We Do: Saying Yes to a Relationship of Depth, True Connection, and Enduring Love

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

WHY SHOULD YOU WE DO?

As a couple therapist, I’m constantly seeing partners who have made many mistakes right from the very beginning. I know that if I had seen them before marriage, I could have predicted the troubles they would later share with me. This may sound arrogant and presumptuous, but once you understand what works and what can never work in any love relationship, you come to understand the trajectory of failed marriages. I wish I had known this many years ago when my first marriage ended and before I’d learned the skills and attitude necessary for a healthy, secure-functioning relationship, which I’m living today with my wife, Tracey. I’m writing this book now because I believe in prevention. If I know that when marriages start improperly they also run aground predictably, why not send out a clarion call to those just beginning their commitment journey?

I’ve witnessed many individuals engage in major endeavors without first learning about them. For instance, many people who want to become parents will avoid or refuse to seek counsel, support, or even books and articles that would help prepare them for the road ahead. Many folks who are becoming stepparents jump right in without the benefit of reading literature or getting counseling that can help prepare them for stepparenting. Major life endeavors such as marriage, stepparenting, or parenting require preparation. Perhaps individuals ignore counsel because people, generally speaking, don’t like being told what to do. Many people think that marriage, like child-rearing or stepparenting, should come naturally, as if we’re born with a road map on how to do it well. Because of the business I’m in, I see clearly that very few people have that road map.

What I’m saying here should interest both you and your partner, not just one of you. If only one of you is interested in learning what I have to say to you in this book, that right there may be a huge problem. If ignored, I may see you in my office sooner rather than later.

I don’t want to use a stick when there really is a carrot here. There are huge benefits to partnering, which I will say a lot about throughout this book. My purpose here isn’t to put the fear of God into you but rather to help you save yourself time and grief by not reinventing the wheel. If reading this book can make both of you happier, healthier, more successful, and better people, would that be worth your while?

I intend to give you all that I currently know and understand about love relationships, particularly committed love relationships. You will come to see that learning to become secure-functioning partners is a process of we do and not I do—which is why I want you to read this book together and follow the many exercises and suggestions it lays out. Like marriage, reading this book is a two-person endeavor, not a one-person project. And that, my friends, is the big message in this written work. We do means just that. We either do this together, as a team, or we don’t do this at all.

One more thing. I, along with many of my heroes in the field of relationships—Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt, Marion Solomon, Ellyn Bader and Peter Pearson, John and Julie Gottman, Daniel J. Siegel, and Sue Johnson—agree with the basic principles of secure functioning as laid out in this book.* Though we each have our various approaches, we agree that our culture has shifted too far in the direction of me-ism and away from we-ism.

WHY WE DO?

Before I continue, dear friends, I want to address my fear that you may be misled by the mixed cultural messages about pair-bonding—a fancy term for hooking up. Not only is happiness a result of secure relationships but it’s also a predictor of longevity and physical health. Let me begin by citing a seventy-nine-year (as of this writing) longitudinal study of men and happiness. It began with the Grant Study at Harvard Medical School in 1938 and has since branched out into other studies to become the longest running human study ever.¹ Dr. George Vaillant, who directed the study for more than thirty years, and Dr. Robert Waldinger, who directs the project today, conclude that warmth of relationships throughout life has the greatest positive impact on ‘life satisfaction.’ Vaillant states this more succinctly in his assessment of the study: Happiness is love. Full stop.²

AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION

Still, approximately 42 percent of first marriages end in divorce, and the average length of those marriages is only eight years. Sixty percent of second marriages end in divorce. Seventy-three percent of all third marriages end in divorce. If you want to beat the odds, what’s the best way? Prevention! Prevention by becoming experts on each other, accepting each other as is, becoming excellent co-managers of each other’s nervous system, creating unassailable shared principles of purpose and vision, managing thirds properly, and engaging in a secure-functioning manner that’s collaborative, fair, just, and sensitive.

What I offer in this book is a psychobiological approach to couple work, which simply means that I consider both psychological and biological factors as to how we connect and relate to one another. Psychologically, I focus heavily on family history and on our early experiences of how we bonded with others—our parents and siblings, for example. Biologically, I focus on how our brain, arousal system, and physical health influence our approach to relationships. This includes how you read your partner, as well as how you manage each other on an emotional and energetic level. Research tells us that both our psychology and biology are major factors for predicting long-term relationship success. Luckily most of these factors are malleable and subject to change. Relationships affect and change our biology for better or worse.

There’s a lot of advice out there for couples planning to tie the knot, to move in together, to have a family together—to commit. You can get help from books, talk shows, counselors, workshops, and friends. Unfortunately much of this advice, though helpful at times, lacks psychological depth, comprehensiveness, and a research-based, systematic approach. Clergy who offer premarital counseling often use interviews—or a questionnaire-oriented process—that fail to prepare couples for the long journey ahead. Premarital counseling within a secular context suffers from the same problems. I’m not suggesting you avoid meeting with a member of your clergy to get spiritual advice prior to marrying, but rather that you use this book alongside the spiritual guidance you receive. This book takes a science-and-research-based approach to the matter of human pair-bonding that includes developmental neuroscience, arousal regulation, and attachment theory, all in plainspoken language.

