Chapter One: Relationship Laws

You opened this book because you want to believe in relationships, particularly your most intimate one. Yet, you may be discouraged that love and initial infatuation takes a relationship only so far. You know the statistics that most relationships, married or unmarried, break up. You may be looking to this book to increase your odds.We can’t just wind up love and let it go and expect love to last. Relationships require knowledge, skills and healthy habits. Just as the habits of smoking cigarettes and eating ice cream destroy our bodies, while habitual exercise and eating vegetables maintain our health, there are skills we can learn, practice and develop into habits that strengthen our relationships.Why do parents teach their children to say “please” and “thank you” and hope that these respectful words become a part of their instinctive habitual behavior? Because parents know that these words will create a civil constructive tone in all of their children’s relationships for the rest of their lives. These words and others like them become gentle background music, habits that can be part of the social and intimate atmosphere of their children’s world.This book acts as a guide to healthy relationship habits, like listening— no, really listening, communion, accountability, confessional communication, third position conflict resolution, and transforming anger into compassion.I wrote this book not because I am a good husband and can model what I know. I am a mediocre husband at best. This book is much better than I am. My marriage has lasted over twenty-seven years but I have two divorces in my relationship history. Though I have never been great at relationships, I have always searched for ways to improve my part.My search to get better at loving my partner qualifies me to write this book, not my success or lack of success. I have no ambition to be the perfect mate, because then I would become smug and my journey toward becoming a better lover would be over. My many failures, some subtle and some grand, have taught me most of what I write in this book.This book invites you to share this journey into our mistakes. If you read this book, you will become more aware of yours, not less. You will do battle with your pride and your ego. You will become aware of laws that have unconsciously governed your behavior. You will learn skills that will transform angry defensive conflicts into respectful intimate conversations. You will have opportunities to practice these skills and to build them into habits.Though relationship work is difficult, sometimes painful and sometimes ineffective in changing the relationship, it always expands our hearts, moves our souls and builds our characters. It engages us in the battle with our egos and our pride and brings us compassion and humility. These are precious gifts that lead us to the rocking chair as warm loving appreciative elders, rather than crotchety, complaining mean-spirited curmudgeons.This book offers solutions to the relationship puzzle. The solutions apply the laws of relationship physics. Caring so much about another person puts our egos at risk. Love often creates more problems than it solves. Using our passion to build a relationship is not part of our DNA. The Laws of Nature tend to tear relationships apart.I hope to describe the reasons for this and help you use the same principles that tear down relationships as tools to protect and establish healthy relationship habits. This book provides skills that hopefully will become habits. Once established, habits become easier to maintain. Developing these habits will help keep love from becoming a monster and it will help transform dangerous caring into healthy love.Our culture offers little help. Madison Avenue and the movies promote a throw-away value system. Our world moves so quickly now that it is more difficult to establish connections and we have so many choices that we disconnect easily. Even relationship professionals can tend to become cynical about long-term commitments.Consider John: The View that Relationships Don’t WorkI was having lunch with a colleague, John, tall, thin, fifty-plus, longish white hair, a mustache, a marriage and family therapist, teaching counseling at a local college. His ready smile and attentive eyes made clear why his clients would enjoy their therapy hour with him.We had just placed our order when John said, “I don’t counsel couples to stay together anymore. I see my job as helping them transition out of their relationship and get on with their life’s next chapter.“I am so grateful for my divorce. It took two therapists and three years to set me free and I have never looked back. Monogamy doesn’t work. All of us get bored, commitment kills joy, security kills lust, stability kills desire. I would rather slit my wrists than be married. She disappointed me. I disappointed her. To stay married I had to run marathons. She had to drink more wine. Part of it was that I couldn’t or didn’t want to keep my zipper zipped. But most of the problem was that relationships required such hard work. She wanted me to change. I wanted her to change. I always blamed her. She always blamed me. I was stubborn. Even if I could, I wouldn’t do what she asked and she was the same toward me. Then, soon after we divorced, I found myself changing, becoming more like she had wished I could be for her. And I think the divorce changed her too. Oh, the divorce was painful and difficult but not nearly as painful and difficult as staying in the marriage.“Now when I meet someone, I make it clear that I don’t believe in long-term relationships. Hell, I don’t believe in long-term anything. I believe only in now, the present moment. If it feels right, do it. This works for me.“When I’m counseling a couple, I try to help them see how nearly impossible it is for their relationship to make them happy. I help them see that life would be so much simpler without the bonds of a commitment. Once they see that and break free of those entanglements and complications, they feel liberated. I know I do.“Relationships are just too hard. You would have to be crazy to try to make one work, crazy or stupid. They hurt too much.”I agree with much of what John said. I would just add one more word. I would say one has to be crazy, stupid or brave to commit to a relationship. The book is for the brave.Why, you might ask if marriage and commitment hurt so, would anyone want this pain? The answer is that relationships expand our souls and build our character. When we relate to others, we must negotiate our needs with theirs and adapt and change. Success in our relationship negotiations comes as we understand the other’s perspective and their experience of us.We can solve our relationship problems by cutting off the relationship (or divorcing, if our relationship is a marriage). But if we don’t use cut-off strategies to solve our relationship problems and work on solving them instead, we can grow and change. We can become smarter, kinder and more compassionate. This is why we need relationships, because they make us better. It hurts sometimes, but less and less often, as we develop strong loving habits.Yes, relationships require hard work. They require change, growth, apologies and accountability; patience, compassion and more patience and compassion.If you are solving relationship problems, you have a sore tongue from the many times you have bitten it to contain words that don’t need speaking. You have exhausted your ears and brain from listening and your self-esteem suffers because you have had the courage to say once again, “I’m sorry, my fault.” And this becomes easier if listening and being accountable becomes a habit.The Three LawsThis chapter proposes three laws that govern every system, whether a physical/ecological system or a human/emotional system, such as a relationship. The first law has to do with balance, homeostasis or equilibrium. Simply stated: Every system seeks equilibrium or balance.This chapter proposes entropy as the second system’s law: Every system tends to deteriorate over time, if it does not receive new resources, energy and attention. Chaos happens and stress is part of life.The third law is that a body in motion tends to stay in and a body at rest tends to remain at rest. This is the law of momentum and it applies to couples. The momentum of a couple matters. If couples have a positive momentum, then it is easier to maintain this motion in a positive