Couple's Manifesto of Love
by Susan K. Perry, Ph.D.
 The
familiar Golden Rule -- Do unto others as you would have them do unto you
-- has
analogues throughout the world's cultures. But when we succeed in observing such
a credo with our dearest loved ones, we're merely offering what we want for
ourselves, not what the other person wants. A better version of the Golden Rule
for couples -- and one of the secrets to loving in flow -- is to do unto your
partner as your partner would like, not as you would like or as you wish
he or she would like.
And that brings us to what I call the Couple's Manifesto of Love: "From each
according to his ability, to each according to his needs." For our purposes,
"needs" equals "wants" (and "his" obviously equals "her"). In following such a
manifesto, we forego a tit-for-tat mentality, what psychologists call an
exchange orientation, to a focus on what's good for both of us, known as a
communal orientation. Research has shown that such a cooperative attitude is far
more likely to contribute to sustained satisfaction for both partners.
So: you scratch my back, I scratch yours? Not necessarily. Rather, when
tonight's scratcher has a need, whatever it is, his or her partner will be
pleased to acquiesce. And this is precisely the attitude I found prevalent in
the most satisfied couples I interviewed.
WHAT'S FAIR IN LOVE AND WAR?
In struggling relationships, both partners often believe they've compromised,
considered the other first when making decisions, put their own needs on hold
for the sake of pleasing the other. And each may believe the other has not
done so with equal consistency. It's easy to slip into such unconsciously biased
thinking, especially under stress.
Here's an example from the life of Jorge, thirty-seven, who directs
educational and career development for a medium-sized Southern California firm,
and his Filipino-born wife Rosalisa, thirty-eight, a nurse. They've been married
sixteen years and have two young children. He's an involved dad, but the
majority of the child care falls to Rosalisa. He admits that he finds himself
"keeping score" occasionally, particularly when tired. For instance, he says,
"Sometimes she'll be in the kitchen and I'll be upstairs and she'll ask me to
get her a glass of water. I'll get the water, but it bugs me at the time. Then
it just fades away." While Rosalisa might feel entitled to this minor bit of
caretaking, Jorge feels he's done more than half the work by putting in those
long hours, and thus briefly resents being asked to do anything extra.
It comes out most evenly if the two of you accept each other's subjective
analyses of how much is being contributed. It took me a while to trust, for
example, that the many hours Stephen spends maintaining our garden is as valid a
use of his time as is my reading of two newspapers daily. Actively supporting
your partner's view of the world is a way of showing love.
Consider speaking to your mate about how various activities exact a different
amount of psychic energy from each of you. You may be surprised to learn that
one of you would prefer to give a half-hour massage than untangle one garden
hose. Psychologist Andrew Christensen told me in an interview that his wife
hates making business phone calls, so he makes them. "If I can do a thing
easily," he explains, "then I do it. I think that's the best system because it's
individualized. You can't just take a template and apply it."
If you both adhere to the Couple's Manifesto, you'll feel secure that you'll
have your turn too. What psychologists call reciprocation wariness, in fact,
inhibits strong interpersonal relationships. If each of you holds back from
giving what might at any one moment seem like more than your half, that might
lead to further wariness and less trust on the other's part, the very behavior
that keeps you from getting what you most want.
Laurie, for instance, expends much effort to cook what her husband likes and
never thinks of complaining that most household tasks fall on her, even though
she also works hard. She says it's because she believes Hamid tries equally hard
to please her: "Anything I want, he'd give me."
If you espouse a philosophy of "only give when you have already gotten," it's
as though you're standing there with your arms crossed, waiting for the other
person to show goodwill. In the best relationships, goodwill must be taken for
granted.
But say you've started taking out the garbage almost regularly without being
nagged, and you're beginning to wonder when your spouse will start initiating
hot impromptu sex, as you've been wanting? In distressed marriages, we feel
"it's your turn to change," as though we're owed recompense because of
the efforts we've made.
