Something Personal: The Rules

Over the course of teaching interpersonal communication and doing my own life, I've come up with a set of rules that I try hard to live by, and recommend that other people do as well. As they are excellent guidelines for human functioning, here they are:

1. Stay Away From Crazy
   
   Yes, yes. I understand we all have a little bit of crazy lurking about inside of us. Things set us off and make us behave irrationally. I'm not talking about that. I'm also not talking about any sort of legitimate mental illness. I'm talking about people who either refuse or don't know how to behave correctly. I'm talking about people who lie compulsively, who are manipulative, who aren't willing to take responsibility for their actions, who make more excuses and explanations than sincere apologies. I'm talking about people, who when you interact with them, routinely make you feel angry or hurt or frustrated.
   
   Why should you stay away from crazy? Because crazy people are takers and not givers. They are usually too self absorbed to actually contribute anything meaningful to our lives and people like this drain us of resource that we could be giving to other people who feed us and help us to grow and live a life full of love. For more on that, see the Glowworm lecture.
2. Never Ask a Question You Don't Want Answered Honestly
   
   It amazes me the number of times I've seen people shocked when someone gives them an unpleasant truth in response to a question. Just a few examples: "Have I gained weight?" "Am I a diva?" "Do you think I make bad life choices?" "Do you fantasize about other women?" "Did you cheat on me?"
   
   If you're going to ask a question like that, you had better assume that there is a possibility that you aren't going to get a nice, tidy, socially appropriate, self-esteem-affirming response. If you are being a diva and if you ask me if you're being a diva, I can assure you that 100% of the time I will tell you that you're being a diva. You may be asking, why wouldn't I just tell a nice little lie that will make you feel good about yourself? Because you asked. And because you asked, you've given me permission to tell you the truth.
    
3.  Seize Joy
   
   I don't just mean stop and smell the roses. I mean go out of your way and find some roses and smell the heck out of them until you suck the scent right off of them and love every minute of it. You have one short, little, precious life on the planet. Go out and seek and grab and pull to you those things, experiences, and people who fill your heart with boundless delight. Be responsible (no, "seize joy" isn't equivalent to the idiotic mantra of millenials, "YOLO"), but know that joy isn't going to happen to knock on your apartment door while you're bingeing on whatever you binge on when you're home alone at night. Rather, ya gotta go out and get it. And when you do, hold the hell on to it.
4. Act Right
   
   Usually, when I tell people this in conversation, the whole rule is, "Act right; it ain't that hard". Perhaps my greatest pet peeve is when people choose to do what they shouldn't or fail to do what they should. In my experience, there are few situations that legitimately impede a person from behaving in whatever way is called for by the situation or relationship in which they are behaving. Rather, we fail to adhere to our responsibilities because we don't want to, and then we make excuses for it. What really drives me bananas is when a person, in the course of making excuses for a failure to act right, bemoans the negative consequences that accompanied whatever ill-conceived choice they made instead of acting right.
   
   I don't care why you didn't do what you should have, or why you did what you shouldn't have. I don't care what unfortunate thing happened to you as a result. Your job, my job, the job of the collective humanity is to behave in responsible ways that minimize to the best of our ability, the chance that our actions in any given moment are going cause someone hurt. Put that way, why wouldn't you act right. It really is too easy.

So, these are the rules. Sincerely, I try very hard to live by these. I don't always succeed, and some I struggle with more than others, but I find them to provide a good framework for making the best of my small little life.

Forgiveness

I've been talking with a couple of friends recently about infidelity. Across my conversations with both of them, the thing that echoed in the back of my mind was the matter of forgiveness. More specifically, I have been thinking about the fact that forgiveness central to the restoration of trust which is the foundation on which the relationship going forward will be built.

The question, then, is: how do we come to forgiveness?

In the course of writing my dissertation, I came across a chapter written by Tedeschi and Nesler (1993) that talked about how people work through being on the wrong end of someone else's bad behavior. Their model had a couple of additions, but the essence of what they argued was this:

• First, a betrayal is committed (after all, without a betrayal, there is no need for forgiveness)
• Second, a responsible party is identified as having committed the betrayal
• Third, the responsible party accepts ownership for commission of the betrayal
• Fourth, the responsible party makes some reparation for the betrayal
• Finally, the person who was betrayed moves toward forgiveness

So in plain English: someone does something wrong to someone else. The person who did wrong has to own what s/he did wrong and attempt to make up for the wrong-doing in a way that is roughly proportional to the original betrayal.

What I love about this model is that it expects that the person who committed the wrong-doing to take responsibility for him/herself and try to fix it. Now, seeing as we can't get into a DeLorean and go back in time to the moment just before we made a wrong choice, what can we do (or avoid) to take responsibility for a major betrayal we have committed against someone we love?

I've got some thoughts on that: 

1. Apologize. For heaven's sake, apologize. And not one of these perfunctory, I'm-apologizing-because-it's-the-socially-appropriate-thing-to-do-but-I'm-not-really-sorry-and-I'll-likely-do-it-again apologies. No. Like a legit statement of recognition of wrong doing and a sincere display of remorse for what you've done and the hurt the other person is feeling because of it.

2. Don't confess unless you expect the relationship to end. Okay, so now we get into some ethical gray area about whether a betrayal that your partner wouldn't know about unless you confessed it should be confessed at all. I am not prepared to get that dirty right now. What I am prepared to say, though, is that if you know you violated a major relational rule, you should should expect there to be negative consequences. One of these consequences may very well be a loss of the relationship. If your partner doesn't want to be with you as a result of your betrayal, you have to deal with that as a foreseeable outcome of your actions. What you don't get to do is accuse your partner of being crazy, irrational, unreasonable, unfair, blah blah blah if that's what s/he decides is necessary and/or appropriate.