direction. If a couple is moving in a negative direction, they will likely continue moving in that direction.This third law is what makes building positive habits in relationships important. It becomes easier to maintain a constructive habit than it is to begin a habit or change the direction of a relationship.Therefore, building skills that partners use so often that the skills become habits is the goal of this book. Once habits are established, they become easier to maintain.This book will introduce several skills that you can learn, practice and build into habits.Considering the three relationship laws together, relationships tend toward a balance; entropy usually transforms a positive balance into a negative balance; and momentum continues this process toward a more negative balance in relationships unless something is done to protect the positive balance from entropy and keep the momentum of the relationship moving in a positive direction.This is the process that my colleague described in marriages and the reason he does not believe in long-term relationships.Fiery Disintegration: Casey and KenCasey and Ken sat across from me on the couch, a thirty-something couple with two children, both with demanding high profile lives, he an attorney for a major law firm, she, a commercial realtor leasing agent for several large downtown sky scrapers. They are an example of a couple in a balanced negative cycle, worn down by entropy and moving further into hurt, blame and meanness.“I’m exhausted,” Casey began. “We have nothing in common except for our children. Our home mortgage and tuition for the children’s private schools have trapped me in this marriage where it’s all on me. I make more money than he does. He has a good job and he provides our insurance. But he does not help pick up the children, pay the bills, mow the yard, pick up the house and wash dishes, cook meals, do the laundry and put things away. I do all these everyday things with no help from him.”“And where am I?” Ken asked. “I have a job too. My law firm expects me there, to bill fifty hours plus every week.”“And to play golf and to drink with the partners,” she replied.“Why should I come home?” he said. “We have sex once a month, if I’m lucky. You snarl at me the moment I walk in the door.”“I wouldn’t snarl at you if you weren’t always late,” she said. “If you helped me and if I wasn’t so tired, maybe I would be more interested in sex. You only care about you and I have lost respect for you.”“Dr. McMillan, I’m supposed to want to come home to that. I would much rather prepare for a legal deposition.”The story of Ken and Casey is a combative version of entropy at work and a marriage with a negative balance of equal blaming.We assume that Ken and Casey’s young relationship once had a positive balance. We might imagine that Ken complimented and appreciated Casey for many of her attributes and gifts to him and Casey returned the favor. When stress came to their marriage, compliments given went unreturned. However, complaints and criticisms were returned and the balance found its lowest level.The force of balance powers this blame game. As Casey feels abandoned, rejected and disregarded by Ken, to compensate and find balance, she attacks, rejects, and loses respect for him hoping she makes him feel as low as she does. Then as Ken feels torn down, rejected and disrespected, he tears Casey down until he hurts her equally, a typical marriage cycle that continues to drive both parties down to their lowest common denominator. Life’s stresses keep coming, establishing a negative momentum.Cold War Disintegration: Tammy and SteveThe story of Tammy and Steve is the cold war version of creating a cyclical, plunging balance.Tammy said, “We don’t ever fight. We aren’t home together much at the same time. I am chairman of the Cancer Society. Most of the organization’s business is done in meetings after 6:00 P.M. And when the meeting is over, I usually hang around and deal with loose ends. When I get home I find Steve in bed watching ESPN. I hate sports. Usually I’ve already eaten. I buy frozen dinners for Steve or he picks something up on his way home from work. I can’t stand to go to bed with those sports announcers yelling. I usually go to sleep in the guest room. Steve doesn’t seem to care.”“I cared once,” Steve said, “before the birth of our second child, our daughter. The first was a boy. After the birth of our daughter, she announced the end of our sex life. She said that she never liked it. She only did it to get children. Now that she has a girl, she is no longer interested. Once the children entered school, she began her career as a do-good volunteer. She assumes that she can leave the childcare responsibilities to me when I get home from work. Our sixteen-year-old daughter has a car. We see her in the morning when she gets up and in the evening before she goes to bed. Our son attends college. Our children need money from us but not much else. Tammy and I don’t have much in common anymore. Perhaps we never did.”“Oh, we did at one time,” Tammy said. “But when the children came, Steve didn’t get it that our world had changed. He left me with diapers and the feedings. The constant demands of childcare all fell on me. I felt abandoned. And I was so angry at him.”“Did you say anything to Steve about this?” I asked.“No,” Tammy replied. “I just began building walls and avoiding him.”“And that’s what I did too,” Steve said. “And years later the walls are strong, thick and impenetrable.”The story of Tammy and Steve illustrate balance at work, anger begetting anger, silent blame and withdrawal creating a cycle of cold detachment. No, they didn’t fight or argue. Both were resigned to their fate, perhaps for the sake of their children, and the momentum of their anger grew into a detached, polite distance of shared disdain. When people try to be nice and avoid trouble, they put their relationships in the freezer. Without truth there is no passion. When truth is told, conflict will happen. At least conflict is interesting.Casey and Ken and Tammy and Steve are examples of balance, entropy and momentum at work. Life comes at them. Unexpected things happen and they are not prepared. Someone misunderstands, feels hurt by the other, and blames him/her for the hurt. Then, the other defends him/herself by blaming the first one. And Ken won’t come home because Casey is angry and sexually rejecting. Tammy avoids Steve because she feels shut out by him. And Casey is angry and sexually rejecting because Ken won’t come home and help. Steve is watching ESPN in part because Tammy seems disinterested in him. The negative momentum overwhelms them. Right now neither of them know how to do anything other than punch, defend and counterpunch. For Ken and Casey the punches and counterpunches are angry words. Tammy and Steve use withdrawal and indifference as their weapons. If an owner’s manual came with their relationship, it has been lost.We all share a great deal in common with Ken and Casey or Steve and Tammy. We have all been exhausted, felt unappreciated and taken for granted, looked to our mate as a place where we can lay blame, attacked back as we felt attacked, and allowed our relationship to find balance at its lowest point. We need help changing our momentum, learning how to make our relationship run smoothly and raising the balance into positive territory. We need to know how to fight entropy rather than each other.The Balance CompulsionWe humans have a need to create balance and equality in our relationships, whether balance exists or not. I’ve played this game. I expect you have too. Balance works as a constant force, like gravity. Just as water seeks its level, just as the stock market finds a trading range for stocks, couples will find balance. Couples may move toward a very low level, as Ken and Casey’s did or they may move toward a high level and offer honor and respect to both parties. But relationships will be balanced or tend toward balance. We should expect that as soon as we blame or tear down our mates, that the same will be coming back at us in their next breath.My wife served as a judge in many divorces. In cases where one party had clearly lost their moral compass (e.g., affairs, drugs, fraud, psychological and physical abuse) and the other party had remained loyal to the marriage until forced to let go, my wife often heard observers make comments like: “I wonder what her part in this mess was” or “There are always two sides.” Or “He married