Strategies to Enhance Your Marriage

Couples often enter marriage with great, but conflicting, expectations. The old joke is that men marry hoping that their wives will never change, while women marry hoping their husbands will change. But often they are both disappointed. Expectations about roles, responsibilities, and how the perfect wife (or husband) should behave stem from our individual, family, and cultural histories. Differences and conflicts are inevitable. But how you handle the gap between your expectations and reality will determine whether your marriage becomes a battlefield or a source of great fulfillment.

Terrence Real, founder of Relational Life Therapy and author of The New Rules of Marriage, identifies five losing relationship strategies that result in dysfunctional patterns of relating. These strategies, along with their negative consequences, include: Needing to be Right (leads to objectivity battles and self-righteous indignation); Controlling Your Partner (leads to manipulation, coercion, and inevitable payback); Unbridled Self-Expression (leads to only one voice being heard); Retaliation (leads to explicit or passive-aggressive offending from the victim position); and Withdrawal (leads to resignation and puts a stranglehold on the relationship).

To counteract these losing strategies, Mr. Real describes five winning relationship strategies that honor both partners and move them past their knee-jerk reactivity. According to Real, this enlightened view of relationship empowerment addresses the basic question, “What do you need from me so that I can help you give me what I want?”

1. Shifting from Complaint to Request: You ask, not criticize, by moving from a negative/past to a positive/future focus. Rather than assassinating the character of your partner, you make specific, behavioral requests that are reasonable.
2. Speaking Out with Love and Savvy: You initiate making repairs in the relationship by first remembering the love you have for your partner and reflecting on how their behavior impacted you and what you want. You give feedback by describing what you saw and heard, how you interpreted it, how you felt, and what you would like in the future.
3. Responding with Generosity: The responding partner listens to understand their partner’s perspective without interrupting and acknowledges whatever they can without debating the facts. They remember that their partner is sharing their perspective. This is followed by giving whatever they can.
4. Empowering Each Other: In this final phase of the repair process, you ask your partner, in addition to expressing appreciation for what they are willing to give, what you can do to help them follow through on their commitment. This is where the golden rule of relationships applies: It is in our best interest to assist each other, knowing that neither of us will be happy if one of us is unhappy.
5. Cherishing: You express appreciation for the abundance in your relationship and cultivate your capacity to enjoy and savor it. You cherish your partner by expressing appreciation for their efforts and the gifts they bring to the relationship as well as showing an increased desire to be pleasing in return. Cherishing helps you and your partner remain lovers when the children and other family obligations leave little time or energy for romance. Of the five winning strategies cherishing stands alone as the most powerful by amplifying what you want to experience in your marriage.

Jeffrey L. Santee, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist with advanced training in cognitive psychology and behavioral medicine. In addition to his work in men’s and marital issues, he specializes in the treatment of depression, anxiety disorders, and stress-related health problems. Treatment modalities include individual Treatment modalities include individual, marital, and group therapy. Click here to view his bio.