You may well be tired and discouraged if you live in an always-competitive relationship. If that is your reality, you may be able to build a cooperative (and not exhausting) relationship on the wreckage of your competitive one — even if your competitive partner is initially not very interesting in going along. Here are some steps to try:

• Start by simply stepping out of the “who is right, who is better“ pattern you two have. Don’t do that dance anymore. Your partner won’t be able to continue very long as a solo. Don’t say “You win” or “Whatever.” Instead, acknowledge that your partner may be right, that s/he certainly has reason for feeling that way, or that his/her memory could be more accurate about this one than yours, etc. Grant the competitive partner the benefit of the doubt. You haven’t lost; you have simply changed the game.
• Rather than advancing your point-of-view while discounting your partner’s, get interested in his/her’s perspective. Do so not to prove it wrong, but to show that — because your care about your partner — you are curious about where s/he is at and why. If you can step out of the “got to win this one” position, then you can cultivate genuine curiosity about your partner. Doing so is a good way to rebuild love.

Your aim in the above two steps is to demonstrate that you care more about your partner than you do about winning the argument. Replace the desire to win with caring and curiosity. If winning the argument is more important than helping your partner feel loved, you’ve probably got a marriage or relationship on a steep decline. Do you care?

More steps to a cooperative relationship in the next post.

It takes a lot of energy to defend yourself all the time, or to fight for your own point of view. Sometimes you wonder, “Is this a marriage, or a courtroom? Must everything between us be a debate?“

“I work harder. I deserve a rest.” “No you don’t; it’s my turn for a break.” “It wasn’t like that at all! You’ve got it all wrong.” “Once again, you’re twisting things around. You said that; I didn’t.”

Ceaselessly competitive relationships are exhausting, because there is never any rest when you’re around each other. Someone always objects. Someone always has a different opinion. Someone is pushing, and someone is resisting.

It’s always no. It’s never yes.
It’s always separate. It’s never together.
It’s always egos in opposition. It’s never open hearts standing together.

Why all this opposition and competition? Why not agreement and cooperation?
Here are several possibilities:

• Both partners grew up in homes of ceaseless competition. They don’t know how to agree. They learned how to grow an “I,” but never a “we.”
• In their competitive families, they learned to defend and assert themselves. They learned to stand alone. According to their family culture, to seek agreement, commonality, cooperation would be to invite defeat.
• One partner defines the win/lose rules of the relationship. The other partner either fights to win or admits defeat.
• Although they both married to be a couple, they are frightened of being anything except “I.” Being part of “we” is too scary to try, because it feels like a loss of self or a defeat.

Share with us what you know about the exhaustion of a competitive relationship and your ideas for building a relationship that restores energy, rather than taking it away.

Next time some thoughts on how to lose exhaustion and gain a “we” relationship which doesn’t require a loss of self.

One of the great benefits of loving is how practical it is. Loving behavior makes a couple relationship go better. Staying open to your partner is an important part of loving — see the previous post. It should come as no surprise that being closed to your partner is an important failure and almost always makes the relationship go worse.

Imagine that you and your partner are having a disagreement, in which your partner is pushing his/her point of view and is not open to you. If you are like most of us, you escalate hoping that talking louder, faster or more urgently is going to get you heard. It rarely does, or if you do succeed — the other person “listens,“ but with an angry and closed mind.

If you are intent on getting in, you bang harder on the door when it doesn’t open.

Or you go away, and when this pattern happens often enough, you maybe don’t go back and knock any more.

If you were intent on improving your ability to love, and you asked me for one essential tip — just one. Here is what I would tell you: Stay open to your partner. Nothing is more important.

Staying open means —

• Open to the other person’s point of view
• Open to his or her urgency, vulnerability, way of seeing things
• Open with understanding
• Open with compassion
• Open to letting your partner teach you — oh, that can be a tough one

Even when you are in conflict with your partner and angry, too —
even when you are so filled up with your own experience, your own point of view, your own urgency —

Leave enough empty room inside yourself so that you can —
Stay open to your partner.

Staying open is love in action.

The Sweet Pleasures of Marital Collaboration

I don’t believe that my wife and I have ever collaborated before — at least about something with a goal that extended beyond our relationship or family. We have cooperated a lot (and conflicted quite a bit, too), but not really collaborated until now.

As you may or may not already know, we have recently begun what may be a long-running collaboration. We are doing a podcast together. It is called “Every Day Love.” The show is live (just like radio!) every Tuesday at 7 PM Eastern time. We are “housed” (is that the right term?) on blogtalkradio.com, along, apparently, with a zillion other shows.

The point I want to make here is that the show is a real collaboration. In other words, tune in or listen to one or more of our archived fourteen episodes to date (available here), and there you will find our marriage on display — our marriage much more toward its best so far than its worst.

I’m co-hosting from the third floor of our house, and Joyce is co-hosting from the kitchen. We both contribute. We support each other and build on each other’s points. Then we meet in the kitchen and critique the show together afterward — and we get better at collaborating with each episode.

Excuse me if I appear to be crowing a bit, but our collaboration is a real pleasure. It takes the marriage way beyond “who’s turn it is to do the food shopping“ talk.

When people tell you that they know the person they are married to, you might want to find out what they mean. There are very different ways of knowing someone — even someone to whom you are married or with whom you have a serious relationship.

These ways are different enough from one another so that it is quite possible that when you say that you know your partner well, you in fact only that person well in one or two areas — and not at all in some other area. If that is true, then could it be possible that this oh-so-familiar person you share your life with may be a virtual stranger in some way that actually matters? You answer. And even if you said yes, would you want to ask about that area of his or her life?

How well do you actually want to know your partner? Are there areas that you really don’t want to know about — like life with her first husband? Or the consequences for him of flunking out of graduate school? Or even what she and her woman friends talk about?

A suggestion: List for yourself some areas of your partner’s past or current life that you don’t want to know about. What do your answers tell you about the breadth and depth of relationship that you are comfortable having with  that person?