All happy, successful marriages have five things in common:
1): Husband and wife are friends and lovers. This means
there’s mutual trust, and there’s safe emotional space that encourages open and
honest communication. Both partners feel at ease in each other’s presence, and
are free to share what they think – and to share their experiences of living
with the other person.
3): They’re life builders (they enrich their relationship by
sharing meaningful “life-affirming” experiences with each other)
4): They’re King and Queen (meaning that there is an
unshakable alliance between them – and for each, their spouse is their number
one priority.
5): They’re masters of growth and healing. They learn to
embrace their problems, seeing them as opportunities for growth. They create an
environment of acceptance and nurturing for each other's inner pain.
Happily married couples give each other pleasure; they do
not cause each other pain.
But a marriage can quickly go bad when intimacy breaks down
– for all sorts of reasons, not least because today work has invaded our lives:
husbands and their wives work, and now most corporate environments expect you
to take work home… to put more money in other people's pockets.
You can very easily get to this point in a modern marriage:
“I just don't feel
that spark with my husband any more. Who knows what he is feeling because we
never talk much beyond ‘what’s for dinner,’ ‘what happened at preschool,’ or
‘how did it go at work.’ At night when we could be together, we are so fried
that we just go to bed. I read, he goes to sleep, and after a while I turn out
the light. We used to feel so good about each other. Does that feeling come
back? Can you lose a spark forever?”
Yes…You can lose the spark forever – because it’s easy for a
relationship like the one above to go from bad to worse. If they don’t build
buffers, a couple can often be “metal on metal”…
Give this couple above a couple of years and they will have two kids, two cars, two jobs, and one mortgage. They’ll try to do the right things but it’ll be like they’re walking through steps. They’ll squabble over little things: how much time he spent golfing Saturday so she had to watch the kids, her long talks on the phone.
He goes off, his wife goes off. They both probably drink too
much, and the days go by.
Superior communication in a marriage, some of it structured,
is the only way you can go from: “Sometimes things feel good” and “We’re polite
and sort of distant” to “John makes me feel safe, heard, and understood every
day” and; “Things are like when we just got married – we’re so happy!”
It’s not too hard – every year, millions of couples make
positive changes and things get better.
But when this happens in your marriage, then you can have
true intimacy and happiness in your own relationship. This improves everything
else... and you start feeling so good about each other again.
The key to achieving all these things is for both partners
to become supercommunicators, so they can negotiate a modus vivendi – a way of
life for a happy, successful marriage; a way of living together where true
intimacy will be preserved in the relationship.
The goal of this book is to give you the tools, technologies or strategies to become super communicators in your marriage. These “tools” will help whether you’re newly married and looking to buttress your marriage for the long haul, or you’re in a troubled marriage that you’re trying to save.