I had an experience at Christmas that confirmed my sense that your real family are the people who love you and whom you love, whether they are related to you or not.

My wife and I have been married for 26 years. We have five children who all lived together during most of their childhood and adolescence. None of these now-grown children are the product of our own marriage. When we first met, I was a single-parent raising three kids by myself, and Joyce was a single parent raising two children. Six years separate the youngest from the oldest.

Our five children, their four spouses and one partner, plus the two grandchildren spent the Christmas holidays together at our house — a gathering that happens at Christmas every other year. For three couples and two children being together with the rest of the family meant flying to Maine from the West Coast.

We had a wonderfully warm, chaotic and loving Christmas together. These events confirmed for me that, in addition to being different nuclear families, we are also one loving family. If you are part of a step-family or are otherwise acquainted with step- families, you know that it is no small achievement to come together as one mutually-caring family.

At our family gathering, I was attentive to the powerful bonds that were celebrated by people who, in several cases, had not seen one another for many months, as well as the new bonds between the grandchildren, both two-and-a-half years old and several of the adults present.

The whole experience was an affirmation for me of the fact that often your real family is the people whom you love and who love you, regardless of whether or not you are biologically related. Affirming that fact can be especially helpful for people who are inclined to bemoan the fact that they are not close to their birth family and overlook the fact that they are surrounded by the loving family of supportive friends who have come together over the years.

Here, as in many occasions in life, we have a choice — regret the love that we don’t have or celebrate the love that surrounds us and needs only to be acknowledged and lived for us to be filled by its presence.

Two people living under the same roof have to cooperate, at least somewhat. Similarly, nations on the same planet must cooperate, even though in some cases it’s very hard to find the cooperation for all the belligerence.

Much cooperation is situationally necessary. (I remember a film from way back in which two convicts who were chained to each other managed to escape from jail and had to cooperate while they were on the run, although they started out hating each other.)

At the other end of the cooperation continuum are those special relationships in which the cooperation is so profound that from it develops a deep and rewarding couple-ness (an “us” so rich that it has a reality of its own — you, me and us. (Suggestion: If you and your partner have such a richly-developed “we,” imagine, each of you, that your “we” actually is a third person in the relationship. Describe that person.)

If you start out with a taste for cooperation and your partner doesn’t, for whatever reason — you become the person in charge of the cooperation venture, and here is what you need to do:

• You need to make it unnecessary for your partner to continue being competitive and
• You need to make “we cooperating with each other” a rewarding and attractive prospect for your partner as well as for yourself.

You need to help your partner realize that s/he loses nothing important by building a good “we” with you. Start out by joining your partner in activities that your partner especially likes and won’t mind having you along. Do so in such a way that your joining your partner strengthens his/her sense of well-being.

Your aim here is to demonstrate to your partner that s/he doesn’t have to oppose you in order to feel safe and strong.

An example might be going to hockey games with your husband or joining your wife in a course that she wants to take. In either case, do your best to celebrate the we experience afterward, without faking it, of course.

Then add more we experiences that are pleasurable and adventurous for you both. When you sense that your partner’s attitude toward cooperating with you has increased to the point that s/he likes being “the two of us together,” then introduce activities that are more tilted toward your own interests.

“Why should I take the lead in this?” you may be asking. Answer: You should because you are the one who starts out wanting it, because you enjoy being “us together” and can introduce the pleasures of that condition to your partner — and because if you are reading this blog, you are probably someone who wants to be more loving, and here is an opportunity. Enjoy.

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.

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.