her. There must be something wrong with her too.”In the 1970s some therapists asked battered woman “What did you do to deserve this?” Michele Bograd pointed out that this use of balance or homeostasis as part of systems theory was harmful to families.Here, the therapist became part of a downward entropy system that seeks balance in pathology and perhaps death. In this case the therapist colluded with the battering husband to help him salvage his ego and pride at the expense of his wife. Such a marriage will find balance, as all systems do— but the balance will be in pathology, not health.Though our relationships may not descent into physical violence, we follow the same cycle downward with words like, “You are just as much to blame as I am” or “I wouldn’t have done that if you hadn’t…” or “You started it.”When accused of a wrong, we often look for a balancing wrong in our partners to reestablish our equal standing in the relationship.An Hawaiian proverb describes the principle of balance this way:When we send our army of angry negative thoughts across the spirit bridge to our opponent, the army returns two-fold back across the spirit bridge to attack us.Said another way, our mates perceive our negative thoughts and feelings (spoken or not) and when they do, our mates defend against them. They use the force of our anger as their motivation to defend. When they defend, our anger returns to attack us along with their defensive anger. Then, we attack again and the cycle continues. All of this is done to try to find a place where we feel level, equal or balanced in our relationship.A 2007 episode of Grey’s Anatomy (an ABC network TV show) offers an example of balance at work. Dr. Grey, the female lead, lay in bed with Dr. Shepherd, the male lead. As she woke one morning, she saw that he had already awakened before the alarm and she asked him why. He resisted telling her but finally admitted her snoring awakened him. She took offense and retaliated by telling him that he had morning breath.Balance at Work: Ben and JaneIn a relationship we do what we can to protect our equal status with our partner. For those of us with poor impulse control and strong opinions, we may often find ourselves out of bounds, apologizing for one mistake or another. This may stand in contrast to our partners who rarely (or never, it may seem to us) apologize to us. In such relationships we have difficulty maintaining a positive view of ourselves. We may search for wrongs and character flaws in our partners in order to have a comparative basis to build our self-worth.Consider Ben and Jane. They came to me to help them work on their marriage.“Ben is so self-absorbed,” Jane said. “I know he has ADD and he takes medication for that. It helps some but he still forgets and does not think. He will fix himself a sandwich and never ask me if I want one too. Or he will go for a walk with the dog and I will ask him to bring in the paper on his way back and he forgets. He will run out of gas in his car because he doesn’t pay attention to his gas gauge. I can’t trust him to pick something up for me at the store on his way home because he will get distracted in the store with a sports magazine and come home with that and not the butter I absolutely needed.”“And this is what I’m married to,” Ben said, “nag, nag, nag, complain, complain. I can’t ever get it right. I do make mistakes. I apologize.”“But what good is an apology,” Jane interrupted, “if nothing changes?”“She never does anything wrong,” Ben replied. “I don’t think I have ever heard her say I’m sorry. Surely she has made a mistake sometime.”In the beginning, they were not balanced in their relationship. Jane thought once they married, Ben would be able to focus better, that she could help him. When they married, Ben didn’t know that his difficulty with attending was such a big deal. At the beginning they both laughed about his forgetfulness. But when the children were born, Jane wanted Ben to grow out of his attention deficit. She was constantly disappointed when he did not.“I try to overlook it,” Jane said, “I try to compensate. I get so tired of being the only family safety net.”Here we have Jane in the “better-than” position. We know what Ben is going to do. He will try to bring her down to his level. This is a lawful social maxim. We see it at work with our children, at clubs or church. When someone places themselves above others, the others will try to bring them down.This need to bring people down to our level exists in all of us. Because it does, our need for balance collaborates, dances and competes with this need in others. We may think of it as a mysterious force like gravity. And it is a force. Though balance may be a transcendent spiritual value (i.e., justice, fairness, equality), it is also a drive that operates like a compulsion. We cannot assume that balance actually exists in our relationships or in any other relationships. We can assume that we reflexively yearn to be at least equal to our partner and when we feel inferior, we search for negative attributes in our partners to regain balance.In Ben and Jane’s story they began their relationship out of balance. Jane was more organized than Ben. Ben believed that her better-than position relative to organization did not matter to their equal value. Jane believed that Ben would become more organized with time. Both were wrong.After years of struggle Ben and Jane became balanced in their relationship at a very low level. Ben remained forgetful but now Jane had become a constant complainer and fault-finder. Both did contribute to the pain of their relationship.Relationships do tend, over time, to become balanced. One partner can bring the other partner down to their level. But balance can also work in a positive direction. Consider these contrasts in balance.Contrasts in BalanceHere are examples of a low-balanced couple and a high-balanced couple.Imagine you, sitting in a restaurant and overhearing the couple’s conversation at a nearby table. The wife says to the husband:“That’s a stupid idea. You can’t leave me, two months pregnant and throwing up all the time, to go on a business trip now. You stupid, thoughtless, self-centered bastard.”The husband replies:“Stupid? You call me stupid? I did not drive my car with the engine light on until the engine burned up $3,000 later. I must make this sale. I don’t want to go. But we have got to have the money that this trip will make to pay to fix the car. And you call me selfish?”As you listen to this conversation you see in your mind this couple’s ship sinking. The wife’s fearful, blaming criticism balanced by the husband who matched her critical words with his own; creates a heavy dark spirit that surrounds and weighs heavy on the two people in this conversation. This couple may not make it.Imagine you overheard the conversation in this form. The wife says to the husband:“I am so proud of you for landing that contract. You worked so hard. And now that I’m two months pregnant we need the money. I’m not sure how I will make it without you when you go on your trip. You have taken such good care of me since I have been so nauseated.”The husband says:“You make me so proud of you. You quit smoking. You take good care of yourself. You read about babies and child development. You are going to be such a great mother. And I’m going to be such a proud father.”In this last example the emotional weight carried by each partner becomes lighter as they praise and honor each other. This respectful spirit surrounds and buoys both people. They used the balance force in a positive way.One simple action or attitude can transform the principle of balance or homeostasis into a force nurture and love.Imagine this scene.“You ate the cake I baked for tonight’s dinner party,” Anne said as she looks into the refrigerator. “You also ate the shrimp I planned to serve for an appetizer. What else did you eat?”“Well I was hungry,” Tom said. “If you had made me some lunch, I wouldn’t have eaten that.”So here you can see balance at work and the system going south. Tom is defending his pride from an accusation. This is as natural as waking up after sleep. It is what all of us are likely to do.But what if Tom had said:“Oh, I did. I was working in the yard and thinking about where I was going to plant the hostas. I was hungry and I didn’t think about the dinner party. My mistake. I will go right now and buy a new cake and pick up some more shrimp at Krogers.”When Tom resisted the instinct to defend and balance with blame, he opened the door to a new kind of balance. Tom took the high road. Anne is now more likely to join him there.She might say:“It’s okay. I should have told you about having the cake and the shrimp for the dinner party. I have some more shrimp in the freezer and you didn’t eat the whole cake. There is enough for dinner. I will serve it in individual pieces on saucers. That will work.”