The New Rules of Marriage. What You Need to Know to Make Love Work

239 Pages·2007·0.99 MB·English

by  Terrence Real

Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter One Are You Getting What You Want?
Outgrowing the Old Rules
Chapter Two The Crunch and Why You’re Still In It
Bad Rules In a Losing Game
Chapter Three Second Consciousness
Stepping Out of Your Bad Deal
Chapter Four Are You Intimacy Ready?
Cleaning Up
Chapter Five Get Yourself Together
Healthy Self-Esteem and Boundaries
Chapter Six Get What You Want
Empowering Yourself, Empowering Your Partner
Chapter Seven Give What You Can
Empowering Each Other
Chapter Eight Cherish What You Have
Full-Respect Living: A New Rule for Life
Resources
Quick Reference Guide
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Terrence Real
Copyright
To the gleeful, enduring spirit of Michela Harriman.
And to her family, who have cherished and who are cherished so profoundly.
Introduction
The New Rules of Marriage provides operating instructions for twenty-first
century relationships. It walks you, step by step, through the fundamental skills
of getting, giving, and having, teaching you how to get what you’re after in your
relationship, how to give your partner what he needs from you, and how to
sustain and enjoy the closeness that healthy getting and giving brings.
Why do today’s relationships need a new rule book? Because we are in a time
of great change. The roles of men and women have dramatically shifted, and so
have our expectations about relationships. We have never wanted more from one
another—more passion, more support, more connection. But our new desires
have not been matched by a corresponding new set of skills, and for most of us,
whatever we learned growing up about relationships is simply not sophisticated
enough to deliver all that we hope for. Am I saying that we now need to be
actively schooled if we want to have a satisfying relationship? Yes. That is
exactly what I’m saying.
As children, most of us were taught how to read and write, but precious little
about how to conduct ourselves in the one area that means the most. We don’t
expect someone to step into a car for the first time and drive without training.
And yet this is precisely what we expect of ourselves interpersonally—as if
handling an automobile were a more complicated task than keeping your
relationship on course. Relationships might have been that simple back in
simpler times, but they’re certainly not that simple now. And the unfortunate
results of our naïve inattention clog our roadways with wreckage. Bad wrecks—
in the form of rampant divorce. Limping wrecks—in the form of marriages that
survive, but not very happily. And functional heaps—in the form of banged-up
relationships that run well enough but that could be a lot more satisfying.
Fortunately, you can do better than this—much better. You can assert your
wants and needs in ways that maximize the possibility of getting what you’re
after; you can bring your relationship back on track when it lurches off course;
and, most of all, you can cherish and enjoy each other, building on each other’s
strengths just as you did at the start. You can do all of these things. You can do
them consistently. And you can do them well.
But you must learn how.
How This Book Came to Be
While I have had the privilege of practicing and teaching couples and family
therapy for close to three decades, the evolution of The New Rules of Marriage
began in 1997 with the publication of my first book, I Don’t Want to Talk About
It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression. At that time depression
was widely considered a “woman’s disease,” so much so that I Don’t Want to
Talk About It was the first book ever written about the condition of male
depression, even though it affects millions of men and their families. The book
struck a chord, and I began getting calls from around the country. Some of the
calls were from men but most were from women—desperate women who’d
already dragged their husbands to two, four, or even six couple’s therapies, all to
no avail. Reading about the highly unusual therapy techniques described in I
Don’t Want to Talk About It sparked a last glimmer of hope. Did I know
someone in their area, these callers asked, who worked in the manner shown in
the book? In 2002 I followed I Don’t Want to Talk About It with my first book
on couples, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between
Men and Women, and the number of calls increased.
At first, with regret, my answer to these urgent inquiries was no. I could not
recommend someone in their area who’d been trained in this model. I directed
the callers, as best I could, to local resources. But after a year or so of such
frustrating nos, it occurred to me one day to ask if the couples might be willing
to come to Boston to work with me. Many were, and what quickly evolved was a
couple’s intensive in which the partners and I agreed to work for two solid days,
at the end of which time a determination would be made that they were either
back on track or else filing for a divorce.
The success rate of these intensives was surprising. Easily nine out of ten
