The Art of Negotiating Household Tasks

The art of negotiating household chores starts with a commitment to teamwork, workability and effectiveness. You and your partner simply need a piece of paper, a pen, and time set aside to talk to each other. If you follow the following guidelines for negotiating household activities, you may find yourselves with a lot more time, […]

Making Time for Conversation

Life is very busy today. Martha and I often feel that we have too much on our plates and want to be less stressed and have more time for ourselves. Our businesses, our family, our friends, our garden, our health and our home take up sizable chunks of our attention. We feel as though we […]

Align on Your Intentions

This past New Year’s Eve, I declared that 2016 is going to be a great year! That sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? Then I started to wonder: What was going to make 2016 a great year? Was it just going to happen because I said so? How would I know? I recently picked up a book […]

Phase 4: You, Me and Us

For many couples, life events during the first five to nine years of their marriage can challenge their resolve to support each other’s happiness and success and that of their relationship. Whether a couple faces financial difficulties, extra-marital issues or communication breakdowns, each person in the relationship must call on their inner resources to renew […]

Phase 2: We’re Committed!

Phase 2 of a partnership marriage begins when the two of you commit to creating a future together. You take the plunge together, get engaged and commit to getting married. Phase 2 often extends into the first few years of marriage. As you look forward to your wedding day, you must learn to balance your […]

Partnership Education

“….though modern Marriage is a tremendous laboratory, its members are often utterly without preparation for the partnership function. How much agony and remorse and failure could have been avoided if there had been at least some rudimentary learning before they entered the partnership….And that statement is equally valid for all relationships.” Leo Buscaglia from Loving […]

By the Year 2017…

In the summer of 2005, Martha and I were living in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, with two of our three children, and starting to think about coming back home to the United States. Martha’s four-year expatriate contract with an international bank would be coming to an end in a year’s time, our eldest daughter was getting […]

Putting Us First

At the end of August, Martha and I spent a wonderful and much needed vacation for a week and a half on Squam Lake in Holderness, New Hampshire. We swam, hiked, put together puzzles and read our books. We didn’t think about work or other responsibilities for a minute. We relaxed and replenished ourselves. We […]

Building a Future Together

Sometime after our third child was born in 1991, Martha and I sat down and created 50-year vision of our future. We imagined our three children going to college and each of them pursing their interests and work that they love. We envisioned traveling overseas and even talked about living in a foreign country at […]

Creating an Intentional Marriage

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.”  Doherty (2001) suggests that there are two kinds of marital commitment: The tentative commitment and the permanent commitment.  When couples make a tentative commitment, they are committed to […]