3. Don't give more information than you're asked for. One of my rules for existing as a human being is to never ask a question that you don't want to know the honest answer to. I would amend that rule to say that if a person tells you that they don't want to know, then don't tell them. You have to understand that you just confessed to a major betrayal. That is a lot to deal with unto itself without a barrage of information coming at your partner that they aren't even sure they want to know. What's more, is that chances are that you're being ultra-disclosive for one of two reasons: either you are trying to unburden your conscience or you're trying to get your partner to break up with you. Neither helping you feel less guilty nor giving you a way out of initiating a break up conversation is your partner's responsibility in this situation.

4. Don't berate, belittle, or insult yourself. Yes, you probably feel like a big pile of poo if you genuinely feel remorse for your betrayal and if you really do want to mend your relationship. And you might really, truly honestly feel like you have nothing to say except to call yourself names. I'm telling you, though, find something else to say. If you insult yourself you're trying to beat your partner to the punch - if you call yourself a(n) [insert your favorite ugly insult here], your partner has no reason to also call you a(n) [see previous insult]. This may seem like a harmless self-protective thing to do, but it's a problem because your partner, if s/he loves you, will feel the need to reassure you that you aren't whatever insult you've called yourself. Let me put that differently: you (the betrayer) are asking your partner (whom you have just confessed to betraying) to console and comfort you in response to your well-deserved guilt. That's an awfully manipulative thing for you to be doing if you've just confessed to a major relational violation. 

5.  Don't ask your partner how they want your betrayal made up to him/her. Like alleviating your guilt, or ending the relationship you didn't want, this puts work and responsibility on your partner for repairing something s/he didn't break. You should be thinking to yourself "how can I prove I love him/her?" and then go do it. I'd like to point out that buying flowers or candy or funding shopping sprees or bringing home puppies are not expressions of love. On a good day, they are gestures of affection. If they come following a betrayal, they are small and trite and comically insignificant as compared to a major betrayal. You may have to prove your love by being willing to give something up in order to invest more in your relationship.

As is always the case, this list isn't by any means exhaustive. It is, however, a compilation of some of the major missteps I've witnessed people making in the course of confessing betrayals to their loved ones.

In the end, you can avoid all of this by really truly trying, every day of your life, not to suck. 
 

References

Tedeschi, J. T., & Nesler, M. S. (1993). Grievances: Development and reactions. Aggression and Violence: Social Interactionist Perspectives. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.

Relationships are Like Gardens Part III: Even Good Ones Have Pests

A few months ago, I was in attendance at the wedding of a dear friend in the delightful city of Chattanooga, Tennessee. On the morning of the wedding, with a few hours to spend alone in the city, I made my way out to find a wedding gift. I will note here that gift-giving isn't my strong suit (I'm great with doing favors, but less brilliant at giving gifts), so I had been thinking for days about what to get the happy couple. Finally, as I was waiting in line that morning to buy my faithful companion, giant iced coffee, I made up my mind.

I left the coffee shop and headed to a bookstore where I picked up for them a copy of John Gottman's Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. I know, it could be construed as cynical to give a book on marital management as a wedding gift, even for people who know me well (and know how much I value knowledge and education as the foundation of happy relationships). Truly, I mean nothing negative in this gift. Elizabeth and David are a wonderful match for one another, they clearly love each other dearly, and they are both committed to making a lifetime of happiness together.

Naturally, then, you should be asking, "CarrieO, if they understand how to do a relationship well, what do Elizabeth and David need with a book on marital functioning". Good question. To answer it, I present to you Part III of Why Relationships are Like Gardens: Even Good Ones Have Pests.

Sometimes, You End Up With Slugs

Tapping back in to our analogy of a garden, the truth is that no matter how much we've learned about how to grow cilantro or tomatoes, and no matter how much we've planned and executed our planting to maximize our success, we can't prevent every  problem. Bugs, slugs, rabbits, birds, and plant diseases are things that our knowledgeable planning can help mitigate, but may not be able to prevent entirely. When the pests start creeping into the garden, we have to manage them well if we expect to be able to harvest.

Our relationships are not unlike this. Being well-matched to our partners in terms of our values, skills, and dedication to our relationship can stave off a lot of challenges that crop up (no pun intended) in our relationships. In spite of all of that, though, it is inevitable that in a lifetime together, we will occasionally encounter situations that create relational strain.

Realizing that we can't predict or control every source of relational strain, part of our becoming knowledgeable and skilled is being able to anticipate, recognize, and effectively manage unavoidable relational stressors. The upshot of this is that stress unto itself doesn't necessarily adversely impact relational quality. Rather, how we manage that strain does.

You Would Never Set Your Garden On Fire

Consider it this way: suppose you've chosen to plant tomatoes. Let's also suppose that some time after you plant, you end up with a situation in which your garden is infested by slugs that eat your plants before they bear fruit. We could manage the slugs by way of, say, setting the garden on fire. As much as that may kill the slugs, it would also decimate the garden. In setting your garden aflame, you've accomplished nothing productive. Sure, you've killed the slugs, but you've also prevented your ability to harvest the fruit of your garden. You've shot yourself in the foot because all of that planting and pruning leads to nothing productive.

You may be thinking that talking about setting a garden on fire to get rid of slugs seems like an insane and irrational example that doesn't really extend into relationship management. I would beg to differ. The reason setting fire to a garden seems insane is because it is an obvious overreaction to a problem in the garden. Interestingly, human beings aren't always quite so adept at recognizing the irrational overreaction that some of our reactions to relational strain may be.

Set Down the Matches, and Get Some Self-Control

Rather than yelling, pouting, giving your partner the cold shoulder, or retaliating by doing frustrating things in times of relational stress, the best thing we can do is muster some self-control and perspective.

The challenge in gaining perspective is in controlling emotions - hurt, anger, frustration, annoyance - that interfere with both our willingness and ability to simply speak our needs to our partners. If we allow our strong emotions to dictate our behavior in a moment then we may, in fact, do more damage to our relationships than we mean to. Much like a fire in a garden, if we act rashly out of emotion and without forethought, the damage we do to our relationships out of unhappy emotion can lead to consequences that are vastly more difficult to remedy than we intended.

