"Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mira Kirshenbaum,)

Table of Contents

PLUME

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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Published by Plume, an imprint of Dutton Signet, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.

Previously published in a Dutton edition.

First Plume Printing, July, 1997

Copyright © Mira Kirshenbaum, 1996

All rights reserved

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

The Library of Congress has catalogued the Dutton edition as follows: Kirshenbaum, Mira.

Too good to leave, too bad to stay : a step-by-step guide to help you decide whether to stay in or get out of your relationship / Mira Kirshenbaum.

p. cm.

Includes index.

eISBN : 978-1-101-12832-9

1. Man-woman relationships. 2. Relationship addiction.

I. Title.

HQ801.K57 1996

646.7’8—dc20 95-53003

CIP

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES. FOR INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION, PENGUIN BOOKS USA INC., 375 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10014.

To my most important teachers: my patients. You have shared your lives with me over the years and I’m eternally grateful for everything I’ve learned from you; for your dedication to health; for how hard you work to find happiness; for your willingness to learn lessons I know are tough; for your trust.

To my mother. I know how much you’ve accomplished, and I know how hard you’ve struggled. I wish I could have helped you when you needed it most, but I was too young. Thank you for inspiring me to believe I could help others. Thank you for inspiring in me the desire to learn the truth about love.

And to my daughters. You’re the best, and you deserve a world of love.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This is a book about truth and love. It would not have been possible without the work of Dr. Charles Foster. Every word here is the product of a fifty/fifty collaboration between us. His research, insights, and ideas fill this book. We are full partners in everything. Because of him, in every way this search for the truth has been a labor of love.

I’m profoundly grateful to all the individuals whose lives and stories went into the research for Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay. They were amazingly open and helpful, and what we’ve learned from them constitutes the bricks out of which this book is built.

There are many people I must mention if I’m to thank them properly. The debt I owe each of them makes me wish I could do more, in this small space, than list their names. These people are, one way or another, colleagues, teachers, heroes, friends who’ve given something specific to me, personally or professionally, through the years here at Chestnut Hill and elsewhere. They may not even realize the value of what they’ve done for me, but it played some role in making these pages possible. To all of them I say thank you: Louise Bates Ames, Shaye Areheart, Lisa Bankoff, Susan Bickelhaupt, Ruth Bork, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Alexia Dorszynski, Barry Dym, Dorothy Firman, Roger Fisher, Betty Friedan, Diana Huss Green, Jennifer Hack, Jay Haley, Jules Henry, Kathleen Huntington, Allan Kaprow, Alfred Kazin, Michael Kirshenbaum, Mary Jo Kochakian, Rabbi Harold Kushner, Eda LeShan, Richard Marek, Amy Mintzer, Salvador Minuchin, Nancy Moscatillo, Eli Newberger, Maury Povich, Cynthia Roe, Izzy Rudski, Ann Ruethling, Kim Schaffer, Gitta Sereny, Myron Sharaf, Judith Sills, Ivy Fischer Stone, Richard Stuart, Walter Watson, Paul Watzlawick, Rosa Wexler, Robert White, Elie Wiesel, Beth Winship, and Harold Zyskind.

Some people are sadly no longer alive to hear my gratitude for what they’ve given me. But I feel I must nonetheless express my thanks to Fred Avery, Gregory Bateson, Herbert Berghof, Martin Buber, Paul Goodman, Walter Green, Don Jackson, Pearl Karch, Virginia Satir, and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

I want to thank my daughters, Rachel and Hannah, who cared so much about this project and who expressed their love and intelligence by letting me feel the full weight of every constructive criticism they could think of.

What incredible good luck to have a mensch like Howard Morhaim as my agent. Without his gifts and his belief in me and in this project, all the people who need it would be denied the help this book offers. I am profoundly grateful to him. And a thanks to his assistant, Kate Hengerer.

My editor, Deborah Brody, has wowed me with her intelligence and enthusiasm. I thank her for caring about this book and for her marvelous ability to translate her caring into effective action that’s enabling this information to reach as many people as possible.

I’d also like to thank all the other terrific people at Penguin and Dutton who I know have helped and will help this book and me. I can’t mention everyone’s name but I would like to single out Marvin Brown, Judy Courtade, Arnold Dolin, Elaine Koster, and Peter Mayer. A thanks to Julianne Barbato for her excellent copy editing, and a thanks for the care she’s taken with my work to Jennifer Moore. Finally, I know how important Lisa Johnson’s inspired work on my behalf has been in the past and will be in the future, and I’m grateful for it. And a special thanks to Tracy Guest.

I’d like to thank all the readers of my previous book for their incredible support. It means so much to me. I’d like to particularly thank the countless numbers of people who called and wrote just to tell me how much that book helped them.

Last, but not least, I must thank those patients of mine who kept asking me to write this book. I can’t mention your names, but you know who you are.

TO MY READER

You are not alone. There are 140 million Americans today in a relationship, and one-fifth of them—that’s 28 million people—just can’t decide whether to stay or leave.

You deserve the happiness you’re searching for. I’ve dedicated years to developing a simple but comprehensive series of questions and guidelines that will help you see clearly, once and for all, whether it’s best for you to stay in your relationship or leave it. The women and men you’ll meet here have struggled with the same issues you have. Their experiences will help you discover what’s real in your own relationship, regardless of how long you’ve been with your partner or how long you’ve been stuck in ambivalence.

This book contains only good news. If it’s best for you to stay, you’ll have the satisfying experience of facing all the issues and discovering that your relationship is truly too good to leave. You won’t be settling; you’ll know your heart is home.

And if you’ll be happiest leaving, you’ll get the reassurance that comes from finally understanding why your relationship has been too bad to stay in. When you end a relationship that deserves to end, you’re liberating two people to move on to better lives.

Either way, because you’ll see what’s best for you, you’ll be far happier than you’ve been. Everything in your life will be better. I’ve written this book to help you make this happen.

Part I

THE PROBLEM

1

Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby?

You’ve gone through a lot to get to this point.

You’ve hoped that love would be enough. And you’ve worked to resolve the problems in your relationship. And you’ve tried to accept things the way they are.

And you’ve agonized over the possibility of leaving.

But you just haven’t known what to do. Now you’re ready to face the choice that’s been weighing on your heart. That’s what this book is for—to help you discover which is best for you:

To stay in your relationship, recommitting to it free of doubt, free of holding back, free at last to pour your love and energy into the relationship and get back everything there is to get from it

or

To leave your relationship, finally liberating yourself from it, free of confusion, free of pain, free at last to get on with a new and better life.

Up until now you haven’t found the kind of evidence that speaks to your heart and makes clear what’s best for you. You haven’t found a sign like one of the following:

Leaving. He wouldn’t make her a sandwich. Heather had been working in the garden in the hot sun all morning, and Bill had been doing God knows what inside the house. Through the open kitchen window she’d heard him grab a beer, and she asked if he’d throw together a sandwich for her. “No, you do it,” he said, as if she’d asked him to do something too hard, too inappropriate.

That’s when it hit her, clear as day, once and for all, that his selfishness was undeniable and bottomless, that for her the relationship was over, that there was nothing here for her, and that she’d be better off getting out. And she did. And she’s never regretted it for a moment.

Staying. What had happened to the sweet woman he’d married? Now, three years later, Steve felt that Lynn had turned into someone who did nothing but complain. Then one Friday coming home from work Steve heard a song on the radio—“When a Man Loves a Woman.” Something about it got through to him, something about his having a responsibility to make sure she knew he loved her. They’d gotten so polarized, he saw, that he’d overlooked the possibility that she was unloving because he was unloving.

Steve spent that night and all weekend trying to show Lynn he loved her. It wasn’t until Sunday that it got through to her. Then she just melted. Her old sweetness came back. It was suddenly clear to Steve how easily they could overcome the problems that had been making him think of leaving. Steve decided to put all thoughts of leaving out of his mind.

Good News

It’s terribly frustrating to be able to do nothing but wait passively for signs like these. Fortunately, new hope is now entirely realistic for you. That’s why I’ve written this book. You can find answers to the questions most important to you:

• Whether the two of you really do fit together or not

• Whether the things that bother you will get better or worse

• How you’ll feel if they do get better and if they don’t

• Whether you can improve the relationship on your own or with the best of therapists

• What you’ll find if you leave and whether it’ll be better or worse than what you have now

• How to balance the responsibility you have to yourself and to the people you care about

No matter how hard it’s been for you to decide, now you can find out the truth about your relationship one way or the other, the whole truth, your own truth, the ultimate-reality-at-the-heart-of everything truth. Now you can achieve the clarity that will enable you to feel confident making one of the most important choices of your life.

But finding clarity depends on whether you actually want to find clarity in the first place or whether the most comfortable place for you is staying up in the air the way you’ve been. Your relationship is either too good to leave or too bad to stay in. But it can’t be both. So there are definite answers for you here, but if you really don’t want to come to a decision, you’ll find that out as well.

But What About Love?

We’ll talk a lot about love here. The clarity you’ll reach will also help you see how real your love is, and how strong. Love, which made everything so definite at the beginning, now makes everything more complicated. Sometimes things are terrible but your love still seems strong, and then what do you do about love? Sometimes things aren’t so bad but there’s little love left to hold them together, and then what does love mean for you?

I just want to assure you that as you see what’s right for you to do, you’ll be able to put love into perspective among all the other things you care about.

THE HAPPINESS THAT LIES AHEAD

My mission is to do two things.

First, it’s to share with you the experiences of people who’ve wrestled with the issues you’re wrestling with and come out on the other side and to report what they discovered. For example, think about something that bothers you about your partner, that strongly weighs on the side of your leaving. Wouldn’t you want to know how other people bothered by that felt once they left? You’ll find that out here. And if something else pointed to a basic strength in a relationship that made people happy they stayed, you’d want to know that, too. And you will. And if yet another issue you’ve been stewing over really turned out not to make too big a difference one way or the other, you’d want to know that as well so you could stop stewing over it. And you will.

Second, my mission is to help you rediscover the value of your own experience. I’m not going to pull a rabbit out of a hat that has nothing to do with what you’ve felt and seen about your partner and your relationship. Just the opposite. We’ll keep returning to the basics of your own experience. The problem isn’t that you don’t know what’s going on; it’s that you’ve had trouble sorting it all out.

The choice you discover will be one you feel good about after you make it, and better and better about as time goes by. It will be a choice that leaves you free of regret. Which is exactly what you were looking for in the first place!

TRAPPED IN LIMBO

If you’ve suspected that it’s not good for you to stay up in the air, you’re right. Staying ambivalent, in fact, can cause tremendous damage. Being stuck like this can end up killing you emotionally if you stay when you should be getting out. And it can end up killing your relationship if you keep thinking about leaving when it could be fixed if you only put energy into it. You can end up being deprived of joy and of freedom, of intimacy and of hope. And it’s not as if waiting around is going to show you what’s best for you. Ambivalence doesn’t produce real answers. It’s just a dangerous trap.

Doing the Limbo

Dee, a twenty-nine-year-old buyer, had lived with Keith for four years. There were good things about the relationship, like their strong sexual chemistry, but Dee was never really happy. They kept fighting about many things, like what Dee thought of as Keith’s irresponsibility, which she was afraid would only get worse in the future.

After they broke up last year, Dee was happier. But she was lonely. Now they’re dating each other again, partly because of her sexual needs, partly because she didn’t meet anyone better, and partly because Keith promised to grow up. And so their relationship chugs on, no better than it was before, filled with the same mixture of familiarity and misery it’s always had.

Dee’s not on the verge of making a commitment one way or the other. She’s on the verge of being stuck not knowing what to do with her relationship for a long time, possibly years.

Can you believe forty years? That’s how long another woman, Kate, spent neither being in her marriage nor leaving it but miserably camped on the outskirts of it, waiting for a sign to tell her what to do.

Kate’s Story

As you’ll see in a moment, Kate’s one of the most important women in my life; and the fact that she never broke through her ambivalence had an unhealthy impact on both of us. So it’s not only professionally but personally that I’ve experienced the terrible price we all pay for not knowing what to do with our relationships, all the pain and wasted time millions of people suffer from staying endlessly undecided.

Kate had married on the rebound after getting divorced following a brief first marriage. Her second husband, now dead, had been a businessman, volatile, quirky, sometimes unpleasant, but in some ways a decent guy. They were able to put up a good front, and their friends envied what from the outside seemed like one of the better marriages in their circle. But it was hard for Kate to remember when they’d ever had much in common. They usually couldn’t talk without fighting; when they weren’t fighting there was usually nothing to talk about.

It wasn’t the most terrible marriage in the world. There was just a lot of unhappiness in it flowing from distance and discord. On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being best), Kate would’ve given it a 3. And yet she stayed in it, doing what she saw as her duty.

What do you think she should have done? Kate had two good alternatives. In spite of myths about women needing marriage, the evidence is now unmistakable that a woman like Kate could have been happy if she’d been on her own. And I believe she also could have had a chance at happiness if she’d stayed, working on the relationship more (perhaps going into couples therapy) instead of finding her energy sapped by thinking of leaving.

The Cost of Staying up in the Air. But Kate was terribly unhappy for forty years because she did neither. She waited for one milepost after another to pass—the kids starting school, her going back to work, the kids leaving home, her husband’s retiring—hoping that she’d get a sign that would tell her what to do.

Just think about what it must have been like to spend all those years thinking about leaving. It meant spending years stewing over all the things that were wrong with him and all the things that were wrong with her for staying with him. You pay a price for feasting on negativity like this. Suppose that it would have been best for Kate to leave. To live with all that negativity and not leave could only destroy your sense of yourself as a valuable, effective person. Or suppose that it would have been best for her to stay. Then living with all that negativity could only pollute and ultimately destroy what would otherwise be a viable marriage.

Kate paid another price for a lifetime of not deciding. The tension and misery she felt, directly traceable to living stuck in ambivalence, put a strain on her relationship with her children that took years to heal.

The woman I call “Kate” is my mother, with some details changed to protect her privacy (as I’ve done with all the people you’ll meet in this book), and her husband was my stepfather. In many ways, Kate’s a heroine, as a Holocaust survivor and a self-made businesswoman. But in this important way she didn’t know how to choose happiness. And in her ambivalence she’s like far too many of our parents, far too many people in middle age, and far too many people just starting out. I wrote this book to save others, to save you, from going through what my mother went through.

THE AMBIVALENCE EPIDEMIC

You may be wondering if there’s something wrong with you to feel so stuck. But the fact is that there’s an epidemic of ambivalence about many things these days. We live in an age that promotes self-awareness but fails to show us how to use our self-awareness to arrive at good decisions. We learn more and more things about ourselves without learning ways to sort them out or to sort out the feelings they generate in us.

This is particularly true when it comes to our relationships. As one actress said on TV, being interviewed about her marriage, “You’re supposed to reevaluate your relationship every day, aren’t you?” Only if you want to confuse and exhaust yourself. We’re told so many contradictory things: to be responsible to ourselves and to our partner, to be happy in ourselves and to be mature about our obligations, to fix our own lives above all else, and to fix our relationships no matter what.

Whatever love we feel for the other person feels so real, and yet we know we also have a responsibility to love ourselves. We see therapists on TV who claim they can bring any relationship back to vibrant life, but we know how difficult it is to change even the smallest thing in our own relationship.

No wonder so many of us have trouble figuring out what’s best for us to do. But you can find the clarity you’re looking for if you want to. And I believe you do want to, and that you have everything it takes to see what’s best for you.

TAKING RESPONSIBILITY TOGETHER

What makes a book like this possible is the fact that an individual can be unique and yet still be similar enough to other people to learn from them. Without our similarities, medicine and psychology would be impossible. It’s because we are similar that a diagnostic test or a wonder drug can help millions.

But it’s because we’re unique that medicine and psychology remain an art as well as a science. I know as a therapist that I can’t meet my responsibility to you if I forget for a moment that you are an individual. Just because you’re similar to other people in some respects doesn’t mean there aren’t profound differences as well. And I always have to take those differences into account.

But I also can’t meet my responsibility to you if I fail to probe for the experiences that link people. That’s the power that research and clinical practice give, not just mine but that of countless others, particularly Dr. Charles Foster, whose shoulders this book stands on.

Answers at Last

This book is based on an attempt to answer questions people have asked for a long time:

• Which iffy relationships will most likely be okay and which ones are virtually unfixable?

• What makes people happy they left a relationship? What makes them happy they recommitted to it?

Our research involved talking to people in the same situation you’re in. They were asked about their ambivalent feelings and their partners’ positives and negatives. They were followed over time, during which many tried to solve their problems (and many were successful) and many ended their relationships.

Then we tried to figure out what made some people say overwhelmingly this made me happy I left and made other people say overwhelmingly this made me happy I stayed. These answers evolved into the questions and guidelines that form the backbone of this book.

The ultimate test of all this is in one-on-one work with people like you. Only when these sturdy truths make sense for a wide spectrum of individuals can any of us feel confident that real help is available.

Trusting the Truth

To be fully responsible to your uniqueness, I have to be very careful about telling you what to do. But if I’ve found deep and powerful truths that hold up for large numbers of people, truths that have been validated over and over, don’t I also have a responsibility to tell you these truths? I can’t tell you what to do, but I can and must tell you what I know. I can’t predict the future, but I can tell you the odds.

It’s what trusted professionals in our lives do all the time. For example, about ten years ago I went to my dentist with a dull, intermittent toothache. He said I’d need a root canal to save the tooth and eliminate the source of the pain. He said that without a root canal the pain might go away for days or months or maybe even a year or two but it would come back and it would get worse. A root canal was the answer.

“How do you know for sure?” I asked.

“Well, I don’t know for sure,” he said. “Everyone’s unique, but this is how things will probably work out in your case because, based on what I can see, it’s how things generally work out for people in the kind of situation you’re in.”

I’m a show-me kind of person, so instead of following my dentist’s recommendation, I waited. I was betting that some quirky feature of my uniqueness would exempt me from the patterns my dentist knew so well.

Of course, he was right. I ended up in the worst pain of my life until I got the root canal I should’ve gotten earlier!

Our Contract

So here’s the deal between you and me. I won’t pull back from making definite recommendations about whether it’s best for you to stay or leave based on your realities and my research and twenty years of clinical experience. In turn, you won’t blindly follow my recommendations for people in a relationship like yours. You’ll certainly want to make sure that you listen to yourself first, to make sure that the reality you’ve uncovered does ring true for you.

And if you have a therapist or other trusted advisor, you’ll definitely want to run by them what you learn here. Nothing in this book overrules what a good therapist you’ve been working with might tell you.

At the same time, you know how easy it’s been for you to stay stuck in ambivalence, and this book is about finding clarity in your situation and giving yourself permission to act on that clarity. So our responsibility to each other requires me to tell you the truth as I know it, as definitively as I can. And it requires you to face your truth and then do something about it.

The truths I’ve discovered here are the kinds of things we all recognize when we hear them. They make sense to people. Your responsibility is to give them a chance to make sense to you. Don’t act on them before they make sense to you, but don’t fail to act on them afterward. Your life is too important to you to waste any part of it stuck in ambivalence.

2

Dancing in the Dark

Issue: Relationship Ambivalence

If you’re in a relationship that seems both too good to leave and too bad to stay in, every time something happens that clearly points to staying or leaving, you probably find yourself saying, “No, it can’t be that simple. There’s so much more for me to think about.” Then a dozen memories and feelings creep in and you say, “I’d better not make a decision until I see what’s best for everyone.” But you never do see what’s best for everyone.

This state you’re in is called relationship ambivalence.

The Road to Ambivalence

We all feel doubts about our partners from time to time, and we all occasionally speculate about what it would be like to be on our own or live with a different person. But that’s not relationship ambivalence.

I’m talking instead about what happens when the bulk of your attention shifts from being in your relationship to trying to figure out whether to stay in it or leave. This shift can take place at any time, from soon after you meet to the day after your twenty-fifth anniversary or even later.

Before that shift, there’s a taken-for-granted quality to your thinking about the relationship, even if from time to time you get upset about things.

Then one too many things go wrong. New problems appear. Bad qualities in the other person or in the relationship get worse while good qualities dwindle or get lost. You find yourself complaining about things like the following:

• “He’s made a million agreements about doing his share of the housework and never kept one of them.”

• “She had this affair with a guy from work, and I really think it’s been over between them for a year, but I’m having so much trouble letting go of the whole thing. And I don’t know what to do about it.”

• “This probably sounds like a Seinfeld episode but he’s a noisy breather—I mean every breath in and out is like a sighing or a moaning. He sounds like Darth Vader when he breathes. Is he the most annoying person who ever lived, or am I the most petty, oversensitive person who ever lived, or what?”

• “Her family is so nosey and bossy and they control her with money—I sometimes feel she’s got to get a divorce from them or I’ve got to get a divorce from her.”

• “It’s one thing for me to complain about him, but when I get embarrassed for my friends to see him or know about the stuff he does, that’s really bad.”

• “Aren’t married people supposed to have sex? I mean, hello? How little sex can you have and then it’s no longer a marriage?”

• “Is there a future for us if we can’t even agree about where to go on vacation?”

• “We always have huge fights over money because I’m a saver and she’s a spender.”

• “He’s such a strict and controlling father, and I think he gives our kids a sense that I’m a bad parent; but he’s the bad parent and I really think the kids and I would be better off if he just stayed out of it.”

• “Sometimes I feel we’re doomed because I’m a people person and I really need having people over to the house. But she’s a real solitary person and resents our having people in our lives.”

• “He was this successful older guy and it was sort of fun admiring him when we first got together, but what it turned into is from morning till night he judges me. I don’t know how much of this you’re supposed to take.”

Once problems like these that make leaving seem desirable are added to all the forces that make you want to stay, you’re in a state of relationship ambivalence. But there’s more to the experience than just feeling all the pros and cons of your relationship.

Stops Along the Way

It’s been a while since you first felt “jerk shock”: the realization that the person you’re with has feet of clay. But instead of giving up, you tried everything you could think of to improve the relationship: honesty and romantic vacations and how-to-have-a-great-relationship books and maybe even therapy. You’ve tried overlooking all the things that hurt or annoy you, and you’ve tried dealing with them. You’ve tried to make the other person happy, and you’ve tried to get the other to make you happy. You’ve tried ... it’s probably hard to remember all the things you’ve tried.

After working on the front lines as a therapist for more than twenty years, I’ve learned that almost no one gets to this point without having worked hard to make the relationship better. We take love too seriously to give up on it without a fight. At the same time, on almost the very first day that love isn’t enough, we also feel hurt, and we withdraw and stand back, waiting and hoping for the other person to make things better.

Looking for the Exits

But thinking about leaving hasn’t helped either. It’s not that you don’t know how to go about it, at least in general. It’s just that you aren’t sure you’ll be better off leaving. Even when you’re fed up with the person you’re with, it’s still not clear that leaving will be better than your entire current life with that person.

Every time you start trying to focus on leaving, thoughts creep in about how you’ll find a place to live, and how you’ll be able to afford it, and whether you’ll find love again, and how expensive childcare or child support will be, and endless other details about how you’ll live. Worries like these just make it harder to leave, and the more of these worries there are, the more you’re willing to put up with a relationship that would otherwise be too bad to stay in.

And so imagining what your life will be like if you leave hasn’t helped.

Friends Try to Help. And your friends haven’t really given you the clarity you’re looking for either. I’m not saying they haven’t listened and been supportive and offered advice. It’s just that as you’ve tried to sort out all the issues and figure out what’s best for you to do, your friends haven’t been able to convince you about what’s best one way or the other.

I’ve seen cases where every friend a person has says leave, leave, leave! and yet somehow instead of it making everything clear it makes nothing clear. In spite of this passionate consensus, you might feel that your friends don’t really know your partner or your relationship, that all they’ve heard most clearly are your complaints as you’ve used their shoulders to cry on.

And I’ve seen cases where every single friend says stay, and you just feel that for whatever reason your friends are somehow invested in your staying together, that they’ll somehow be more devastated if you break up than you’ll be.

And so all your wrestling with issues and trying to put them into perspective has given you little clarity. This confusion can be tormenting. I’ve had people tell me that they’ve prayed for their partner to do something really awful, just so they would get the clarity they need. But that clarity doesn’t come.

And so here you are. You’ve spent what must feel like a very long time now dancing in the dark, flip-flopping back and forth about whether to stay or leave.

LOOKING FOR CLARITY IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES

I’ve talked about what’s similar in what people go through, but the actual experience of relationship ambivalence itself varies widely. Here are some snapshots of what it’s like for different people to be stuck in relationship ambivalence:

• One person goes through long stretches when things are really bad and she feels she’s definitely going to leave, but then there’s some mysterious atmospheric change and suddenly things are okay and she doesn’t want to rock the boat by even thinking about problems, much less thinking about leaving. This lasts until the atmosphere changes back to terrible again.

• Another does everything he can to put the choice he’s facing out of his mind. He asserts his right to complain about everything, and yet he stands next to this mountain of complaints and denies that he wants to leave. Occasionally one too many things go wrong or he spends just a little too much time with his partner, and then all his thoughts of leaving creep back in.

• Another talks to everyone, asking all the people who know her and care about her to tell her what to do.

• Another person obsessively and endlessly and constantly thinks about whether to stay or leave all day and half the night until her head’s ready to explode.

• Another denies there’s anything to be ambivalent about in the first place: he thinks it’s not the relationship that’s iffy, that the problem is just his fear of commitment.

• Another spends hours meditating alone, trying to remove all thought from his mind, so that he can allow an irrefutable signal to emerge all by itself and show him what’s best.

• Another goes for the superrational approach, assigning a numerical value to every positive and negative, so he can add up the score and get a single number that will tell him what he’ll be happiest doing, and he always gets some number but he never trusts it and never acts on it.

• Another keeps walking out, not because she wants to but because she’s hoping that breaking up will make things clear. But then she keeps starting the relationship up again.

But while everyone expresses ambivalence a little differently, there’s one thing people have in common: ambivalence in your heart goes hand in hand with distance in your relationship. When you feel ambivalent about your partner you make distance from your partner. You spend less time together. You talk less, and about less important things. You stop doing things together. There’s a cool, formal, ritualistic quality to the relationship. You make distance from your partner because you’re having an emotionally intense affair with your own ambivalence.

And like all the other things you do in your ambivalence, distance only serves to make it worse. Now your ambivalence has taken on a life of its own.

THE BALANCE-SCALE APPROACH

What is it about relationship ambivalence that gets us stuck in it and keeps us stuck in it? Good question! The people I’ve worked with over the years are a smart bunch, and for a long time it didn’t make sense to me that women and men with all kinds of street smarts and academic smarts and every other kind of smarts could be so stuck.

I figured, wearing my researcher hat, that with all the differences among all these people there had to be something they shared deep down that was responsible not for their feeling iffy about their partners—we’ve all felt that from time to time—but for their getting stuck in feeling iffy, so stuck that they couldn’t find their way out.

