10 Principles for Making Marriage Work
Physical Safety
If there is any ongoing threat of physical violence in your intimate relationship, you will be hard-pressed to step into the kind of collaborative conflict that is necessary to help the relationship grow and mature. As an adult, it’s your responsibility to do everything you can to ensure your physical safety, especially if you are threatened by an intimate partner.
Emotional Safety
Children are not capable of regulating their own emotions so they need adults to help them feel emotionally safe. It’s tempting to continue this pattern in adulthood, but doing so prevents you from enjoying intimate relationships. As adults, we’re capable of ensuring.
Surviving Childhood
Your brain is optimized for surviving childhood and falling in love, not for thriving in a committed adult relationship. What we’re doing here is rewiring the brain to do well in adult relationships.
The 80/20 rule
80% of your relationship distress is an emotional flashback from childhood. The rest is a response to what’s happening right now.
The 50/50 rule
You and your partner have similar levels of emotional maturity, and you grow or stagnate as a couple. It’s incredibly rare to see a relationship where one person is significantly more mature than the other.
The Speed Bump Principle
You are not responsible for your partner’s unwanted behavior, but you are responsible for your own contribution to that behavior. You play a role in constructing the environment your partner lives in, and that environment affects how they behave. This is called the speed bump principle because you can’t control how fast your partner drives around your neighborhood, but you could ask the city to install a speed bump there. I can change the way I behave in a way that creates a “speed bump,” making it less convenient for my partner to keep doing the thing I don’t want them to do. There is a big difference between having a real speed bump in the road, and having a partner who says “slow down” all the time.
Resentful Accommodation
You gradually build up resentment when you accommodate your parter against your better judgment. There is a significant difference between accommodating out of love and kindness, and accommodating from a sense of requirement or pressure.
The Third Way
Most of us never saw our parents engage in calm, collaborative conflict where they stood up to each other in a kind way. What we saw instead was long periods of avoidance punctuated by angry outbursts and arguments. The third way it so stand up for what you want in a calm, collaborative way. It’s the key to creating lasting love.
The Progression of Anger
Anger is the second act in a three-act play. First, you feel unsafe, insecure, or threatened. Second, you get angry, Third, you act on your anger, turning it into aggression. Anger is a feeling, and aggression is action taken in anger. For most of us, the progression happens so fast that we become aggressive as soon as we feel threatened. Relationships are much better when we stop the progression at the first or second stage. Aggressive behavior always harms intimate relationships.
Reveal, don’t convince
Tell your partner what you see and what you want. Here are some examples:
You spoke to me unkindly last night
I don’t believe you
I want you to spend more time with me
I want you to care about my wellbeing
I think you prioritize your work over our relationship
The key is to state your perception and preference clearly, without trying to convince your partner that you’re right. They will probably disagree, and that’s ok — the point of relationship communication is to reveal, not to convince.
