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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Having your Marriage be a Top Priority

Couples live in a world today that is individualistic, consumer-oriented, media-saturated and work-oriented which often leaves them with less spark, less connection, less intimacy and less focus on the quality of their marriage or committed relationship. Here are some of what competes for a couple’s attention: • Couples are too busy to put a priority […]

Being Aware of Unwitting Perspectives

In a committed relationship, couples unwittingly adopt joint perspectives or ways of seeing their world together that have great impact on the quality of their relationship. Some couples view their lives together through a joint perspective that they are sharing an exciting adventure. There are couples that view their relationship as hard work requiring much […]

100% – 100% Responsibility

Many couples early in their relationship set up a model of responsibility that could be called 50% – 50%. If each person in the partnership does their 50%, then all 100% of what needs to be done gets accomplished and presumably both partners will be happy and satisfied. The 50% – 50% model is an […]