Challenging Assumptions in your Marriage

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 […]

Keeping All Four Feet “in the Ring”

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 […]

Exploring Your Unique Friendship

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 […]

Recent Trends in Marriage Today

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 […]

Co-creating A Life Together

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 […]

Suspending Blame and Fault

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 […]

Giving Up Having to be Right

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 […]

Making an Important Life Choice

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 […]

Partnership in International Living

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 […]

A Life of Shared Meaning

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 […]