A primary purpose of this book is early prevention, and the preemptive methods discussed throughout are based on my Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy (PACT), developed out of both infant and adult attachment research, marital outcome studies, and developmental neurobiological capacity models (what people are able to do on a social-emotional level). We will spend a few chapters discussing the psychology of relationships, because your past experiences relating with others, especially those from childhood, impact you today. I aim to help you prevent future marital problems rather than sit back and wait to help you solve those problems after they occur. Although therapy can be very valuable down the line, there’s a greater risk that it will come too late when you haven’t addressed core needs, desires, styles of relating, and mutually agreed-upon principles of power and direction. Together, let’s set up your relationship from the get-go so that it has all the elements it needs to succeed.

So I start off this book with a strong message to you: no matter where you stand on marriage or commitment, your relationships and their quality will greatly influence (if not determine) your health and happiness in life. That’s because you need other people for a whole lot of important things, only one of which is companionship. Adult human beings require at least one other adult human being (not a child) to help with self-esteem, self-knowledge, self-discovery, and self-improvement. You need another person for silly things, such as letting you know if you have spinach in your teeth, and more significant things, such as helping you understand what you don’t know (and there are tons of things you don’t know). You need another person to trust. (I bet you thought I would say that you need another person to trust you. That’s true as well, and it’s certainly nice. But the first is, well, first.) You need to love and you need to trust. And that’s where secure-functioning relationships come in. More on that soon.

Although I believe in committed relationships (whether marriage or partnership) and have dedicated my life’s work to helping couples have healthy, sustainable, and enjoyable connections, it’s clear that the state of marriage is currently in flux. Will marriage continue as an institution in the United States? Or in the West in general? Or even in the world? As of this writing, Japanese young people aren’t getting married. They’re not even having sex. Millennials may be changing the rules, though it’s too early to tell. New sexual freedoms are attracting subcultural movements to change the definition of love relationships from monogamy to polyamory. If so, offering a new premarital handbook may be as relevant to some as selling buggy whips. Yet I don’t believe pair-bonding will cease to exist because pair-bonding and mating aren’t culturally determined practices. Rather, they’re biological drives hardwired into the human species. Therefore, this book has enormous relevance (phew) regardless of whether you’re using the m word (marriage) or the c word (commitment). I think it’s safe to say that committed love relationships will never go out of style.

So let me also start with a promise. I wrote this book because I want you to have a successful relationship. My promise is that if you and your prospective partner adopt the principles and skills I describe here, your relationship will be successful—not just for starters but for the long run. This may sound like a grandiose promise, but because this book offers a unique and comprehensive kind of premarital or precommitment counseling, it helps you and your partner look seriously at important questions and considerations as you form your We Do relationship. Trust me, it’s possible!

Sure, executing the plan put forth in this book may seem challenging at first, but that’s because we’re talking about two people here, not just one—two different brains, different needs, different histories, different desires, and different personalities. As a couple therapist, I’m often approached with questions from individuals. I can never properly answer those questions because I need to see both partners in action. There’s no way to understand a couple system without studying both partners’ moment-by-moment interactions. And it’s not the therapist who actually needs to understand the partners. The partners need to understand each other deeply and accurately. That can only be accomplished by a thorough partner-partner investigation, deliberation, and accord. To do that, however, takes knowing what to investigate and deliberate, and how to create agreement without compromise.

WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK

Until We Do, I wrote mostly about the psychobiology of couples and about secure functioning. In my books Wired for Love and Wired for Dating, I delve into attachment styles, brain function, relationship improvement, and appropriate mate identification, which we will touch on here too. But We Do is different. It’s intended to prepare you and your partner for marriage, in all its incarnations, so that you can set your relationship on the right path from the very beginning. It’s my most comprehensive work to date. This book isn’t simply about deciding if your partner is right or wrong for you. Rather, it prepares you and your partner for the long road ahead and provides you with the best possible launch, tools, and attitude for now and for the future.

Current models of premarital guidance offer little in the way of helping partners know each other as well as what they will be fighting about for the next twenty years. These models also do little to frame marriage in terms of secure functioning. In this book I aim to provide you with a vision of partnership that will be complex enough to help you and your partner through even the worst problems known to arise in marriage as well as prepare you for the good to come. Secure functioning means that you and your partner can operate as a two-person psychological system as fully collaborative, cooperative, and mutually protective.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

In the first two chapters, we cover the secrets to a successful marriage. Next, we look at the issues that affect couples most, including the negative brain; the troublesome triad of memory, perception, and communication; and attachment styles. Finally, we will examine how well you know each other, which includes a lengthy discussion on how to identify and deal with any deal breakers that could threaten your relationship. Later, I also include in-depth discussions on sex and how to fight well.

