerships in which couples are committed to a life of shared meaning by being in alignment around a set of virtues and values and by having a vision for how those principles are expressed in their lives. Fowler (2000) writes that marriage can be thought of as a partnership that allows couples to be powerfully connected through a shared purpose. He recommends that couples articulate their shared values, design a common vision for their lives and shift their focus from emotional gratification to the quality of their marriage and their partnership. He suggests this as a radical view of marriage.

Partnership marriage also requires the sharing of all the day-to-day, logistical, how-are-we-going-to-handle-everything-we’ve-got-to-do kinds of demands. Like a great pair of jugglers, throwing bowling pins back and forth or, like two trapeze artists, flying through the air and catching each other 50 feet above the circus ring, their daily activity requires co-ordination and commitment. Partners must sort out who is going to do what and when. Successful partnership requires coordinated action that leads to a shared sense of satisfaction, competence and teamwork.

The experience of partnership may be challenged when communication breaks down and coordinated action falters. When this occurs, a couple who is committed to partnership will re-connect around what is important to them, their vision for their lives and the quality of their relationship.  They will avoid focusing on who is wrong or who is to blame and instead focus on what on what kind of life they are committed to creating together.  This commitment to creating a life of shared meaning is key to co-creating a partnership marriage.

 References

Fowers, B. (2000) The Myth of Marital Happiness. San Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass, Inc. Publishers.

Harrar, S. & DeMaria, R. (2007) The seven stages of marriage: Laughter, intimacy, and passion, today, tomorrow, and forever. Pleasantville, New York: Reader’s Digest:

The Random House Thesaurus, College Edition. (1984) New York: Random House.