I discovered that everyone stuck in relationship ambivalence shares an image so powerful, so controlling, that it shapes their entire experience of deciding what to do about an iffy relationship: the image of a balance scale. You know—the kind of scale the figure of Justice holds in her hand in front of the Supreme Court, with a pan on one side and a pan on the other side, all set up for weighing the evidence, pro and con. You might have used a scale like this yourself in high school chemistry.

The image of the balance scale lies at the heart of how most people deal with the stay-or-leave decision. It’s what I call the balance-scale approach. You try to figure out whether to stay or leave by piling up all the evidence about your partner on a kind of giant scale and seeing how it balances out:

On one side you pile up all the evidence for staying and against leaving: all the good things about your relationship, all the things you hope for, all the things that make leaving seem scary.

On the other side you pile up all the evidence for leaving and against staying: all the bad things in the relationship, all your fears, all your hopes for being on your own again.

All by yourself, you do what the opposing lawyers do at a trial, each lawyer piling up evidence on one side or the other. Then after acting as lawyer for both sides, you act as the jury, looking to see which pile of evidence weighs more. It’s instinctive. It’s universal. And it’s guaranteed to drive you crazy.

Weighing the pros and cons of staying or leaving isn’t like weighing a can of tomatoes against a box of cornflakes. It’s like placing puppies on a teeter-totter: everything constantly moves and shifts, nothing stays pinned down.

When it comes to relationships, the balance-scale approach is the problem, not the solution. It gets us into trouble, not out of it. How can you weigh the things you know about your relationship in the present against a huge uncertain future? How can you weigh a problem that’s bad for you against the knowledge that a lot of people have this problem but don’t seem to be breaking up their relationships over it? How can you weigh a problem that makes you want to scream today against the possibility that it won’t bother you so much tomorrow?

With the balance-scale approach pieces of evidence keep sliding in and out of the picture. You try to add things up that don’t add up, to compare things that can’t be compared. Like a tenderfoot in the woods, the more you try to find your way, the more lost you get.

Carol’s Tale

Just look at the balance-scale approach in action. Here’s how Carol described it:

Two weeks ago Tom was so nice to me. I wish it could be like that all the time. But then last week he went back to being the way he usually is, where he’s so nasty and everything I do is wrong and he keeps putting me down and making my life miserable. How do I add those up? He leaves me alone to watch sports all the time and he yells at me if I want to talk about our problems, but sex is still okay with him. What does that add up to? To make it even more confusing, sometimes things are going well with me and the things I have trouble with about him don’t bother me so much.

There are more details, but Carol’s provided a good sketch of some of the pros and cons in her relationship. Is it clear to you what she should do? I don’t think it’s clear to anyone. Weighing the pros and cons just sucks you in to adding more and more things to the balance, and every time you add something the picture gets more confusing.

Therapists do this, too. One way we get suckered into using the balance-scale approach is that we try so hard to avoid playing the blame game when people come to us for help. So whenever we see something “bad” that one person does, we look to see what the other person does to elicit it. For instance, if you say your partner’s nagging drives you crazy, we’ll say, okay, maybe your partner’s nagging but maybe you’re not listening.

But when you’re helping one person decide whether it’s best to stay or leave, you’ve got to look for the fly in the ointment, and it doesn’t matter who put it there. The balance-scale approach doesn’t work for anybody. I don’t think you’d be reading these words if the balance-scale approach had worked for you.

So no more relationship ambivalence, starting right now. No more putting your relationship on trial. No more weighing huge, unwieldy piles of evidence pro and con. No more listening to the voices on both sides producing endless arguments and very little clarity. Fortunately, there’s a much better alternative, one that will help you see straight through to the truth about your relationship.

Part II

THE SOLUTION

3

Enough Is Enough

Issue: Danger Signs

DIAGNOSTICS

Here’s how to find your way out of relationship ambivalence. Don’t put your relationship on trial the way lawyers do. Make a diagnosis the way doctors do.

That’s what we’ll do here. We’ll ask one question at a time, step by step, responsibly searching for that one fact, that one piece of evidence about your relationship that makes clear what’s best for you to do. And it’s all based on what research shows are the experiences of other people in situations like yours.

It’s like going to the doctor for stomach pains. If she can diagnose appendicitis after some questions and a few tests, you’re all set. You don’t need to go through every test and weigh every possible piece of evidence pro and con. If your answer to one question doesn’t provide a diagnosis—“No, doctor, it doesn’t hurt there”—you move on to the next question or test until you find the smoking gun that points to a specific ailment.

It works much the same way here. Instead of balancing pros and cons, we’ll try to arrive at a diagnosis of your relationship. At each step you’ll answer a question about an issue between you and your partner. In most cases it’ll be a straightforward, easy-to-answer, yes-or-no question. Depending on your answer, you may be able to get a clear indication right then and there of whether it’s best for you to stay or leave. You’ll have found out what’s real about your relationship without needing to go further.

One Step at a Time

The order of the questions is carefully arranged. The main principle, as with any diagnostic procedure, is to deal with the clearest, most obvious issues first. For example, if your TV is on the fritz, the repairperson will check if you’ve forgotten to plug it in or if the cable box is properly connected before looking into the subtler malfunctions deep in the electronic bowels of the set.

In the same way, earlier diagnostic questions here deal with clearer, more obvious issues, and later questions deal with more nuanced issues. By the end we’ll have dealt with all the major issues that might bother you—from intimacy to power, from affairs to lying, from sex to money, from your hurts from the past to your hopes for the future, from signs you really hate each other to signs you really belong together. We’ll investigate everything that goes on in relationships from the point of view of what makes them too bad to stay in or too good to leave.

By the end you’ll know which is true for you.

All that needs to happen as you read is that you trust yourself, take things a step at a time, and think of each question as an opportunity to find out what’s real for you. Often you’ll know the answer right away, but sometimes you may have to sift through your thoughts and feelings and memories.

Most people come up with their answers fairly easily, because that’s how these questions were designed. It’s no more difficult than when your optometrist clicks those lenses back and forth and asks you if you can see better the first way or the second way. Either one is better or the other is better or you can’t tell the difference: they are all valid answers. The point is that with the step-by-step approach all you have to do is come up with one answer to one question about one issue at a time.

The diagnostic questions here include everything that’s important to pay attention to in deciding whether to stay or leave. If it’s not in the questions, it’s not so important in deciding what’s best for you, and you can let go of worrying about it. So let’s get started.

STEP #1: THEY WERE THE BEST OF TIMES

You’ve probably put a lot of energy into thinking about the bad times in your iffy relationship, but in this first step I’d like you to think about the good times for a moment. The best time, in fact. Try to remember when you felt most comfortable, most satisfied, most optimistic about the relationship you’re in. It could have been the day you met, the time you took your first trip together, a special rainy weekend the first year you were married, a period when you were working together to achieve some joint goal. If you’ve been together a long time, don’t worry about being too thorough. Trust your unconscious to throw a searchlight on a “best” time even if it’s not the absolute best.

Now ask yourself: 

Diagnostic question #1. Think about that time when things between you and your partner were at their best. Looking back, would you now say that things were really very good between you then? 

This is a simple question. Were things between you actually very good when they were at their best?

What do I mean by “very good”? Some people, even in relationships that feel awful now, know that there was a time in the past when things were wonderful. They were in love, they were genuinely happy, they felt good about themselves when they were with the other—there was a kind of happy magic of warmth and connectedness. Their answer to question #1 is yes.

But other people realize that the “best” was never very good. Something was wrong. They’re usually referring to an empty, distant, tainted, painful quality at the core of their relationship, even back then. Their answer to question #1 is no.

Here are some things people have said describing “best” times that weren’t very good:

• “At the beginning I loved him very much and I thought we were close, but even then we’d have violent arguments every couple of days that completely drained me and spoiled everything.”

• “Our best time was on our honeymoon. We were happy in a way, but I now realize that all the pleasure came from the activities we did, not from being with each other. It was like having a really great vacation with a stranger.”

• “There was a period when we never fought, but we never spent much time together then or were close either.”

• “For the first couple of years sex was great—it’s how we got together in the first place—but we had nothing else in common and didn’t really care about each other.”

You probably have a pretty clear sense about whether, when things were at their best, they were actually very good or not. For most people whose relationships are iffy now, they were pretty good at one point. But for about ten percent of you, they were actually never very good.

Jennifer’s Story

In a moment you’ll see what your answer to question #1 means. But first, let’s put all this in the context of someone who was going through something like what you may be going through now.

Jennifer was thirty-six. She was an attractive woman who acted like she could make quick work of any problem you gave her. When she came to see me she’d been married for eight years. And for the last six she’d been in a constant struggle about whether to stay with her husband or leave him for good.

For all the time and brain power she brought to thinking about what to do—probing every strand and filament of feeling, every nuance of behavior, every hint of what the future might hold—she’d grown less and less clear over the past six years. And it was tearing her up inside.

With Jennifer’s training and ability, you’d think she’d be smart and knowledgeable enough to avoid this dilemma. She’d graduated from medical school in the top quarter of her class, had started out on a promising career as an oncologist, and had switched to psychiatry when she got tired of seeing people die and wanted to help them find a way to live.

Finding a Balance. You might think being a psychiatrist would have given Jennifer an edge in figuring out relationships. But it didn’t help: as you’ll see, it produced only more confusion. She couldn’t remember what started her ambivalence; maybe it wasn’t anything specific. But for six years her heart was burdened by more and more considerations that piled up without ever sorting themselves out or producing a resolution.

I don’t want to give short shrift to the mass of things Jennifer had to weigh, but this will give you the highlights:

• On the plus side, her husband, Don, was great with the kids, charming when he wanted to be, a good income earner as a computer executive; they shared some spiritual values, he said he cared about her, and he gave Jennifer the space she needed to do her work and be with her friends. She thought she still had some love for him.

• On the minus side, he was angry with her most of the time, picked fights with her, kept expressing his disappointment with her, kept trying to change her, had had an affair, and had once shoved her during a stormy argument after she’d shoved him. She didn’t think she loved him enough.

Maybe you look at these two piles of evidence and it’s clear to you which way Jennifer should go, but it was never clear to her. There were times when she vacillated minute by minute, and long periods when she seemed to have made a final decision that never turned out to be final.

Looking for Help. I was one of a long line of therapists Jennifer had seen, and my goal was to be the last.

Jennifer had also spent countless hours with friends talking about what to do. Most of her friends did what her best friend Sarah would do: listen endlessly, commiserate constantly, and try sincerely to be as supportive as possible. Sarah was never afraid to speak her mind, and Jennifer valued her honesty.

The problem was that Sarah didn’t have much to go on, and Jennifer knew it. Sarah was a wise and honest friend, but of course she knew less than Jennifer about what things were really like inside the relationship. And the truth is that Jennifer selected what she talked about. She shaded things. She made things sound worse than they were when she needed sympathy. She made things sound better than they were when she didn’t want to talk about them.

And Jennifer had done more than just talk to friends and therapists. She and Don had gone on many vacations to try to kindle a flame of caring and commitment. They’d made distance to try and cool things off. And from time to time Jennifer had interviewed lawyers about the possibility of divorce.

Jennifer’s Answer. Soon after she came to see me, I asked Jennifer question #1. I was surprised by how quickly she said:

Oh no, it was never really very good. We’re just one of those good-on-paper couples. You know, we like the same things—books, music, movies—and we have similar opinions about things—politics, childrearing, spirituality. It wasn’t a match made in heaven, just computer heaven. We never really got pleasure from each other. We thought we were enjoying being together because we did things we both enjoyed. We’d go sailing and have a great time, but I’ve gone for walks with my dog where I feel Champ and I have gotten closer than Don and I ever have. But I blamed myself. I just had this sense that my heart had always been closed to him and that something would happen one day to make me open my heart and then my love would flow. But it’s been so many years and I wonder what I’m waiting for.

When she heard herself saying this, Jennifer was hit by a kind of emotional shock. It was suddenly clear to her. All this time she’d spent trying to figure out what to do with a relationship so filled with pros and cons—there’d never actually been a relationship in the first place. There’d been a marriage and a joint history and children and friends and possessions and the dream of a heart one day opening up. But never a relationship. She started crying for all the years she’d spent trying to make a decision about something that had never existed.

What if what’s true for Jennifer is true for you? The findings are very clear on this:

GUIDELINE # 1

If, when your relationship was at its “best,” things between you didn’t feel right or work well, the prognosis is poor. I feel comfortable saying that you’ll feel you’ve discovered what’s right for you if you choose to leave. Quick take: If it never was very good, it’ll never be very good.

If you fall into the ten percent of people in relationship ambivalence that guideline #1 applies to, I have to say to you what I say to everyone who answers no to question #1: it’s your decision, but most people in your situation who end up leaving are glad they did.

“How Can You Tell Me to Leave?”

If you think about it, this guideline’s not really such a leap. It’s not as if everything were perfect except for your answering no to this question. You’re in a state of relationship ambivalence right now! That means there are already plenty of negatives.

Beyond the fact that most people in your situation who leave are happy they did so, you’ve got to face the fact that if it was never very good at its best, then where are the good things going to come from that you have a right to look forward to in any relationship? You can wait, but it’s unlikely you’ll find them.

My years as a clinician plus a ton of accumulated research show that you can often fix what was broken, but you can rarely fix what never worked in the first place. There was a basic difficulty, present from the beginning, that prevented things from being good or prevented you from seeing that they weren’t good. The satisfaction-producing core that’s necessary for a relationship to take root was never there.

Professional integrity demands that I speak the truth as I see it. And the truth here is that a relationship that was never very good is unlikely to become good in the future. People can always surprise you, but in this case don’t hold your breath. If your answer to question #1 is clearly no, then you’ve already found the truth about whether it’s best for you to stay or leave.

Now let’s look at the flip side. I’m not saying you should resolve to commit to your relationship if things were good when they were at their best—there’s a lot more to consider before you do that. I am saying that people are generally satisfied when they choose to end their relationship if they realize that when things were at their “best” they weren’t, in fact, good.

PERSPECTIVES: WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO Do WITH IT?

All the questions here are designed to probe for whether your relationship is basically alive or dead.

Here’s an analogy. I’ve lived in a big old house in Boston for almost twenty years. When the real estate agent first showed it to me, students were living there and it was a mess. I took one look and said no way. Then for some reason I went back with a friend and she said, “Hang on a second, it just needs a cleaning and a clearing out of all this junk. Then it’ll be great.”

She was right. It turned out that with just some cleaning and paint the house was terrific.

That’s the way it is with a lot of relationships. There’s a surface of day-to-day experiences that might feel awful, but below the surface there’s what I call a satisfaction-producing core. It’s there as solidly and clearly as a sturdy well-built house might be there underneath some dirt and clutter. What makes a relationship actually too good to leave is when it has that satisfaction-producing core.

Now let’s look at the other alternative. We’ve all known houses that look good on the outside, but there’s structural damage due to a poorly laid foundation or major termite infestation or water damage or many other problems. These are houses that need a lot more than most of us are willing or able to put into them. They might look good, but they’re really not worth the trouble. They will begin as a headache and end as a heartache.

It’s that way with a lot of relationships. Any couples therapist will tell you about relationships where the surface might be nice and smooth and polite, even seemingly friendly, but below the surface there’s what I call a basic discord. I’m talking about an emotional, psychological fracture or dislocation or disconnection. There’s something rotten in the foundation, regardless of what the surface is like, and the only thing it’s built for is distance and hostility. What makes a relationship actually too bad to stay in is when it has that basic discord.

The Truth of Love and the Love of Truth

How does love fit into all this? We’ll talk about love plenty in this book. But for now let’s remember what our job is here: to put love in perspective. Love is a mystery we have to respect. But I know this (and I hope you agree with me): if love has any function it’s as our servant, not our master. Love is an important part of our lives, but we’re not love’s slaves. Most of all we’re not love’s fools.

To see the importance of putting love into perspective, just think about situations we’ve all known about personally and that I’ve certainly seen my share of as a therapist. I’m talking about those cases where some man or woman is horribly abused or neglected or maltreated and yet stays in the relationship. Why? “I can’t help it,” they say. “I love him [or her].” And we’ve all seen cases where it seems as though someone is in a perfectly good relationship with a thoroughly nice person and yet walks out. Why? “I couldn’t help it. I just stopped loving him [or her].”

Love can too easily be the wild card in our relationships, taking on any value at any time for any reason. If we don’t put it into perspective, it will make fools of us.

But it’s time we told the truth about love. Love isn’t blind and it isn’t stupid. It can see and it can learn. If you allow your love to see the truth of your relationship, if you allow your love to take care of you, it’ll respond appropriately.

Do you really want to open your heart to a love that will not let you show it the truth of your life? If the truth is that there’s a basic discord in your relationship, that it’s dead and will never work, what good is a love that refuses to see this?

The next question probes the one situation where more people have died of being enslaved to a blind love than any other. If the next question doesn’t make clear why we must put love into perspective, nothing will.

STEP #2: WHEN IT’S A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH

Another clear step may be possible right away toward discovering what’s best for you to do. Answer this: 

Diagnostic question #2. Has there been more than one incident of physical violence in your relationship? 

Notice I’m not asking you if there was only one incident; I’m asking if there was more than one incident. Of course, if there’s even one episode of physical violence that causes real injury or that makes you feel threatened with the real possibility of injury or death, there’s nothing to discuss and you need to leave immediately for the sake of your physical safety.

Other than that, I’m a firm believer that everyone is entitled to one mistake, and it’s hard to know what something means when it only happens once. I’ve seen a lot of situations where in the heat of an argument the man (it’s usually the man) commits some first act of physical aggression. It had never happened before, and either he’s horrified himself or she makes it clear that everything will be over if it ever happens again. And it never happens again. It’s when acts of physical aggression repeat themselves that you can point to a pattern.

Facing Reality

You might wonder if this question is really necessary. With all the attention paid to spousal abuse in the media, doesn’t everyone know that when there’s physical violence you just get out as fast as you can?

People know this in general. But when it comes to their actual lives they face two kinds of obstacles. One is that as a practical matter it’s often too difficult to get out, at least in the short run. People facing this obstacle fit the profile of the woman who’s afraid for her life and knows to leave but who stays because of children, money, not having a place to go, fear of provoking her husband to still worse abuse, and other considerations that put her in the category of people who know what’s best for them to do but haven’t yet figured out a way to do it.

But the majority of women and a few men who stay in spite of the threat of violence are stuck because of something far different than the image promulgated in the media. The obstacle isn’t that they can’t get out; instead, it’s that they can’t decide what to do. As amazing as it might sound, while they know they’re in a relationship that’s too bad to stay in, they also feel it’s too good to leave.

On the Inside

How can there be such ambivalence? From the outside we see someone physically abused to whom things should be very clear. But from their vantage point inside the relationship, what people report overwhelmingly is the struggle to weigh a mass of evidence both negative and positive that keeps them in a terrible state of relationship ambivalence.

Here’s how some people have described their lives as they actually experience them:

• “I admit I’m afraid of him sometimes, especially if things aren’t going well for him at work, but things can be so great, too, and we can be so happy together.”

• “Yeah, he slapped me some, and of course I hate that, and I know I deserve better, but most of the time I get a lot, too, because he’s also very sweet and apologetic.”

• “Forget about the times he hit me, which weren’t that bad, but he’s pulled his gun on me. It’s just that he’s a cop, and so in a way I really trust him. You might say I’m in denial, but he’s a very solid, reliable guy, and he makes me feel safer than most guys have.”

What millions of people like this in abusive relationships need is exactly what they themselves have been struggling so hard to find: a way to sort things out and decide what, in fact, is the best thing for them to do.

And here, too, experience and research speak with a clear voice. Slapping, punching, shoving, and other acts of physical violence, if they happen more than once, will not stop by themselves. They will escalate. The findings are very clear on this. Here’s the guideline:

GUIDELINE #2

Abuse that happens more than once means you must leave the relationship. Otherwise it will happen again and again, and it will get worse, and your self-esteem will fall, and your sense of being trapped will grow, and you’ll wish you’d started the process of getting out right now, however much you love the person and whatever the pluses in your relationship. The only exception to this is when the abusive partner is currently, actively, and motivatedly participating in a program designed to treat abusive partners and stays in this program for at least a year. Quick take: Physical abuse means love is dead.

Everyone who stays in a situation like this regrets it. Everyone who leaves feels better and better about it as time goes by.

Time for an Ultimatum

Here’s how to put this guideline into effect. If you’ve been abused more than once, this is a time to issue your partner an ultimatum:

Tell him he’s got to find a program for abusive partners within the next two weeks. He’s got to begin participating in it within the next four weeks. He’s got to maintain active consistent participation for a full year, going to at least one meeting a week. If he’s not willing to agree to this and keep to it, tell him that means to you that he’s not serious about eliminating all threats to your physical safety, and that means your relationship is over. If he leaves the program before a year is up or if he ever hurts you or threatens to hurt you again, that means your relationship is over.

If you’re afraid to even issue this ultimatum, that by itself means that your relationship is over and you must do whatever’s necessary to contact women’s shelters or spousal abuse resource centers to figure out how to leave your relationship both quickly and safely.

Simple Truths

If you’re in a physically abusive situation, part of you probably feels it’s more complicated than this. You love your partner and wonder how you can walk out on love like this. Your partner has most likely said how much he loves you during the period after he’s abused you, when he’s very sorry, and part of you may believe that his love is real even while he’s abusing you. You’re aware of his good qualities and of things you do that you feel provoke him. Perhaps the whole world thinks of him as a great guy, and so part of you feels crazy for thinking there’s something terribly wrong with him.

And you feel that a good person like you couldn’t love a bad person, so you think sometimes that he couldn’t possibly be the monster he seems like, which means (you hope) that any day now he could wake up and your nightmare will be over. And you’re sure your love can help you find a way to help him wake up.

I understand what your love means to you (and some of the questions coming up will help clarify how to deal with love that can make it so hard to figure out what to do). And I understand that most things in life really are more complicated than they seem on the surface. But if you answered yes to question #2, then it’s certain you’ll say you made the right choice if you decide to leave. It may feel more complicated than this, but in a situation where there’s been repeated physical abuse, it isn’t.

PERSPECTIVES: REGAINING YOUR SELF-TRUST

This is not only a book about figuring out whether to stay in your relationship or leave it. It’s also about undoing some of the damage that occurs from being stuck in relationship ambivalence. And one of the most important kinds of damage is loss of your self-trust.

Think about what happens when you’re stuck in relationship ambivalence: every day you give yourself the message that you’re not able to figure out what’s best for you. That’s what destroys self-trust. And where do you go from there? How does a person who can’t trust herself to figure out what’s best for her, figure out what’s best for her?

Let’s go back to Jennifer. Six years of uncertainty had made Jennifer afraid that she actually wasn’t smart enough—a doctor! —to figure out what to do with her relationship. And that’s devastating. You might look at her and feel reassured by seeing how even certifiably smart people can be made to feel stupid in the face of their iffy relationships. But Jennifer became convinced she was stupid when it came to deciding whether to stay or leave, and that damaged her confidence that she could make the right decision.

And because she felt so ambivalent, Jennifer was also afraid she suffered from some grave psychological damage. Why would she be so ambivalent, she wondered, if she wasn’t simultaneously suffering from a fear of intimacy where you’re never happy staying and a fear of abandonment where you’re never able to leave. Like a lot of psychologically sophisticated people, she sifted through events from her childhood, offering them to me as clues for why a decision kept slipping from her grasp. The longer it took her to see the truth about what to do, the more psychologically damaged she thought she must be.

But she was wrong.

From Ambivalence to Self-doubt

I think Jennifer was free of the kind of psychological damage that would leave a person truly unable to choose what to do about a relationship that others would have an easy time deciding about. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, most of the time in fact, and sometimes relationship ambivalence is just relationship ambivalence, without any history of deep psychological damage.

“I’m stupid.” “I’m psychologically damaged.” “I’m afraid of being abandoned.” “I don’t know how to handle intimacy.” These are ways in which not knowing what to do about a relationship undermines self-trust. And your undermined self-trust helps keep you stuck.

You’re not the problem. The method you’ve been using is the problem. It’s trying to balance pros and cons that, damages your self-trust. How could you trust yourself when you used a method virtually designed to produce confusion? The diagnostic step-by-step approach we’re using now is designed not only to uncover your truth but to do so in manageable chunks.

The Ambivalence Trap. Let’s look at what losing self-trust does to you. Back when she first met Don, there was a race inside Jennifer between love and doubt, the way there is for all of us in that period before you commit to somebody. Love usually wins, otherwise you wouldn’t make the commitment. But love’s victory doesn’t annihilate doubt. Doubt lurks in the bushes, waiting for you to come back from your honeymoon.

And for Jennifer, as it does for so many of us, doubt crept back in as Don revealed more and more of his shortcomings. At the beginning she’d trusted herself to recognize that love was speaking the truth to her, and now she desperately wanted to trust that she’d known what to do then and knew what to do now.

But she didn’t know what to do now. And the less certain she was, the less she trusted herself. The less she trusted herself, the harder it was to find her way back to certainty.

This is a psychological process called the Ambivalence Trap. The more we try to weigh the mountain of facts and feelings we’ve accumulated, the more confused we get. The more confused we feel, the less we trust ourselves. The less we trust ourselves, the more we feel we have to wait, allowing more confusing evidence to pile up. This is where relationship ambivalence becomes a self-perpetuating trap.

The Way Out. Imagine being thrown into a deep sandy pit with a small shovel. All a shovel can do is dig you in deeper, eroding the very walls you need to climb out. That’s what self-doubt does: it erodes whatever happens to be solid under your feet. To climb out you need a completely different kind of tool, a ladder let down to you that you can use to climb out step by step.

This book is your ladder. Clarity waits for you on the other end. It may be that your self-trust has received many blows, but in fact it’s not really been damaged. You were simply using the wrong tool.

A week after she answered question #1 and realized the truth about her relationship, I saw Jennifer happier than I’d ever seen her. It was clear to her that she wanted to end her relationship with Don, and she felt better about her decision with each passing day. Jennifer has been on her own for four years now, and she’s never regretted her choice for a moment. Whatever alternative turns out to be right for you, I know you’ll feel the same way.

NEXT STEPS

There’s a chance you’ve already found the truth you were looking for if you answered no to question #1 or yes to question #2. You can feel secure with this truth. Nothing’s going to change it. The guidelines here won’t contradict themselves.

But it’s more likely that you’ll find your truth as I keep asking questions and discussing what your answers mean. Some answers, like the ones I’ve talked about so far, will allow me to recommend you get out. But you’ll be happy to know that other answers will allow me to point to important strengths in your relationship you might have overlooked. These strengths permit me to feel comfortable saying there are resources in your relationship that can overcome a number of risk factors.

What if you’ve found your truth already? If this were one of my workshops, I’d make an offer no one ever takes: “If you’re clear already about what’s best for you to do, feel free to go.” And they’re right to stay. Sometimes, even though you see the truth with your mind, you don’t feel it with your heart. Sometimes you feel the truth but you just need confirmation. And you’ll find it as you keep going through the questions and guidelines. So even if you know your truth right now, you’ll benefit by answering all the questions.