So, the sum total of all of this is that when we bind ourselves in loving bonds to other human beings, we have no choice but to contend with the quirks our loved ones possess. If we want love and closeness to grow like a garden, then we have to learn to patiently cultivate the parts of the garden that nourish us without destroying the entire thing out of frustration.

Stay tuned for part four.

Relationships are Like Gardens Part II: Success Requires Skills and Planning

This is part 2 of a 5-part series drawing the analogy between gardening and building good relationships. Part I talked about how knowledge is central to success in both endeavors. Here in Part II, I discuss how the acquisition of the right skills, and the development of a sound plan are important to success in gardening and close relationships.

I introduced this series with a very sad tale about how I tried once to grow cilantro and failed miserably because I didn't know how to do it. Not knowing how to do it prevented me from being able to generate a plan for when and where to plant (as it turns out, I failed on both these points) or knowing whether I had the skills to do it (I still wonder if I am capable of seeing the difference between the edible first round of leaves and the frilly, lacy, bitter leaves that the plant produces as it matures).

My cilantro fiasco (as I'm now calling it) was rooted in a lack of knowledge, but that lack of knowledge ultimately resulted in my total inability to know how to plan for planting and then tend the plant once it started to grow. These same pitfalls in relationships can cause them to fail to flourish.

Strategy: Identifying a Desired Outcome and Developing a Viable Plan to Get There

The word "strategy" can be off-putting for people in reference to their relationships. Strategy sounds like something we do when we are playing games or going to war - both of which are categorically terrible comparisons for relationship management. Curiously, when we begin what we hope is a romantic relationship, we often strategize like champs. We know what we want (to form a romantic relationship with potential-partner X) and we know how to get there (by a series of tactical moves that are part of a larger playing-hard-to-get strategy that minimizes our availability and maximizes our desirability).

Something happens, though, as we become confident in the persistence of the relationship. We stop approaching it strategically. We let the relationship, for lack of better language, "do what it's going to do". Here's the thing about relationships "doing what they are going to do" - they don't. Relationships don't do a thing. Relationships are a result of human action. If we don't behave well, our relationships won't be well.

If we want our relationships to be well, our over-arching strategy should be to take care of the relationship and each other. If caring for ourselves, our partners, and our bond is what is at the front of our minds every time (and I do mean every time) we communicate, then our tactics should match that.

Let's take a recent example from my own life. My sister and I were hanging out a couple of weeks ago. I had intended that we would hang out together with my niece, Doodle, and have dinner and catch up. She spent the first two hours of my visit working on something else and only half-listening to me during our visit. I became increasingly frustrated but said nothing to her about it until I had utterly lost my patience and felt hurt and dismissed as a result of her inattention. My hurt and anger caused me to lose sight of that big relationship objective of caring for our bond and I yelled at her to stop what she was doing.

This was a major, massive tactical fail on my part which happened because I was more concerned with expressing my annoyance with her behavior and getting her to stop rather than the bigger strategic objective of taking care of our relationship. As you can imagine, my behavior hurt and upset my sister, and we proceeded to waste the better part of the next 3 hours yelling and crying. A mildly annoying situation turned into a huge, hurtful incident because I prioritized my own emotion over the relationship. I made a bad tactical decision that I would have avoided if I adhered to my strategy of caring for us both.

If we have a good plan and commit to adhering to it, we make better choices and have better relationships (and cilantro).

Strategy Can't Work without Skill

Okay, so it's all well and good that we decide that our primary strategic objective is to care for our partners, ourselves, and our relationships and that we should devise a set of tactics that enable the meeting of that objective. The trouble is, we may not have the skills to do so.

I can assure you, that while I don't remotely have the skills to be able to grow cilantro, that I absolutely have the skills to be able to have good conflict. I simply chose not to use them in the situation with my sister that I referenced above.* But what if I didn't have the skills? What if I knew that barking wouldn't end well, but didn't know what else I could do? What if I didn't know how to express frustration and ask for us to change what we were doing without sounding angry? Would I be doomed to failure in relationships? No. Certainly not.

Skill comes from practice, but we have to practice the right things. If you have a friend who is good at the thing you want to get better at, ask if they might role-play and practice while they give you feedback. There are also people who provide relationship and communication coaching** (myself, included) who, like an athletic coach or trainer, will identify skills fundamentals that need improvement and help you to develop them. You can ask your partners to tell you how they would prefer for you to behave in a given situation. If they can alert you to the troublesome behavior and motivate you in the midst of a conversation to do a better behavior, this can help you grow as well.

Growth is the End-Game

In the case of cilantro or relationships, what we're ultimately trying to do is grow them. Our closest relationships are the most valuable things many of us have. In order to grow them, to make them closer, warmer, more stable, we need to be mindful about how we approach communicating within them. We've gotta be knowledgeable, strategic, and skilled if we intend to reap the enormous benefits of our closest bonds.

Of course, all of the knowledge, strategy, and skill in the world can't prevent the occasional pest or hassle from creeping into our relationships and cilantro beds. We'll come to that in my next post, so stay tuned for Part III.

Notes:

* Yes, dear readers, being an expert doesn't necessarily mean I always do the right thing. I'm well-educated, but I'm sure not perfect. And yes, I absolutely did apologize to my sister.

** If you're looking for a relationship coach, scrutinize credentials. There are lots of people who will sell relationship coaching services with no educational or experiential credentials that would justify their charging you for their alleged expertise. Find someone whose academic or experiential credentials are clearly identifiable, and ensure that their degrees, certifications, or experience are in an appropriate field (e.g., you don't want an MBA in Management teaching you interpersonal conflict management but they may be perfect for business communication coaching). Many certified legal mediators with specialties in family mediation may also offer coaching services.

Relationships are Like Gardens. Go on, Roll Your Eyes, then Keep Reading

Love is like a garden - feed it, tend it, and it will bloom. Blah blah blah.

Some cliche analogy isn't where this post is going. Instead, I want to share a comparison I often use to talk about the choices we make and actions we take in our relationships. Analogy is useful for teaching, and the big-picture comparison I use to talk about relationships is gardening.