“But you won’t get to present that beautiful whole coconut cake,” Tom answers.“That’s okay,” Anne said. “I appreciate that you understand. I’ll have to do a better job of letting you know when the food in the fridge is not for you.”“And I will ask you before I chow down on something that is left in the refrigerator.”Imagine the difference in the melody of voices in these two conversations. When Tom did not fire back defensively, he helped make the second conversation possible. His words committed him to something beyond the defense of himself. He had the courage to look at his mistake and claim it. That made the difference.This book is about helping you build that strength. This will be the theme of this book, to avoid blaming, avoid the entitlements of innocence, pick up after yourself, clean up messes without looking for fault. If you are capable of this, you will become easier to love.EntropyLife is full of the unexpected and unpredictable and much of life’s unexpected surprises are not positive; the birth of a disabled child, the loss of a job, a sudden new responsibility, sickness, the loss of our cellphone, weather-related events, etc. Entropy wears down relationships. When entropy hits our relationships, we act like rats in a cage without enough food. Instead of attacking our cage, we attack each other.Now let’s consider what we can do to find some third force that will help us raise our balance, fight entropy and create a positive momentum so that our relationship works at its highest level and does not descend into meanness, pathology and even perhaps death.Entropy: Life HappensEnid and Ed married fifteen years ago both at the age to thirty. They put off having children until they were forty. When they had their son Charles, he was diagnosed with Williams syndrome. He is now five and unable to independently care for his basic needs.“We were happily married before Charles came,” Enid said. “I loved tending my gift shop and Ed was doing well working on the line at Nissan. We had time for a date night, some weekends away and vacations.”“Since Charles was born we have not had a date,” Ed said. “I work a second job because we need help with Charles. He requires constant attention. We need the income from Enid’s shop, but she has extra expenses for hiring help there to so she can be the main person to take care of Charles.“I paint houses as my second job and I met this sex addict interior decorator on a job. Enid and I hadn’t had sex in months. I jumped in bed with the decorator nymphomaniac immediately and knew it was a mistake. I told Enid, another mistake.”“I hurt my back lifting Charles,” Enid said. “I began taking Loritab. I got addicted to them. My mother died and she had been a great help at the store, with Charles and a support to me. I withdrew from Ed. I was so depressed. The pain pills made my depression worse.”And so on and so on. The stress of life overwhelmed Enid and Ed. Their lives had no room for mistakes; every mistake was magnified and made worse by the stresses in their lives. Life came at them so hard and fast that there was no space, time or resources available to them to heal or recover.This is entropy at work. Though the stress of our lives may a pale in comparison to Ed and Enid’s, life happens to us too. Sometimes it comes at us fast and furious and we too become lost and overwhelmed. What positive balance we had turns and the momentum increases downward.No one is to blame. We all have our version of workplace demands, disasters (natural, psychic and economic), and wars (of various sorts). We are all aging. Our friends and family dies. We suddenly don’t have money or we suddenly do and are overwhelmed by the choices it creates. Just because no one is to blame, however, does not mean that we do not blame the one we love. In fact, that is what we are most likely to do.When our self-esteem flags and we face failure, we look for someone to blame and that person is most likely to be the person who loves us the most. And entropy never stops. Unexpected change comes and comes. For a couple to dance together in the context of life’s chaos, they must have special skills, constructive habits and faith in one another.Rat experiments demonstrate that when you have two rats in a cage without enough food or under other stresses, they attack each other, rather than the cage that creates the problem.The Third Force, or One Plus One Equals ThreeHave you ever sat in a restaurant and played the game of guessing what people at other tables feel? (It is an impossible game watching one person dining alone, but much easier with couples.)With couples you can see in their faces and body language, the emotional energy or spirit around them. Imagine the young couple holding hands and leaning forward, talking, looking into each other’s eyes; or the older couple who are sitting comfortably in their seats eating, commenting on their food or sitting quietly, calmly enjoying their companionship; or the forty year old couple sitting with few words spoken between them, their sour looks creating a mirror for one another and the coolness that surrounds them. The woman is crying and the man looks so embarrassed that he wants to crawl under the table. I could go on and I expect you could, too.A relationship consists of three entities, the two people plus this alchemical third thing, their spirit. My friend and colleague, Steven Prasinos, makes this point by saying, “In a relationship 1+1=3.” The word “Coupleship” creates the image of the two people floating in a boat. The boat may float low in the water or float high in the water. The lower the spirit, the more emotional weight the relationship carries and the harder for the boat to move through the water. The higher the boat floats, the lighter it sits on the water and the easier the boat moves through the water.Two parts of the couple are obvious. There is the spirit of what one wants and this is often opposed by the spirit of what the other wants. The third entity gives us some other spirit to serve. Serving the third force helps a couple avoid win/lose power struggles. The third force may pull a couple together by offering each of them something to serve that transcends the individual parts of a couple. Our relationships benefit when we nurture this third entity, contribute reasons to help our partners believe in “us” and in the strength of the third entity, our couple’s spirit. One goal of this book is to help couples serve this third entity, to speak and behave in ways that add reasons to have faith in their bond and to lift their level of commitment, communication, and cooperation.We support this third element by committing to nurture it as much as we nurture our partner or even ourselves. This commitment to a spirit rises above the “you” and the “me” in a relationship. When we commit to nurturing this spirit, we discover the essential ingredient to a successful long term bond. The “we” and the “us” is more than the sum of “you” plus “me.” In a strong relationship both parties first ask, “How can I protect our spirit, put our ‘we,’ before what is best for ‘me’ or for ‘you’.” What is best for “us” surprisingly includes what is good for “me” and for “you.” We fight entropy and raise the balance when we serve the third force, our relationship’s spirit.For a relationship to survive entropy, keep its balance and maintain a positive momentum, it requires a mission—a third force that both parties serve. Missions can change. In the beginning it may be to share sexual pleasure, and it may change to nurturing children, and change again to healing the earth. But if there isn’t a shared mission, a reason to be together, the relationship will be difficult to maintain.EXERCISE #1:(a) When was the last time you were together, sitting across from one another holding hands? What created that moment? Write about this in your journal. Share your writings and reflect on this time together.(b) Reflect on other times you were together; silent times, cold times, times when one of you was hurt.