Take whatever time you need. I want you to feel confident that, as long as you’re honest with yourself, you’re on a path that’ll lead you to the best, most responsible decision for you.

4

It’s Too Late, Baby

Issue: If You’ve Already Decided to Leave

We’ve all known people who got married and one or two things went wrong and bang they ended the relationship. But there’s a deepening sense that divorce shouldn’t be so easy and automatic. People today just don’t feel comfortable with hair-trigger divorces.

But the other end of the spectrum is growing. I’m talking about people who’ve made it too hard for themselves to leave, not too easy. Instead of a hair-trigger divorce, for these people the bullet’s already left the gun and yet they’re still afraid to pull the trigger. Deep down they’ve already decided to leave the relationship and yet they’re sticking around anyway. If they could admit it, they’d say, it’s too late, baby, to their partner—this relationship’s not been good enough for me to stay in for quite a while, and now it’s over.

These “stuck stayers” are a minority of people in relationship ambivalence, but if you fall into this minority, you deserve help fast because you’re not really ambivalent at all.

There are many reasons for not knowing it’s over when it’s over. You might feel guilty. You might still think you’re in love. You might not be willing to face the post-breakup choices that await you. You might be afraid of freedom. You might be afraid of loss. And you might (this is just as true for women as for men) be having a hard time connecting with the bedrock of how you really feel about the relationship. The next two questions are designed to help you get over these obstacles if deep down you’ve already decided to leave.

STEP #3: ACTIONS, NOT WORDS

Sometimes the best way to figure out your truth is to look at what you do, not at what you say. Here’s an example.

We’ve all had the experience of spending all day Friday looking forward to going out that night. But when we get home from work we dawdle and laze around and have trouble making up our minds about exactly where we want to go. Soon it’s nine, ten, eleven o’clock, and at some point it hits us that from the moment we got home we were too tired to go out at all. We’d made the decision to stay in the moment we got home, but it took us all evening to realize we were implementing that decision.

It works the same way for a lot of people in relationship ambivalence. Here’s the question to ask yourself: 

Diagnostic question #3. Have you already made a concrete commitment to pursue a course of action or lifestyle that definitely excludes your partner? 

What do I mean by this? What follows is a clear example.

Ruth’s Story

Ruth had been married for ten years to the same person. Spike was a rock-and-roll musician, and the first several years of their relationship were filled with a sense of promise about his career. There was always the band that was going to take off, the recording contract just around the comer. Ruth worked this whole period as a nurse, and for long stretches her income was their sole support.

Ruth was proud of being a nurse and found satisfaction in helping people, but after a while the work started feeling routine, and she yearned for more meaning, variety, even excitement. Meanwhile, Spike’s aging-rocker routine was getting old. It kept looking less and less likely that the lightning of success would strike his career, and frustration was making him increasingly bitter and blue.

The fairy-tale version of this would be that he let Ruth know she was the one good thing in his life. The real-life version, as you might guess, is that he took a lot of his frustration out on Ruth. If misery loves company, Spike seemed determined to take Ruth down with him.

Ruth was a self-aware woman, and she knew exactly what was going on. But she was kind, generous, and loving. Besides, you know how it is: the more you make an emotional investment like Ruth’s, the harder it is to pull out. She thought about leaving, and even threatened to leave if Spike didn’t change his act. But she never thought she would.

Training to Leave

Here’s what Ruth actually did. As an outlet for her search for a sense that she was really helping people, Ruth volunteered for an organization working with refugees with health problems who were newly arrived in the States. These were refugees from such places as Thailand, Cambodia, Guatemala, Haiti, the former Yugoslavia, Russia, Liberia, and Rwanda. Ruth didn’t speak any of their languages but she had one special qualification besides being a nurse: she was the daughter of refugees herself.

The organization’s main mission was to recruit people like Ruth to go abroad for long periods of time for little or no pay to work in refugee camps in some of the worst places in the world. The training they provided Ruth was geared for sending her to those places.

Ruth acted as though working with these refugees here at home was as far as she wanted to go, but for two years everything she did deepened her ties to this organization that would take her out of Spike’s life.

When I saw Ruth, she was agonizing over whether to stay with Spike or leave him. When I first asked Ruth question #3—Have you already made a concrete commitment to pursue a course of action or lifestyle that definitely excludes your partner? —she said she didn’t think so. But after she told me more of her story I asked her to look again at what she’d actually done and take another crack at question #3.

She sat silently for a long time and then said, “How am I going to tell Spike?” The bullet had left the gun a long time before she was ready to pull the trigger. Deep down she’d already decided to leave him eighteen months earlier.

So here’s the guideline:

GUIDELINE #3

If you’ve actually made a concrete commitment to pursue a course of action or lifestyle that excludes your partner, then on some level you’ve already decided that you’ll be happier if you leave your relationship. Most people who’ve done this are not happy when they stay. It’s as if you’d already advised yourself to leave. Quick take: If you look like you’re leaving your relationship and act like you’re leaving it, you’re leaving it. You know best.

Let’s be precise about what this guideline says and what it doesn’t say. The emphasis is on doing something concrete to change your life in a way that excludes your partner. This does not mean experimenting, fantasizing, speculating, or merely screwing up, and it does not mean doing things that will allow you to keep on having the same kind of life with your partner that you’ve been having. Here are a couple of examples to make this distinction clear:

• Checking out apartments you might move into does not mean you’ve already decided to leave. Actually renting an apartment and paying for the first month plus a security deposit does mean you’ve decided.

• Applying for jobs far away when you know your partner can’t relocate does not mean you’ve already decided to leave. Accepting an offer for such a job does mean you’ve decided (unless you’ve both agreed to a temporary arrangement like this).

• Consulting a divorce lawyer, even a whole series of such consultations, does not mean you’ve already decided to leave. Filing divorce papers after a careful consultation does mean you’ve decided.

Some of these might seem obvious to you. But to stuck stayers, they’re far from obvious.

Actions, Not Accidents

What about affairs? Are they expressions of a “concrete commitment to leave”? Let’s talk about affairs for a moment here. Later we’ll get into the issues behind affairs that make relationships too bad to stay in, but for now I’m only going to look at how affairs relate to guideline #3.

As a result of years of clinical work with couples, I’ve learned not to jump to conclusions about what it means psychologically when someone has an affair. Sure, the person who’s been cheated on (the “cheatee”) often sees the relationship as over when she discovers her partner’s affair. But just because it means it’s over to the cheatee doesn’t mean it’s over to the cheater. Whatever the cheatee feels, it wasn’t necessarily the intention of the cheater to create those feelings.

If you’re in an iffy relationship, the fact that you’ve had an affair could mean many things. It could mean you were experimenting to see if things could be better with someone else. It could mean that you just made a stupid mistake. It could mean you were very angry. In and of itself, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re setting in motion a chain of events designed to take you out of your relationship.

Here’s where your having an affair does mean you’ve “made a concrete commitment to leave”: If you stop caring whether your partner finds out or not, then an affair is a sign of your having taken practical steps to set in motion some course of action or lifestyle that definitely excludes your partner. I’m talking about transparent lies. Trips for which you don’t bother to give an excuse. Mysterious late night phone calls or gifts or lipstick stains you don’t try to hide.

If your answer to question #3 is yes, you’ll know it by now. It’s not that you’ve just “done something,” it’s that you’ve done something to burn your bridges behind you or to pour the foundation for a bridge to a new future that excludes your partner. You don’t have to decide to leave. You’ve already decided.

A woman once asked me about this. “I slept with a guy at work. It’s over now, but my problem is that I feel so guilty and mad at myself that I can’t get beyond those feelings and that makes me wonder if it isn’t too late for me.”

My answer is this: you have to treat feelings carefully. They’re real and important but they can also be complicated and misleading. If your relationship is really over, you’ll find that out through answering this series of questions. But having had an affair can make you feel guilty, grief-stricken, fearful, enraged, self-satisfied, empowered, and a lot of other emotions that can lead you to think you’ve done something to end the relationship when you really haven’t. You’ve only done something to end the relationship when you’ve done something that actually ends the relationship. In and of itself an affair is not necessarily that.

PERSPECTIVES: HOW TO GET OVER THE LOSS OF LOVE

The theme right now is your facing up to the possibility that the relationship is already over, that it’s just been hard for you to face the fact that you’ve decided it’s best to leave.

Why would you be so blind?

It’s hard to give up on love, to say good-bye to love, to move into a future where for sure you don’t have the love you used to have. After all, even in the worst of relationships there’s a little love left somewhere. And for people in relationship ambivalence there’s usually more than just a little love left. Leaving means saying good-bye to this love, and that’s very scary for a lot of people.

This is particularly an issue for women. In one area of life after another, from love to money, women are often more motivated by fear of loss than men are, less willing to take risks. When offered the choice between the bird in the hand and two in the bush, more women than men will choose the bird in the hand and more men than women will go for one of the birds in the bush.

I don’t want to overemphasize the difference. There’s no huge polarity. It’s not that all men love risk and all women hate risk. But when it comes to staying in a bad relationship more women are motivated by fear of loss and loneliness than men.

The last thing someone in your situation wants is empty reassurances. So I won’t tell you that if you’ve found someone once you can find someone again; and if you’ve loved someone once you can love someone again; and the more love you have to give, the more likely you are to find someone.

Instead, let me tell you what most people in your situation say when they’ve left a relationship that was clearly too bad to stay in: over and over, they say they feel relief and hope, supported by a newfound sense of self-respect and self-reliance.

Women particularly say they’re surprised at how much they like living on their own, able to do what they want when they want. They’d like to fall in love but almost never are they willing to settle again for the kind of relationship they left.

What’s their advice to you? Don’t worry, they say. If you made your choice in a responsible way, you will get over the loss of a particular partner. In the meantime, the keys to happiness are doing things you care about and staying connected to people.

STEP #4: “IF IT WERE UP TO GOD ...”

Some people have already decided to leave their relationship even though they’ve taken no action to get out. The obstacle for them isn’t acknowledging something practical, it’s acknowledging something emotional.

What’s missing for them is a sense of permission. They might feel guilty about leaving a partner who needs them. They might feel publicly shamed if this relationship can’t work. They might feel worried about what leaving will do to their children. They might dread the sense of failure that’ll come with ending the relationship, perhaps because other relationships have failed. They might be unwilling to acknowledge the death of love. They might be feeling all of these and more in some unique combination I’ve never seen before. Every part of them knows it’ll be best to leave—they just need permission before they can see their truth.

Michael’s Story

Lots of people have shed tears in my consulting room, but I never saw a flood of tears like the one poured forth by Michael, a locally prominent couples therapist, who’d come to me for help. After I worked with him for a bit I started to smell a rat. This talented, knowledgeable, highly motivated guy shouldn’t have had such a tough time seeing what was going on in a relationship so clearly filled with terrible problems.

So I asked Michael what I’ll ask you: 

Diagnostic question #4. If God or some omniscient being said it was okay to leave, would you feel tremendously relieved and have a strong sense that finally you could end your relationship? 

That’s when his tears flooded forth.

We’ve all seen films about wild chimpanzees in which there’s the heartbreaking scene of a mother chimp carrying around the corpse of her dead baby for hours, even days. That’s what it had been like for Michael: he’d been carrying around the corpse of a dead relationship for a long time for the simple reason that he couldn’t give himself permission to acknowledge that it was over. He sobbed in sudden mourning for a loss he’d been living with for a long time.

Why was it so hard for him to give himself permission? Partly it was because he was a therapist: if his relationship was over, didn’t that mean he was a fraud and a failure? And lots of non-professionals have the same feeling, too. Women feel it because we believe that making a relationship work is ultimately our job, our skill, our talent even. But men feel it as well.

There were other reasons why it was hard for Michael to give himself permission to leave. Most important was the sense he’d had that if he really were a good person he’d stay and work harder at it. Only a bad person, he thought, would walk out on a partner and all the hopes they’d had for the future, to say nothing of what this would do to their children.

This “I don’t want to be a bad person” factor is often overlooked these days because so much emphasis is placed on our sense that there are too many divorces. Perhaps there are too many. But for every divorce brought about by people who should feel more responsible to themselves and their partners, there’s a relationship not ending because someone feels too responsible.

Let’s deal with question #4 itself. Here’s the guideline:

GUIDELINE #4

Imagine how you’d feel if God or some omniscient being said you had permission to leave your relationship if you wanted to. If this suddenly gives you a strong sense that it’s all right for you to end your relationship, you’ll most likely feel you’ve discovered what’s best for you if you choose to leave. Quick take: If God’s saying “Hey, whatever you want is okay with me” is all you’d need to feel it’s okay to leave, it’s okay to leave.

Your answer here is only meaningful if a clear, definite yes came through without hesitation or confusion. If you have to stop to analyze your feelings to see if your answer is yes, it’s not yes.

You won’t need such an overwhelmingly resounding yes to count as an answer to other questions, but you do here. If the sense of total relief at the thought of getting total permission to leave doesn’t immediately clarify the fact that you’ve already decided to leave, you need different kinds of information to get you out of relationship ambivalence. You’ll get that information later, but you haven’t gotten it yet.

My World Is Empty Without You, Babe

Every once in a while someone has an unusual response to question #4. Instead of feeling either tremendously relieved or not feeling anything strongly one way or the other, they’re astonished to find they feel dismayed or indignant. They feel a kind of loud No! rise up in them. They discover that they very much do not want to hear that it’s okay to leave. They’re aching for some sign that there are buried treasures in the relationship that make it too good to leave.

What does it mean if you felt something like that? It might mean that you’d pinned a lot of hopes on this relationship and that you’re convinced your life will be empty without it. If that’s the case for you, then you’ve got to face the possibility that there are a lot more negatives for you in this relationship than for someone who’s just as ambivalent as you are but isn’t so hopeful. With all of your hopes, it would take that many more negatives to make you feel so ambivalent.

So as you read through the material to come, don’t let your hopes blind you to the realities in your relationship. If it’s too good to leave, that should only be because it is too good to leave, not because you want it to be too good to leave.

On the other hand, your being that incredibly hopeful even though you’re stuck in relationship ambivalence might mean you’re a candidate for couples therapy if you haven’t tried it already. If that’s the case, you might find the following Perspectives especially helpful.

PERSPECTIVES: A NOTE ABOUT COUPLES THERAPY

I rarely see people in relationship ambivalence who haven’t worked hard to make things better. And that means there’s a good chance you’ve already tried some kind of couples therapy or workshop. So I’m reluctant to urge people who’ve already worked on their relationship to work still more on it. At some point enough is enough.

If you haven’t worked on your relationship, though, that changes things. All the recommendations I make here are based on the current realities between you. I’m saying that if a specific reality is true at this moment, then other people for whom that’s true felt they were better off breaking up. But I’m not saying that it must be true, that it can’t change.

A really good couples therapist can sometimes change things between you that seemed horrible and unchangeable. So if some reality in your relationship points to your leaving, you always have the option of going to a couples therapist to see if you can change it.

But you want to avoid falling back into relationship ambivalence. Here’s the test. If your experience with the therapist is “Gee, she’s really good” and yet there’s no change after nine months in whatever it is that makes your relationship too bad to stay in, then you can feel confirmed in your sense that it’s most likely unchangeable. You’ll know you’ve done everything you could do. And that can make it easier to accept that you’ll be happier leaving the relationship.

When I’m working as a couples therapist, for a couple, I feel that it’s my mandate to always work to save the relationship, to never give up, to always search for a sign of life. A doctor shouldn’t give up until death wins, because that perseverance often enables a doctor to achieve victories over death. I feel the same way about the death of a relationship.

But I’m also a therapist for individuals, who have to make decisions about what’s best for them as individuals. And that’s my function here with you, to help you get out of the pain and waste of relationship ambivalence. So if you haven’t tried to make the relationship better, then by all means do so. But if you have tried and there’s no change after working nine months with a good therapist and your answers to the questions in this book point to leaving, then you can feel comfortable that you’ve been smart and responsible if you decide to leave.

5

Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love

Issue: Preconditions for Love

FITTING LOVE INTO THE EQUATION

I’ve never met anyone in a state of relationship ambivalence who wasn’t trying, in one way or another, to find a way to fit love into the equation. One of the biggest issues that keeps coming up is whether love exists between you at all. This is a question most of us have been asking ourselves since junior high school. “Do I love him/her?” “Do I really love him/her?” “How can I tell if I love him/her?” “Am I in love with him/her or do I just love him/her?” “Can I love him/her if I feel so frustrated and angry so much of the time?” It can be very confusing.

There are ways out of this confusion. The way we’ll look at right now is to see if the preconditions for love still exist in your relationship. The issue of love is endlessly mysterious, but it certainly helps to know if love is possible. If it’s not even possible, then it sure can’t exist.

You know how in some cartoons the character runs off the edge of a cliff but stays suspended in midair until he looks down? Only when he sees there’s nothing under him does he start to fall. It’s like that for a lot of us in iffy relationships. We’re up in the air because we haven’t looked down to see that there’s nothing under our love to hold it up. If we hadn’t fallen in love with this person in the first place, we wouldn’t be in love now.

So if you’re trying to find the truth about whether you’ll be happier if you leave or stay, it’s important to explore the foundations for love in your relationship. Wouldn’t it be great to know that love was possible? Wouldn’t it be great to know that there was a foundation for your love to rest on?

Then you’d have something you could point to to say yeah, let’s do it, let’s fall in love.

STEP #5: STAYING ALIVE

Sometimes things look dead and they’re not. I remember years ago when I was a kid growing up in New York City on the Lower East Side. We moved to a new apartment and there was what looked like a dead tree outside our door. New York is a tough place for trees, and this tree looked really dead. I must have some kind of an instinct about life and death because when some neighbor said she was going to call to have the tree removed I found myself insisting it was still alive. I made a bet with her—I’d give her free babysitting for a year if that tree didn’t bring forth leaves in the next spring.

Of course the tree did sprout leaves. Somewhere under the dry, peeling bark and the brittle branches was some current of life.

I think about that tree from time to time when people come to me for help figuring out what to do about their relationship. Like my neighbor, they’re sometimes pretty sure it’s dead and are looking for my advice about removing themselves from it. And yet they’re asking my opinion. That tells me they’re still ambivalent. They suspect that maybe there’s a current of life, of love, still flowing through their relationship. They’re hoping I can point to it, show it to them, hold it up to them right under their noses so they can smell it.

Jack’s Story

A few years ago a man came to see me because a lot of things weren’t working in his life. Jack was a corporate consultant and trainer and seminar leader. With the busy, dizzy pace of his life, Jack had grown emotionally estranged from his wife, and that bothered him. He felt the two of them should be connected, the way they’d been years ago because, he said, when things between them had been at their best they’d been very good indeed. Disconnected as he was from his wife, he wondered if he didn’t owe it to himself and to her to leave the relationship. It’s not that it was too bad to stay, but he couldn’t see how it was too good to leave. “What should I do?” he asked. I felt he was asking me to find a sign of life in his relationship. I asked Jack the question I’ll ask you to answer for yourself: 

Diagnostic question #5. In spite of your problems, do you and your partner have even one positively pleasurable activity or interest (besides children) you currently share and look forward to sharing in the future, something you do together that you both like and that gives both of you a feeling of closeness for a while? 

Instead of answering right away, Jack made me justify every bit of what I asked. Frankly, I think he was stalling for time and, on a deeper level, he was making it hard for me because he was scared I’d provide some illusory and ultimately disappointing piece of reassurance.

First thing he said was, “What do you mean ‘besides children’? What’s wrong with children bringing people together?”

The short answer is that children aren’t glue and shotgun weddings don’t work out. You probably know people who had kids in the hopes that it would pour some cement into the shaky foundation of their marriage. We all root for that to work, but we all know how often it doesn’t. Children will keep you connected, that’s for sure, but it’s not the kind of connection that has much to do with your love for each other. People fall in love and make a bond before there are children and they have to stay in love after the children have left home; if you want to look for a sign of life you’ve got to look beyond the children for it.

Beyond Sex

Jack was silent for a moment. He and his wife did have children and they had similar values and, on the rare occasions when they had the time, they shared family time together. But now I was asking him for another positively pleasurable connection between him and his wife. He still had trouble wrapping his mind around what I was getting at. “Do you mean sex?” he asked. “I like sex. Does that count?”

Maybe, I said. Orgasms alone don’t count. Good sex alone doesn’t count. Sex counts for question #5 only if it’s something you really share. You know it counts, I said, if it’s something you both anticipate with pleasure, if it not only feels good but makes you feel close, if that glow of closeness is real and lasts for a significant period after sex, and if you keep seeking it out.

I could almost see the wheels working as he tried to take in the distinction between sex that superficially felt good and sex that produced a real close connection that felt good on every level. Then I saw discouragement spreading over his face.

“Look,” he said, “I’ve never had bad sex. But I can’t honestly say that Laura and I really connect through it. Sex happens but we don’t go out of our way to make it happen and when we do, for me, it’s basically about sex. So does that mean that I’ve struck out on this question?”

Not at all, I said. We’ve just begun. It doesn’t matter how you connect as long as there’s something you do together that feels good and you look forward to doing together and that makes you both feel close. I’m not saying that if you don’t have this things are over between you. But if you do have it, that’s an indication of life in your relationship, a foundation for love.

“So help me out,” Jack said. “What are you talking about?”

It’s different for different people, but here are some activities that people have told me give them a close, pleasurable connection, that give these particular people an experience of being in love again:

• Cuddling in bed together before turning off the lights

• Having friends over for dinner

• Gossiping about those friends after they’ve left

• Laughing together at the same zany comedy

• Going dancing

• Going away together

• Talking politics

• Playing tennis

• Sitting around on Sunday morning with the New York Times and a pot of coffee

• Kissing each other

• Checking out the antique shops

• Gardening together

• Walking home from church

• Holding hands and going for long walks in the country or on the beach

• Running around in the park with the dog and a Frisbee

It’s not that activities like these make everything great or that they’d mean anything to anyone else, but for at least one particular couple one of these things made them feel close and made them feel good about feeling close. Whenever they did these things—and they did them at least once a month—they not only felt their love, they felt their love was real. For a few moments they could forget all the things that made their relationship feel too bad to stay in.

Now You’re Cooking

Jack closed his eyes and drifted off in thought to see if he could find something like this in his life with Laura. “Does cooking count?” he asked.

It depends. What are you talking about?

“The thing is,” he said, “that we don’t have to cook at all, not together the way we do, but every couple of weeks or so on a Saturday afternoon or something we’ll really get into making some special meal and we’ll go into the kitchen and we sort of mesh the way we work together. We’ll talk, we’ll even sing, or we’ll be silent for a period. I know some couples get into fights the minute they’re both in the kitchen together, but for us it’s a kind of tension-free zone, and I have no idea how it happens but I think we really feel close, like we’re enjoying something together we’re not supposed to enjoy.”

Jack had found it, and it had been under his nose all the time. That’s how it works for some people with this question and with other questions later on that point to the possibility that a relationship really may be too good to leave. Pain throbs, but the current of life in a relationship is all too invisible. No wonder it so often dies of neglect.

So here’s the guideline I was able to provide for Jack:

GUIDELINE #5

If there’s even one thing you and your partner experience together and look forward to (besides children) that reliably feels good and makes you feel close, there’s the possibility you’ll be able to clean out the crap between you and have a viable relationship. If you had just met, there’d be the possibility of your falling in love. Quick take: Real love needs real loving experiences.

This guideline doesn’t refer to things you do together that just feel okay or that enable you to stop fighting or hating each other. It refers to things that provide regular, positive, pleasurable connections, that you both look forward to and you both make happen.

But remember that Jack was a tough customer. “If all this gives me is just the possibility that I’ve got a viable relationship, what’s the big deal about it?” he said.

Every sign of life is precious. A yes answer to question #5 is a sign that love is possible. It gives you what strong, deep roots give a plant that’s been hit by drought. There’s reason to hope. There’s reason to press on. There’s reason to keep cultivating the relationship and looking for more signs of life. It might still turn out that later on in this book you’ll learn something about your relationship that makes it clear that you’ll be happier if you leave, but for now it’s clear you’re not there yet.

PERSPECTIVES : A NOTE ON HOW THE GUIDELINES WORK

Because this book works just like medical diagnostics, positive and negative guidelines don’t exactly have equal status. A guideline that says your relationship is too bad to stay in overrules any guidelines that say your relationship is too good too leave.

Why is that? I know that sounds negative, but it isn’t. It’s just how diagnostics work. Let me explain.

Suppose you were trying to decide whether to stay in your house or move. An incredible view or an ideal layout might make your house too good to leave and might outweigh a lot of negatives. But they don’t counteract your house being sandwiched between a slaughterhouse and a cement factory. They don’t counteract your house’s foundation having been completely eaten away by termites. They don’t counteract your living in a floodplain.

It’s a kind of rule in life. A lot of good stuff might make us willing to put up with some bad stuff. But any really terrible stuff has veto power over a ton of good stuff.

So any guideline that says this makes a relationship too good to leave is provisional only. It’s true only as long as nothing else comes along to make it too bad to stay in.

Guideline #5 is absolutely basic. Even some couples in the worst possible shape trying to work out the greatest difficulties have discovered they can answer yes to this question, and that positively pleasurable connection, however small, has provided a basis for working their way back to each other.

But guideline #5 has a special importance for people who are in what clinicians refer to as dead or devitalized or roommate marriages, where the really bad thing that bothers them is that there doesn’t seem to be anything really good. Guideline #5 is a test for whether this is really the case. Some relationships are more cool and distant than others. But if there’s a positively pleasurable connection and you answered yes to question #5, then your relationship may not be as lifeless as you think.

What If Your Answer’s No?

If you’ve been holding your breath this whole time because you answered no to question #5, you can relax. With diagnostic questions, usually one of the answers to a question is more meaningful than the other. You know how it is: If you can jog a mile without getting completely out of breath, that’s a sign you’re in decent shape. But if you can’t, if you have to stop and catch your breath, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve got a medical condition—you just might be out of shape.

In the same way, when it comes to question #5, if you answered no there’s still the possibility that you’ve got a viable relationship. It’s just that you’ve got to work together to find something that you both look forward to doing together that feels good and makes you both feel closer. It might be something you used to do together. It might be something you’ve never done together. If nothing else is seriously wrong, there’s still a chance you can find it.

STEP #6: THE NASTY-STUPID-CRAZY-UGLY-STINKY FACTOR

There’s an even more elemental precondition for love than having something you do together that makes you feel close. It’s so obvious I’d be embarrassed to mention it except for the fact that it’s proved so helpful and reliable for people. You can’t fall in love with somebody you find repulsive, loathsome, and, as Daffy Duck would say, despicable. So if you want to know what to do about your relationship, it’s time we took a look to see if we can rule out what I call the nasty-stupid-crazy-ugly-stinky factor.