Some therapists go so far as to suggest that the partner who makes any small
change should get a payoff of some sort. So, in an example given by psychologist
Ayala M. Pines, if you talk to your mate for a half-hour as she's been asking
you to do, you get to choose a movie that week. From my own experiences and
those of others, I can tell you that such tit-for-tat efforts are ineffective at
creating long-term change. Fairness ought never become a battle cry. If you're
too busy tabulating every penny spent, every minute of effort, every compromise
made regarding what to eat or watch, it's liable to slip your mind that you're
on the same side in this relationship.
Peter D. Kramer points out in his insightful book Should You Leave?
That men whose wives complain they aren't doing enough characteristically argue
that the wife's standards are unfair and that he doesn't have a say in
establishing them. And what if he does what she wants (i.e., becomes an ideal
husband from her standpoint), is she willing to do the same from his standpoint?
And what might this mean? Only in the best relationships are wives willing to
look at themselves from a mate's point of-view: maybe I'm not giving up
as much as he is, maybe I don't often play fantasy sex kitten, maybe I do carp
on matters that are trivial to him. Or it might be the husband who is locked too
tightly inside his own perceptions and unable, for a moment, to see through his
wife's eyes.
Talk openly about what "fair" means to each of you, sharing incidents that
exemplify or contradict the word. When my children were small and I spent a lot
of time reading to them, taking them on enriching outings, playing with them and
keeping them from maiming each other, my then-husband would have preferred that
I get a paying job. He said, and I'll never forget this, "Anyone can do what
you're doing with the kids." Our perceptions of the value of my mothering were
at such loggerheads that we couldn't resolve this issue amicably.
MY MONEY, OUR MONEY
Christensen cites an old Ben Franklin story: a rooster wanted to make a deal
with a horse -- "If you don't step on my feet, I won't step on yours." In
actuality, some couples take such thinking to mean that if your husband spends
$600 of joint funds on a pre-amp, then you get to buy several expensive pairs of
shoes you hadn't planned on. But what if that leads to a more depleted bank
account, which isn't pleasing to you?
Or what if one spouse works more hours than the other? Is it equitable, then,
for the one who labors longer to get more of the benefits? What if the one who
puts in more hours earns less? Or one spouse may make more money than the other
for about the same number of hours of labor. Does that one then get more say in
how the money is spent? In some traditional couples, that's the way it's done,
but they've obviously eschewed the Couple's Manifesto altogether.
Pepper Schwartz, after analyzing thousands of couples, dubbed some of them
peers, about whom she concluded, "Each partner can and should give in different
coin." True peers agree that money isn't the only coin that counts. Still, money
does matter, and couples choose a medley of accommodations in the pursuit of
fairness.
In my own marriage, as in the marriages of many of the couples I interviewed,
we commingle all our funds. Back when Stephen worked two jobs and earned a lot
more than I did from my freelance writing, he never hesitated to turn over his
pay-checks to me, knowing that a large chunk of them would go to pay for private
school for my son that lived with us. Now that I'm making more, it's fine with
me that Stephen spends less of his time producing income. We believe that each
of us has the inalienable right to pursue our own goals and that the unit has to
create a way to make that possible.
Still, when one of us acquires "extra" money, we have very different thoughts
on where it should be used. I add mine to our joint funds, whereas if it's
fallen into his hands, Stephen considers it bonus money with which to buy
flowering plants (his passion) or to add to his computer equipment. We
communicate, we struggle, we make deals. There is no one right way to handle
money. A few of the couples I interviewed separate their financial affairs in
the interests of their own notion of fairness, with some switching systems over
the decades.
Bea told me, "For years, it was my business that supported everything. And
now it's Herb's. At one point, I kept my money separate. But it was also my
money we used to remodel this house. Every time it would come up and feel
negative to me, I'd push it aside. And then you'd have the fleeting thought, 'If
we were ever to split up, I'd never get that back.' You have to override that:
you can't handle every situation like that, as though the worst thing that could
happen is going to happen."
Tina Tessina told me she and her husband each have their own money, and they
divide expenses in half. She pays for all the food, he pays all the utilities.
They tracked it for the first couple of years, finding it came out sufficiently
even. But if they go out to dinner, they split it fifty/fifty.
Why such a strict division? Not only does Tina remember her mother standing
with her hand out asking for money to buy Tina's clothes for school, but Tina
and Richard relate to money very differently. "We wind up in the same place,
approximately, but he balances his checkbook to the penny, and I'm slapdash.