To make my point that relationships are basically like tomato plants, I'm going to post a 5-part series on why building good relationships is like growing a garden. Each post will deal with one of the five following characteristics of both relationship building and gardening:

They require knowledge.

They require skills and planning to execute well.

They require ongoing tending.

They present their fair share of pests, annoyances, and hassles.

They should result in something that feeds you.

I'm going to kick off the series by addressing the first point:

Building Relationships and Growing Gardens both Require Knowledge
I tried to grow cilantro once. It was a miserable failure. I was mystified by my inability to grow cilantro because I was under the impression that growing it was about as easy as growing a wild onion (i.e., it's easy to be successful by accident). Apparently, that is not the case.

So, the question is: why did I fail? The answer is: because I didn't know what the blazes I was doing.

It's my feeling that most people attempt to manage relationships in the same way that I attempted to grow cilantro - with the misguided assumption that they are natural and they will essentially grow themselves. We come to this impression because most of us have had relationships forged for/with us for a very long time with little thought, work, or input of any sort on our parts. We form relationships with our parents, siblings, classmates, neighborhood kids, etc. We meet people, tell them things about ourselves, we like the same things, we become friends, and tah-dah - instarelationship.

That our relationships are forged for us for most of our formative years sets us up, I think, to assume that we inherently know how to form, grow, and maintain relationships. That assumption is as problematic as my assumption that I can grow cilantro because it's a plant and plants grow by themselves all the time. When I say it like that, it sounds slightly crazy that we all think we just get how to be in relationships.

Here's the truth: we have to learn how to do relationships the same way we need to learn how to grow cilantro or tomatoes. Part of learning means understanding that why an action (giving a plant too much sun, or yelling in a conflict) results in one outcome or another (plant death, or hurt and anger). I am positive that had I known the first thing about how to plant cilantro, I would have been more successful than I was. Similarly, if we want to grow relationships, we need an education about how to do so.

There are any number of ways to educate yourself. Take classes in communication or social psychology to understand what scholars have learned about relationships. Seek out relationship coaching or couples therapy to learn about how to interact with one another more fruitfully. Read a relationship blog.

Better yet, you should learn about your partner. Talk to your partner about how something they do in a conflict, for example, affects you (and vice versa). Deliberately try communicating differently to see if you get a different outcome (because whatever the outcome is, you've learned something). Talk to each other about how your experiments are going and adapt your communication to what you've learned about one another.

Whatever you learn, how ever you learn it, you should be learning it mindfully. We improve our odds of having successful relationships when we are deliberate and purposeful about learning what we need to in order to address our most important relationship concerns.

In retrospect, it occurs to me that I never googled how to grow cilantro. How easy that would have been. Instead, I embarked on an adventure armed with nothing but a desire for fresh cilantro all the time. I ended up with nothing to show for it but frustration. Be better about approaching your relationships than I was about approaching gardening. If you do, you will amass knowledge and information that will help you plan better, acquire more skills, and  have more tools in your repertoire to be able to succeed at building solid relationships.

Stay tuned for Part II. 

Lesson 3, Part II: Managing Conflict: Successful Conflict Means Everybody Wins

A while back, I wrote a post on differentiating between a conflict and a fight. Really, if you haven't read it, you ought to. It will make this post make more sense . . . and it's just a darn good lesson to learn.

Today, I wish to revisit the issue of conflict in relationships and talk about what makes for good conflict.

Remember that a conflict is a conversation between two people who have stated their needs to one another and found that their needs are incompatible. Conflict isn't a sign that the relationship is dysfunctional. In fact, it suggests that you and your partner recognize that an important function of your relationship is to meet your respective needs (our lesson on what I affectionately refer to as Glowworm Theory gets at this).

How to Have Bad Conflict
Conflict goes awry in a relationship, though, when we don't express our needs in a manner that demonstrates respect for our partners. Yes, we form relationships with the expectation that they meet our needs. But, our expectation that our relationship partner meets our needs doesn't entitle us to whatever we want, nor does it obligate our partners to give it. This sense of entitlement is often the reason that we are motivated to behave badly in conflict. We feel like our partners have to do what we ask. When they refuse, for whatever reason, we take this personally. This displeasure with our partners' refusal to meet our needs often manifests as anger or hurt.

If we feel hurt or angry enough, we might choose to demonstrate our negative emotions rather than attempting to resolve the conflict issue in a productive manner. Some things we do in destructive conflict include:

• Avoiding the issue or your partner
• Yelling or doing other things that express our negative emotions
• Acting defensive or refusing to take responsibility for unreasonable requests
• Insulting or criticizing our partner
• Being emotionally manipulative (e.g., trying to make our partners feel guilty)
• Retaliating (i.e., doing something we know will hurt our partners because they hurt us and we owe them one)
• Engaging in violent actions including threats, damaging property, or harming our partners

If we do these things in a conflict, we show our partners the worst version of ourselves. If we show our partners the worst version of who we are, it makes little sense that we we should expect our partners to give us the best of themselves.

How to Have Good Conflict
Clearly, there are plenty of things that we can do in a conflict episode that can adversely impact our relationships. There are, however, plenty of things that we can do to make sure that a conversation about what we need doesn't turn the relationship toxic. So, here's some strategy for you for how to make your conflicts work for your relationship rather than against it.