Diagnostic question #6 . Would you say that to you your partner is basically nice, reasonably intelligent, not too neurotic, okay to look at, and most of the time smells all right? 

This is an unpretentious question. I’m sure that you, like most people stuck in relationship ambivalence, are all too aware of all kinds of unmet needs and unsolved problems. But you can’t let this blind you to a basic issue: suppose you got everything you want and all the problems were solved—would your partner still give you the creeps?

You’re not looking for the most wonderful person in the world with this question. You’re not applying anyone’s standards but your own. You’re not trying to live up to any expectations but the most basic. You’re just looking for animal compatibility, and I use the word animal in the nicest sense of the word.

So would you say that your partner’s essentially a nice person? Not the biggest-hearted person in the world, or even someone who goes out of his way to be kind. But do you have a sense that your partner is the sort of person who doesn’t always grab the last piece of cake for himself?

And would you say that your partner is smart in ways that matter to you? Not that she’s a genius or smarter than you are or even particularly smart in most ways. But would you say that there’s some vein of wisdom or cleverness or common sense that you can tap into and that you respect in your partner?

And would you say that your partner’s reasonably sane (or at least no crazier than most of us)? Indeed we’re all a little crazy in our own ways, so I’m not asking if your partner has no emotional hangups or psychological quirks. But if you remember Jack Nicholson in The Shining or Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, would you say that your partner’s not like that?

And would you say that your partner still looks pretty good to you? Of course most of us start heading downhill once we hit twenty-four. But the human heart is very forgiving and the human eye can find attractions everywhere, so would you say that on balance you like the way your partner looks?

And would you say that your partner still (believe it or not) smells good to you? Smell is the most emotional of the senses. It’s not that any of us smell like perfume, and as comedian Monica Piper says, “Who wants to smell like a man?” But when your partner’s reasonably clean, do you like the way he smells?

Now suppose your answer to question #6 is yes. Let’s talk about the yes answer. Yes is good.

GUIDELINE #6

If you can say that right now you feel your partner’s reasonably nice, smart, sane, not ugly, and okay smelling to you, you’ve removed an important obstacle to your finding your way back to each other. When people say yes to this question, the possibility of love still exists. Quick take: You just can’t love someone who’s mean, dumb, crazy, ugly, or stinky.

I know we fall in love with people because we feel there’s something special or wonderful about them, some deep connection, some magic chemistry. But before all that can happen, even when it’s a case of love at first sight, there’s at least a moment—an absolutely necessary moment—of what you might call pre-love. It’s a kind of almost animal-like filter where you determine the other person’s basic okayness for you. It’s so basic that we tend to forget it. Question #6 is a reminder.

What if your answer was no? In most cases, that’s not necessarily a bad sign. When I ask people this question, their no’s are often misleading. Remember, they’re stuck in a state of relationship ambivalence. They’ve built up a huge backlog of negatives about the other person. In fact, in most cases when people say their relationship is too good to leave but too bad to stay in, the negatives usually outweigh the positives because it takes an awful lot to make us think of giving up on love.

So, when people say no to question #6, it’s very often an angry, disgruntled, grievance-filled no. It’s a no that’s tainted with hurt and disappointment. They may feel the other person’s not nice because they’ve just had a huge fight, stupid because he doesn’t understand how she feels, crazy because his feelings seem to make no sense, ugly because he’s so angry and damn it because he said he’d lose weight and he didn’t, and stinky because he ... well, because he’s been acting like a stinker. This is not a diagnostically meaningful no. There’s a high probability that negative feelings are clouding your lens and your no answer isn’t a useful indicator for you right now.

A Dead-Certain No

Every once in a while, though, someone answers question #6 like this: They think about it for a while, taking enough time to make sure that they’re not being controlled by the moment. Then suddenly it’s very clear. There is a resigned but dead-certain no. This kind of careful, thoughtful, unmistakable no only happens a small percent of the time with this question, but when it happens it’s a definite sign that there’s a basic discord. If you look your relationship in the face, if you can see it unclouded by superficial hurt and anger, and the nasty-stupid-crazy-ugly-stinky factor stares back at you, then it’s most likely you’ll feel you’ve made the right decision if you leave.

Linda’s Story

Let me tell you about Linda. I worked with her when she was married to a very rich man. To put it bluntly, this guy had enough dough to make a lot of people stick around in an otherwise unsatisfying relationship with him. Linda was a person like this. I asked Linda question #6 and she knew without the slightest doubt that for her this guy was a mean, dumb, weird, ugly, smelly bastard. But while she was unhappy with him, there was frankly too much money there for her to want to get out.

But when a major business deal of his went sour and his net worth dipped below 5 million dollars, Linda finally left him. As Linda said, he just wasn’t rich enough anymore to put up with. It takes more than 5 million dollars to make it bearable to live with someone when you answer no to this question.

It’s a crude story, but isn’t clarity great?

6

You’ve Got a Hold on Me

Issue: Power—When the Other Person

Is Bossy, Controlling, Domineering,

Overwhelming ...

“Because I just can’t deal with her.”

“Because he’s impossible.”

“Because I have a terrible knot in my stomach every day while I’m waiting for him to come home from work.”

These are some of the most common things I hear from people who are wondering if their relationship is too bad to stay in. There’s something about their partner that frustrates and confuses and overwhelms them and makes their life unbearable. And that something has to do with power. Everyone intuitively understands there’s such a thing as being in a relationship with someone whose personal power is so overwhelming and destructive that you’ve just got to get out. That’s what we’ll deal with here.

HURRICANE SEASON

Have you ever been outside during a hurricane? I have. The wind was so powerful that it was almost impossible to walk in the direction I wanted to. Most of the time I could barely manage to avoid being blown over or carried away in the direction the wind wanted to take me. I didn’t want to conquer the wind. I just wanted to go where I wanted to go. But it felt as if the wind wanted to conquer me.

Imagine falling in love with that wind before it turned so powerful, while it was still a gentle tropical breeze. That’s what a lot of our relationships are like. Almost no one shows their true capacity for power when things are just starting out. Even young women who get involved with rich, influential older men find that generally in the early stages guys like that soft-pedal their ability to throw their weight around. They’re even careful to show how sensitive and considerate they can be. It all feels so good. Then with time the winds start picking up.

There’s a beautiful illustration of this in the movie Citizen Kane. When Kane first meets sweet young Susan Alexander, the incredibly powerful Kane is as cute and vulnerable as he can be. But before you know it, he’s ruling her life and everything in it.

When I ask people in relationship ambivalence to talk about the things that make them feel maybe they’ll be happiest leaving, the issue of power comes up a lot, one way or the other, even if the word power is never used. Everyone’s experience is a little different, of course, but here’s what one guy said that really captured the essence of what a lot of people have to deal with:

My friends tell me that years ago I said I wanted to marry a strong woman, and I’m sure I did. But Gwen’s more than I can handle. She’s so passionate about everything, and it keeps shading into rage or craziness. Plus she’s got this whole set of tricks up her sleeve—I mean, she’ll make a scene in public if it looks like she’s not going to get things her way, or she’ll win by making me feel like a jerk for wanting what I want. And she’s always got so many arguments for her side that half the time I feel like an idiot for even bringing things up.

It can be exhausting and demoralizing to live with someone like this. But if you’re in a state of relationship ambivalence, you know it can be very hard to see when the other person crosses the line from being just difficult to deal with to being too difficult to deal with. It’s not knowing where that line is, not even being able to see it, not feeling you have a right to draw that line that keeps you stuck in relationship ambivalence.

That’s what we’ll sort out here, so that you can discover whether your partner’s power is something you just have to deal with the way everyone else does or whether there’s something about power in your relationship that’s so bad that most people in your situation ended up feeling happy they left and unhappy they stayed.

Let’s begin with an example that’ll give us a frame of reference we can keep coming back to.

Rosemary’s Story

Rosemary and Vinnie came to me seeking help because of what they said was Vinnie’s unwillingness to “consider” Rosemary, as if this were one of those typical cases of the insensitive man and the oversensitive woman. But Vinnie was like a steamroller, and what does it mean to be oversensitive to that? You have to know how to get people to do what you want to run a successful restaurant like his. When Vinnie wanted things to happen, they happened. When he didn’t want things to happen, they didn’t happen. Vinnie was like a force of nature.

Rosemary went along with this for a while for the most obvious of reasons. Vinnie was a typical man, she thought, and what can you expect from a man? He had enough money to call the shots. His business was so demanding that he could get whatever he wanted by saying it was “for the restaurant.” Vinnie put out a lot of superficial respect for Rosemary as a “lady,” smart, educated, refined—respect she felt she’d lose if she got down in the gutter with Vinnie and challenged him. Besides, Rosemary was an accountant, and the restaurant was one of her accounts, which meant that in a sense Vinnie was one of her bosses.

Rosemary’s dilemma was this. Was Vinnie just a forceful, on-top-of-things kind of guy who seemed hard to deal with but who was really just trying to do a good job? Or did he have something else going on inside him, some need, some hunger, that made him a kind of Hitler unable to rest in peace as long as one single Poland remained unoccupied? Was Vinnie the restaurant’s servant or Rosemary’s dictator? Was there ever a chance he’d let her draw a free breath?

Let’s see just how badly Vinnie rode roughshod over Rosemary. One incident stands out for Rosemary as capturing the truth about who Vinnie really was.

At one point we had an extralong session devoted specifically to Rosemary trying to show Vinnie how everything in their relationship was set up for him to get everything he wanted and for her to get nothing of what she wanted. Maybe that wasn’t literally true, but it certainly felt like that to Rosemary.

Vinnie tried arguing with her. “Well,” he said, “we never have sex unless you want to.”

“I’m not accusing you of rape,” Rosemary said. “I’m just saying you always win. I wasn’t talking about sex anyway, but even there the whole thing is governed by your pressure, your moods, your schedule, your ability to make me feel guilty, your deciding when you want to initiate sex, your making me feel creepy whenever I initiate sex. But you’re even doing it now. We’re talking about sex. I didn’t want to talk about sex. How can you be so powerful to get us talking about sex when sex wasn’t the issue I wanted to talk about? The issue is that everything is what you want when you want it.”

Maybe Vinnie didn’t want to look bad in my eyes. So he suddenly became eager to learn all the things he’d been doing “wrong.” Rosemary complied. She poured forth a litany of instances when Vinnie had bullied and dominated her. They ran the gamut from how it happened that they still didn’t have kids even though Rosemary wanted them to how Vinnie ended up controlling her accounting business.

The scales seemed to fall from Vinnie’s eyes. He acted genuinely sorry. “You tell me every time I do something to be too powerful,” Vinnie offered, “and I’ll try not to do that, okay?”

Rosemary hoped she’d finally gotten through. Still in the safety of therapy she said, “All right—when we leave here I’ve got to go right home so I have time to change ’cause I’ve got to get dressed up for a meeting with a new client. Is that going to be a problem for you?” It was fine with Vinnie.

But later I learned that in the car, driving home, Vinnie had started insisting they quickly swing by the restaurant to see how things were going there. “Besides,” Vinnie said, “you don’t need to change.” Rosemary suddenly had this horrible sense that he knew exactly what he was doing, that he didn’t really need to go to the restaurant at all, that for him if they drove right home Rosemary would “win” and that Vinnie was an automaton programmed to not let that happen.

Hidden Power

But do you leave a relationship just because your partner “modifies” an agreement? Rosemary had been asking herself questions like that for a very long time. There’s something about power—like the wind—that makes it invisible in relationships even when it’s blowing us away.

We’ve got to understand what keeps power so hidden before we can truly see it. There are a couple of reasons why the ebb and flow of power is a dirty little secret in relationships, why we keep it secret from each other and from ourselves.

Power v8. Love. First, power seems completely antithetical to the idea of love. We feel that power no more belongs in the love context than sex belongs in the church context. If two people are getting close and little red hearts are floating up in the air like bubbles from a bubble pipe, how can the thought of power, much less the reality of power, intrude?

No wonder we’re blind to power in the realm of love. It’s a terrifying thought: “If I even think it’s about power, that means love is dead, and I won’t face that.” Yes, we reserve the right to complain endlessly about our partners, to even call them controlling, but if this relationship is about power, we think, it can’t be about love.

But in the world of how things really are, as opposed to the world of how things are supposed to be, there is all too often something going on with power in our relationships that fills them so full of frustration and confusion that all we can think of is getting out.

Power and Shame. The other reason power is rarely talked about is shame. Imagine how a smart, competent, educated woman like Rosemary felt admitting she couldn’t hold her own in the face of Vinnie’s power. Outside of coping with a newborn baby or a teenager or a boss, we’re all embarrassed to admit we feel powerless. Besides, to do so would mean we’re saying we want power ourselves, which is embarrassing. But even more, it would mean we’re saying we’re weak, which is humiliating.

And so men certainly don’t talk about how their wives make them feel powerless. And women today are just as reluctant to seem like helpless victims.

Unfortunately, women also get hit from the other side. While we’re ashamed of being powerless, we’re ashamed of being powerful too, of wanting power, of caring about power. The image of women in our society these days is that women somehow have a special aptitude for cooperation and connection. This translates for the average woman as saying that if she cares about power and uses her personal power, she’s not a normal woman. So if there’s shame both from being powerless and from being powerful, the only psychological strategy that’s possible is to try to put all thought of power out of your mind.

And, when it comes to dealing with a relationship made iffy by power problems, this means a lot of women have trouble figuring out what’s really going on and what they really want in the relationship.

But there’s good news. When you look power in the eye, you can’t lose. Either there’s something toxic going on with power in your relationship that makes it a relationship you’ll be happy leaving, or the realities of power in your relationship don’t make it too bad to stay in, and you’ll very likely find that power problems are fixable.

STEP #7: POWER PEOPLE

How in the world does power intrude on our love nests? Simple. It’s up for grabs. The only way you could have a relationship without power struggles would be like the famous scene in the fifties movie Marty, where Marty and his buddy sit around saying:

“What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know. What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know. What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know. What do ... ?”

You get the picture.

The point is that from the day you and your partner meet, you have to decide to do things and you have to decide to do them in a certain way. Every single decision is fertile soil for a power struggle, because with every single decision there’s a question of who’s going to make it and whose needs are going to prevail.

So there are power issues involved with deciding where you’re going to go on your first date, when you make love, what you do when you make love, who’s allowed to shout and under what circumstances, where you’re going to go on your vacation, how much money you’re going to save, how long the baby’s allowed to cry before you’re either torturing him or spoiling him, how late you’re allowed to come home from work without getting in trouble for not calling.... Everything is a potential source of power struggles.

No wonder people fight in even the healthiest of relationships: there’s a rough balance of power and they’re just struggling to have their say. If you watch the average couple deal with this, you see that sometimes they work out who decides what by letting each partner be in charge of certain things: you’re in charge of paying the bills, your partner’s in charge of initiating lovemaking.

Sometimes couples work this out on the basis of need: whoever cares the most about something makes the decision.

Sometimes couples work this out through some rough sense of balance: because you decided what to watch on TV Thursday night, your partner gets to decide what to watch on Sunday night.

Sometimes couples work this out on the basis of knowledge or skill: whoever’s best at something makes decisions about it.

Most people work out their power issues through a mixture of these and other fair methods, including a fight that’s often just a way of bringing out all the issues and showing who cares how much about what.

But some people can’t. They’re what I call power people, and they consistently make relationships too bad to stay in.

Power people are different from everyone else. If you’re in a relationship with the average person, then the two of you struggle as everyone else does over whose needs will get met. But if you’re in a relationship with a power person, then any and all of your needs are a threat to his power. You’re not two people with ordinary needs; one of you has an inordinate need for power in and of itself.

Here’s the question that gets at this: 

Diagnostic question #7. Does your partner bombard you with difficulties when you try to get even the littlest thing you want; and is it your experience that almost any need you have gets obliterated; and if you ever do get what you want, is getting it such an ordeal that you don’t feel it was worth all the effort? 

There’s a lot to think about here. You’ve got to be careful with this question. It’s so easy for people in iffy relationships to get annoyed with their partners that they might confuse someone who’s very strong with a real power person. Let’s make the difference clear in the following Perspectives.

PERSPECTIVES: POWER PEOPLE

So who are these power people that question #7 applies to? Where do they come from? What makes them the way they are?

Turning on the Power

There are two main threads that generally run through the growing up years of power people. The first thread is that they have parents or other influential family members who are in one way or another incredibly powerful people. They grow up with the sense that accumulating power of one’s own is the only way to survive. They learn the rule: do whatever it takes to win.

Their parents don’t necessarily exert power by being straightforwardly domineering. The parents can get their power by being incessantly, intensely emotional. They can get their power by being outrageous. They can get their power by being nutty. They can get their power by making the child feel like an idiot. The point is that the child of parents like this soon realizes that cooperation is impossible. The only alternatives are victory or escape.

The second thread for power people growing up is that their parents inadvertently ran a school that taught them lessons on how to be powerful. They observed their parents and they saw how when you do this you win. This learning gives them an advantage. We all emphasize our strengths in life—intelligence, charm, beauty, energy, whatever. This means that as we pass from childhood to adulthood we enhance the strengths we began with. And power people started out by learning how to be powerful, they used their lessons well, and so they developed further power skills.

A Talent for the Game

Power people also bring their own traits and aptitudes to who they are. In the old nature-nurture controversy, the correct answer is always both. That applies to power people, too.

Here’s what power people have going for them. One thing is talent. I’ve spent years working with individuals in a variety of contexts where power was up for grabs, and a talent for power is as palpable in relationships as a talent for music stands out in a high school band. Anyone who works in an organization of any kind knows exactly who has a talent for power in the circle of people he works with.

But there’s a further dividing line beyond having and not having a talent for power. There’s the line between being able to acquire power in a particular situation and being unable to stop yourself from acquiring power in any particular situation. The mere talent for power doesn’t make you the kind of power person that destroys relationships. But when the talent controls you and makes you its servant, then you and everyone around you are in big trouble. Power people are out of control with the need to be in control.

Reality

Then there’s reality. There are practical circumstances in people’s lives that make them much more powerful than they might otherwise be in a relationship. Most often this comes from their job.

For example, if your partner is involved with any kind of emergency-type work, whether as a fireman or as head of emergency medicine at a big-city hospital trauma center, the demands of the job are so intense that it’s easy for your partner to get whatever he wants by standing on the shoulders of the job. But any kind of job with significant pressures or demands or difficulties can give your partner real power in getting what he wants. “You’ve got to do this or that because I need it for my job.” “You’ve got to stop doing this or that because it prevents me from doing my job.” These kinds of things put a strain on any relationship, but if you’re involved with a power person they just add to his power.

There’s a surprising range of circumstances that give people power. Owning a business does this. Having real power in the corporate world does this. Political power does this. Having star power in the entertainment world does this. Having to hold down two demanding jobs to make ends meet does this. Having a power person for a boss does this. Even if your partner’s not a power person, if your partner’s boss is a power person it can still be like being married to a power person yourself.

In some circumstances even being pregnant can give you real power, as was the case with a woman I worked with who was the wife of a mob figure. He’d ignored her and run roughshod over her for years, but she was amazed to find that starting with the day he learned she was pregnant she could get him to do whatever she wanted whenever she wanted. Sadly, her new power lasted only until the day she brought a healthy baby home from the hospital.

But it’s crucial to distinguish between external circumstances that change the power dynamics all by themselves and a power person using circumstances to gain still more power.

One more thing power people have going for them is caring. That might sound odd until you think about it for a moment.

Suppose the issue is deciding what you’re going to have for dinner. One of you doesn’t much care what you eat. The other cares passionately. He emphatically requires certain vegetables cooked a certain way, for example, vehemently hating certain dairy products. Guess who makes the menu.

Or one of you doesn’t much care how things go when you make love, as long as you make love. The other has a whole list of must do’s, must do’s in certain ways, and must not do’s. Guess who’s in charge of lovemaking.

One of you is pretty easygoing when it comes to the kids. The other strongly believes in a whole list of rules and restrictions. Guess who’s in charge of childrearing.

Someone who’s not a power person can be very powerful in a relationship the more things they care about and the more strongly they care about them. But at least you can talk to someone like that about the impact their caring has on your power dynamics. A power person goes beyond caring about some particular thing and uses his caring about everything to gain power.

This gives you a sense of what you’re potentially up against in a relationship with a power person. Someone who was brought up to have a hunger for power. Someone who learned about power at his or her parents’ knees. Someone with a talent for power. Someone willing to go much further than you’d ever imagine in an attempt to gain power. Someone whose power is enhanced by the realities of his or her life. Someone who cares overintensely about specific issues.

To someone like this, you may very well be invisible.

Power People in Action

To help you answer question #7, the issue is are you in a relationship with a power person?

It certainly looked as though Rosemary was. That incident in which Vinnie suddenly had to stop by the restaurant even though it was so important to Rosemary to go right home may not have been important in itself, but it clearly showed something that had been true for Rosemary every day of her life with Vinnie: he was interested in getting his needs met, but he was even more interested in maintaining his power.

Going to the restaurant seemed completely unnecessary. But power people fight for a lot of seemingly unnecessary things. They only seem unnecessary, though, when we focus on their need for that thing. They’re completely necessary from the perspective of their need for power.

The problem is that if you’re not a power person it’s easy to understand needing specific things but very difficult to understand needing power. So it’s hard for you to accept what a power person’s really up to. And that means it’s hard for you to accept what’s happening to you if you’re living with a power person.

Now suppose you’re in a relationship with a power person like this and you try to take care of yourself. All you want to do is get some need of your own met, like Rosemary’s wanting to go right home so she’d have time to change her clothes. But you have to understand how the power person’s mind works. If they care about power so deeply, they can’t imagine that you’re not the same way. If all they want is power, all you must want is power. They interpret your actions with their own meanings.

So if they do things not to get their needs met but to maintain power, anything you do to get any of your needs met must be to assert your own power. At least that’s how they see it.

So while Rosemary was working to make her relationship a place where she could take care of herself, Vinnie couldn’t help translating this as a power struggle. He was like the scorpion who stings the frog that’s ferrying him across the river and then drowns along with the frog because he can’t help himself, because that’s just who he is. In the same way, a power person is made stupid in the service of his need for power. Instead of trying to make an entire balanced menu of things work as well as possible, he focuses on power so exclusively he’ll destroy everything else.

So let’s see what your answer to question #7 means. I bet you can predict what this guideline’s going to be:

GUIDELINE #7

If your partner bombards you with difficulties when you try to get even the littlest thing you want, and if almost any need you have somehow gets obliterated, and if whenever you do get something you want it’s such an ordeal that you don’t feel it was worth the effort—then you’ll be happy in the long run if you leave and unhappy, if you stay. Quick take: Power people poison passion.

What if you’re still not sure if your partner’s a passion-poisoning power person? Maybe you can’t get inside his head, but you can see what he does and how it makes you feel.

Power Moves

The things power people do to maintain their power fall into a number of specific categories. Here are the main ones. Watch out for them:

The Best Defense Is a Good Offense. Whatever need you have, power people claim there’s something wrong with you for having that need. They’ll try to make you feel ashamed or guilty. They’ll make you feel sick or weak. They’ll sneer and make you feel inferior. They’ll provide a variety of labels—“defensive,” “neurotic,” “codependent,” the list is endless—so you feel, well, anyone who has this need is like that, and I don’t want to be like that, so I’d better not have that need. These tactics are often hard to notice at first because you’re so busy dealing with your own feelings about there being something wrong with you that it’s hard to focus on what the power person’s really doing.

Power Judo. Why do things the hard way? A lot of power people discover that they can win if they yes you to death. Vinnie, in our example, used power judo at first, and it so lulled Rosemary into thinking that she was going to get what she wanted that she wasn’t prepared when he slipped in his own need by saying he wanted to quickly go and check out the restaurant. The point of these tactics is that instead of opposing you the power person seems to be going along with you by promising you what you’re asking for. But he never delivers.

Snow Jobs. I don’t mean flattery. I’m talking about an overwhelming, distracting blizzard of complication and confusion that so spins you around and turns you upside down that you’re willing to let the power person have everything he wants if only you can find a sliver of peace and clarity. You can be greeted with an emotional uproar, a verbally abusive uproar, a political uproar, an intellectual uproar, even an uproar of busyness and practical details that obliterates your own needs. It doesn’t have to seem like an uproar at all, though. You can be snowed under, for example, by a confusing blizzard of polite considerations all seemingly raised for your benefit.

The Endless Campaign. All you wanted was one simple thing. But the power person keeps coming at you, coming at you, coming at you—battling endlessly over every step and at every possible moment and with renewed energy at every setback. The exhausting relentlessness of this—like a little kid you take to the supermarket who wants you to buy him a certain cereal he’s seen on TV—makes you so sorry you brought up your need in the first place that you not only give up now but you don’t try again for a long time.

Dirty Fighting. Power people scare and intimidate us. They quickly convey a fearless sense that they’ll do anything to get what they want or prevent you from getting what you want. They will literally act crazy if necessary, even though they’re not. One guy, on the occasions when his wife told him he was driving too fast (and evidently he was), would either say, “You think this is fast—I’ll show you fast,” and put the pedal to the floor, scaring her witless. Or, as happened in the middle of sixty-mile-an-hour rush-hour traffic, he’d say, “You want me to slow down—why don’t I just stop,” and he just came to a complete stop in the middle of a four-lane highway. (When this woman first came to see me the first words out of her mouth were “My husband says I need therapy because I’m too emotional.”)

Con Jobs. Your needs make them sick. Literally. Or so they’d have you think. That’s how power people work. One woman learned this at her mother’s knee when as a teenager she told her mother she didn’t want to go to church anymore. Her mother fell on the floor, enacting a full-blown heart attack so convincingly that the daughter called the paramedics. Later, in her own relationship and an accomplished power person in her own right, she’d pull everything from hysterical crying jags to gasping attacks to blinding headaches to get her own way.

Power people will do anything to win. This is how you end up feeling that your needs are obliterated and that it’s not worthwhile to even try to get a need met. Ultimately what this does to you is give you a looking-for-ways-to-do-things-behind-your-partner’s -back attitude.

And the reason you’ll be happiest leaving isn’t only what all this does to you. It’s that any attempts to deal with it or fix it will just seem to your partner like an assault on his power and he’ll have to come back at you with whatever tactics he’s got. You’ll never get the sense that other people in other relationships have, that, “Yes, everything isn’t perfect but we both want to work things out so we both get our needs met.”

You wouldn’t mind having a partner who wanted to get his needs met. You wouldn’t even mind having a partner with whom you had occasional fights as you both tried to get your needs met. But all the people I’ve talked to make it clear that what’s unbearable is to be stuck with a partner whose main need seems to be that you don’t get your needs met.

The Fairness Test

If you’re still not sure whether you’re dealing with a full-blown power person, try the fairness test.

For a particular need you have, and without blaming or attacking or labeling your partner, explain to your partner how it’s simply not fair that things are the way they are now. For example, you might say, “It’s not fair, is it, that we always watch what you want to watch on TV and never watch what I want to watch?” Do they respond to your appeal to fairness?