(c) Describe your coupleship now. Write about that separately. Then share what you wrote. Talk about your impressions.Always remember if your conversation in an exercise in this book becomes painful or difficult, stop and continue this conversation in front of your therapist.Making the “We Commitment”Though relationships tend toward balance, some relationships fall deeply out of balance.If we imagine the example of two tennis players, there are times when the two tennis players on the court have such different levels of tennis skills that no practice will ever bring a balance to their talents as tennis players. A mature, responsible, able adult woman can marry a charming immature sociopathic man who will never match her capacity for integrity and she will never match his capacity for cruelty and manipulation.Glenda, an A-student, college junior is enamored with Bud, a charming man with a new BMW and a dark past. She enjoys their relationship until one night he tries to convince her to have sex with a man for money and she learns that Bud is a pimp.Emotional illnesses can strike one partner and not the other, creating an imbalance that can never be recalibrated. Gary married Angel when they were twenty-two. After the birth of their third child, Angel had post-partum depression that evolved into paranoid schizophrenia. She spent many years in hospitals. She regressed to the point of having the maturity of a five year old. Ten years after Angel was diagnosed as psychotic, Gary met and fell in love with Sandra. He never divorced Angel. He and Sandra lived together raising Gary’s children and taking care of Angel.An eating disorder or various addictions to sex, alcohol, spending or gambling can strike one partner and the other partner will suddenly become either their victim, their enabler, or their ex-partner. A mosquito with the West Nile Virus bit thirty-five year old Jean. The illness caused a very high intense fever. Some doctors conjectured that the fever injured her brain. This caused insatiable compulsion to consume. Jean was married to Carl, an auto mechanic. Carl suddenly found that his kitchen was empty of food, his credit cards maxed out and Jean weighed 250 lbs. He divorced her.In these situations the couple should consider terminating the relationship.But if the parties attempt to repair their relationship, they must re-enter the relationship and pick up the pieces together. If one of the partners ends an affair and re-enters the marriage still torn with strong feelings for the paramour, the relationship won’t heal if the other partner uses guilt to control and leverage their partner back into the relationship. Guilt always undermines desire. Guilt will not make a strong emotional bond. Consider these imagined conversations between Bob and Carol.Guilt and Commitment: Bob and Carol:“I was wrong. I know,” Bob said, “I can’t blame you. My father died. I began to drink more. I couldn’t face you and the kids. I avoided coming home as much as I could. Alice came along and you found out. I moved out. I want to come back home and I am afraid to at the same time.”Now let’s imagine this to be Carol’s response:“How do you think I feel, my husband with another woman? Do you know how humiliating that feels? I don’t want to divorce you but right now I don’t want you to ever touch me again. You lied, cheated and destroyed any trust that I ever had in you and in our marriage. How could you? And you still have feelings for her, don’t you?”“Yes,” Bob admitted.“And you think you can come home and still keep talking to her and seeing her?”“No.”“You are damn right you can’t. I don’t want to see your face as long as you still love her.”“Are you going to file for divorce?” Bob asked.“No, I don’t believe in divorce. It will never be me who files for divorce.”Is there any common ground on which Bob and Carol can build, given this response? What can Bob do?Yes, he can stop talking to Alice—but can he stop caring about her because Carol demands it? And don’t Carol’s demands make it harder for Bob to stop his addiction to his fantasy infatuation with Alice?Perhaps Bob will suddenly find a backbone and rediscover his integrity and honor, but consider the chances of a now alcoholic, infatuated, addicted Bob suddenly becoming able to tell the truth, and finding a truth to tell that pleases Carol. Won’t he just descend lower into his lying and manipulating without some help?Could Carol help? Now let’s consider how this story would play out if Carol responded this way:“Bob, this affair hurt me, our marriage, you and perhaps someone else. You had many better choices about how to grieve your father than running to alcohol and another woman. You can’t blame me for those poor choices.“The affair has left this marriage in an awful mess, with children and another woman in the middle of it all. You have now developed an addiction. You could lose your job. I have not been the perfect wife. I had our two children, became their mother and stopped thinking about what you needed. I just pretended that nothing had changed when you lost your father and that you didn’t need me. You did need me and I abandoned you.“We have made an awful mess together. I married you and I’m committed to fixing messes like this with you. You have lost your way. When I married you, you were an honest, good man who always told the truth. Now look at you, torn between me, your children, another woman and the bottle. You’re not the man I married. I want him back. I want to help you find that man again.“Bob, you must begin by telling the truth, make me your confidante, rather than Alice. Tell me your private thoughts. She knew everything. I have been kept in the dark. You must share your honest forbidden thoughts with me.”“I’m not sure that you would like that,” Bob answered. “Do you want to hear that I miss Alice, that I still have sexual fantasies about her, that I am afraid of you?”“Hearing those things hurts,” Carol admitted.“Well, those things are part of my truth and I think they will be until I have more strength to fight my addictions,” Bob said. “I will understand that you may hurt too much to hear my truth. And if you cannot, then divorce me because I agree with you I need to stop lying and tell and live the truth.”“I want you to tell me the truth,” Carol said. “I see that when you trust me with your truth, good and bad, that you honor me as your confidante and trusted partner.“I think I can hear your truth, if you keep your promises. Everybody feels, thinks and fantasizes. While I may not like some of yours, I understand that you still have feelings for Alice, but I need to be able to trust that you will not act on them.”“But what if the truth is that I have a powerful urge to be with her?” Bob asked.“I don’t know what I can do about that.”“You can ask me to tell you about these feelings and you can accept them without making me feel guilty,” Bob said.“Yes, I can do that. And maybe I can go talk with Alice,” Carol said with an inquisitive look on her face. “After all you lied to Alice and manipulated her, too. She needs the truth. I would like to talk to her, reassure her that I don’t blame her, suggest that if we both know what you tell the other one, you will have to choose one of us. That way your lies won’t work. I can ask her to join me in the adult world that faces reality and tells the truth. I can say that our connection as two women, two sisters, whom you treated badly and lied to should count for something. While this may not stop your lying, you will have to find another person or persons to lie to.”“I want to fight for you and my marriage. In fact this idea of talking to Alice feels good to me that I can do something to help. I would like to talk with Alice. I’m not sure we can be friends but we could tell each other the truth. I need that. I hope she will talk to me.”Either partner in the Bob/Carol story can contribute their strength and begin the healing process. Bob can develop a spine, leave Alice, re-commit to Carol and take his punishment until Carol gets tired of her resentment and need for revenge and returns Bob’s commitment and love.Or Carol can bring her strength and contain her feelings, put her hurt pride aside and hear and respect Bob’s truth without retaliating.Bob could make some progress using what strength and integrity that he can muster and then Carol can contribute what strength she has to contain her hurt pride. Together, with help, they may be able to heal their marriage.Tall orders for all parties. But what won’t work is one party blaming the other, claiming innocence and waiting until the other partner fixes what was broken. To heal the relationship after such damage, aggrieved parties must rejoin the “we,” claim the mess as theirs, do what they can to help clean things up, and rejoin their shared mission. The people who follow this path choose a “better or for worse relationship” and are not afraid of emotional work.For many couples such ordeals, as the one described above, can serve as an initiation into a deeper, more profound relationship. Often couples become grateful because surviving such a trauma made them stronger and more confident in one another and in the strength of their commitment.Changing the Momentum: Mike and Beth AnnMike, a local doctor, came to see me for our fifth session.