• Really think about whether the need you're asking your partner to fulfill is reasonable.
  A reasonable request is one that:
  a) you have the right to expect from your partner,
  b) that your partner has the means to give you, and
  c) that your partner is comfortable giving you.
• State your need in a manner that is respectful and consistent with the rules of the relationship.
  You can't reasonably expect your partner to do anything to meet your needs if you express your needs aggressively, passive aggressively, ambiguously, or in any manner that doesn't promote clear, honest, respectful talking about your needs.
• Identify whether the incompatibility that exists between your needs and those of your partner is real or perceived.
  This point is more easily addressed with an example: Sue has a bad day at work and comes home to her romantic partner, Bob. She asks Bob if he will sit with her on the couch and hold her while she tells him about her awful day. Bob replies by saying that he can't do that because he has a paper he has to finish for the next day. Bob perceives that he cannot both provide support to his partner and complete his work. If they let the conversation get past the initial request, though, Bob would have found out that Sue really only intended to sit and snuggle for about 15 minutes because she, too, had other things she needed to get done before bed. Surely, Bob can spare the 15 minutes. Because he can spare the 15 minutes, his need to write his paper is, in reality, not at all incompatible with Sue's need for support.
• Be open to negotiation.
  In conflicts, we generally start by stating our need and our preferred means by which that need should be met. In the example of Sue and Bob above, Sue's ideal outcome was to be snuggled while she vented about her day as soon as she got home. Bob's ideal outcome was to be able to work on his paper, uninterrupted until it was finished. When we strip away all of the preferences and extras, all Sue wanted was support and to be held, and all Bob wanted was to finish his paper before his normal bedtime. If Sue and Bob would negotiate, they could talk through what their bottom lines are - what is it that they each really mean to achieve. Negotiation allows us to separate what we really need from the preferences we have about how that need gets met. This, in turn, promotes resolution.
• Shoot for collaboration, not compromise.
  I don't know about you, but the big conflict management strategy I learned in school was compromise. Teaching compromise to children is easier, I suppose, than teaching collaboration, but it breeds a shortsightedness about how to have really great conflict. Here's the fact about compromise: it means that everybody has to give something up. The word compromise means to reach an agreement by way of mutual concession. When we begin a conflict with the frame of mind that we are going to have to give something up to get what we need, we start the episode on the defense because we want to give up as little as possible. Our partners approach the conflict the same way, and the potential for excellent outcomes to arise is diminished. If, on the other hand, we approach conflict as a collaboration, we are in a different and more productive frame of mind. Here's the fact about collaboration: everybody wins (or at least has the potential to). The talking that we do in conflict should be, more than anything else, about how we get everything we both need. When we come at a conflict with the belief that everybody can get their needs met and that we don't have to start by giving something up, we tend to be more creative about how we solve the problem. We generate better ideas, we are more open to suggestions for alternative solutions, and we are thus more likely to arrive at a solution that is good for everybody. 

Good Conflict Makes Relationships Better
The majority of students to whom I have taught conflict management have come to me with the belief that conflict does harm to a relationship. They aren't wrong. Conflict can have very detrimental effects on a relationship - if we do it wrong. If we spend more time trying to inflict hurt or protect ourselves than negotiating the conflict issue, then yes, conflict can diminish relational quality. On the other hand, good conflicts draw people together. This happens because the trust, validation, and self-esteem that come from a successful collaboration makes us feel closer to and more invested in our partner. And all of that is on top of the fact that we resolved the initial conflict issue.

So you see, when we do conflict right, we get what we need, our partners get what they need and our relationships improve. Everybody wins.

Class dismissed.

Soapbox: To Get It, Ya Gotta Give It

I've titled this post "To Get It, Ya Gotta Give It" because this is the root of so many of our missteps in the way we manage expectations for other people. We tend to approach life with an exaggerated idea of the resources we are entitled to expect from other people - time, energy, money, company, love, affection, sex, respect, etc. Unfortunately, we tend to spend a disproportionately small amount of time thinking about the extent to which we have given enough of those resources to other people to warrant our expectation that we are entitled to receive them.

Do me a favor and think back to your grade school days when one of the first life lessons we were taught was the Golden Rule - do unto others as you would have them do unto you. When we are taught this as children, the point is that we should avoid treating each other badly if we expect others to treat us well.

As adults, it behooves us to consider this advice with a more sophisticated mindset. We should consider the Golden Rule as our own mindful establishment of parameters for how we should conduct ourselves in relationships, rather than just having the mindset that we should avoid doing unkind things to others.

Here are some things you ought to consider as you devise a strategy for doing unto others:

• Give the resources you want to receive.
• Show appreciation when you receive resources that you didn't expect or that you arguably haven't earned.
• Occasionally choose to give up resources to your partner that you feel like they haven't earned to help build a landscape of positivity and generosity in your relationship.
• Apologize for your failure to give resources that you should have . . . and then try better to provide those resources to avoid breeding resentment over unmet needs.
• Try not to suck.

Long story short: you can only expect to receive what you're willing to give. If all you're willing to give is nonsense or nothing, then you're not prepared to be in a relationship. Work on that.

*hops off soapbox*

Lesson 6: Trust

This is as much a lesson on relationship management as it is a Soapbox Session. It's a little longer than my average post, but trust is a big relational deal so it's worth the words (and the read).

The big idea: A relationship cannot function without trust. If you do not trust your partner, or your partner does not trust you, the possibility for the relationship to grow or bear the nurturing fruit of closeness is limited at best. A realistic view of the level of trust in your relationship must underlie your decision to escalate or persist in a relationship. If you do not realistically trust your partner, there is no point at all to being in the relationship. Period. Seriously. Read on.

To begin, we should probably define trust.

Trust is the confident expectation that your partner will not harm you. In close relationships, harm usually comes in the form of the commission of a relational betrayal. Betrayals are acts, large or small, that violate the implicit or explicit rules for conduct in a relationship. When a betrayal is committed, our confidence in the expectation that our partners will not harm us wanes. If enough betrayals of significant importance are committed, our expectation shifts away from believing our relationships are safe and moves toward a confident expectation that our partners will do us harm. This results in a relationship being characterized by a lack of trust.

Under normal relationship circumstances, occasional violations of relational rules of minor or moderate importance will happen. Usually, these relatively minor betrayals are a by-product of selfishness or thoughtlessness. Though these may be annoying, generally, these relatively minor betrayals are neither a sign of, nor do they lead to, relational disintegration. Rather, we are able to rely on the bank of relational credit that we have accrued in the relationship to draw against to cover the negative effects of a betrayal. In other words, if the betrayal is small enough, and the relationship is good enough, even after the betrayal, the overall value of the relationship is still positive. We are able to return to a confident expectation that our relationship is a safe place to be.