If they just respond with more power tactics, however confusing or misleading (including the tactic of yessing you to death and then going on to do whatever they want), you know you’re dealing with an incurable power person. There are a lot of strong personalities and a lot of not tremendously sensitive people who are nevertheless fair and will respond productively to the fairness test. Power people will not and cannot.

Power people do what they do because they feel incredibly unsafe unless they’re holding all the reins of power. They feel as unsafe without power as you’d feel vulnerable walking the streets of Manhattan with no clothes on. But your understanding their need for safety doesn’t help you. Their safety is your nightmare.

That’s why guideline #7 applies.

STEP #8: THE RIGHT NOT TO BE HUMILIATED

The issue of power in relationships is so important that I’ve got to make sure I help everyone who couldn’t bring herself to answer yes to question #7 but who’s still stuck in a relationship with an impossible power person. But how could that be? you might wonder. If your partner makes you feel your needs are obliterated, wouldn’t you know that?

Not necessarily. Something I’ve noticed over and over through the years is the all-too-tragic way men and women get swept up in admiration of power people. Yes, they’ll say, my partner is domineering and overwhelming, but, gee, he’s so wonderful, too, so smart, so capable. Yes, my needs are obliterated, but I’m just a ninny (they say to themselves). Maybe I shouldn’t really have those needs.

What makes it all so confusing is that while power people spoil our lives and are certainly controlling, people who are controlling are often people who are in control, and people who are in control are often people we admire most and feel safest with.

So how do you distinguish between (1) your being trapped by a power person who hoodwinks you into believing among other things that he’s “in control” and (2) someone else who’s not a power person but who’s just very strong and competent and whose being in control conveys a sense of power? If you’re trying to decide if you’ll be happiest staying or leaving, you need help sorting this out.

Another reason you might not see that your needs are being obliterated is that some consummately subtle power people always know when to stop one step short of your consciously feeling your needs are obliterated. If you fall into this category, you’ll sincerely answer no to question #7 because of the way now and then one of your needs does get satisfied. And yet you’re miserable anyway.

Let me try to help.

Diagnostic question #8. Do you have a basic, recurring, never-completely-going-away feeling of humiliation or invisibility in your relationship? 

This is a question about how you feel in the relationship with respect to your partner’s power. Let’s go back to Vinnie and Rosemary. To put it bluntly, Vinnie made Rosemary feel like a nothing, constantly defeated and frustrated.

There’s a flush-faced feeling of humiliation, a hollow-chested sense of being invisible, that never goes away when you are in a relationship with a power person. Almost every day he or she makes you feel like nothing, like a nobody. Clearly, having your needs obliterated will do this. But it doesn’t have to be so dramatic. You may not have some strong “need” to be listened to when you talk about what your day was like or about some thoughts you’ve had about the children, but if your partner’s Is power shuts you up, then that’s a slap in the face and you burn with humiliation.

There are two main ways people express their feelings of humiliation or invisibility: rage and depression. When the others power makes you feel like nothing, you want to destroy them or you want to destroy yourself.

Now it may be that you’re directly aware of the fact that your partner makes you feel this way. Not just occasionally—that happens to almost everyone—but most of the time on the surface and deep down, always. But if you’re not sure, if you can’t say you’d label the way you feel “invisible” or “humiliated,” then here are some instances of what other people have felt or gone through. Perhaps these will help make your situation clear to you:

• One mild-mannered man whose wife’s powerful personality dominated him was shocked to realize that during or after almost every prolonged interaction with her he had thoughts of bludgeoning her to death. (A fantasy like this once in a blue moon doesn’t necessarily mean you’re being humiliated; it probably just means you’re angry.)

• One man came home from work most days to find that his wife had a long list of problems for him to take care of and she tried to control not only what he did but how he did it and when he did it and even how he felt about doing it. Almost every night going to sleep he planned ways to kill himself.

• One woman’s partner topped everything she said. If she said she was tired, her partner was completely exhausted. If she talked about applying for a new job in her company, her partner talked about making a major career move. These power moves made the woman feel like a nothing and put her on what she called the “choo-choo of misery”: a train of depressing thoughts that began with her feeling she wasn’t important and led to feeling that her life was a complete waste.

• One woman found that every time she cooked for her domineering husband she had vivid, persisting fantasies of poisoning his food and his dying in pain.

• One man’s partner constantly ordered him about but did so in a polite, even seemingly sweet way so that she made him furious, and yet on the few occasions when he’d expressed his anger she’d made him feel so completely in the wrong that for years he swallowed his anger and yet it stayed with him like a hastily swallowed, undercooked doughnut.

GUIDELINE #8

If your partner gives you a basic, recurring, never-completely-going-away feeling of humiliation or invisibility, then you’re in the kind of situation that people report they were happy they left and unhappy they stayed in. Quick take: Humiliation is the barometer of hatred.

Humiliation is an important clue to the fact that your partner’s ability to dominate you has made the relationship too bad to stay in. And you measure humiliation by the degree to which your thoughts are filled with fantasies of violence toward the other person or toward yourself, the degree to which you go through your days blue or furious. Just as important, these thoughts or feelings seem to be correlated with contact between you and your partner, typically increasing just before, during, or after any humiliating interaction.

The Humiliation Trap

You have to beware of the humiliation that comes from being in a relationship with a power person. If you don’t understand the degree to which it’s destroying your happiness and peace of mind, it will keep you trapped in that relationship and trapped in ambivalence about that relationship.

Those violent fantasies and angry feelings seduce you into schemes of revenge, like a gambler obsessed with the thought of recouping his losses. Instead of pushing you out of the relationship, they suck you more deeply into it, because you develop the sick sense that recovering your pride and satisfaction lies in dominating or at least undermining the person who’s put the whammy on you for so long. That’s the humiliation trap.

And it works the same way with feelings of invisibility. Someone who makes you feel as though you don’t exist, as though you were nothing, can trap you into endless efforts to get his attention. Unfortunately, you can grab someone’s attention most effectively by acting sick or crazy. This is so common that whenever I see someone in therapy who’s been acting sick or crazy or self-destructive in any attention-grabbing way I check to see if they’re in a relationship with someone who makes them feel like they’re nothing.

It’s a mistake to think that unhappy, unsatisfying relationships generally end in divorce. Sometimes they dig both partners more deeply into marriage. There are many long-term marriages in which both people are slaves of hatred and misery. And many of them began with the ensnaring drama of power and humiliation.

It’s hard for most of us to go through a typical day outside the home without some humiliating incident, however trivial, without some frustrating reminder of how limited our power is, how unimportant we are. The relationships we want to spend our lives in should be a refuge from this. If they are just a source of more humiliation, they’re not healthy places to stay in.

Guideline #8 makes clear that you won’t be happy if you stay in a relationship where you generally end up feeling like a nothing and a nobody, and you will be happy if you leave. The reason I’ve talked about the humiliation trap is to warn you about the forces that might keep you stuck in a situation like this even though it hurts you so much. There’s no way you can win by staying. In that sense it’s not different from physical abuse.

But the sense of release and relief that comes from getting out of a relationship like this is enormous.

7

Talk to Me

Issue: Communication

“We just can’t communicate.”

“We never have anything to talk about.”

“We just don’t understand each other.”

People have long recognized that something about communication is the lifeblood of a relationship. A breakdown in communication is one of those signs, like a child’s fever, that sends people running for help. That much is clear.

But so much else about communication is confusing, particularly when you’re trying to figure out if you’ll be happier leaving or happier staying. For example, when there’s bad communication, is the communication bad because you’re not getting along or are you not getting along because the communication’s bad?

If your partner can’t listen to you, is that because you’re not communicating effectively or because of what you’re talking about or because of your partner’s anger or what?

And when there’s bad communication, what part’s fixable and what part’s fatal? What just looks bad on the outside and what really is bad on the inside?

And there are so many kinds of bad communication. There’s the kind that kills relationships. There’s bad communication that’s a pain in the neck but doesn’t really damage relationships. And there’s bad communication that’s nothing more than the way people interact in normal relationships.

CONFUSED ABOUT COMMUNICATION

No wonder we’re all so confused. To make matters worse, part of us really does want to work at communicating as clearly and effectively as possible, but another part of us feels we’re entitled to relax, be our sloppily communicating selves, and let the chips fall where they may. Isn’t there a part of all of us that’s tired of working on our relationships?

All these communication issues are important because just the way someone with a really bad cold can look sicker and feel sicker than someone who has a fatal cancer, someone in a basically healthy relationship can sometimes be a lot more troubled by their communication than someone in a relationship that’s truly too bad to stay in. In fact, sometimes when things are at their worst you’re so eager to avoid talking about anything difficult that you don’t talk about anything difficult, and that gives you the illusion that things are better than they really are.

So, since you’re trying to figure out what’s best for you to do, we’d better get a handle on exactly what it is about your communication that would point to the need for you to leave your relationship. Everyone has problems with communication in relationships. But you need to know if your problems are the kind that are both unfixable and relationship destroying.

Let’s sort this all out.

THE DIAGNOSTIC NEEDLE IN THE HAYSTACK OF COMMUNICATION

When it comes to communication we’re all stark naked. I might have to guess about or probe for everything else, but in all the years I’ve worked with couples, communication has been the one thing that’s always been right out there in the open. And that’s great. When couples finally get to the point where they can tell the truth and hear the truth and convey their needs and get close without making a mess and without making each other miserable, I know they’re on the road to working things out.

The problem is that there’s so much communicating—good and bad—going on every minute that zeroing in on what’s absolutely critical is very difficult. So let me tell you how I found the diagnostic needle in the haystack of communication.

Soon after I started researching this issue I was confronted by two separate piles of impressive candidates, from which I was sure I’d find those signs of fatally bad communication that point to the exits. I labeled one pile alien communication—problems caused by two people being very different from one another. I labeled the other crazy communication—problems caused by confused, vague, misleading, misconceived words and gestures. These piles contain important communication issues that many of us are overwhelmingly aware of.

But the two piles of candidates proved to be far less helpful than I’d thought in diagnosing relationships. We need to take a moment to talk about them because they figure so prominently in our minds as “relationship destroyers.” Let’s take them one at a time, before we get to the communication issues that really do determine whether it’s best to stay or leave.

Alien Communication

There are more gulfs separating people than you can find in an atlas. But the gulfs that have been getting the most attention recently have been gender gulfs. We’ll focus on these gender gulfs here but the point I’m making about them applies to all of our differences.

There’s a current fad running around this country where we all get excited talking about how utterly, profoundly, interplanetarily different men and women are. One of my daughters called me the other day, excited because she was reading a book all her friends were reading that “explained everything” to her: The book kept revealing the wide chasms between men and women. Certainly every woman who’s ever felt her husband’s basically a Martian—and what woman hasn’t?—has felt validated by these books. He is a Martian! There’s been a lot of emphasis on communication differences like the following:

• A man’s trying to fix a faucet. The woman makes “helpful” suggestions. She’s trying to communicate that she cares, but the message he receives is that he’s not competent to do the job without her help.

• A woman’s trying to fill out a tax form. The man leaves her completely alone. What he’s trying to communicate is his sense that she can do it herself and his support for her doing it herself. But the message she receives is that he just doesn’t care about her.

Because so many of us are such big fans of linking miscommunication with gender these days, you can probably supply endless examples of your own to illustrate this issue.

Now I have no doubt that differences between people, like this gender difference, can make getting along harder. But they don’t kill relationships nor are they signs of dead relationships.

Alien communication is something we can live with. We’ve been living with male/female differences since we evolved from the amoeba stage, and we’ve gotten along so far. An overemphasis on gender differences obscures how skilled we are at bridging these differences. There are plenty of happy heterosexual couples who have few communication problems and yet are just as definitively masculine and feminine as unhappy heterosexual couples with communication problems. And homosexual couples, with no male/female differences to worry about, fall into the miscommunication soup just as easily as everyone else.

I think the real problem in relationships isn’t how untalented we are at bridging our differences; it’s how incredibly talented we are at manufacturing differences out of nothing if necessary, just to create a sense of differentiation, uniqueness, specialness. Besides, communication is the one thing in the universe specifically designed to bridge the gap between our differences. If we’re having trouble with that bridge, partly it’s because we’re so interested in magnifying those differences. But communication is the solution, not the problem.

To get right down to brass tacks, I’ve never seen a couple for whom inability to throw lines of communication across the sexual gulf was so severe and so unfixable that they just had to give up on each other, not without a lot of far more serious, far different problems. On the day that heterosexuality itself makes heterosexual relationships impossible, the human race is in big trouble. I don’t think we’re there yet.

The same applies for communication across all of our differences. Talking about differences when it comes to communication is like talking about rivers when it comes to bridges. Rivers are what bridges are designed to cross. And differences are the reason we have communication in the first place.

Crazy Communication

At least it’s fun to talk about “he said, she said.” We get to play “me Tarzan, you Jane,” and that’s always a turn-on. The other pile of candidates is a lot more serious. It’s what I loosely call crazy communication, where confused, unclear, misleading, misconceived words and gestures cause the problems.

I’m not talking about communication by crazy people. I’m talking about communication that makes people crazy. Like when someone talks and you can’t figure out why they’re saying what they’re saying. Or they act like they’re disclosing something but you feel like they’re hiding something. Or they answer something you say but for the life of you you can’t figure out what their answer has to do with what you said. Or they’re telling you something and yet you’re absolutely convinced they’re asking you for something and yet they deny they’re asking you for something.

This is very different from alien communication. Here’s the difference. Alien communication is where one person says there’s a tiger in the grass and the other says grab your gun and the first person says I don’t need you to tell me what to do, I know to get the gun, I need you to understand what I’m going through. Crazy communication is where someone sees a tiger in the grass and says, “What do you think about tigers?” Or you say you see a tiger and as if that would reassure you he says, “What tiger?” or even tries to convince you there is no tiger. Or he sees a tiger and starts talking about how all these tigers make him really sad. Or he sees a tiger and asks you where you put the airline tickets.

Mary and James’s Story

The essence of crazy communication is that when it’s going on you don’t know what the other person is really saying or why they’re saying it. Believe it or not, crazy communication like this is infinitely more common than alien communication. It’s just a lot less noticeable, except when there are tigers around.

Meet Mary and James. They might give you hope. All they had to do was open their mouths and there would be instant total confusion. They always miscommunicated, and yet they never stopped being amazed by their miscommunications because they came from the same Irish Catholic background, same neighborhood, same parish, and had the same friends growing up. Pick either Mary or James, and you’d find someone who made communication messes.

It doesn’t matter whom you start with. This particular example just happens to start with Mary ... or does it?

As a school nurse Mary would be home from work early. As a truck owner-driver James would show up later. On this particular day, he brought his rig home, turned it off, and just sat in it. Mary saw this and wondered why he wasn’t coming in. Then she started getting suspicious. Was he hiding? she wondered. Was he afraid? There was crazy communication already and no one had said a word.

After a while James finally walked through the front door. Money’d been tight, he was supposed to have gotten paid, and his sitting in the truck had made her nervous, so Mary led off with, “Did you get the check?”

This was crazy. You’re supposed to say, “Hi, honey, how was your day?” aren’t you? Why would she have asked about the check like that if she didn’t want to open hostilities, James and others among us might wonder, even though we understand her anxiety.

“What check?” James said. He’s got the check in his pocket! But he already feels third-degreed and mistrusted. He acts like he’s got to defend himself even though there’s nothing to defend.

This, too, was crazy. So what if she threw him with her question? He could’ve answered it anyway. He could’ve said it made him mad. But he shouldn’t have spun off in his own crazy direction. I can tell you from my own direct clinical experience that those five words—where’s the check? what check?—started the biggest fight that had absolutely no content or direction that you can imagine.

But as bad a problem as this is, it is fixable. James and Mary eventually learned to communicate beautifully. This kind or any kind of crazy communication is just not necessarily in itself a sign of a relationship that’s too bad to stay in. It’s not always fixable and it can sometimes destroy a relationship, but if there’s crazy communication (and I’ve seen few relationships without it), you can go on to discover how much amazing progress you can make toward learning to communicate in a healthy way.

So we’ve found that some of the conventional wisdom about how poor communication destroys relationships is wrong. What then are the real culprits?

STEP #9: OFF-THE-TABLE-ITIS

There’s a kind of regenerative property in healthy communication, something in it that allows it to function as the interpersonal equivalent of whatever it is that allows a starfish to grow a new point when one breaks off. This regenerative property exists even in the face of obstacles like alien communication and crazy communication.

You can see a really good fictional example of this regenerative property in the movie Enemy Mine, directed by Wolfgang Petersen and starring Dennis Quaid and Lou Gossett, Jr. It’s about two space travelers from warring planets who get stranded on some asteroid together, just the two of them. Not only can’t they speak the other’s language, but they’re of different species and each has a mandate to kill the other. But because of communication’s awesome ability to build bridges across distances and difficulties, they’re eventually able to talk to each other and build a good working relationship.

The movie may be science fiction, but the principle it illustrates is pure science. I arrived in this country as a little girl of four speaking no English. I was immediately put in a nursery school with other kids from other countries. Almost none of us spoke each other’s language. Yet within weeks, even days, we were all bridging every imaginable gap of background and culture and playing together like kids who’d all been born on the same block.

This brings me back to my search for the diagnostic needle in the haystack of communication. I realized that if there were something about communication that made a relationship too bad to stay in, it would have to be something that damaged its regenerative capacity. It would have to be something that damaged communication’s bridge-building function. And in fact my work with men and women who were going through what you’re going through has shown me that my hunch was absolutely correct.

Do you want to find a true villain in the drama of communication? Look at what I call off-the-table-itis. This comes from an expression people use in talking about negotiation. It refers to someone taking something “off the table” when he doesn’t want to talk about an issue. Off-the-table-itis occurs when someone keeps taking things off the table, when someone keeps not wanting to talk about issues.

Off-the-table-itis kills relationships. Or perhaps I should say partners with off-the-table-itis kill relationships. I’ll show you how in a moment. But first here’s the question that tests for it: 

Diagnostic question #9. Does it seem to you that your partner generally and consistently blocks your attempts to bring up topics or raise questions, particularly about things you care about?  

He can do this directly and openly: “I don’t want to talk about that.”

He can do this less directly and openly: “Okay, but what about ... ,” and the next thing you know you’re talking about something completely different.

He can do this threateningly: “If you keep pushing me to talk about that, I just don’t want to be in this relationship.”

He can disguise his off-the-table-itis with emotional abuse, making you seem somehow stupid or weird or in the wrong for even mentioning certain things that are important to you.

He can even take things off the table with such extreme politeness you don’t even know it’s happening: “That’s a wonderful question and I’m so happy you brought it up, but I’m really going to need time to think about it,” except that thinking about it takes forever.

I don’t want to go overboard with this. It’s not off-the-table-itis if it’s simply hard for your partner to talk about something you want to talk about. It’s not off-the-table-itis if you merely sense his reluctance. And I’m certainly not saying that if he refuses to talk about something once or twice or occasionally because he’s in a bad mood or because your timing is bad that you’ve got a problem with off-the-table-itis.

It’s off-the-table-itis only when your attempts to communicate are rejected over and over, so that you feel genuinely discouraged from ever bringing it up again.

And it’s not off-the-table-itis if your partner simply doesn’t know that he’s doing it and stops when you point it out to him. If you say something like, “You know, you never want to talk about sex,” and your partner says, “Gee, you’re right, I’m sorry. Let’s talk about sex,” it’s not off-the-table-itis. But if he consistently denies taking something off the table or makes you feel in the wrong for wanting to put it on the table, that is off-the-table-itis.

Diagnosing Off-the-table-itis

You might find yourself saying yes! right away to question #9. But I’m concerned about the cases of off-the-table-itis that people don’t realize are happening. When someone tells you consistently to shut up, it makes you mad in the short run but over time you get numb to it.

But off-the-table-itis is often done in extremely hard-to-detect ways. It’s not really surprising, when you think about it, that one of the hallmarks of people who take topics off the table is that they take off the table the possibility of talking about how they take things off the table. The subtleties are infinite. But off-the-table-itis destroys relationships anyway. To help you see it in action, here are some snapshots of off-the-table-itis:

• Suppose there are sexual difficulties between you and your partner that you’d like to start talking about. But when you say, “I’d like to talk about how we don’t make love so much anymore,” your partner gets upset and literally says, “Oh, I hate talking about that. I just don’t want to talk about it.” And he says it so vehemently and firmly that you just feel squashed. That’s off-the-table-itis.

• Every time you talk about how you feel about something, he sighs or he changes the subject or he reads the newspaper or turns to the TV or pets the dog or is busy lighting a cigarette or gets something to eat or does anything else to move away or shut you up. That’s off-the-table-itis.

• You’re both working far too hard and have no time for each other, and yet you’re not bringing in enough money to cover your overhead. The only way you can solve this is changing your lives in some important way. But whenever you bring this up your partner constantly throws the conversation into one distracting sidetrack after another, so that you keep skirting around talking about what you’re supposed to be talking about while these distractions mean you never actually do talk about it. That’s off-the-table-itis.

• You agreed that giving each other feedback is a good idea, but whenever you give your partner feedback, although she says she wants to hear it, she criticizes so many things about the way you do it and when you do it that you feel forced to drop your efforts. That’s off-the-table-itis.

• The man you’ve been seeing for the last year seems interested in having a relationship with you, but he never says I love you and in fact is never really affectionate in any way outside of sex. You try to bring this up and he listens politely and then tells you how interesting, fascinating, intriguing everything you’re saying is, how much you’re giving him to think about, and he promises to think about it but he never gets back to you, and when you ask him about it he always says politely that he needs more time to think about it. That’s off-the-table-itis.

• Your partner’s in charge of paying bills and as far as you can tell she’s been doing a poor job. And that makes you angry and nervous. You say, “We really need to talk about the way you pay bills.” She doesn’t refuse to talk about it, but she acts so miserable that the experience is an ordeal and you’re sorry you ever brought it up. That’s off-the-table-itis.

• Whenever you talk about anything important to you, your partner sits there and says little, but there’s an impenetrable, stony quality to his “listening” that overwhelms you with the sense that your words are reaching his ears and yet he’s never allowing them to get inside his head. That’s off-the-table-itis.

• You talk about some need or problem you have. Your partner responds by telling you what’s wrong with you for having that need or problem. He can do it in a gross way with some general putdown. Or he can do it subtlely by suggesting that whatever it is you’re expressing is a sign of some kind of psychopathology or childhood trauma or being “just like your mother” or some other problem you have that has nothing to do with what you’re wanting to talk about. That’s off-the-table-itis.

• You come home from work and want to talk about your job because there’s so much going on you just can’t sort it out by yourself. But your partner gets restless and impatient after five minutes. She tells you point-blank that she’s just not interested in all the office politics and career issues that so preoccupy you. She points out that her father did extremely well in his career without any help from her mother. That’s off-the-table-itis.

I could go on and on with examples like these. But it’s important for you to develop a sense of all the not-easily-detectable ways people we’re in a relationship with can shut down communication. You don’t always know it when it happens. But you do feel something. You have to play back in your own mind what whizzed by you to see clearly how what you just felt was connected to your partner’s taking off the table what you cared about. In fact, the more successful your partner is at taking things off the table, the better he is at making sure you don’t know that he’s doing it.

Going Too Far

It’s time for the guideline, but we’ve got to be careful. Off-the-table-itis in its milder, more occasional forms is like the common cold: a huge pain in the neck but not necessarily fatal. So if your partner’s taking things off the table weakens in response to your efforts to put them back on the table, that’s a good sign. And if the more important something is to you, the less likely your partner is to take it off the table, that’s a good sign. And if there’s only one or two hot-button issues that your partner takes off the table, that’s a good sign. But here’s where you have to draw the line:

GUIDELINE #9

If your partner constantly and unyieldingly prevents you from talking about things that are important to you, so that you have a sense of being shut down and shut up, then you’re faced with a destructive problem that will not get better by itself. I feel comfortable saying you’ll be happiest if you leave. Quick take: You’ll suffocate if the dirt hits the fan whenever you try to shoot the breeze.

If you feel this guideline applies to you, don’t do anything yet. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between a real monster and someone who’s basically fair but has little self-awareness. So you’ve got to make a test. When you see a way your partner takes things off the table, point it out.

Say for example, “Whenever I want to talk about visiting my family [or whatever the issue is], you get so upset that I feel I’m not even permitted to bring it up.” Maybe you’ll make progress letting your partner know what he’s doing. Then guideline #9 doesn’t apply to you. But maybe your partner will just find another way to make it impossible for you to talk about what’s important to you. If holding up a mirror to your partner does nothing to diminish his tendency to shut down communication, then you’re confirmed in your sense that you’ll be happier leaving.

There’s one exception to this guideline. You just might be doing something that fosters your partner’s off-the-table-itis. You might be one of those people who absolutely refuse to take no for an answer. No matter how clearly an issue’s been discussed and decided, for these people the issue remains open forever and they keep bringing it up.

For example, one woman had a full, frank, and open discussion with her husband about her wanting to spend money to remodel the house. He was very open to talking about it with her and showed her how they simply couldn’t afford it at that time. She understood what he was talking about and even agreed with him. But then she wouldn’t let it drop. She kept bringing up an already-decided issue over and over. Naturally he didn’t want to keep talking about it. That’s not off-the-table-itis.

The Problem That Makes Problems

Why am I making such a big deal about off-the-table-itis? Every relationship has disagreements, but when disagreements are ruled out of order and not allowed to get aired, there’s an even more basic problem that can’t be fixed. How can you fix something you can’t even talk about because your partner takes things off the table by getting mad or miserable when you bring them up, or only listens to you with an unyielding refusal to let anything in?

A pattern like this is highly resistant to change because it rules itself off the table. It’s the communication problem that prevents the solving of every other problem.

Your partner’s off-the-table-itis is particularly destructive because of the way it so often focuses on your attempts to give feedback. Feedback is the simple ability to say, “I like this,” “I don’t like that,” “This hurts me,” “That doesn’t hurt me.” This airing of feelings is the oxygen that relationships need to be able to breathe. Without it they suffocate, because without it things go from good to bad to worse without anyone being able to do anything to turn the situation around.

When someone blocks your attempt to give feedback—by getting hurt, by getting angry, by turning the tables and launching into a tirade about what’s wrong with you, by simply refusing to listen—it’s as if he were putting up a huge sign that said, “I just don’t care if this is a relationship that feels good to you.”

I see how utterly devastating off-the-table-itis is every day. It’s like the difference between a dog and a wolf. Some relationships are like a dog: even a really dumb dog can learn some tricks. But a wolf, however bright and beautiful, refuses to be tamed. He might be magnificent in nature but you can’t have him in your house: his wildness precludes any attempt to train him. He won’t allow himself to be influenced.

In a nutshell, it’s not the things that make communication difficult that make a relationship too bad to stay in. Even if it’s an uphill battle, you can still win it. It’s the things that make communication impossible that make a relationship too bad to stay in. Off-the-table-itis is one of them.