couples renewed their relationships. I don’t claim that these interventions
“fixed” those relationships, but they did succeed in pulling the couples back
from the edge of marital self-destruction. The therapeutic techniques that
evolved from the challenge of these encounters were unusually quick, powerful,
and very different from common practice.
Wanting to make this unconventional way of working with couples more
widely available, I formed, with the help of wonderful colleagues, The
Relationship Empowerment Institute for the purpose of training therapists in the
new model. And I’m delighted to say that, so far, hundreds of clinicians from
around the country have come to Boston to train with us. At the same time,
public media were getting wind of my couple’s intensives and began covering
them. Most dramatically, the television show 20/20 came to my office one crisp
New England spring morning with a couple I had never met who were on the
verge of divorce. The cameras rolled and the couple and I had five hours to save
their marriage. We did.
The professional training we offered at the Institute made it clear that the
techniques I had been using could be articulated and taught to other clinicians.
The next question was whether we could devise a curriculum, a process, that
would enable a group of ordinary men and women to stimulate in one another
something akin to the accelerated learning that occurred in the two-day
intensives. With help and encouragement from my colleagues at the Institute, I
created a three-day Relationship Skills Workshop in an attempt to answer that
question. And the answer has been a resounding yes. Although the Workshop
was not designed exclusively for couples in dire straits, many such couples claim
to have found unexpected new hope, while couples along the whole spectrum—
from those in crisis to basically healthy couples hoping to become better—claim
that the experience of the workshop changed their lives.
The next question seemed clear. Could a manual be created that would walk a
reader through a process akin to the three-day Skills Workshop? Could someone
without professional coaching, either singly or with a partner, take in the
information and begin the practices we taught in our groups? And the answer to
that, as well, is a resounding yes.
That manual is in your hands.
How to Use This Book
Becoming relationally fit is just like becoming physically fit. Understanding how
to achieve the goal is essential, but the best results come from the doing. You
will find exercises throughout this book, some in the body of a chapter, others in
separate practice sections following the chapters. These exercises are designed to
guide you through three steps:
1. Assessing some aspect of yourself or your relationship
2. Envisioning with clarity the changes you’d like to see
3. Beginning your practice of a new technique
I encourage you to do the exercises and to practice the skills presented in this
book. I’d like you to use the book as a guide through a process—the process of
beginning to master the art of having a great relationship. Think of it as your
own private tutorial.
And what about your partner? Wouldn’t it be best if he were to read the book,
and even do the exercises, along with you? Yes, that would be ideal. And those
partners who participate together are well on their way toward improving their
relationship. But with or without your partner’s participation, you can develop a
level of skill and mastery that will astound you (and, by the way, surprise your
partner as well). The New Rules of Marriage gives you everything you need to
step out of your well-worn rut. And while there are no guarantees, powerful and
unexpected things do happen—with or without your partner’s deliberate
participation—when you move beyond your habitual role. Along the way, The
New Rules of Marriage will also equip you to evaluate your relationship, to
determine realistically what the balance is between how much you get from it
and how much you pay. You will learn when and where to turn for professional
help and how to help your therapist help you.
At the end of the book you will find a list of additional resources. And finally,
you will find a Quick Reference Guide that offers pared-down versions of the
most important ideas and techniques covered in the book.

While I have described what you are about to read as a new rule book, an
owner’s guide to today’s relationships, its real goal goes beyond introducing you
to the ideas and tools of an effective relationship technology. Its deepest
ambition is to introduce you to a whole new way of life I call full-respect living,
an artful way of handling yourself that allows you to assert your truth and your
needs while at the same time honoring the truth and needs of each person with
whom you interact—especially those you love.
I have called this book a new rule book in order to stress its practicality. But,
at its core, The New Rules of Marriage is meant to be more than either an
informative good read—as wonderful as that may be—or a manual of
instructions, as useful as that may be.
It is an invitation…