There are circumstances, however, during which we find it difficult or impossible to recover trust in a relationship. If a betrayal is the violation of a major relational rule (such as the commission of a sexual infidelity) or if the landscape of the relationship is generally negative, then there may not be enough positive relational credit to cover the negative effects of a betrayal. If the relationship cannot recover from the negative effects of a relational betrayal, then we end up trying to carry on a relationship with someone whom we expect will metaphorically take a hammer to our hearts every time we hand it to him or her. This, my dear friends, does not make for a happy relationship. This isn't good. It isn't productive. It serves no purpose. It has no point.

So what we know so far is that:

1. Trust is the confident expectation that our partners will not harm us.
   
   
2. Minor betrayals that happen in the context of a generally positive relationship do not typically have lasting negative effects on the trust in a relationship.
3. Major betrayals or frequent betrayals that happen in the context of an already-negative relationship undermine and can ultimately destroy trust in a relationship.
4. Relationships that lack trust are ultimately pointless to pursue.

A common question that I get from my students is whether and how trust can be recovered after a major betrayal (or a lot of smaller betrayals that have ruined the overall landscape of the relationship). 

The answer to that question is dependent on many things. Arguably, though, one of the most important factors that determines whether trust can be restored is whether we are able to forgive our partners. Forgiveness is complicated and deserves its own post. Suffice it to say, that being able to move past the betrayal and believe truly that our partners will never commit a betrayal of the same magnitude is essential to post-betrayal relational functioning. While I'm not prepared to talk about both trust and forgiveness in this post, what I do want to say regarding post-betrayal trust is this:

If you cannot forgive your partner, then terminate the relationship.

I'm going to remind everyone here that I am not a marriage therapist. I'm a scholar and teacher and relationships are my area of expertise. While my aim is generally to help my readers navigate as successfully as possible through the muddy waters of relationship stress, it is also the case that sometimes I want my readers to figure out when a relationship is past its expiration date. If you feel like you're handing your heart to your partner with the expectation of it being smashed to smithereens, it's time to cut and run. And here's why:

1. You will behave badly. Bad behavior comes in a variety of forms. You may be suspicious, snoop, engage in surveillance or following behaviors, you may perform repeated tests of your partner's devotion, you may stop being mindful of your own obligation to be kind, courteous, or respectful because you feel your partner owes you something . . . you get the idea.
2. Your bad behaviors, how ever justified you (or your partner) initially perceive them to be, will be equivalent to ongoing relational punishment.
3. While the punishment may be warranted, your partner will eventually come to feel like they have paid their relational debt to you by taking whatever punishment you see fit to dish out. The point at which your partner feels that he or she has paid their debt, your punishment will be seen as a justification for your partner's further bad behavior. After all, if we are already being punished, then why bother behaving?
4. The point: your bad behavior begets negativity, which will beget further negative behavior, and so on in a vicious cycle.

And as I said above, a lousy relationship characterized by negativity and that drains your resources and your joy is a colossal waste of emotional energy and other resources. Stop it. If you can't let go of the betrayal, then let go of the relationship. 

Class dismissed.

Lesson 4: "I'm Sorry" is Not a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free Card

The topic of our last lesson was the fact that a fight and a conflict are not the same thing. We haven't talked yet about effective, collaborative conflict management strategies, and we will come to that. Before we approach some conflict management strategies, though, I think it is important to talk about apologies. Regardless of whether you work hard at managing your conflicts well, and regardless of whether you can separate a conflict from a fight, it is reasonable to expect that occasionally we will need to give or accept an apology in a relationship.

If you're a fan of the drama show NCIS, you'll know that the quiet-but-effective protagonist, Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs, has a set of rules. Among them (number 6, I think it is) is that a person should never apologize as it is a sign of weakness. In general, I think Gibbs' rules are a good idea - always carry a knife (Rule 9), never date a co-worker (Rule 12), never screw over your partner (Rule 1). These are bits of wisdom and good advice for life. The business of never apologizing, on the other hand. Well that's a whole bunch of nonsense and I'll tell you why.

An apology is not a sign of weakness. Rather, when it is sincerely given, it is an acknowledgement of responsibility for some betrayal or other wrong-doing for which another person had to bear negative consequences. Without going into a whole lot of research, we do know that the acceptance of responsibility for wrong-doing serves important relationship functions including restoring equity after a transgression has been committed, and enabling forgiveness. So, Gibbs is way wrong when he says that apology is a sign of weakness. Rather, an apology  is an overt recognition and ownership of actions that we have taken that have harmed people we care about.

Now, here's the tricky part: an apology isn't a cure-all. An apology is not just a couple of little words that can smooth over the negative consequences of a wrong relational turn. An apology really only has any hope of moving two people past a betrayal if it is a legitimate sign that we are willing to accept responsibility for our negative actions and committed to trying to avoid the same wrong-doing in the future. We often make the mistake of translating our own apologies to other people as "I'm sorry that I did something that upset you and that we got into a fight over it." Rather, the more appropriate translation of our apologies should be "I'm sorry that I made a choice that caused you hurt. I accept responsibility for my actions and I commit to us both to try my best to avoid repeating the hurtful act."

If you find yourself (or your partner) repeatedly apologizing for the same hurtful action we must confront at least one of three likely realities:

1. You (or your partner) fail to realize that there was really, truly hurt on the other end of an action.

2. You (or your partner) fail to realize that the apology is a sign of ownership and acceptance of personal responsibility. You also probably fail to realize that accepting responsibility for a wrong-doing necessitates an attempt to modify the problematic behavior.

3. You (or your partner) realize that you did something to cause hurt and that you should change hurtful actions, but you just don't care. This can be the consequence of laziness, selfishness, or relational disinvestment. The particulars of why you don't care about the consequences of your actions are less important than the fact that this attitude has almost no hope of resulting in anything except the continuation of a pattern of wrong-doing.

If your situation is either 1 or 2 above, you have some hope for remedying repeated hurt. You can talk to your partner about what an apology really means. You can talk about why the action is hurtful or otherwise negative. You can talk about possible alternatives to the problematic action that can meet your needs without hurting your partner. There is talking to be done, but there is a lot of potential here to move past a repeated conflict.