“I’m feeling better,” he said. “I was depressed but I’ve done my homework. I used that ritual you gave me from your book Emotion Rituals and I’m doing better.“I’m glad to hear it,” I said, unsure about the sudden flight into mental well-being.“I haven’t told my wife what I’m doing,” he said. “She noticed me in a better mood. We were playing bridge with another couple, usually an occasion for us to bicker. One of us finds fault with the other. After she lays her cards down on the table as the dummy, I usually begin my assault. I might use the word “dummy” to refer to her opening bid, when in bridge “dummy” is the word used to identify the player who lays down their hand for all players to see as the tricks are played out.“After whatever snide remark I might make, she comes back with her version of a nasty comment about me.“On that night, I didn’t play that game. I was quiet. I watched as the other couple danced their version of this negative, angry, sarcastic dance. It seemed so natural. They both seemed to take no offense. It was what, before this therapy, I would have called “teasing” or “mean words meant in fun” or “just play.” But in my new emotional space, it seemed different. I usually played my version of this game with my wife. I didn’t want to this night. My wife fired her shot to invite me to join the communal bickering. I don’t remember which of my many faults she nominated for me to defend. Whatever it was, I didn’t respond.“I found myself detached, observing, playing cards but not joining into the defense of men and me, or the attack of women and my wife. It was strange. My wife began to slow down her attacks. The other couple continued with a vengeance. Probably this spirit of vengeance was what my wife and I used to feel and express. From this new observing position, the game seemed mean, silly and unnecessary.“I didn’t feel any closer to my wife but I didn’t go home as angry and closed down as I have felt after an evening of cards with our friends. And she said that I was different that night and she enjoyed me.”“I wonder,” I asked, “What it would be like if you played the game with compliments and affirmations for your wife and not criticisms?”“I really don’t have much good to say about the insensitive bitch,” he said. “She is fat. Her hair is thinning. Her breasts fall to her navel. She is lazy, insipid and boring. All she does is whine.”“So are you saying,” I began, “that this woman to whom you have been married for thirty years, who bore your children, tended them for you, accompanied you to boring events with your extended family, cooked and created a home for you has nothing about her that is good that you can notice and acknowledge? If that is true, then I don’t think she is the one at fault.”“I see your point. Surely there are good things about her.”“Once you are joined in this battle of critical barbs, you see her as against you. As you defend yourself against her, you gather facts that you can use to devalue her. Once you begin this, your perception becomes distorted. You thrust every bit of information you come across about your wife into evidence against her, your adversary and eventually there is nothing about her that you see as good.“It is not your wife to whom you are married. You are not married even to a person. You are married to a negative downward critical process of tearing down your opponent. How unfortunate for this poor woman, who is your wife, that she has become the target of your attacks. And it is just as unfortunate for you that you have become the target of her attacks.”“Oh my God,” he said. “You are right. What has happened to my marriage? It is not her fault. It is not my fault. We are an old married couple. I thought about leaving and starting with someone else but I can’t afford a divorce and I’ve lost my libido. I would disappoint.“But now, I see that if I did start over with someone else, in time I would end up in this same place. Because this is what marriage is.”“No,” I said. “This is what marriage is without an owner’s manual. It is what happens in a car when the power steering leaks and you don’t fix it. It is what happens when you don’t change the oil. Marriages need regular maintenance too.“Human brains are organized to focus on things that go wrong, to look for fault and to place blame away from ourselves onto someone else.“Our brains are not organized to notice the good, to praise, acknowledge, appreciate, apologize, forgive, listen, really listen, to share and offer compassion before blame—essential things to the maintenance of a relationship. We have to learn these unnatural skills and practice them if we want our relationship to avoid becoming an old wreck.”“So there is something we can do about this?” Mike asked.“Yes,” I answered, “but you can do something if you want with or without her help. You can look for the good in your wife, mention it to her, acknowledge that this good part of her matters to you and appreciate her for it. You can change the music of your voice from sarcastic and cynical to praising and appreciating.“Just as you have noticed that spending time in a compassionate space rather than an angry place feels better to you, this affirmative appreciation will feel better too. That is the best reason to raise your eyes from what’s wrong, poor-me, blaming place into the what’s right, appreciation, praising place. You don’t bring yourself to this place to manipulate your wife into appreciating you. That may eventually happen, but if that’s your motivation, you will be disappointed and angry at her if it doesn’t. And you will be drawn back to a responding in kind, tit-for-tat negativity.”“So a relationship is like a car,” Mike said in a contemplative voice. “I haven’t had a clue what it needed. Our marriage didn’t come with an owner’s manual and I am certainly not trained as a mechanic. I don’t have the tools and I’m not sure I can stay in this positive place you are talking about without help.”Mike did get help. His marriage needed tending. We continued working on giving him the tools he needed to control his anger. Then he invited his wife to join in this work. She came and they began raising their balance together, fighting entropy and building habits that carried their positive momentum.Mike learned that our naturally negative brains can become entropy’s best tool. When our brains look for what’s wrong, we find it and we join entropy in tearing down our partner and our relationship. We forget about the good things in our partners and in our lives.When we turn our minds away from our negative tendencies and discover, notice and acknowledge what is right and good about our partner and our life, we fight entropy, raise our balance and change our momentum.EXERCISE #2:Think about your partner. List the good things about him/her that you appreciate. Try saying things to your partner several times this week. See if you like yourself better and enjoy the praising role. Reflect on how you feel as you do this. Write about your feelings.Relationships Can Help Us Grow UpIf we bring even a small amount of maturity to the relationship, whenever we act from this mature self, we begin to challenge our own character flaws and grow our soul.As we play together in love, we grow and move up a notch in our level of maturity. Then we challenge our partner to move up and join us. Unfortunately, we sometimes become smug. We think we know or we think we have arrived. That’s when our partner passes us and goes up a notch without us. They challenge us to face ourselves, feel the shame that is a natural part of hurting someone we love, grow with that shame and climb the ladder to join them. The great thing about life and relationships is that we can move up this ladder