Now imagine if there were something that went even further, that not only prevented communication but actually subtracted from it. That’s our next question, and we’ll get to it after we put off-the-table-itis in perspective as part of the central drama in relationships.

PERSPECTIVES: SAFETY FIRST

Some people are surprised that something like off-the-table-itis is so important in pointing to a relationship that’s too bad to stay in. It’s bad, they say, but it doesn’t sound totally horrible. Why are you emphasizing it?

Let me put it in context. Here’s something that I believe is at the heart of what goes on in relationships and at the heart of what’s necessary to fix relationships:

Telling someone something means revealing something. So in a sense, communication is a process of getting naked. Not physically, but interpersonally. The closer you are to someone, the closer communication brings you to this interpersonal nakedness. And love is the place where it’s safe to be naked. Everywhere else in our lives we have to put on half-masks of politeness, regardless of how we really feel. But part of the experience of falling in love and being in love is taking off these masks.

Of course we take off our clothes as part of physical intimacy, but we let our hair down in other ways as well, confessing secrets and showing parts of ourselves no one else in the world sees. So we’re not just naked physically but also naked emotionally and naked as who we really are as people. And not only does love mean feeling safe as you get naked, it means relaxing into feeling more safe the more naked you get.

But this doesn’t mean you have to get totally naked in every possible way. People also need boundaries, and some people need more boundaries than others. For example, many people will never feel comfortable with their partner’s being in the same room while they go to the bathroom. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But if there are so many boundaries and they’re so high that your relationship is more about hiding and distance than openness and closeness, then your relationship is a place where it’s not safe to be naked.

The problem is that when you’re naked you’re also vulnerable. People can get hurt when they reveal themselves. The things people say and do to reveal themselves can create problems, fear, and pain instead of safety. So I’ve learned that no matter what problems people bring into therapy and no matter what other issues I work on with them, I’ve also got to make their relationship a place where each person learns how to find safety being himself (for example, “I can reveal my goofy sense of humor without getting mocked”) while providing safety for the other person to be herself (for example, “I learned how to stop making you feel it’s not okay for you to be in a bad mood once in a while”).

Shut Up and Put Your Clothes On

Balancing nakedness and safety can be difficult for some people to handle. If it’s too difficult, then that’s a relationship that’s too bad to stay in. And understanding why it can be too difficult can help you understand why a relationship can be too bad to stay in.

If love is the place where it’s safe to be naked, then every relationship is an attempt to answer these questions:

• Can I be safe when you’re naked? Will I still feel comfortable when you let your hair down and show yourself for who you really are and say what you feel and do what you really want?

• Can I be naked and yet you still feel safe? Can I reveal through word and deed who I really am and how I really feel without making you feel uncomfortable?

Let’s take just one issue: expressing anger. Kiesha, a twenty-eight-year-old police officer, felt that her anger was something very deep and personal, something to share only with someone she was very intimate with. So for her feeling safe enough to feel emotionally naked meant getting to the point of feeling free to show her anger. But for her partner Dennis, a fireman, feeling safe meant feeling protected from her anger.

What made this so hard for them to deal with was the fact that Dennis’s being emotionally naked in the relationship meant feeling free to say how really uncomfortable he felt with Kiesha’s expressions of anger. But for Kiesha to feel safe, she needed to feel protected from Dennis’s saying things that made her feel bad about having her feelings.

You can see how your needs for nakedness and safety and your partner’s different needs for nakedness and safety can get so tangled up, regardless of the issues you’re trying to deal with. The things that you long to feel safe enough to reveal might be the very things your partner wants to feel safe from having revealed to him.

Balancing Act

All couples try to balance safety and nakedness. Usually they find a way to work it out. They do so because each person recognizes that they both have to feel safe while they’re both being naked. That’s the kind of place love is.

But sometimes people come into a relationship with a need for safety that overwhelms their partner’s ability to provide safety. This extra need for safety can come from needing to feel safe from the other person (from insults, rejections, attempts at control) and in needing to feel safe in themselves to do what they want. If one person’s extra need for safety is so great that he can’t allow the other person to both feel safe and do what she wants, that’s a relationship that’s too bad to stay in.

Off-the-table-itis fits right into this. The person who takes things off the table is basically saying that your getting naked—by showing the issues that are important to you and showing your need to resolve them—makes him unsafe. So he tries, consciously or unconsciously, to make you unsafe by not letting you talk about it.

Question #1 asked if things were good when they were at their best and question #5 asked if there was one thing you and your partner did together that felt good and that you looked forward to. That is the issue of pleasure.

Now I’ve just talked about the issue of safety. This, too, came up before, for example in question #2 when you were asked if you’d been physically abused and in the previous chapter when we talked about power people and your being in a relationship where it’s not safe to have any needs.

These twin issues of pleasure and safety will keep coming up over and over as the underpinnings of what makes a relationship too good to leave or too bad to stay in.

STEP #10: TO TELL THE TRUTH

Off-the-table-itis is bad because it prevents communication. Lying is bad because it subtracts from communication. If someone lies to you, then you’re worse off than you were before. Before, you just didn’t know. After the lie, you think you know but you’re wrong. Lying is to communication what murder is to life. Both are a taking away of what’s real and precious. Murder is worse, of course, because you can always bring the truth back to life, and yet we feel almost the same loathing for real liars as we do for murderers.

But there’s a paradox. Almost all of us lie, from little white lies to spur-of-the-moment lies to protecting-the-innocent lies to just-not-telling-everything lies to it’s-all-for-the-best lies to saving-your-butt lies. Some of us lie more than others, but Diogenes attests to how difficult it is to find someone who never lies. So if the fact that you’ve caught your partner in a lie were grounds for ending a relationship, we’d all be alone.

And that’s the problem we have to sort out here: how to find our way between the fact that lying is the norm and the fact that lying is the worst possible thing that can happen in communication, even worse than off-the-table-itis.

The key here is safety. The fact that most people lie a little makes most of us feel okay with the idea that our partner might lie from time to time, especially if they’re just little white lies. As long as we can say, “Well, he’d never lie to me about anything really important,” most of us aren’t too upset.

But when you lose your basic trust that the other generally tells the truth, there’s a fundamental obstacle to your relationship ever being satisfying. And so the next question is: 

Diagnostic question #10. Have you gotten to the point, when your partner says something, that you usually feel it’s more likely that he’s lying than that he’s telling the truth? 

Some people get to this point if they catch their partner in even one big lie. Others can tolerate a lot of little white lies and even a few big lies. But wherever you draw the line, the question is whether you’ve gotten to the point where, if you had to bet, you’d bet that what your partner says is a lie.

Ronnie’s Story

Crabs don’t lie. That may be their only virtue, but for Ronnie it was the kind of virtue she’d been looking for for a long time.

Hal, Ronnie’s husband, was her pride and joy as well as her biggest disappointment. He’d grown up in what he called the town of Nowheresville, Rural State, USA. But he had the look and the voice and the ambition for doing TV news, as well as the luck of there being a small TV station nearby. While he was still in high school he got a job reporting the news on weekends. The day he graduated he became one of their regular reporters. There was little money and not much prestige in that job, but Hal felt he was on his way to bigger and better things.

After a couple of years of sending tapes around Hal landed a job with a major market TV station. That’s when Ronnie met him. She was an image consultant for a local department store, and Hal needed her badly because he was still the boy from Nowheresville and he had none of the polish and manner he needed in the big city. Ronnie taught him everything, from how to dress to how to comb his hair to how to behave in a restaurant. They soon got more and more involved with each other and fell in love.

Was their relationship doomed from the start? I don’t know, but by the time I saw them a lot of damage had been done. Ronnie had been blinded for a long time by Hal’s charm. She was also profoundly misled by how well he took to her coaching. Most of her friends could barely change anything about the men they were involved with. It seemed to Ronnie she could change everything about Hal. Except, she found out, his propensity for lying.

It was his talent for lying that prevented her from seeing, for many years, how often he did exactly what he wanted to do whenever he wanted to do it no matter how it affected anyone else. He saw himself as a future TV news star and thought he was entitled to get now as a young man what he might have to wait many more years to get.

At first Ronnie was aware of only a couple of lies, like his saying he was on assignments when he was out with the guys. Then there were a series of misdeeds, nothing really terrible but all reasons to be angry and disappointed, such as large, selfish expenditures of money, all protected by a cocoon of lies.

And as the cycle of screwing up and lying about it worked its way forward, there were repeated breakups and reunitings and a baby and another breakup and another baby and a coming back together yet again. An all-too-typical tale of relationship ambivalence enacted not in the seesaw motions of the heart but on the canvas of life.

The last time they came back together, Hal made promises that Ronnie wanted to believe because Hal always seemed like such a nice guy. She couldn’t believe what he said, and yet she couldn’t admit that she couldn’t believe him.

That’s when the crabs entered the picture. How could she have possibly gotten pubic lice? She knew she hadn’t been with anyone else. She asked Hal and he said he had crabs, too. Where did you get them from, she asked. A public toilet, he said.

But Ronnie knew this was impossible. The crabs were telling a truth that Hal was unable to tell. Ronnie could no longer lie to herself about the fact that she knew that Hal was a liar. And that she’d have to assume that anything he said would be a lie.

What devastated Ronnie was the terrible waste of years. It’s not just that the relationship hadn’t worked out but that she’d stayed in it years after she realized that if Hal said something it was probably a lie, years before the day of the crabs.

Here’s the guideline for question #10:

GUIDELINE #10

If you find yourself thinking, “He’s probably lying,” whenever your partner says anything, or even if you just find there’s a tightening in your gut that indicates you’re expecting a lie, nothing good is going to happen for you in that relationship. Everyone else in this situation is happier leaving and you’ll be happier, too. Quick take: When you’re married to a liar, your marriage is a lie.

Let me make something clear about this guideline. In a troubled relationship, one person often catches the other in a big lie, such as when one of them has been having an affair. But being found guilty of a big lie is not a relationship-ending offense, not necessarily anyway. Relationships can recover from someone telling a big lie. Yes, trust can be easily damaged, but unless it’s completely destroyed it can still be rebuilt.

Guideline #10 doesn’t refer to the person who’s told one big lie; it refers to the person you believe may be lying almost whenever he talks to you. It’s not about how “bad” what he did was; it’s about how bad an impact what he’s done has had on you, and not just one lie but the pattern of lying.

So you have to be careful with this guideline. The fact that someone’s lied to you can make you feel very angry and very mistrustful and very unsafe. It’s natural after being told a big lie to go through a period of being convinced that everything else your partner says is a lie, and maybe everything he’s ever said to you has been a lie.

But you’ve got to distinguish between your emotional reactions, which may or may not be warranted and from which you may or may not recover, and an abiding gut sense that if you had to make a bet, you’d say your partner was lying when he opened his mouth.

A Life of Lies

Why are most people happier when they leave if they answer yes to question #10? It’s because of what it does to you to live with someone you’re convinced is more likely lying than telling the truth. You’re headed for a state of bitterness, paranoia, and despair. Your world will turn nightmarish. The only way you’ll manage to feel safe if you stay is to disconnect so profoundly from your partner that it’ll be as if you’ve ended your relationship anyway. You might as well in fact do now, cleanly, what you’ll do in spirit later, painfully.

And the lying won’t get better. As things between you become more difficult, your partner will have just that much more incentive to lie.

As one woman who’d left a man she’d come to see as a liar said, “Every day in my new life on my own is a treat because, no matter what, I know the person I am living with—me—will always tell the truth.”

8

What Is This Thing Called Love?

Issue: Is There Real Love Left?

LOOKING FOR LOVE IN ALL THE RIGHT PLACES

Sometimes when a relationship is hanging by a thread, it’s a thread of love. Much in the relationship is bad, only a little is good, but the one thing that keeps you hanging in there is that love connection, that thing you say to yourself: “But I love him [or her].”

This is one of the reasons the balance-scale approach to deciding whether to stay or leave drives people crazy. For more than twenty years, people have come into my consulting room carrying their relationship cupped in their hands like a sick puppy, telling me incredible stories of misery, disappointment, and disaster, giving me every reason to believe the relationship could not survive without life support, that they didn’t even want it to survive.

“It sounds like you know what’s best for you,” I say. The balance scale seems totally tilted toward leaving.

And then they reach into their hearts and take out the love that’s left and place it on the other side of the balance scale, and that hunk of love has for them a weight as heavy as gold on Jupiter and tilts everything the other way. For people in this situation, love indeed seems to conquer all, even in some cases the putrefying realities of a dead relationship.

But is it dead? Doesn’t any amount of love heavy enough to register in our hearts have the power to keep a relationship alive? Aren’t you obligated to stay in any relationship where you feel you love the other person?

Or can our feelings sometimes be illusions? Is the love that feels so real and hefty sometimes merely the ghost of dead hopes and dreams?

Yet we feel our love. And haven’t therapists like me spent our professional lives helping people learn to trust their feelings? Can I ever say don’t trust your feelings to anyone?

So let’s talk about those relationships where it feels as though only your saying “But I love him [or her]” prevents the relationship from clearly being too bad to stay in. Let’s see if we can find a way to decide how real and strong that love is, to determine how much of a difference it really makes.

Too Jung to Be in Love

You’re not alone in being confused by love. Most therapists are so confused by it they just throw up their hands. In one of the most influential textbooks on marital therapy-Helping Couples Change—the author’s bibliography refers to almost 100,000 pages of material that went into his book, and yet the word love barely appears in the text or in any of the references. In the invaluable Handbook of Family Therapy, love is mentioned once and then as only one of forty-two components of marriage. Love is one forty-secondth of marriage!

Other therapists take a stab at it and then throw up their hands. In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl Jung says, quoting the New Testament, that, “Love ‘bears all things’ and ‘endures all things.’ ” Jung feels these words “say all there is to be said” about love. But then he has the honesty to admit, “In my medical experience as well as in my own life I have again and again been faced with the mystery of love, and have never been able to explain what it is.”

Jung and other therapists are responsible enough to admit that they’re thrown by the word love. Other people just throw the word around. All I know is that whatever this thing called love is, it can be terribly confusing, particularly for people on whom it weighs most heavily.

Nothing More Than Feelings

Let’s sort this all out, so you can see what to do with the love you feel, so you can decide if your relationship is too good to leave or too bad to stay in.

Earlier we talked about the preconditions for love, because most people are not happy staying in a relationship with someone they couldn’t possibly fall in love with now. What we’ll do now is test for whether your feelings have a foundation of personal truth. You can always trust that you feel what you feel, but you have to be extremely careful to check out what’s really making you feel the way you do.

To understand what it really means to trust your feelings, you have to understand how feelings work. Here’s a quick way of understanding this that I’ve found most helpful, not just professionally but personally as well.

Let’s go back about ten thousand years to visit our primitive ancestors. Here’s the sequence that will show the context in which feelings have their special place. It’s just one example, but the stages themselves are eternal:

Stage 1: Reality. A tiger is creeping toward you through the grass.

Stage 2: Perception. “A tiger is creeping toward me through the grass!”

Stage 3: A feeling. “Yikes!” Fear of tiger.

Stage 4: Action. You get your butt in gear and get the hell out of there.

Every feeling anyone’s ever had fits into this sequence. It makes clear how we get into trouble with our feelings. Notice that before we have the feeling “Fear of tiger” there should be a real tiger out there in the grass that we should be accurately perceiving.

There’s a lot of talk about respecting all feelings, but, let’s face it, you’re going to feel pretty stupid feeling “fear of tiger” when you are correctly perceiving something but it’s only, let’s say, some joker in a fiendishly well-made tiger suit. And you’re going to feel pretty stupid feeling “fear of tiger” when, like the proverbial hunter in deer season, you’re misperceiving what’s actually a zebra or a pussycat or a mother-in-law. No one can tell you what to feel, but for feelings to make sense they’ve got to be based on correctly perceiving something that’s real.

Love, like any other feeling, fits into this sequence:

Stage 1: Reality. There’s a person you meet and get to know. This person has real qualities.

Stage 2: Perception. “What a wonderful person with perfect qualities for me.”

Stage 3: A feeling. “I’m in love!”

Stage 4: Action. You get more and more involved.

Your saying “But I love him [her]” is only a description of your feelings. It’s not about what’s really out there or your perceptions of what’s out there. Love of John [or Jane] is a good thing, but only if you would actually feel love if you correctly perceived the real John [or Jane].

Feeling love doesn’t mean that your perceptions are accurate or that the realities warrant your feelings. In other words, feelings are not necessarily appropriate just because you have them. Ask any scam victim who was tricked into misperceiving realities that didn’t even exist in the first place.

STEP #11: YOU LIKE ME, YOU REALLY LIKE ME

If you’re one of those people being kept in relationship ambivalence by love, let me help you make sure your feelings of love make sense given your realities.

Of course this whole book is designed to help you with this, but what we can focus on here is not the other person but love itself, whether you’re really being stalked by the tiger of love or a paper tiger or a ghost tiger or no tiger at all.

Here’s one of the best ways I know to get at whether love is dead. This question may be as familiar as a thermometer, but like a thermometer it has amazingly powerful diagnostic properties: 

Diagnostic question #11. In spite of admirable qualities, and stepping back from any temporary anger or disappointment, do you genuinely like your partner, and does your partner seem to like you? 

Just so we’re clear, there are really two parts to question #11:

1. We’ve already established you don’t find your partner nasty or stupid or crazy or ugly or stinky. But do you genuinely like your partner? I’m not asking if you’d be friends with your partner exactly the way you’re friends with other people in your life. I’m not asking if you get along doing things like making meals or going shopping. I’m not asking if you like the same things. I’m not asking if this is always true every minute of every day. I’m just asking if, when it counts for you, you really like your partner the way you like a friend or someone else you feel comfortable and happy being with.

2. Does your partner seem to like you? I’m not asking you to get inside your partner’s head or heart. Instead I’m asking how your partner makes you feel about how he feels about you. Does your partner act as though he likes you? Does your partner make you feel he likes you? I know there are periods of anger and hurt and distance between you, but does your partner convey to you the sense that he likes you outside of these periods?

These aren’t always easy questions to answer. Let’s see what we can learn from some people I call the Couple Who Tried Too Hard.

Ann’s Story

Ann and Dave fell in love and married because they shared the same values. They met at a Quaker Meeting. They’d both been brought up as Quakers but had drifted away from it when they hit adolescence. They’d each been married briefly before to other people and they were trying to get back to their spiritual roots.

What initially drew them to each other was their discomfort with the political activism of some people at their Meetings. Ann and Dave were hungry for more spiritual experiences. When they first found each other, that hunger combined with the background they shared made it seem as though they were a perfect match: two good, kind, gentle, loving people hungry to connect with God, each comfortable knowing the other was right in his or her judgments.

In fact, they agreed so much and supported each other so strongly that, echoing Quaker ways of putting things, they got into the habit of constantly referring to each other as “my best friend.”

I’ll never forget the downright shame that burned in Ann’s face when she came to me wondering how she could be so unhappy in a “perfect marriage” to someone who was her “best friend” that she “loved with all her heart.” She didn’t make sense to herself. How could all this be true and yet all she thought about was wanting to leave Dave? Surely something would have to be terribly wrong somewhere, probably with her, she thought, probably with some emptiness or coldness or deadness or rage in her soul that was shutting her down to love.

This Can’t Be Love. Ann was perfectly willing to blame herself for anything and everything, but when I asked her to talk about her “best friend” the complaints poured out. Although she was careful to remember to point out the high values Dave had that she shared, she had nothing else good to say about him. Sure, he was eager to get close to God and heal the world, but to actually spend her days with, he was mean, complaining, cold, boring, disconnected from his feelings, uninterested in talking about their relationship. He couldn’t talk about anyone without putting them down. And if you asked him what time it was, he’d build you a watch.

“But I love him,” Ann said to me. “He’s not a bad person. Is there something wrong with me that I can’t stop wanting to leave him?”

This is actually a very common way people express their ambivalence. For them it’s not the person’s good qualities in one pile and bad qualities in the other. Instead it’s all their qualities, all bad, in one pile, and in the other just a general sense that they’re a good person and worthy of being loved.

The End of the Journey. I never know where these journeys are going to take me when I start, but the journey I went on with Ann kept leading me away from something being wrong with her. It led to Ann’s need to give herself permission to get clear about this relationship and act on that clarity.

Eventually we got to the question I just asked you. “Ann,” I said, “I know you’re a spiritual person and your values are very important to you, but speak from your gut feelings for a moment and tell me the truth. Do you like Dave? Do you have the sense that he likes you? I know you like the things he believes in that you agree with. But I’m remembering all the things you told me about him that aren’t the things you say about someone you like [and I gave her some examples]. So when you really search your heart for how you feel about Dave minute by minute as you go through your days, do you actually like him?”

There was one of those long, long, long silences I’ve learned not to interrupt. Finally Ann said in a dry, quiet voice, “I don’t think I’ve ever really liked him. I like what he likes. But I don’t like him.”

It was sad. It’s always sad for me to see a relationship breathe its last breath. But it was particularly sad here because I’d seen how hard Ann had tried to like Dave over the years. She’d done so many things with him. The Couple Who Tried Too Hard had gone on pilgrimages and retreats together. They’d taken up joint hobbies. They’d gone to every couples workshop that hit town. In a way, all that trying had worked to Ann’s disadvantage. The more she tried to like Dave, the harder it was for her to admit that she didn’t like him.

What’s the guideline for Ann and for you and for everyone in this situation?

GUIDELINE # 11

If it’s clear to you that basically and overall you just don’t like your partner, then your love is a ghost, no matter what else you have going for you and no matter how loudly your heart cries out that you love him, and you’ll be happiest if you leave. And if your partner makes it clear to you that he just doesn’t like you, then in this case, too, you’ll be happiest if you leave. Quick take: In the long run—no like, no love.

Virtually everyone I’ve encountered who was in a relationship where one person didn’t like the other was happy they left or unhappy they stayed. If you’re wondering whether you still love your partner or whether there’s enough love left in your relationship, the quick take makes the answer clear.

The “Critical Incident”

How does it get clear to people that they don’t like their partner? Sometimes you just know it. Sometimes, though, you need what I call a “critical incident” to make it clear. Before this you felt uncomfortable and maybe there were things about your partner you didn’t like, but then that one incident comes along and highlights who he really is and how you really feel about him.

For example, one woman had been on the fence for a long time about whether she liked her husband, and her dislike centered around a crass, selfish quality of his that made her think of him as a guy who was all take, no give. But she made excuses about him or pointed to other more positive qualities of his that made it hard for her to admit she didn’t like him.

Then they were at a country food fair where locals displayed free samples of homemade products they could ill-afford to give away. Her husband went up to one table and proceeded to gobble up all the pieces of cookies and cakes that had been put out as samples. The sheer, blind, gluttonous greed of this served as a critical incident that gave this woman permission to finally acknowledge that she truly did not like her husband.

If you really don’t like your partner on balance and overall, either you’ll just know it or a critical incident like this will suddenly make it clear.

A Time Trap

There’s a time trap some people fall into with this issue. They get stuck waiting for not liking to turn into liking. On one level this makes some sense. We’ve all had the experience of meeting someone, not liking them at first, getting to know them better, and then finding we like them a lot. That’s what happened to me with my husband. The first hour or so after we met, he seemed so opinionated that I didn’t like him. But then the more I learned about him, the more I liked him. There are studies to show that some of the people we like best in our lives are the people we started out not liking so much.

No wonder people who end up not liking their partners can fall into a time trap: if not liking could turn into liking before, then it can do so again, they think, and so they wait. But this is really a completely different situation. Not liking can turn into liking, but liking that turns into not liking can rarely turn back into liking. Particularly not after the kind of time and commitment you’ve given to each other.

Feeling Liked

It’s time to talk about the second part of the guideline, where it’s clear to you that your partner doesn’t like you. This is not about how your partner really feels. It’s not about whether your partner says he likes you or thinks he likes you. It is about how much liking gets through to you.

I know there’s no one in the world in a relationship who isn’t aware that there are things about them that their partner doesn’t like. But I’m talking about your having a sense that on balance and overall your partner just doesn’t like you. Day after day, waking up and going to sleep, eating or talking about the kids or watching television together, you actually feel as if with the heft of a paperweight in your hand that he doesn’t like you.

If that’s true for you, then you’ll be happiest if you leave. The bad feelings just get worse. A relationship like this is too bad to stay in.

If you’re genuinely stumped about whether you really like your partner, keep a daily record on a piece of paper. Every day jot down a D (for dislike) if basically and overall you didn’t like your partner that day. And jot down an L (for like) if something happened to make you like your partner that day.

Keep this daily record for about six weeks. Then look at what you’ve recorded. Look at the pattern of D’s and L’s. I can’t tell you what adds up for you to “basically and overall not liking your partner,” but you’ve got to let the real pattern show you the truth of your life. The truth will be there. You can do the same thing to determine whether you feel your partner likes you.

PERSPECTIVES: MUTUAL SHUTDOWN

There are many ways for a relationship to die. We’ve just talked about one: there’s no liking. But the different ways a relationship can die have something in common—what I call mutual shutdown. Let me tell you about it. You’ll find it important for understanding every guideline here and throughout the book.

Like being infected with the deadliest virus, mutual shutdown usually starts small, slow, unnoticed. It can start the day you meet, the day you marry, or not start until you’ve been together for twenty years. All it needs to get going, though, is a small hurt or disappointment. A slight coldness in bed or a sexual rebuff. The attempted hug that’s pushed away. A putdown when you’re vulnerable. Something big can start it, like discovering your partner’s had an affair. But something incredibly small can start it, too, like feeling that the present you’ve gotten for your birthday isn’t as nice as the present you gave your partner on his birthday six months earlier.

Here’s how it kills relationships. Before mutual shutdown starts, when two people come together there’s the sense that “I’ll make a hundred percent effort to contribute my full fifty percent to the relationship and you’ll make a hundred percent effort to contribute your full fifty percent. We each do our best to give our all.”

But if you do something to hurt someone or disappoint him, even if it’s unconscious and inadvertent, if you do anything to make it seem as though you’re not trying a hundred percent and not contributing fifty percent, then it’s natural that he’ll pull back, too. Maybe not right away. Maybe he’ll put up a fight. But eventually it’s going to be impossible for him to feel he wants to keep giving to you as much as he’s been giving when he sees you giving less.

What Keeps It Going?

If this were a world of saints, you’d see your partner pull back, you’d see his complaints and coldness, and immediately realize what you’d done to make that happen. You’d immediately start giving back to make him willing to give to you again. But we don’t live in that world of saints. Instead what we do is all too often respond to hurt and anger with hurt and anger of our own. If he’s going to give less, you’ll give even less than that, is in effect what we say. This mutual shutdown is a pure psychological reflex.