On the other hand, if scenario 3 above is more what you're looking at, it might be time to revisit whether or not the relationship is something that you should be bound to. I do believe in talking, productive conflict and relational work, but if you need to be convinced to do right by a partner, you probably have some work to do for yourself first before you try to bind yourself to someone else. (If your partner is the transgressor, you might want to revisit an earlier post here at Relationship School about knowing when to toss in the towel).

Here's the long story short: It is important to exchange apologies in a relationship. Being able and willing to honestly say to a partner that you have committed a wrong-doing can help us move past the hurtful action and into a place where we have learned and grown together as people and as partners. Apologies are not cure-alls, they aren't instant fixes, and they don't take the place of working to be better for the people we love. Don't apologize if you don't mean it - that action cheapens an apology and causes it to lose their tremendous relational value that we often take for granted. 

Class dismissed.

Lesson 3: Conflict Part I - A Fight and A Conflict Are NOT the Same Thing

One of  my favorite lessons to teach in my Interpersonal Communication class is the unit on conflict. To this day, it astounds me that a simple reframing of what a conflict is vs. what it isn't can change people's minds about how they approach a conflict interaction with their partners.

There are several academic definitions for what constitutes a conflict. For our purposes, though, I'm going to identify a conflict like this:

A conflict is a conversation in which two people who share a relationship together each speak their needs, find that their needs are incompatible with their partner's needs, and they work collaboratively to find a way to meet both their needs.

I'd like to emphasize a few important parts of this definition.

First, a conflict is a conversation. You have these all the time. You have them about the weather, and TV shows, and cosmetic products, and what's in the news and whatnot. There is no reason that a conflict has to be anymore daunting or terrifying than a conversation about anything else. (Okay, your relational investment and how important the issue is can change the tone of a conflict, but that's a lesson for a different day).

Second, a conflict allows two people to speak their needs to one another. A good relationship is one in which each partner recognizes that a relationship is an environment in which people exchange resources, and that exchange of resources is supposed to provide for each person's needs. If you read back to Lesson 2: Glowworm Theory, you'll remember that we form relationships specifically to have our needs met. A relationship cannot function well when you have needs, be they emotional, logistical, or whatever else, that are going unmet. However, you and your partner cannot expect that you will each provide for each other's needs unless you communicate them to one another.

Finally, a conflict requires collaboration. It is often the case that your needs are incompatible with those of your partner. This may be as simple a situation as your wanting to eat Chinese and your partner wanting to eat Mexican, or as serious as you want to get married where your partner is content never to be married. Regardless of the importance of the issue, the fact is, there can be no satisfactory resolution if partners are not willing to cooperate and work toward a solution that is best for both parties. We'll talk in another lesson about strategies for achieving collaborative solutions to conflict, but for the time being it's important to spend some time understanding what a conflict is, and what it isn't.

A conflict is NOT a fight. Think about any fight you've ever seen: a bar fight, a boxing match, whatever. The objective is that someone wins by way of beating the daylights out of the loser to the point that the loser is rendered incapable of further participation (or standing upright). Imagine applying that model to your relationship. If you approach a conflict as a competition in which you intend to win (i.e., achieve your needs) at your partner's expense (i.e., your partner's hurt and emotional and verbal inability to speak his or her needs to you), nothing good, beautiful or productive will come. Rather, we breed hurt, animosity and resentment. And, if you ask me, resentment is like relational Round-Up - the stuff kills relationships right down to the roots.

Here's the long story short: a conflict is a conversation. It is NOT an opportunity for you to emotionally lay your partner out. If you stop thinking about conflict as a war to be fought and won, and start thinking of it as an opportunity to collaboratively address both your needs and those of your partner, this can change the way you approach conflict episodes. The simple readjustment in your thinking can be the first step to promoting a more positive and open attitude as you communicate your needs to your partner.

Next time, we'll talk about communicative strategies for improving conflict interactions as well as a few things to avoid.

Until next time, class dismissed.

Lesson 2: Need to Belong (aka Glowworm Theory)

In 1995, a couple of really smart, interesting psychologists named Baumeister and Leary published an article entitled The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation. I had the occasion to read this article when I was a student in a social psychology class at Michigan State University. It, to this day, is probably the most influential scholarly work I have ever read in the course of my academic career. This article is the cornerstone of one of my best and favorite lectures in my Interpersonal Communication class - the Glowworm lecture.

My students have told me that this lecture helps them re-frame and reevaluate some of the relationships they have on the basis of this lecture. So, for your reading delight, I present the highlights (i.e. the Blogger's version) of that lecture.


1. The human need to belong can be considered to be sort of a metaphorical bucket that each of us fills with different people who serve, to some degree or another, our need to belong. Some of us have really small shot glass-sized buckets, others of us (myself included) have big wiskey barrel-sized buckets. The bigger a person's bucket, the more relationships we tend to work to maintain with others to see to the meeting of our need to belong.

2. Because human beings are basically all replaceable, we can think of the relationships with which we fill our buckets as Barbies and G. I. Joes. They're all basically the same, they all take up about the same amount of space, and they all service our need to belong in some small way or another. If one of them stops working to contribute to our feeling a sense of belonging, we toss it out of the bucket and find a new one to replace it.

3. Ideally, we want to invest our time in a relationship that does the work of several loose associations we have with other people. We foster relationships with people who provide for a multitude of our needs and desires, especially when they satisfy a need for affection and warmth. I liken this relationship to being a Glowworm. Glowworms are considerably larger than Barbies and G.I. Joes, and they feel vastly less replaceable than the cookie-cutter sameness of Barbies and G.I. Joes. Generally, our Glowworms take the form of best friends, and often ideally, romantic partners.

So the question now is how does this help us to understand the choices we make in our relationships?

Well, here go.