as long as we live. Soulmates do not agree with us, they challenge us.Earlier, I noted the importance of each partner bringing maturity and the ability to cooperate and co-create to the relationship. And I noted that few of us come to relationships psychologically mature. All of us bring our character flaws to our friendships.What then comes from a relationship with two immature partners? The answer is that our relationship struggles challenge us to mature.Remember our image of visualizing the spirit of couples in a restaurant. The poet John O’Donohue goes evens further and says he believes our soul exists outside our skin. The soul encompasses us rather than residing inside of us. He believes also that we all have a way to almost instantly sense this soul energy of another person. We can tell a frightened, anxious soul from a soul of courage and hope, and a young, impatient soul from an old soul. Can you imagine how the privilege to love another and serve a relationship might change our soul? Can you imagine what happens to that soul when it loves?Some of us fear that our identity might be lost in a committed relationship. Considering what love, dedication and commitment can do to build our character, it seems reasonable to believe that a relationship can expand our personal identity rather than confine it. Loving another and serving a relationship provides a gift that gives to us as much as it gives to our partner.Good couples’ therapists shine the light on the strengths in each partner—and especially on the strengths they have as a team, helping them look for what’s right instead of what’s wrong. That does not mean, however, that we avoid the dark side of the people who consult us. In order to grow, all of us must look honestly at ourselves in the mirror. For a couple this is especially important.If good therapists help partners avoid pointing fingers and blaming the other, what are we to do with the darkness in the partners that we confront?As we discourage finger pointing, we encourage confessions. We want to challenge partners to take on their own emotional weight, avoid claiming innocence and keep finding things in themselves they can improve. Each person is responsible for their own darkness.As therapists, we should keep one partner from attacking the other. At the same time, we should encourage partners to point to their partner’s strength with compliments, acknowledgements and expressions of gratitude. Therapists can challenge couples to make it a habit to confess, compliment and acknowledge. This means helping couples focus on their partners’ best selves as they contain the darkness of their own worst selves. This requires abandoning the search for equality or dominance or status and instead focusing on how to become a better partner.Of course, we hope the power we give away to those we love is returned in equal measure, and when one partner consistently absorbs the love and adoration of the other, without offering the same in return, the relationship will eventually become dysfunctional. It may find balance, but the balance will have a painful, ugly foundation; or balance will be gained as its momentum leads toward the end of the relationship.The Past: Vern and ShirleyHarville Hendrix proposes a familiar theory and a therapy for couples to find a path to healthy balance. He terms this approach “Imago.” This therapy focuses on one’s past to help explain the problems we have in our present relationships. Though there is some virtue in this, sometimes it may do more harm than good, if not used carefully. The story of Vern and Shirley makes this point.“I want to know why she keeps blaming me for things I don’t do,” Vern said. “I think it comes from how her father treated her and then there’s her ex-husband who assumed that Shirley was married but that he wasn’t. He didn’t even wear a wedding ring when he traveled. Shirley was none the wiser until she got a sexually transmitted disease. She divorced him and now she’s paranoid. She accuses me of seeing other women and I don’t. She accuses me of not caring about her, when I do. She thinks she is fat and ugly and she isn’t.”“So what you are saying is that she is crazy,” I said.“Well yes,” he admitted, “but I thought you might use a more professional term like paranoid or insecure or neurotic.”“And if I agree with you that she’s crazy, will that help you?” I asked.“Well yes,” he said then he contradicted himself and said, “Well no, it will help Shirley and that will help our marriage and that will help me.”“Shirley, I agree with Vern,” I said. “You are crazy. And if it would help for me to use other words, I will. You are paranoid, anxious and neurotic. Does that help you, Shirley?”“No,” Shirley said. “But it helps Vern make me the problem and avoid the blame. I think Vern…”“Is crazy?” I asked interrupting her.“Well, yes.”“Before we get into Vern being crazy,” I said. “I want to get back to you, Vern, about how knowing Shirley is crazy will help us here.”Vern quickly answered, “Can’t you take Shirley back into her past and help her see that the reason she is so insecure has to do with her father and her ex-husband and not with me? I’m not the bad guy here. I love her. I want her to realize that and I thought you could help her.”“Okay,” I said. “Let’s see if this helps you, Shirley. You are crazy. The reasons come as much or more from your past as they do from your present. Vern is not to blame for most of your fears. Is that helpful?”“No,” Shirley said. “I know this. I told Vern this. He got all his information that he uses to attack from me. I know I need help. But Vern is crazy too.”“Oh I know that,” I said, “I am crazy, too. All of us have character flaws. We will be working on them for a lifetime.”“But Vern doesn’t think he does,” Shirley said, “Vern thinks he’s perfect. And all our problems are because I’m crazy because of my father or my ex-husband. But ask him why he hasn’t had sex with me in three weeks. I’ll tell you. It’s because I told his mother we weren’t going to her home for Christmas, that and he lost $100,000 in the stock market. His sex drive seems to fluctuate with the Dow Jones. When things don’t go well for him, he withdraws from me, has little to say, won’t talk about what’s bothering him. And he’s says I’m crazy.”“Vern,” I said, “when you and Shirley came to see me, you told me that you were Christians and you wanted to be sure that I was too. You were more comfortable with me as a therapist if I was a Christian. I told you I was. Remember?”“Yes,” Vern said.“Well I’m not sure the faith of a therapist matters as to what kind of therapist they are. But as a Christian, isn’t it part of your faith that you confess before God in prayer that you know you mess up and that you often don’t do the right thing because something inside isn’t right? The word in church is “sinner” and most churches have a time in each service where sins are confessed. Don’t you admit that you have problems and that you are not perfect?”“Not to me he doesn’t,” Shirley interjected. “He’s got an ex wife and a mother and father. He has a past that makes him the way he is.”“Shirley, let me talk to Vern,” I said.“Yeah,” Vern acknowledged. “I’m a sinner. I’m not perfect. I’m not sure it’s my past though. I’ve always been the way I am. If I was hurt, I got quiet. I was that way when I was two years old. My mother will tell you. When I skinned my knee, I didn’t cry much. And I didn’t want someone to make a fuss over me. I tolerated my mother putting ointment and a band-aid on my scrapped knee and I went to my room.”“So will it help you to have a label for your craziness?” I asked.“Conflict avoidant,” Shirley shouted. “Passive aggressive.”“Borderline histrionic,” Vern replied under his breath.“So you’ve done some research, I see,” I said. “Do any of these words help either of you?”“No,” they both said at once.“And does it matter why you are crazy?”“Not really,” Shirley said.“I guess not,” Vern agreed.“I want to be real clear here,” I said, “I’m a wounded healer. I have character flaws that affect my marriage. And I will work on them for a lifetime, just like you.”“So what do we do, Doctor?” Vern asked. “It sounds like you are saying we are beyond help.”“No, I’m not saying that,” I said. “But name calling and blaming don’t help. Too often, we use the past as a weapon. I don’t want to do that here. You both came here because you both contribute to the problems of the relationship. Can we agree on that?”“Yes,” they said.“So what can you do for us?” Shirley said.