Conversations for Partnership in Marriage

In my book, The Partnership Marriage: Creating the Life You Love…Together, I outline six distinct phases of marriage. Many stage models in the marriage literature are strikingly similar. In The Partnership Marriage, I focus on describing the marital commitments and kinds of conversations that are central to each phase of marriage. It is the premise of my book that marriage is fundamentally a network of conversations for creating a fulfilling and enduring partnership.

As your marriage grows and matures, you deepen your commitment to each other and to your life together. Within each phase of marriage, you engage in important conversations upon which the quality of your marriage is built. At each phase in the development of a long-term marital partnership, you invest in a new promise and possibility for your marriage.

Understanding the essential conversations at each phase of marriage can transform how you view your marriage over the long haul and how you relate to each other every day. By learning to successfully engage in important conversations at each phase on that journey, you both grow individually and can nurture the quality of your relationship. The kinds of conversations you are able have at one stage stand on the success you have had at previous stages and also set the foundation for your being able to have increasingly effective conversations in subsequent phases of your marriage.

Here are the phases of a partnership marriage that I discuss in my book:

1. In first phase, the central conversations for the couple are exploring what is important to them, creating a loving connection and clarifying their commitments with each other.
2. In the next phase, the key conversations for the couple are exploring their unexamined ideas about marriage, exploring the workability in their marriage and creating a powerful sense of team.
3. In the third phase, the essential conversations for the couple are being responsible for their own happiness and expanding self-awareness by identifying disempowering patterns of thinking and ways of being that get in the way of effectively communicating and solving problems. Couples at this stage also learn to align with each other’s visions of happiness and success and to declare their commitment to their individual well-being as well as to the quality of their marriage over the long-term.
4. In the fourth phase of a partnership marriage, the central conversations for the couple are learning to be in alignment around what works in their marriage, their values, their vision and their commitments while at the same time balancing all that they are responsible for. They are also learning to be powerful partners in creating a long-term vision for their life together and designing projects to manifest their dreams.
5. In the fifth phase, the important conversations for the couple are mastering the challenges of living in the empty nest period of their lives (if they’ve had children) and re-examining what is important to them. Couples at this stage express the wisdom of their relationship, develop their purpose anew and contribute in ways they have never imagined before.
6. In the last phase of partnership marriage, the key conversations for the couple are taking care of their health and well being, staying connected to family and friends, exploring a new sense of playfulness and talking about the legacy they are leaving to their family and friends.

In the next six newsletters, I will summarize in greater detail the marital commitments and conversations of each of these six phases of a partnership marriage. You and your spouse can learn to be masterful in having many different kinds of conversations that will have a profound impact on what is possible in your lives and on the quality of your marriage.

Stay tuned!

Reference

Miser, A. (2014) The partnership marriage: Creating the life you love…together. Charleston, South Carolina: Create Space Publishing.

Posted in Partnership Marriage