Most self-help books address one person, and that’s sufficient if the only subject of the book is you. However, in two-person psychological systems, both individuals need to understand and accept the same principles or complications will arise. One person is complicated enough but a two-person system is ever more complex.

Most partners won’t read a book together and that’s partly because self-help books for couples are often aimed at one person, and one person can’t get a relationship into its most alive and healthy state. It’s the proverbial sound of one hand clapping. Very hard to hear. If you want to create a successful marriage, you need to be on the same page together, reading with all four eyes, listening with all four ears, and engaging with your two hearts.

For this reason I wrote this book to be read by both partners. If you read it by yourself, and even if you completely buy into the ideas it contains, that will do little good unless your partner does as well. Instead, read it to each other in real time or simply make certain you both read each chapter and then discuss it together. Finally, We Do is for all committed relationships whether for marriage or something else. We Do is about we-ism or we-dom—not me, not I. We’re moving into a new era of interdependence, of we-ness, and away from social idealization of independence and supercilious labeling of codependence. I hope to convince you as to why this is true. I intend to show you how the human condition is universal, how interdependency isn’t merely preferential. Rather, it’s a part of our biology and genetic heritage. As you read you will come to understand that we require at least one other person upon whom we can depend, trust, and be tethered to in order to live longer and healthier.

I want to again urge you to read this book together. You might trade off reading each chapter to each other and then talking about it. Try to be understanding of each other’s thoughts and opinions about the book’s material. It’s possible, even likely, that one of you will react strongly to some ideas. Don’t worry about that. Just let these concepts float a bit in your head. They make more sense as you continue through the book. Each chapter contains concepts, explanations, examples, and exercises. Some of the experiments, exercises, and games presented in the book may be more useful than others, depending upon your particular interests and needs. Be sure to do them together.

For those of you who are science nerds, the ideas presented here aren’t simply personal opinion. They’re grounded in research from infant and adult attachment, neuroscience, developmental psychology, strategic and structural systems theory, object relations theory, affect and arousal regulation theory, marital outcome studies, facial expression and body language models, and well-known human stress models. Rather than get into the weeds with the backend of this material, I’ve spared you the technicalities, for the most part, and focused on what to seek, avoid, and understand in your foray into we-dom. You can read from cover to cover, or you can concentrate on chapters that call out to you.

I present a lot of information to help you get to know each other better. Some of this is deep psychological stuff and comes with a caution: This material should never be used to diagnose yourself or your partner, nor should it be used to demean, dismiss, or attack yourself or your partner. Scientists and researchers study large populations to understand norms and behaviors. While their research gives us a bird’s-eye view, individuals are unique, and their behavior should be interpreted by someone who can bridge the gap between the scientific categorizations presented in this book and the behavior of real individuals. So tread lightly and don’t pigeonhole. Consult with an expert instead.

I like to teach by using case examples. Please keep in mind that these examples are composites of real cases and don’t represent any real individual or couple. I’ve seen so many couples over so many years that it’s impossible to know how made up these people are; therefore any likeness to persons living or dead is purely coincidental or at least unintended.

I’ve also filled the book with many exercises, some of which involve making sustained eye contact while abstaining from talking. While this is important, I realize several people will complain. Holding eye contact with your partner may feel uncomfortable at first, but it’s so important, which you will understand better once you work with the material.

Okay? Now let’s get started on We Do.

*Relationships First, a nonprofit organization committed to cultivating healthy relationship skills in couples, families, communities, and institutions, was founded by Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt. Other founding members include the above, me, and my wife, Tracey Boldemann-Tatkin.

1

THE SECRET TO A SUCCESSFUL MARRIAGE

As I wait at the altar for my radiant bride, Tracey, I ponder our love, the richness of this moment, and the long journey that got me to this point. Tracey, the statuesque blonde I first met in junior high school science class and crushed on (through high school), was about to commit to sharing her life with me. Around the time I was reintroduced to Tracey, I was still a member of the walking wounded. My first marriage had ended in divorce, triggering all kinds of questions and self-doubt. I kept asking myself, Why did this happen to me? Was it me? Was it her? Did we start out with enough in common? Did we grow apart? If we had done something differently, would our marriage have survived? And if so, what? The us question never occurred to me, even though how we functioned as a couple was more important than anything we did or didn’t do as individuals. As Tracey nears the altar and I get ready to say I do for a second time, I know this time it’s different—very different—because this time instead of I do both of us are saying We do.

WE DO IS DIFFERENT FROM I DO

I’ve spent years discovering what makes marriage work, and I will share what I’ve learned with you in this book so your marriage starts on solid ground. After working with couples for decades, I know that when faced with conflict, differing priorities, and communication problems, you need to have the skills to repair or strengthen your