Conflicts between spouses are inevitable. My wife, Joyce, and I face at least one every hour we’re together. Our perspectives on how a problem should be solved are often entirely different. But in spite of those differences, we’ve become experts at resolving conflicts almost as soon as they arrive. And the skills we’ve developed in handling disagreements quickly and effectively have helped make our marriage everything we’d hoped it would be.
But what if we didn’t know how to do that? What if our conflicts remained unresolved? What if we fought with each other or stonewalled each other instead of finding solutions? Conflicts would then pile up over the years. And by now, after fifty years of marriage, we would be drowning in unresolved conflicts. We wouldn’t be able to tolerate living with each other.
When I was young, it was the norm for couples to marry, have kids, and raise those children together. Today, by contrast, the majority of adults are single, over 40 percent of children are raised by a never-married parent, and the percentage of adults choosing to marry is still dropping steadily. Those who do marry face the very real possibility of divorcing at some point.
In this book, I will focus attention on one of the reasons for this sea change in our culture—failure to negotiate successfully. When faced with conflicts, most couples do not know how to resolve them to their mutual satisfaction.
This is nothing new, of course. Marital therapists have been aware of this problem since the rate of divorce took off in the 1960s, and many books have been written to help couples communicate, understand, listen, and respect each other more effectively. So what can I offer that has not already been said?
What’s different about my approach to resolving marital conflict is its ultimate goal: for a couple to be in love with each other. While most therapists view the resolution of martial conflict to be an end in itself, I view it as a means to an end. If a resolution builds your feeling of love for each other, I approve of it—it’s been done the right way. If it fails to build that love, however, I believe you’ve made a mistake.
Throughout my counseling career, I’ve seen many couples who have no difficulty communicating with respect yet want to divorce because they have lost their love for each other. But I’ve never witnessed a couple who is in love and wants to divorce.
By reading this book, and applying its lessons to the way you handle conflicts, you will learn how to communicate effectively and resolve your conflicts—guaranteed. But you will learn something else that is far more important. You will learn how to do it in a way that will sustain your love for each other.