Because our buckets are fairly fixed in size, we can only fill it with a finite number of relationships. When we choose to invest ourselves in a significant relationship with a Glowworm, we don't have the space (i.e., the energy and resources) to maintain our relationships with our Glowworm and all of our Barbies and G.I. Joes. As a result of that finite amount of space, and as a result of our restricted amount of energy to expend, and because our Glowworms occupy so much space, necessarily, we choose to terminate some of our less important Barbie and G.I. Joe relationships. If you've ever noticed that when a friend of yours starts dating someone seriously that you hear from them less, it isn't because they are lazy or mean, it's because they are trying to make space in their bucket to grow a relationship that is increasingly valuable and beneficial to them (yes, more so than his or her relationship with you is).

Similarly, and often more importantly, we toss our Barbies and G.I. Joes out of our own buckets in order to make room to grow our own Glowworms. As a result, we restrict the number of people on whom we can rely for social resources while we are fostering a relationship with a Glowworm. As long as our Glowworm is in our bucket, we don't really notice the fact that we have fewer Barbies and Joes than we used to. We do, however, notice this in a big way if our relationship with our Glowworm ends. Sometimes our Glowworm jumps out, sometimes we toss them out, but the point is sometimes the Glowworm departs our bucket. What that also leaves is a huge hole in the place in our bucket where the worm (and before that, Barbies and Joes) used to be.

That sudden and very noticeable space in our bucket where there used to be a Glowworm, but there is no longer, hurts. That hurt comes from the fact that our need to belong is unmet and, if you'd read Baumeister and Leary, you'd know that that's a huge bummer. Enter the dreaded rebound. Basically, rebounds are people with whom we foster relationships that are characterized mostly by an illusion of intimacy. They fill the empty space in our buckets for a temporary time while we work to reestablish our relationships with foregone Barbies and Joes whom we tossed while the Glowworm was taking up so much space. Sometimes our rebound Glowworm is someone we've had on our proverbial "hook" because we know they want to be our Glowworms, and we take advantage of that willingness when we need a boost in our sense of belonging (humans are such scumbags sometimes).

Okay, so you know that: 1) you work to fill your bucket, 2) most relationships are basically replaceable, that 3) they are ideally replaceable with a Glowworm, and 4) when the Glowworm relationship ends, we notice a huge sense of loss and hurt that comes from an unmet need to belong which often sends us off looking for a rebound.

There is one last lesson I must teach you. That is: Beware the JabbaWorm.

Jabba the Hutt, of course, is a character from the Star Wars movies. I'm not so much interested in the story-relevant attributes of the Jabba character, rather, his physical appearance is what I'm really trying to evoke here. He's a big, fat, sloppy, sluggish, disgusting thing that takes up space and hordes resources. Sometimes, we form relationships that are a lot like that. We trick ourselves into thinking that they are a Glowworm - they look like Glowworms. They take up a lot of space, they result in our kicking extraneous Barbies and Joes from our buckets, and we expend energy and resources on them. The trouble with a JabbaWorm is that they don't give us anything. They are resource suckers. They drain us. They take up our time and energy and love and keep us from fitting relationships into our buckets that do feed us. So, beware of the JabbaWorm, and know when to kick such sloppy people out of your bucket to make room for relationships that are good uses of your time and energy.

So, that's the abridged version GlowWorm lecture. I hope that your current and past relationships make a little more sense in light of all of this information.

Class dismissed.

Daytime Tri-Cities Day 5: Keeping Your Relationship Fresh

Today's topic (and the last one for the week) was about keeping a relationship fresh and warding off boredom.

So let's suppose you've managed to meet a great person, you've dated a while, you've made a long-term commitment to each other, and the relationship has gone on . . . and on . . . and on. Inevitably, the boredom that comes with the mundane routine of everyday life sets in. You find yourself not only bored with your life, but also bored with your partner. And that, my friends, is bad news if you don't manage it well.

The thing about boredom and routine is that they are normal. I repeat: being periodically bored is a normal part of even the happiest most functional relationships. I talked in the Daytime segment today about where that boredom comes from and why it's natural. What I want to spend the blog post talking more about, though, is what to do about that boredom.

So, I present to you a few tips for reducing boredom and reintroducing excitement into our relationships:

• Date your partner. At the start of the relationship, we plan and do activities that we enjoy. We go to concerts and out to dinner. We make trips to the zoo and and go on moonlit walks. As we grow into a stable pattern in our relationship and life happens around that relationship, we tend to stop prioritizing these enjoyable activities. We feel like these small delights are luxuries that we aren't entitled to when we have the responsibility of everyday life to attend to. Let me tell you what - if your relationship is working and happy, you'll be happier while you do all the other things that life demands.
• Create a relationship bucket list. Many of us have either a mental or written list of the things that we want to do in the short time we have on this planet. I recommend making a relationship bucket list of activities that you would like to do with your partner. Decide together on things that you want and are committed to trying to do. These can be small things like going ice skating together, or bigger things like taking a luxurious vacation together that you plan and save up for. (By the way, vacations are especially good for relationships - especially your sex lives. Check out this article published by USA Today about the subject). Not only will you create a list of things that you are looking forward to doing together, but the activity of creating the list and adding to it when you come up with a new idea can also create fun in the relationship.

• Play with your partner. We often think of play as being something the children do. Happy relationships, though, are characterized by playfulness and lighthearted activity that might include having nicknames for your partner, gentle teasing, wrestling, or playing literal games like board games. In addition to breaking the routine and monotony of a relationship, Leslie Baxter, a relationship researcher, contends that play can serve other important relationship-improving functions. Having a playful atmosphere in our relationship allows us to express our feelings for each other, manage conflict in a non-confrontational way, and to develop a culture in our relationship that makes us feel special and unique as compared to other relationships (here's the citation for her article on play in Human Communication Research). 

Naturally, the best thing to do in your relationship when boredom sets in is to tell your partner that you think it's time to break your routine. Be sure to be clear that you don't blame your partner for your boredom, and invite your partner to think about ways that you can reintroduce fun and excitement in a way that you'll both enjoy. While relationships do require some work and tending to in order to thrive, they are supposed to be joyful and fulfilling. When you start to lose sight of the joy, go get it back. Have fun!