“I can teach you some relationship skills,” I said. “Just like a dance teacher can teach you new dance steps or a music teacher can teach you new chords or a golf instructor can teach you how to grip a golf club. There are things that, if you knew to do them, could make a great difference in your skills to love and care for each other. And if you practice these skills, they will become habits, making love easier.”“What good will these skills do for us if we are still crazy?” Vern asked.“They will keep your character flaws out of your way,” I said. “But the skills won’t take away your personality problems. They will help some with your sanity. They help us have better relationships and that helps. They will stop the blaming and name calling and that will help. The skills will not change who we are. They will just change how we behave toward each other. Just like in dancing, music or golf, to improve at these things, you require instruction and practice, lots of practice. With practice, we all get better.”Couples therapy could become a venue to prosecute your partner for their past. That doesn’t mean that an examination of the past cannot help us in our relationships. It can. But it is safer to do this work individually. If the couple’s therapy environment is safe, then the past can be explored there, but couples’ therapists need to explore the past with care.Teaching relationship skills to couples is always a productive use of the couple’s therapy forum. Couples leave the session with things each person can practice. The skills generalize beyond the couple’s relationship into work, parenting and friendships.Though the past can become a weapon used by our partner against us, it is very useful in teaching us who we are and how we can become a responsible partner. Among the lessons we can learn from our past is that we have personal deficits. We need alliances with people who are different from us. This awareness is a seed of maturity. This seed can grow and flourish in a relationship.EXERCISE #3:Have you had trouble leaving the past in the past? What would help you let the past go?Chapter Three will have some tools to help you do this.Fighting Entropy and Changing the Momentum of BalanceBalance as a force in relationships often operates in a downward spiral. One partner blames, the other partner defends with blame and down they go. If one of the partners becomes internally imbalanced and feels “less than,” the relationship will begin moving toward a negative balance. Or the relationship will lose its balance if either party, for whatever reason, focuses internally on their own personal poor-me story without recognizing the other partner has reasons to feel hurt as well.”Balance can work as a positive force in relationships when one or both parties are focused on serving the relationship’s spirit—that third part. When we focus on serving and protecting the relationship’s spirit rather than ourselves, it becomes easier for us to see past our partner’s angry, hurt, blaming worst self, to the good, well-intended person we know them to be. With one or both parties internally balanced, it becomes easier to resist the temptation to respond in kind to negative attacks. Said another way “if you want peace, be peace.”Our competitive quest for equality or balance becomes an unfortunate detour. We all have character flaws and that is where we need to work. We can never change another person. When we focus on nurturing our relationship, balance works as a force to bring both partners into their best selves and the relationship’s positive momentum is maintained.If both partners are internally balanced and externally focused on doing right by their relationship, then balance will only rise and their spirit will only grow stronger. The purpose of this book is to aid in the positive use of balance in relationships. Kindness begets kindness.I attended a wedding presided over by Father O’Farrell, a Baltimore priest. He had an interesting version of the Adam and Eve story. In his version a bite from the apple taught Adam and Eve how to avoid responsibility, blame the other and keep score to protect their individual appearance of innocence.God came to them and said, “Look, if you want to be the innocent one and keep score, you will have to leave the Garden of Eden. But if you can agree to forget about blaming, score-keeping and innocence, then you can stay.”Of course, Adam and Eve could not stop themselves from looking for balance and keeping score. Father O’Farrell’s point was we cannot always stop either. But when we can stop the tit-for-tat game, when we can place responsibility onto ourselves rather than push it off onto the other, when we stop protecting our egos, we catch glimpses of paradise. We begin to use the balance principle in another way. We honor, praise and nurture without hoping to get back something in return. And when we give up expecting a tit for our tat, we often get so much more. Giving up our expectation of getting in return for our gifts requires courage and self-confidence. It requires a shift of focus away from ourselves and away from the other to a third force. Few of us have the wisdom to attempt this and fewer of us know how. This book honors those who do make such an attempt and it provides them helpful tools in their journey together.Perhaps this Nancy cartoon from the Nashville Tennessean, January 30, 2010, makes the point better than my words.Practice RequiredThe chapters that follow are the practical parts. Therapists will need patience. Clients will need a strong desire and commitment to get better. Couples must practice what they are learning. It will take lots of practice. However, like dancing, if couples have a passion for learning to love their partners and they practice, these steps will become second nature, a love habit.Often couples come to therapy after years of marriage in a low balance with a negative momentum, beaten down by entropy. They remember the first stage when they were “crazy” about each other. They wonder what has happened to their partner, who now seems to be crazy but not about them. They feel angry and discouraged and yearn for the feelings they had when they first met.Most of us are aware that the passions of the infatuation stage are not going to be part of the future. But a stronger, more realistic bond could grow in these relationships. They have the parts and the ingredients. They simply need the skills and the recipes to help them find healthy ways to feed one another and their relationships and make loving a habit.Please excuse my multiple metaphors—but imagine a couple as a warm ball of plastic passing through a structured process then finding themselves coming out at the other end as a useful part of a car or a constructive team working on their shared mission.Or imagine a couple trying to change a tire with only their hands and teeth. How much easier does changing the tire become when they are handed a lug wrench and a jack?This book will give you structures that can discipline both parties into constructive, adaptive, cooperative problem solving. It will give you tools that will make relationship repairs much easier.Once a couple finds these tools and practices these skills, they will create a shared history of accomplishments that will make them a proud team with a positive momentum. That sense of shared accomplishment and competence will have a basis in reality that they can rely on and believe in. This feeling and these habits, while not as exciting as the feelings of infatuation, are healthier and longer lasting.The purpose of this book is to teach us how to use the balance principle, to learn how to notice and fight entropy, and to develop habits that make it easy to create a positive momentum. Abstract ideas like “what goes around comes around,” “if you want peace, be peace,” and “kindness begets kindness” provide ways of thinking but they do not provide ways of acting. Chapter Two will help couples discover and acknowledge dysfunctional traps that can create a negative momentum. The third chapter begins the practical skill building part of the book. There we will resume our fight against entropy, our quest to raise the balance in our relationships, and build positive lifelong loving habits. The following chapters begin the teaching of what to do to put relationships in a positive balanced frame and keep them there. Once these habits are established, maintaining a loving relationship will become easier.