Think of it like the two of you forming a relationship and having a bank account with a fixed amount of money in it that can never grow. As long as you leave that money alone everything is fine. But if you find that he’s taken five dollars out, it doesn’t feel fair and you feel deprived and you’ll not only take a similar five dollars out, but an additional five dollars. Why should he be five bucks ahead of the game when you can be five bucks ahead? But when he realizes you’ve taken out ten bucks, he takes out fifteen; and then you take out twenty. It doesn’t matter how much you started with. Eventually there will be nothing left.

Mutual shutdown works just like this except with an emotional, not financial, bank account.

I’ve never encountered a relationship in trouble where mutual shutdown wasn’t working its evil magic. But like most of the viruses that are in our bodies right now, mutual shutdown is not inevitably fatal. It won’t stop all by itself, but it can stop if you do something to stop it. What that “something” is and whether it’s enough is the issue I address next.

STEP #12: FREE GIFTS OF LOVE

Let’s talk about love some more. What I’m trying to do in this chapter is offer some specific help to people who want to get a handle on what it means that they say “But I love him [or her].” “Do you like each other?” is one way of getting a handle on this, on what’s real about your love. Another way is to see if mutual shutdown is more powerful than you are, or you’re more powerful than mutual shutdown.

The best way I know to determine this is by asking the next question: 

Diagnostic question #12. Do you feel willing to give your partner more than you’re giving already, and are you willing to do this the way things are between you now, without any expectation of being paid back?  

It’s so hard to know what’s real about love. We talk about love that doesn’t exist. We forget where we’ve hidden treasures of love that do exist and that could change everything. But if I know anything about love, it’s that love delivers.

Remember our four stages of reality, perception, feeling, and action? There’s a tiger. You see the tiger. You’re struck with fear. You run or panic or do whatever people do when they see a tiger. But if you don’t do anything and you don’t even have a real response inside, not even the flush of adrenaline on your face, you have to wonder if you really are afraid. In the same way, if a supposed feeling of love isn’t leading you to do things that are the kinds of things love leads people to do, then you’ve got to wonder if you really are feeling love.

One of my favorite therapists and someone I’ve learned a lot from was Harry Stack Sullivan. He probably worked as hard as any of us to make sense of love, but at least he wasn’t trying to shove any hobbyhorse down our throats. And in a book that was the last place on earth you’d think of finding someone saying anything wise about love, Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry, Sullivan said, “When the satisfaction or the security of another person becomes as significant to one as is one’s own satisfaction or security, then the state of love exists.”

What does it mean to say that someone else’s satisfaction or security is as significant as your own? To me it means that love is not the package you carry around, it’s the package you deliver. It’s not what you feel inside and certainly not what you say you feel inside, it’s what you can give based on what you feel inside.

Here’s how this works in the context of mutual shutdown. If your partner doesn’t give to you, it’ll be harder for you to feel you have something to give your partner. You still have something left to give though. But at some point during this process of mutual hurt and withdrawal, you and your partner have shut down so much that you simply have nothing left to give, regardless of what you say you feel. That’s the death of love.

And the simplest test of this is question #12: Are you still willing to give something unconditionally to your partner?

Some people have trouble answering this question. They have such a strong sense of how much they’ve given to the other person and to the relationship in the past, and how much they’re giving in the present, that they get indignant. Why should they be willing to give more, they wonder, when they’re giving so much now? What can this question possibly prove except masochism?

Let’s find the answer.

Barbara’s Story

Barbara got married very young. She was twenty, the same age I was when I got married. When you’re kids starting out like that, you’re full of romantic hopes for the future. You’re so young that you have a strong sense of the specialness that brings you together. You have this idea that your destinies are uniting.

For Barbara, the sense of special destiny got all tied up with her husband Sam’s business, a costume jewelry manufacturing company. It was a small, downtown sweatshop that from the beginning teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. They weren’t wealthy the way we imagine manufacturers to be—they were often broke.

Except for a brief period when her kids were little, Barbara worked in the business for a small salary that was more often than not never paid her. She did it to keep their livelihood, their dream, their marriage alive. Working twelve-hour days, she gave a hell of a lot.

But adversity corrodes. Barbara and Sam fought constantly. Frustration and disappointment kept bringing them to flash points of anger. By the time Barbara came to see me there was a huge pile of twenty years of grievances counterbalanced only by her saying that she loved Sam.

Was This Love Enough? What that boiled down to, eventually, was whether I’d have the guts to ask Barbara, who was in a total mutual shutdown with Sam, if she’d be willing to give him more than she was giving already, even though from one point of view she was already giving a lot.

How bad was the mutual shutdown? No sex, for one thing. She felt used and abused every day at work, so she had no interest in making love at night in bed. For another thing, she just couldn’t say anything nice to him. Sure, if he had a meeting with a potential customer she’d say optimistic-sounding things, but it was just to help the deal go through. But she had nothing nice personally to say to him about him. She couldn’t say “I think you’re terrific.” This woman, who was hanging on in the relationship because she loved him, couldn’t say “I love you.”

I’ll tell you what gave me the guts to ask Barbara if she could give more to Sam. I know the terrible power of mutual shutdown to make relationships sick and kill them. But doctors ask sick people to do things all the time that are hard to do but make you better. How can a doctor ask someone suffering from cancer to go through the pain of chemotherapy? But how can she not ask him if it’s the best way to cure him? So how could I not ask Barbara to give more?

Running on Empty. “Look, I know you’ve given your life to Sam and your relationship and the business and everything,” I said. “But what you’re saying to me is that the whole thing is dying. You and Sam are moving away from each other with a terrible speed and something’s got to stop that. I need to know if, in spite of everything, you have anything left to give him. I’m not talking about work. I’m talking about an unconditional gift of love, something warm and loving, like what you gave each other when you were kids starting out. I’m not going to judge you if you can’t. But we’ve both got to know if you can give something to him without any expectation of getting anything back. Or are you running on empty?”

Barbara was silent for a minute and then said, “What difference does it make? Suppose I can. What does that prove? Suppose I can’t? Does that mean it’s over?” Here’s the guideline:

GUIDELINE # 12

In spite of how hurt and deprived you feel, if you are still willing to deliver a concrete expression of love, without expecting anything back in the near future, there’s a real chance there’s a solid core of aliveness in your relationship. If you won’t give unless there’s a clear expectation of getting something in return, that’s evidence you won’t be happy if you stay. Quick take: When there’s nothing left to give, there’s nothing left at all.

The yes answer is the really important one here. If, even though your partner’s been stingy and miserable and angry and critical, even though you keep taking care of your partner and it doesn’t seem as though he takes care of you, you’re still willing to give without expecting to get anything back, that means that when you say “I still love him” you’re not full of bull. Your feelings are about something real.

What do I mean when I talk about “delivering a concrete expression of love,” about “giving” when you don’t feel like giving? I’m not talking about anything dramatic or costly. I’m just talking about small, concrete things that may not be so hard to do but that make a difference to the other person. This kind of concrete expression of love could include things like the following:

• Smiling at your partner when he comes home

• Complimenting your partner on the excellent job she’s done on a pet project

• Stopping to rub your partner’s shoulders when you walk past him

• Picking up something you know your partner will like when you’re at the store

• Conceding some point that’s been a bone of contention between you

• Offering to help your partner when she’s working on something

I can’t tell you what to give or what would work in your relationship if you gave it. But if you are still willing to give something like the things I’ve just mentioned, then that’s a sign that your love is real.

It may still turn out that love is not enough. And in the long run, we’ve all got to feel that we’re getting back from our relationships roughly as much as we’re putting into them. But for right now, you’ve got to know whether the “I love you” you claim is keeping you in the relationship is more than just words.

Keeping Hope Alive

What does a no answer mean? That’s the problem. If someone says to me that they’re just not prepared to give unless they’re going to get something back in return, then I have to ask where change and hope and healing are going to come from. What’s going to make things get better? What’s going to reverse the inexorable process of mutual shutdown? Because if you feel that way, your partner probably feels that way, and the two of you are standing there with your arms folded basically saying that even if you have to wait until the day you die, you’ll wait for the other to make the first move.

But it may only seem that way. Saying you’re unwilling to give unless you get something back sometimes means it really is all over, but it sometimes means you’re just in terrible pain right now. When I gave birth to my babies I used natural childbirth, and that meant I was in the kind of pain I hope never to experience again. If I hadn’t been giving birth I would’ve wanted to die with pain like that. But it wasn’t the pain of death. It was the pain of life, and that made all the difference. In the same way, if you’re in pain in your relationship and the only ray of light is that you love your partner, that pain might just be the kind of pain that goes away.

That’s what happened with Barbara. At first she said, “No. I’m sorry, but I feel wiped out. I have nothing left to give.” But Barbara and I both needed to understand what her no meant. With question #12, only time makes that clear.

I asked Barbara to do what I’m going to ask you to do if your answer is no. On a piece of paper write these words:

As of [today’s date] I just don’t feel willing to give unconditionally to my partner anything more than I’m giving right now.

Then go through the rest of this book. Another question later on might make it clear that you’ll be happier leaving. But if by the time you finish this book the signs are that you’ll be happier staying, do this. Put that piece of paper in your wallet. Look at that piece of paper six months or so from today’s date. If nothing’s changed and you still feel the same way, I feel comfortable saying that you’ll be happiest if you leave.

Here’s what happened with Barbara. She must’ve had a sense that her running on empty had to do with more than just the relationship. So she took a vacation from Sam and the business. If he couldn’t handle that, she thought, that’s all she needed to know. But it was fine with him. So Barbara went to stay for two weeks with her mother in Florida. She got physically rested and emotionally left alone.

What surprised her was that when she got back to her life with Sam she was nice to him again. The pressures and difficulties were still there as they’d been before, and Sam was the same demanding guy he’d been, but it must be true that she loved him because it seemed as though she had some love to give him again.

It wasn’t that alone that made the relationship too good to leave. But when she saw what she was giving to him, she asked herself, “Is there a reason I can’t keep this up forever? Does this cost me anything?” Her answer was no to both questions. And that was a reason to stay.

You’ll be happy to know that in this case the power of giving unconditionally to the relationship turned things around. It didn’t make their relationship at work less stressful, but Barbara gave Sam a present of herself by being nice to him the way he’d remembered before all the difficulties. And Sam responded. He wasn’t a completely new man, but he showed Barbara that he had love to give her that he delivered by being nice back to her. With no other negatives in their relationship making it too bad to stay in, these little but real gifts of love turned mutual shutdown into mutual turn-on.

Every once in a while someone’s afraid to give unconditionally. They feel they do have something left to give but they’re afraid if they actually give it they’ll get screwed, used, suckered into doing all the work in the relationship.

But I want to say that these fears are generally unwarranted. You already know the relationship’s iffy. You’re already thinking of leaving. If you give and nothing happens and you get nothing back, the forces of mutual shutdown are powerful enough to make it likely that you won’t have anything left to give the next time, and you’ll have found the clarity you’re looking for. At least you’ll have tested the reality of your love.

9

It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing

Issue: Sex and Physical Affection

Here it is. Sex. But I’ve got a surprise for you. In a way this whole book is about sex. Let me explain.

There are all kinds of sexual problems we deal with in our relationships that can drive us nuts, make us miserable, and make us wonder if there’s something wrong with the relationship, something so wrong that maybe we’d be happiest leaving. I’m talking about the whole gamut of sexual problems, such as one of you just not wanting sex, fights over how often you make love and who initiates lovemaking, sex without passion, the desire for more foreplay, sexual needs that one of you has that the other doesn’t want to satisfy, sexual boredom, premature ejaculation, difficulty reaching orgasm, or 101 other sexual problems.

The issue we’ve got to face here is where to draw the line between (1) sexual problems that frustrate and disappoint us and (2) sexual problems that make a relationship too bad to stay in. This chapter focuses on what it is about the physical part of your relationship that indicates a basic discord in the entire relationship, meaning you’ll be happy if you leave, as well as what provides evidence for the possibility that you’ll be happy if you stay.

The guidelines here are so specific that you might think I’d somehow left out all the other sexual problems I’ve just mentioned. Isn’t there some minimum frequency of lovemaking that means you’ll be happiest leaving? Isn’t there some level of sexual pleasure that’s so low that you’ll be happiest leaving? Isn’t there some degree of difference between you when it comes to sex that means you’ll be happiest leaving?

Sexual Guidelines

I didn’t leave any of this out. It’s just that the sexual part of your relationship doesn’t exist in isolation from the rest of your relationship. Every chapter of this book provides guidelines that point to issues that are all-important in determining what it is about sexual problems that makes a relationship too bad to stay in.

Take this sexual problem for example: a woman has trouble reaching orgasm with her partner. There’s nothing about this particular sexual problem that tells you that you should leave. The real issue is whether she can talk about it with her partner. It’s not trouble reaching orgasm but off-the-table-itis that determines whether she’d be happier staying or leaving.

People whose partners take off the table discussions about sexual matters are the ones who end up being miserable if they stay. People whose partners do not take sexual discussions off the table are much more likely to feel their relationship is too good to leave. Here’s why. Because their partners are open to talking about a problem like having trouble reaching orgasm, they’ll either make progress resolving their sexual problems or at least feel close to their partners and feel they’re working together to build a solid relationship.

The Bottom Line

Let me put it like this. Think about some couples who’ve grown old together. Being able to say “We could always talk about anything” buys you a lot of happiness, regardless of how many orgasms you’ve had. But if you have to say “We could never really talk about anything important,” then that buys a lot of disappointment and unhappiness, regardless of how many orgasms you’ve had.

Besides, being able to put things on the table can solve sexual problems. But good sex can never solve the problem of not being able to talk to each other.

And it’s like this for almost every issue in every chapter of this book.

Take the very first guideline in the book: that you’ll be happy leaving if things were never good when they were at their best. If things were good in general, then even if sex hasn’t been particularly good there’s a basis for hoping and connecting. If they were never any good anywhere, where’s there going to be a basis for their being good in sex?

Later on we’ll get into other issues, like mutual respect, the ways you and your partner are different, your partner’s having particular problems, intimacy, and many other issues. All of these have some bearing on whatever might not be working for you in your sexual relationship right now. The point is that sexual problems are not separate from relationship problems. It’s the same problems that make a relationship too bad to stay in that turn sexual difficulties into relationship-ending problems.

If there’s no reason why you’ll be happy leaving your relationship based on these problems, there’s certainly no reason to leave because of any specific sexual difficulty, other than what I deal with in this chapter.

A RED HERRING

Let’s get past an important source of confusion when it comes to bad sex and troubled relationships. There’s a high correlation between deteriorating relationships and a drop in the frequency of lovemaking. When people start fighting they stop making love.

But what causes what? Deteriorating relationships cause people to stop making love. This means that if you know things are going bad in a relationship you can predict that that couple isn’t sleeping together as much as they used to, and you’ll have a good chance of being right.

But you can’t flip this around. You can’t say that just because a couple isn’t making love all that much that things are going bad in the relationship. Here’s an analogy. If you know someone’s sick you can predict that there’s a good chance they’ll be in bed. But if you know someone’s in bed, you can’t predict they’re sick. Most people in bed are just sleeping.

And getting clear about what predicts what is important, because problems with lovemaking are a major reason people start wondering if their relationship is too bad to stay in. The bottom line is that if you and your partner have stopped making love as often as you used to or as you’d like to, it doesn’t necessarily mean there’s anything seriously wrong between you. It’s not a reason by itself for you to conclude you’ve got to leave or even that there’s anything necessarily wrong with your relationship.

It could be that the two of you are content not making love as much anymore. It could be that the two of you are mad at each other and that when your anger cools off your bed will get hot. It could be that the two of you need to talk but you haven’t for all kinds of reasons, including the fact that you’re so busy. It could be, believe it or not, that having kids in the house spooks you, and once they become horny teenagers who are out of the house a lot, the two of you will get horny again, too.

The point is that sex is like those canaries miners carry into a mine to see if the air is safe: it’s a highly sensitive responder to what’s happening in the atmosphere. Whatever’s going on with sex is far more likely to be a symptom than a disease. So if none of the guidelines in this book that say leave apply to you, then the odds are overwhelming that you’ll either be able to work out your sexual issues or you’ll be happy enough with things the way they are.

Now let’s get down to business. When does it mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing?

STEP #13: REACH OUT AND TOUCH SOMEONE

The physical side of a relationship is a huge area. There are whole libraries about what goes into good sex and how to get it. Couples argue constantly about when to make love and how to make love and what to do when making love. But where do you find, in the midst of the stormy and confusing sea of lovemaking, that one clear beacon that tells you there’s something so wrong between the two of you physically that your doubts are at an end and it really is best for you to leave?

This question is very basic.

Diagnostic question #13. Do both you and your partner want to touch each other and look forward to touching each other and make efforts to touch each other? 

I’m talking about things as elemental as kissing, hugging, stroking, holding hands, rubbing a neck, putting a hand on a leg, and any other form of touching that goes on in committed relationships. And in any of these ways, do you feel that you want your partner to touch you, even if it’s just holding hands? Do you wish your partner touched you more often? Are you happy when your partner touches you now? Or do you feel that your partner gives you the creeps physically and that you actively and affirmatively do not want him to touch you?

And, since it’s so closely related to this, do you want to touch your partner in any way too, even just to give her a kiss on the cheek?

And, even though you might have to guess about this, based on your experience, would you say that your partner wants to touch you in any way, and does your partner want you to touch him? I realize that some people are naturally very physically affectionate and others are naturally more “hands off,” but given your partner’s basic personality, has he moved to a zero point where he wants no physical affection?

Where does lovemaking fit into this? For now, just think of it as another form of touching, like any other. Don’t give it a higher status than other forms of touching. But since lovemaking is a form of touching, you could ask yourself if you want to make love to your partner. If you’re not making love, do you wish that this period of coldness and distance were at an end and lovemaking started happening again? I’m not asking about how often you want to make love to your partner. I’m just asking if in general you want to make love to your partner at all.

When you look at him does it ever occur to you to make love to him? When he touches you do you ever feel you want to make love with him? When you’re by yourself do you ever have the feeling that you want to make love with him?

And do you guess that even though your partner’s acting mad at you he really wants to make love with you, too?

All these questions point to the basic issue of whether you and your partner are physically attracted to each other. Wanting to touch and wanting to be touched are the bedrock of the part of your physical relationship on which your emotional relationship builds.

Most other sexual problems people can and do cope with or live with. But if you’re agonizing over whether to stay or leave, here’s the guideline:

GUIDELINE # 13

If either you or your partner has stopped wanting to touch the other or be touched by the other, and this goes on for several months without any sign of abating, then you’re making a profound statement about how alienated you are from each other, and based on the experience of other people in this situation you won’t be happy if you stay and you will be happy if you leave. Quick take: If someone makes your flesh crawl, it’s time to crawl out of the relationship.

There’s one thing you have to be careful about with this guideline. It’s why I talked about this going on for several months without signs of abating. You have to be careful about the fact that people get into weird places when they’re mad at each other or when they feel hurt by the other. So there are very commonly periods in troubled relationships where there isn’t any touching going on, much less sex. And there are periods where emotions are running so high that you don’t want to be touching each other. But I’m not talking about situations like these, and you’ve got to make sure that you don’t apply this guideline to what’s essentially a temporary situation.

Guideline #13 applies only when it sinks in that literally not wanting touching has become permanent for you or your partner.

The Bridge Back

Why is not wanting touching the touchstone? Why is this the place I go to in the sexual realm to diagnose a relationship that’s too bad to stay in, other than the fact that this is where most people feel comfortable having drawn the line?

It has to do with the way people in a troubled relationship that’s basically too good to leave find their way back to each other. One way they do so is by building on some kind of physical bond or connection. As bad as things are, they hold hands or kiss each other good-bye, or their bodies make contact when they lie in bed at night, or suddenly out of nowhere they find themselves hugging, or in the midst of their distance from each other they find themselves wanting to touch.

You remember that I talked about mutual shutdown, the way two people pull back from each other, and keep pulling back, each waiting for the other to make the first move, emotionally, conversationally, on every level. Well, wanting touching is one of the most important ways two people find a way to stop this mutual shutdown. Some “accidental” or spontaneous touching happens that both people want, and the touching escalates, and shutdown becomes turn-on. And that’s how millions and millions of couples find their way out of a nightmare of hurt and anger.

You could think of wanting touching as the brakes on a car. Of course brakes can’t steer you out of danger but they do stop you from reaching it. A car without brakes is undrivable. A relationship without the braking mechanism of both people wanting to touch and be touched on some level and in some way is a relationship without this protection against a crash.

The good news is how seldom guideline #13 applies. But when guideline #13 does apply and there’s no one there to want to touch the other, then they’re just trapped in a nightmare of hurt and anger and there’s no way to get out.

STEP #14: GETTING PHYSICAL

A question people often ask me is how good sex has to be before it makes a relationship too good to leave. And where this question comes up most often is with people who’re feeling very ambivalent about their relationship because there are a lot of things going on they don’t like, and yet sex itself is still really good. And so they wonder if they’re being too finicky, if great sex doesn’t in fact cancel out a whole bunch of bad stuff, the way you might stay in a crappy house that happened to be right on the ocean.

Let me tell you where I’ve learned to draw the line. It’s between two parts of your own sexuality. There’s the part you carry around with you wherever you go. Let’s call this your general sexuality. I’m talking about sexual responses and feelings that you’ve generally had in most of your sexual relationships. For example, the physical process you actually go through to reach orgasm in most of your relationships is part of your general sexuality.

And there’s the part that responds to the person you’re with. Let’s call this your person-specific sexuality. This refers to parts of your sexuality that are different with your current partner than with other partners.

Your general sexuality shouldn’t have anything to do with whether you stay or leave a particular relationship. So even though it might feel wonderful to be touched and your orgasms are satisfying now, if this is something you’ve experienced in other relationships or think you’d probably experience in other relationships, that’s great but it’s no reason in and of itself to stay in your current relationship. It might seem as though there is great physical chemistry, but that’s only because of what you are carrying around with you wherever you go. It’s because of who you are, not because of what there is in the relationship.

But your person-specific sexuality, the part that responds to the person you’re with, is the part that’s absolutely critical for ending your relationship ambivalence. If you want to see what it is about the physical side of your relationship that makes it too good to leave, just ask yourself: 

Diagnostic question #14. Do you feel a unique sexual attraction to your partner? 

I’m not asking how great sex is with your partner now. That wouldn’t be fair to this relationship, because great sex can so often have to do with your general sexuality that you carry around with you wherever you go. And when I’ve worked with people in iffy relationships and it became clear that for whatever reason the relationship was too bad to stay in and yet they stayed anyway because of great sex, they didn’t end up happy with that decision.

But more often than you might think I run into people who somehow feel uniquely physically attracted to their partner. It’s not that they can’t imagine having sex with anyone else or that sex wouldn’t be good with anyone else or that sex is even so unbelievably great with their partner. But for whatever reason there’s something sweet or safe or special or comfortable about their sexual relationship with that person that simply puts other people in a different category. Other people just don’t feel right to them. But this person does.

One man I interviewed had had a lot of sexual experience before his current relationship and was still one of those guys who liked looking at attractive women. But here’s the thing. He might flirt with other women at parties, but if he danced with them or sat close to them he felt, as he put it, “distinctly not turned on.” On the other hand, there was something about his partner’s skin—the way it felt, the way it looked, the way it smelled—that was unusually appetizing for him.

That’s the kind of thing that makes the difference. Here’s the guideline:

GUIDELINE # 14

If you feel a physical, sexual attraction to your partner that puts him or her in a special category for you, where you’re drawn to him or her strongly and in a way you’re not drawn to anyone else, then I feel comfortable saying you’ll be happy if you stay because most people in this situation are happy they stay, as long as there are no powerful reasons to leave. Quick take: If you’re especially attracted to your partner, there’s something special about your relationship.

If this guideline doesn’t apply to you, don’t worry. People can be perfectly happy in relationships with someone they’re no more physically attracted to than they are to anyone else. All you absolutely need is what the previous guideline pointed to, that you want to touch each other. So what if you’re physically attracted to other people, too?

It’s just that in those cases where someone’s partner feels special to them physically not because of any unique beauty but because of some chemistry that makes them feel different from others, then as long as there are no other problems, people in this situation are usually happy they stayed and unhappy they left.

10

All the Things You Are

Issue: Your Partner’s Problems

BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE

Here’s what can happen if you don’t deal with things in a timely way. Sally was married to an alcoholic for thirty-two years. For the last twenty of those years he made her life miserable, coming home high during the week and getting loaded every weekend. He never abused her, not physically anyway, but his drinking made him angry and unavailable. Sally spent most of her marriage pretty sure it was too bad to stay in. Only her blind hope that he might change one day made her think it was too good to leave. But her hope turned out to be pointless. Finally, all their money gone, and far later than she should have, she ended the relationship.

Within six months she was absolutely stunned by how good she felt about herself and her life on her own in her new apartment.

She was truly at peace for the first time in decades. But she was bitter, too. She’d never really grappled with the issue of her husband’s changing and dealt with it one way or another. Not until it was very, very late in the game.

But it doesn’t have to be that way for you. Let’s talk about the problems our partners have that contribute to our relationship ambivalence. Of course every problem we have in a relationship feels as though it’s connected to there being something wrong with our partners. But for now let’s talk about those situations where your partner has some kind of problem and yet it seems as though everything would be different if only he could change.

What problems am I talking about? Any of the things that destroy lives and relationships. Alcoholism, of course, and any other form of substance abuse like cocaine addiction or being hooked on painkillers. It could be being a pothead, a hothead, or a fathead. It could also be depression. It could be resentment of authority. It could be unwillingness to settle down and have a career. It could be carelessness with money. And it doesn’t have to be a psychological problem. It could be lack of education. It could be premature ejaculation. It could be anything that drives you crazy and makes you think if only he didn’t have “that one thing” everything would be great, except he does have “that one thing” and your life is hell.

How do you sort all this out? You want to be fair. You want to be patient. But you also want to be happy.

The Ideology of Like-It-or-Lump-It

Few things keep more people more stuck in relationship ambivalence than confusion about whether we have a right to ask for change at all. Aren’t we supposed to accept our partners for who they are? Aren’t we supposed to think only about changing ourselves and not the other person? Let’s see.

Going back to one of the very earliest historical marriages we have any knowledge of, the one between Socrates and Xanthippe, people have understood that it’s their right to do everything possible to change their partners and to demand that their partners solve their problems.

But there’s also been a very strong like-it-or-lump-it attitude throughout history, one generally associated with people (usually men) who could afford to say “like it or lump it.” Unfortunately for people in relationships today, the like-it-or-lump-it attitude got a strong boost in the sixties and has gone on to affect the twentysomething offspring of people who grew up in the sixties. It’s also an attitude that a lot of baby boomer therapists promulgate.

You can see this attitude illustrated by something called the Gestalt Prayer. It says in part:

I do my thing, and you do your thing.

I am not in this world to live up to your expectations

And you are not in this world to live up to mine.

There is some value in these lines, but the throw-away-relationship attitude exemplified by the Gestalt Prayer went way too far. I’m not a politician or a theoretician or any other kind of -ician. I’m just a therapist on the front lines of men and women trying to keep their love alive and balance being happy together with being happy in themselves. And I know that the lifeblood of a relationship is people feeling they can influence each other, particularly about really important things.

It’s Okay to Ask for Change

Nothing works more powerfully to make people feel rage and create distance than the sense that they can’t influence their partner. And to influence someone is to get them to change, whether it’s getting them to go from being someone who never picks up his socks to being someone who almost always picks up his socks, or getting them to go from being someone who always picks on you to being someone who never picks on you.

If I wanted to write a prescription for how to have a doomed relationship that was overwhelmingly too bad to stay in, I’d have both people say I can’t change, I won’t change, I don’t want to change, and I don’t see a reason to change, but if we find each other, it’s beautiful. The point is that you’re entitled to feel you want your partner to change things about himself.

But then what? How do you then decide when your partner has problems that they’re too serious or too difficult for you to deal with for you to be happy staying with him? The solution we’ll work with here is to separate out four different issues:

• Can he acknowledge his problem?

• Is he willing to change?

• Can you let go of being bothered by the problem?

• Is he able to change?

Let’s deal with these one at a time.

STEP

#15:

BEYOND DENIAL

The word denial is tossed around so often and so glibly these days that I’m afraid it’s lost its usefulness. So I’m going to use that word as little as possible here. Instead I’m going to talk about things like blindness and ignorance about who you are and what you’re doing and what its effects are on the people around you and what the long-term consequences are.

Blindness and ignorance about what problems? We can begin with alcoholism and other forms of substance abuse: “I’m not a problem drinker, I just like to have a couple of drinks in the evening to unwind.” But he always has these drinks, and there are more than just a couple, and he unwinds himself into a stupor.

I’m also talking about a range of psychiatric problems, such as paranoia and a number of personality disorders that involve a refusal to acknowledge that there’s anything wrong as part of the symptomatology.

And I’m also talking about all the other things we’re blind to that we do to spoil relationships, from constantly maneuvering for control to not answering questions to issuing an endless stream of putdowns disguised as humor to nagging to having no energy to not being informed about what you’re talking about to being essentially uninterested in the people close to you. I’m talking about things like people not knowing they’re boring lovers or domineering parents or neglectful housekeepers or overbearing personalities who can’t stand to lose an argument or hotheads who blow up into wild rages.

I’m talking about someone like King Lear, whose daughter said about him, “He hath ever but slenderly known himself,” and whose whole tragedy grew out of that.

Mandy’s Story

People can close their minds and eyes to any possible aspect of who they are. Let me tell you about Mandy’s husband Bob, aka Mr. Selfish. While Bob might seem superficially like a lot of men and women you’ve known, he takes selfishness much further.

Bob is a professor of philosophy. If Bob were merely self-absorbed in a charming absentminded-professor way, or if you could somehow wake him up from his deep sleep of self-absorption, it might be easier to tolerate him. But no matter how blatant an act of selfishness you catch Bob in, he will either not admit he did it or not admit it was selfish. He might even rigorously defend it.

There are two ingredients here:

1. Selfishness. It’s not that Bob has any interest in dominating his wife, Mandy. He’s happy for her to do what she wants and be what she wants to be. It’s just that he simply cannot see outside of his own needs any more than someone on television can see you watching him.

So, for example, with very few demands on his time and a sense of himself as a free spirit, Bob hates plans, schedules, and appointments. If they have to do anything together, Bob simply can’t “get” a conversation about making appointments and is unable to participate in it. If Mandy says it’s important to her to schedule things because of her many commitments as an acupuncturist, Bob cannot see why it would be important. If they somehow do manage to schedule things, he can’t see why his adhering to the schedule is important.

2. The other ingredient is Bob’s utter cluelessness, his inability to perceive his own selfishness. What an enormous difference it would make if Bob could say yes, I know, I am selfish. But instead he’s got a million reasons and explanations and justifications for what he does, thereby annihilating everyone else’s needs. You’ve seen talk shows on which some selfish guy is paraded for all to see, but most of them don’t have a philosophy professor’s ability to come up with passionately reasoned justifications.

For example, when it comes to his refusal to cooperate with Mandy in any scheduling of an event Bob needs to be part of, he chides her for being uptight, petty, rigid, controlled by time instead of controlling time. He essentially has a philosophy for why her need to plan events is wrong. That philosophy is what keeps him blind.

I asked Mandy the question I’ll ask you: 

Diagnostic question #15 . Does your partner neither see nor admit things you’ve tried to get him to acknowledge that make your relationship too bad to stay in? 

Of course this kind of blind ignorance is annoying no matter what it’s about, but what I’m talking about here is your partner’s closing his eyes and mind to one of his problems that bores right through you like a bad headache when you think about the things that make your relationship too bad to stay in.

The Quicksand of Denial

If these things don’t matter to you, there’s no problem. But if they really do matter, you’re in for sheer hell. It’s not only that the problem won’t change—that’s obvious. But there’s something about this kind of blindness and ignorance that endlessly tantalizes you. People whose partners deny something important like this don’t usually come right out and say their partners cannot and will not see the problem. They say instead, “I am really trying to get him to see the problem and even though I was discouraged about it yesterday, today I really feel I’ve come up with a way to make him see it.”

After all, what’s easier than seeing? It’s something we do ten thousand times a day on the other side of every blink. It’s that seeming ease of seeing that’s so tantalizing. Any day now, we think, they’ll get it. Dawn will come. Light will shine. As if poked by an electric prod, our partners will leap into sudden realization of whatever it was they hadn’t seen before. It all seems so tantalizingly easy that we don’t acknowledge what should have been so easy for us to see: that if our partner can’t see something that’s so easy to see, there’s something wrong there and that means there’s a good chance they’ll never see it.

So what do you do if you answered yes to question #15? Here’s the guideline:

GUIDELINE # 15

If there’s something your partner does that makes your relationship too bad to stay in, and if you’ve tried to get him to acknowledge it and he simply cannot and does not, then that problem will just get worse over time. If the thought of a lifetime with it getting worse is not acceptable, you’ll be happiest if you leave. Quick take: If your partner can’t even see what it is about him that makes you want to get out, it’s time to get out.

Let me be blunt: People are rarely happy they hung in there with someone who refuses to acknowledge an issue of critical importance to them. But what does it mean exactly for your partner to “acknowledge doing something that makes the relationship too bad for you to stay in”?

One thing is for sure: it’s got to be more than just words. Your partner’s got to have a shock of recognition about what he’s doing. Of course acknowledging means saying “yes, I do that” or “yes, I am that way.” But he’s also got to convey the sense that he sees how what he’s doing is a problem for you; and that there is nothing wrong with you because it’s a problem for you.

In the story I just recounted, Bob would have to smack himself on the forehead and say something like, “My God, I finally realize what it must be like for you to live with me, how I insist on always doing things my way, and I never compromise toward doing things your way. I might have all kinds of justifications for being the way I am, but I can see how from your point of view it looks like pure selfishness. I’m sorry for how hard I’ve been for you to deal with.”

You’ve got to watch out for one of the slipperiest ways people refuse to acknowledge their problems: they get hurt. Your asking for acknowledgment makes them sad, discouraged, desperate. It seems to make them feel so bad about themselves, it’s such a blow to their ego, that you start getting the sense that even mentioning the problem makes things worse, not better. But what these people are really doing, consciously or unconsciously, is using emotional blackmail to convince you that night is day and that not dealing with a problem is a more effective way of handling it than dealing with it. Actually, they’re using a form of off-the-table-itis to prevent you from asking them to acknowledge their own problem.

Regardless of how he does it, if your partner can’t even recognize what he’s doing and the impact it has on you and the fact that it makes the relationship too bad to stay in, how can things possibly improve? One person out of touch with reality is bad enough; two people like this are an insane asylum.

STEP #16: WILL HE BE WILLING TO CHANGE?

Okay, there you are in a terrible state of relationship ambivalence. And let’s say that the problem your partner has that makes you think about leaving is something he acknowledges. That’s good. Acknowledgment delivers real hope.

But now let’s take the next step. Yes, he acknowledges the problem, but is he willing to do something about it? Is he at least willing to try? Let’s say (because the story coming up is about this) that the problem is that your partner is too fat. This is a politically incorrect issue, but inside our relationships political correctness flies out the window. And my job is to talk about the real things people deal with on the level they deal with them.

And a huge problem for people in relationship ambivalence is what happens after their partners admit they have a problem. They may admit it but they’re too often not willing to change. Here’s the question that’s helped a lot of people get out of their ambivalence: 

Diagnostic question #16. Is there something your partner does that makes your relationship too bad to stay in and that he acknowledges but that, for all intents and purposes, he’s unwilling to do anything about? 

The key is that word “unwilling.” It might sound simple, but like the iceberg that sank the Titanic it’s ten times bigger than it seems and most of it is submerged. For every person who comes right out and admits they’re unwilling to change, there are ten people who won’t say they’re unwilling to change and yet they’ll fight you every step of the way to prevent change.

Jim’s Story

Let me go back to the case of the man whose partner was too fat for him. I know you probably hate him already, but let’s look at his side of things for a bit.

Jim was a fitness coach for a professional sports team. Being in shape and looking in shape was his life and livelihood. When he’d first married Peggy she’d been a dancer and was in terrific shape. They’d shared a focus on the body. Just the way two really smart people might come together with the understanding that they’ll spend their lives enjoying each other’s intelligence and that if one of them should start acting stupid it’s all over, it was like that for Jim and Peggy with respect to having beautiful bodies, at least from Jim’s point of view.

By the time I saw them together, Peggy weighed 290 pounds. Here’s the impact this had on Jim. Sex was physically uncomfortable and unsatisfying, but even more than that he simply didn’t desire Peggy any more. He was ashamed of being embarrassed by her, but he was embarrassed nonetheless. Most of all, perhaps, Jim went around in a constant state of rage inside for what Peggy had done to herself and to him.

I checked carefully and as far as I could see Jim had done everything possible to convey to Peggy the full import of how he felt and what things meant to him. Peggy knew that for Jim her being fat was a violation of the unwritten spiritual contract that had brought them together. Peggy knew that as Jim weighed the pros and cons of staying and leaving there was a 290 pound weight in the balance on the side of the relationship’s being too bad for Jim to stay in.

Jim’s ambivalence came from all the things on the other side of the balance, like the fact that he still loved Peggy and the part of him that felt guilty about making appearance such an important issue.

Let’s check in with Peggy. Acknowledgment wasn’t a problem : she knew she was fat, she knew it was unhealthy she knew it was unattractive, she even knew it depressed her, and, most important for our purposes, she knew it was driving Jim away.

But this is where we have to face the issue of what real willingness to change means. It would have been clearer if Peggy had simply.said, “Yeah, I’m fat, and I know you find it obnoxious, but I like myself this way and I don’t want to do anything about it.” But Peggy was a textbook illustration of how people who state a superficial willingness to change actually convey a real unwillingness to change, regardless of what the particular problem happens to be. Here are some of the things she said:

• “Of course I want to lose weight but I don’t make it the be-all and end-all the way you do. It’s more important that I eat healthy food and concentrate on my work and most of all eliminate stress from my life.”

• “It’s not for you to tell me what to do. In fact, your telling me what to do makes me not want to do it.”

• “It’s wrong of you to want me to change. You’re supposed to accept me the way I am.”

• “Every time you complain about this it makes me depressed and I just put on more weight.” (People who aren’t willing to change always say that expressing your need makes them dig themselves deeper into the problem.)

Then there’s the ultimate expression of unwillingness-hiding-in-seeming-willingness:

• “I want to lose weight, too, but I’ve got to do it for myself, not for you, and I’ve got to do it in my own time and in my own way.”

You might be wondering what’s wrong with this last statement. Aren’t we supposed to believe this? Well, it’s certainly the kind of thing therapists like me have tried to get people to believe, because it’s important that we own our own lives and do things for ourselves. But there are two completely different possible translations of Peggy’s last statement:

• The first translation is “I want to do it and I will do it, but it’ll only work if I do it my way.” And that’s good if it’s sincere.

• The second translation is “I’m unwilling to do it, and you can hang around and watch if you want but I’ll never do it, and when I say ‘my way’ I mean if it happens without my making an effort, fine, otherwise too bad.” And that’s not good.

The second translation is what Peggy really meant. She was saying she was willing when she was really unwilling. Here are the facts. Jim had made his feelings clear to Peggy for many years. Peggy had said she’d lose weight “in her own time and in her own way” for just as many years. But her body exhibited her unwillingess to change.

So let’s see if we can be a little more sympathetic to Jim. Sure, he should have been a more noble, more spiritual person. But he never pretended to be a different kind of guy than he was. And he’d made it very clear to Peggy what was at stake. By her saying in a dozen ways both directly and indirectly that she was unwilling to change, she was in effect giving Jim permission to end the relationship. The gap between them was just too big.

If your answer to question #16 is yes, here’s the guideline:

GUIDELINE #16

If there’s something your partner does that makes your relationship too bad to stay in, and he acknowledges it, but he’s in fact unwilling to do anything about it, and if his unwillingness has been clear for at least six months, you’ll be happier if you leave. Quick take: If you’re waiting for your partner to want to change, you’re waiting for Godot.

This guideline is clear. When people are miserable in a relationship because of something the other person does and the other person is not willing to change, they’re usually satisfied with their decision if they decide to leave the relationship.

Sometimes you know your partner’s unwilling to change because he says so. Or because he shows you in a dozen different ways, like Peggy. But sometimes he says he’s willing but he’s not. If your partner is willing to change, he’s willing to do something to change. But do what? How does this work in practice if you’re in this situation?

Demonstrating Willingness

It really works when people come up with some specific idea of what it means for them for their partner to be willing to change and then they tell their partner what this is. They say something like, “This problem of yours makes me want to leave our relationship. You’ve said that you acknowledge that you have this problem. I’ll know that you’re willing to do something about it if you .. ,” and then they say what that something is. Clearly there’s got to be room for negotiation. You can’t just arbitrarily lay down the law. But your partner can’t just say he’s willing to change and then not do anything that demonstrates real willingness to you.

So how do you come up with this thing that demonstrates real willingness to you that you’ll tell your partner about? Since there are a million different problems and a million different reactions to each of these problems, all I can say is that whatever you come up with has to be real and specific and meaningful and observable. It’s got to be something that’ll actually make you firmly believe your partner is genuinely trying to change. It’s got to be some action about which you can say, “I know he’s willing to change because when he does that, I know he’s really trying.”

What kind of actions am I talking about? Here are some examples:

• For one person, a partner’s being willing to change with respect to substance abuse might mean going to some kind of AA-type meeting. For another person whose partner has the same problem, being willing to change might mean stopping hanging out with the same old crowd. Either way either person can say, “He’s really trying to change.”

• ∙ For one person, a partner’s being willing to change a pattern of earning little money and having long stretches between jobs—for whatever reason—might mean going back to school and getting some kind of skill or credential that will create good options. For another person whose partner has the same problem, being willing to change might mean taking that kind of serious real-world job they’d said in the past they’d never take and sticking with it for a year without getting fired. Either way either person can say, “He’s really trying to change.”

• For one person, a partner’s being willing to change being depressed, tired, and miserable much of the time might mean going into therapy and sticking with it. For another person whose partner has the same problem, being willing to change might mean going to a doctor and trying to get a prescription for an anti-depressant. Either way either person can say, “He’s really trying to change.”

Then you make an agreement about the specific change, which includes some kind of time frame. I’m talking about something like, “I’d like you to start doing this within a month and keep it up for a year. Not because I’m trying to boss you around or lay down the law but because it’s a simple fact that your not showing me you’re willing to change just makes the relationship too bad for me to stay in. That’s not a threat, it’s just my reality.”

The Waiting Trap

If you make an agreement you can save yourself from one of the many ways people fall into what I call the Waiting Trap.

We’re all susceptible to falling into the Waiting Trap all the time in our lives. Here’s an illustration of how it works.

Say you’re waiting for a bus. If you wait for ten minutes, you immediately convert that waiting time into a kind of investment. Because you’ve invested ten minutes in waiting for the bus, it feels stupid not to invest another ten minutes. Before you know it you’ve invested twenty minutes, and with an investment like that, how could you not keep waiting more and more. This is how you end up waiting forty-five minutes for a bus to take you somewhere you could walk to in fifteen minutes.

People do the same thing with problem partners. If you’ve waited a year for your partner to change, you’re almost magically drawn into waiting another year. And then how can you not wait two more years after waiting the first two years? Do you remember Sally from the beginning of this chapter? She was married to her alcoholic husband for thirty-two years because she was a victim of the Waiting Trap, wherein the more she waited, the more she felt she had to keep waiting to recoup her initial investment.

It’s to avoid the Waiting Trap that you specify a time frame when you talk about the specific thing you want your partner to do to show that he’s really willing to change. Some people hate the suggestion I’m about to make, but it’s really helpful to actually write down what your partner’s willing to do and the time frame on a dated piece of paper. Then you both sign it. (If he won’t even sign it, how can he be showing his willingness to change?) Then check in with this piece of paper a year (or however long you agree on) later. If he hasn’t done what the two of you have agreed, then he’s shown that in fact, regardless of his words, he’s unwilling to change and guideline #16 kicks in.

STEP #17: LETTING Go

Okay, so your partner isn’t willing to change and this problem is making you miserable. Here’s an option that never occurs to some people: it’s your just letting go of being bothered by the problem. Here’s the question for you: 

Diagnostic question #17. This problem your partner has that makes you want to leave: have you tried to let it go, ignore it, stop letting it bother you? And were you successful? 

I’m not talking about enduring the unendurable. I’m not talking about learning to live with suffering. I’m talking instead about something I’ve seen people do in the face of real problems, even in the face of problems that have bothered them for a long time. This problem that was attached to them like a ball and chain—they suddenly treat it like a helium-filled balloon they’re holding in their hand; they just let go and it flies away. They’re not enduring anything, because there’s nothing there anymore to endure.

Here’s an example.

John’s Story

Shortly after John moved to Boston from Texas for business, he met and married a woman who was a food writer and locally based editor of a women’s magazine. Because of what Beth’s work was about, John assumed that she’d be as traditionally oriented as he was. He understood that she’d continue to work professionally, but he took it for granted that she’d do most of the cooking and housework as well. He figured she’d want to.

Imagine John’s shock when he found that Beth was a slob, never did housework, and never did any cooking except for assignments. As his situation dawned on him he got more and more angry and disappointed, and they had bitter fights about “her” problem. She acknowledged that she didn’t do anything around the house and she expressed a kind of willingness to do more only in the sense that she said that if her schedule ever lightened up she’d do her fair share. Other than that she didn’t want to change.

There was a period when this issue really felt like a deal breaker to this Texan. He’d spent his whole life anticipating being married to a woman who would be a wonderful homemaker. I asked John if he could let go of his expectations. That possibility had actually never occurred to him before. He said he’d need a week to think about it.

When he came back, he said, “You know, I thought to myself if this works, it’ll be the easiest thing I’ve ever done. Let me see if I can just take a big breath and let go of the stuff I had in my head about Beth doing all the work around the house. I couldn’t believe it but it worked.”

It’s not always so easy to let go, and the odds are that you’ve already tried it and it hasn’t worked for you, but if you haven’t tried to let go of either paying attention to or being bothered by this thing that’s making your relationship too bad to stay in, then it’s worth trying now. Give it a week or two and see what happens. Then what’s your answer to question #17? Can you let go? Here’s the guideline:

GUIDELINE #17

If you can really let go of the problem that’s most making you feel you want to leave your partner, if you can stop paying attention to it or stop letting it bother you, there’s a real chance this relationship is too good to leave. Quick take: In a relationship with a future, people can let go of the problems they can’t solve.

People often talk about how you can’t change someone else, you can only change yourself. That’s what this guideline refers to. But the reality is that this kind of letting go is a lot harder to come by than we’d like. Most of the time, after we’ve tried to let go and failed, we’re forced to confront our need for the other person to change. As long as your partner’s willing to acknowledge that the problem exists, as long as he proclaims a willingness to change, there’s hope. But can he change?

STEP #18: CHANGE AND THE WORLD CHANGES WITH YOU

The answer to the question “who are you?” is that we are all the things we are now and all the things we can be in the future. This is what I often say to patients when I ask them to make a change and they say, “I can’t because it’s not who I am.” But you don’t know who your partner is to the extent that you don’t know who he can be in the future. And the only way you can find that out is to try and see how much he can change.

Julia’s Story

It was one of those tragic cases I’ve seen where someone is painfully stuck in relationship ambivalence for fifteen years. That’s how long Julia had spent feeling horribly dissatisfied with her husband, Oscar. She’d done things to half leave the relationship, things like renting a studio of her own to work in or talking to lawyers. But she’d stayed and stayed, making plans for their future together, plans she looked forward to and dreaded at the same time.

They were a cultured, intellectual couple. She was a classical musician, not tremendously talented by her own admission, which was part of the problem, because if she’d felt more talented she’d have felt more entitled to have her own life as a musician. But that was hard because Oscar was a genius. He was a prize-winning world-class scientist and businessman.

You’ll have to believe me when I tell you that Oscar was both one of the most frustrating, infuriating, exasperating people around and at the same time rather sweet and charming. I know this doesn’t sound like it makes sense, but here’s an example.

He’d come home from work, interrupt Julia in the middle of whatever she was doing, turn off her music, because he’d forgotten for the millionth time her million requests to not intrude on her when he came home. And yet, his intrusions were always for the sake of telling her an amusing story or about some small triumph that had occurred during the day.

The tragedy was that Oscar desperately wanted to connect and yet was unable to connect. His slightest utterance had the quality of a formal lecture by an Old World professor. He was boring, incredibly long winded, and insensitive to the point where he never looked at anyone he was talking to.

Was this relationship too good to leave for Julia, or too bad to stay in?

In His Own Sweet Way. It might sound amazing, given Oscar’s air of imperviousness, but he knew there was something wrong with how he acted, and the sweet part of him was sincerely willing to change. But his ability to change was limited and frankly weird. He was to personal growth what an extremely brilliant parrot would be to learning English. He could change very fast, but only when I presented his task in almost mathematical form, and then he’d change completely but only in that one narrow respect.

For example, everyone in his family complained passionately about the way he monopolized the conversation no matter how many people were in the room. Nothing could get him to change this until I presented him with the following little formula: Divide the amount of time available by the number of people in the room—that’s the percent of time you can talk and the rest of the time you have to listen. If there are two people in the room, you can talk half the time; if there are four people you can only talk a quarter of the time; and so on. He got it and he did it. But not one single other thing would change until I’d come up with another mathematical formula.

What should I do, Julia asked, stay or leave?

Here’s the question I asked Julia:

Diagnostic question #18. As you think about your partner’s problem that makes your relationship too bad to stay in, does he acknowledge it and is he willing to do something about it and is he able to change? 

How can you tell if your partner is able to change? There are many ways, and it’s important to understand them. Oscar had his own unique style of changing. It was weird, but it was change.

You see, asking if an individual can change means asking what an individual needs to change. One person might simply need to be asked. Oscar needed extremely precise, concrete instructions, the kinds of things he used every day as a scientist. Other people need other things. Some examples follow.

Knowing You Care. A lot of people need the sense that you really care about what you’re asking for. You’re probably surprised at this. How can she not know you care if the two of you have done nothing but fight about this for years? Well, it’s a mystery to me, too. And I’ve resigned myself to knowing that I’ll probably grow old and die without ever solving this mystery.

But from the perspective of my years of clinical experience, although I don’t know why this is true, I know it’s a fact that people can spend decades yelling and crying and fighting over an issue and their partner will still say in all honesty, “I never really knew how much it mattered to you.”

So before you can say your partner can’t change, you’ve got to make sure your partner knows how much the issue matters to you—not based on your thinking he should know, but based on his proving he does know. Ask him: on a scale of 1 to 10 how important do you think this is to me? If he doesn’t say “10,” you know he doesn’t know how important it really is to you.

Motivation. Other people need adequate motivation. But isn’t knowing you care enough? It should be, in a perfect world, but in this imperfect world of ours change is painful and scary. And sometimes it’s hard for people to change even with all the motivation in the world. At least with adequate motivation the likelihood of change increases.

If you’ve been suffering in an iffy relationship because of something your partner does, you need to ask yourself, “Have I made it clear to him how his life will be better if he changes?” If his life won’t be better, why should he change? If you haven’t made it clear to him how his life will be better, why should you expect he’ll want to change?

Therapy. Some people need therapy to change. The statistics are that about two-thirds of the time a good therapist can succeed in producing change where the people themselves have tried and failed. The question is what constitutes a good therapist, because your partner should certainly go to one before you give up on his changing.

Here’s what you should look for. Some good signs are

• Someone you know says this therapist has helped her with a similar problem in concrete ways.

• The therapist offers a plan that focuses on helping you reach the goals you’ve set, and it’s clear to you how what the therapist does will help you reach your goals.

• This therapist uses a variety of methods depending on your problem and who you are.

• You have an ongoing sense that this therapist is more often than not helping you feel better in your life and helping your life work better.

Some bad signs are

• There’s no change in your life or how you feel or what you do after four sessions, or things actually get worse.

• The therapist seems uninterested in the concrete realities of your current life.

• The therapist is focused exclusively on ways you’ve been damaged, instead of on your needs or strengths.

• The therapist seems to have one all-purpose theory or “answer” that explains everything.

So before you say your partner can’t change in the specific way that makes your relationship too bad to stay in, my personal rule of thumb is that a good therapist has had a crack at it and it still hasn’t changed. Good therapists always make some real difference but they can’t fix all things.

So what do you do about question #18, which asks if your partner can change? This guideline emphasizes the positive:

GUIDELINE #18

If your partner shows a real sign of being able to change with respect to a problem that makes your relationship too bad to stay in, there’s a good chance there’s something healthy and alive at the core of your relationship and you won’t be happy if you give up on it at this point. Quick take: It’s the ability to change that turns frogs into princes.

The point of this guideline is that the ability to change is very, very good news.

But what if your answer to question #18 is no? That’s not necessarily bad news. Remember, we’re talking about someone who has acknowledged there’s a problem and demonstrated a solid willingness to deal with it. With someone like this you don’t give up hope, not until you learn a lot more about the situation. A therapist is a doctor of the mind, and doctors are virtually commanded to look for the possibility of someone becoming healthy no matter how sick they happen to be at the moment.

So even if your partner hasn’t yet shown signs that he can change, as long as he’s passed the acknowledgment and willingness to change tests, there’s always the possibility of change in the future. Whether that change will actually come and whether it’s enough for you are important questions, but I think they can be put off until later. Right now, because your partner’s passed the acknowledgment and willingness to change tests, people in your situation make it clear that you can afford to wait and see what happens.

By the time you get to the end of this book you’ll have explored all the possible areas that clearly point to reasons you’ll be happiest if you leave. If none of them apply, including the deal breakers we’ll get into next, then your relationship is most likely too good to leave.