This way we're not struggling with each other all the time."
Laurie also insisted on separate bank accounts when she married Hamid. "We
split the rent, because I wasn't young when we got married, and I thought, my
God, I'm not going to support him. If one of us can't pay our bills, though,
which just happened a couple of months ago, I paid the whole rent for three
months, but he paid me back."
BUT YOU OWE ME
In the working world, you put forth effort with the expectation of getting
paid -- that's where exchange relationships are the most prevalent. It's
different at home. In communal relationships, the kind between family members,
we not only don't expect repayment for favors, but it might dilute our warm
feelings if we are treated on a tit-for-tat basis. Of course, this makes
perfect sense when you consider all that is now known about rewards and
intrinsic motivation. In a loving relationship, you're not expecting some
additional reward beyond the love itself; the more you move that relationship to
a reward-based footing, the less likely that flow will prevail.
Even so, playful point systems aren't unknown among intimates. Naomi, in her
late forties, has been with her partner Janice, in her mid-fifties, for eighteen
years. They have evolved an informal routine in which, when one mock-grudgingly
accommodates to the other, she gets points.
"Janice has a very high need for order and routine," explains Naomi, "so that
if I leave my mail out for more than one day, it starts to bug her. I tell her,
'That's too bad, I live here too, and I get to do this." Here Naomi laughs at
the silliness of such an interaction, then continues: "She'll get to a point
where she says it's getting to her, and I don't think it's worth having World
War Three over, so I just bitch back a little bit and then I'll say, 'Well,
sure, I'll go take care of that, but I just want you to know how much I hate
it.' And while we're being mad at each other, we joke about a scorecard.
"Or, every now and then when one of us does something really good for the
other one, like cleaning up sooner than I want to, or leaving sooner to go out
than I think is necessary, those kinds of things, I'll just say, 'Okay, but I
get points for this."'
Naomi explains that what's most important about such interactions is that the
partners are communicating to one another that they know themselves and each
other, that they're willing to do some compromising, but that they also want to
make sure that each respects the other's independence. "When we were younger and
hadn't had as much therapy, etc cetera," concludes Naomi with another laugh,
"those were bigger battles. And now they're not battles at all. They're almost
like scripted exchanges."
Some couples even play around with outright barter: I'll have sex with you
later if you wash the windows now. So long as your bond is a healthy one and you
both see the humor in such play, occasional stylized deals will do no harm.
"What we call love," suggests author Phyllis Rose, "may inhibit the process
of power negotiation. If the impulse to abjure measurement and negotiation comes
from within, unbidden, it is one of life's graces and blessings."
If you find yourselves scorekeeping seriously, then it means that something's
already amiss. Let it serve as a warning that, uh oh, somebody's going to start
withholding, and then severe conflict is sure to follow. If you deal
constructively with dissatisfactions as soon as they appear, there's no need for
the relationship to tilt toward a tit-for-tat, and less caring, direction.
Frank's resentments, for example, would be over trivial things, such as when
the couple had a garage sale and he felt he had to sell his favorite popcorn
popper. He didn't have to, insists Margie, but at the time he felt
obligated, and that stuck in his mind. When such feelings would eventually
emerge, Margie would tell Frank, "You have a resentment book."
Couples design their own ways to achieve a feeling of ultimate fairness,
whether they use the word or not. For instance, Teresa told me that when Derek
raises his voice at her, she feels attacked. Then, a couple days later, "to get
back at him, I won't fix him something to eat that he wants for supper. He'll
just look at me and go, 'Okay.' It's a kind of teasing that says you're over the
anger, but you want to press the point and say, 'You hurt me, see?' It feels
more like we're even then." If such minor vengeance served cold two days later
were to become a substitute for communicating frankly in the moment, only then
would it be time to have qualms.
One woman told me she'd figured out a way to even things out when she gets
disappointed. Say her husband isn't able, at the last moment, to take her
somewhere she'd planned on going due to the demands of his job. "Then I tell him
to go buy me a candy bar to make up for it. Or this chocolate cake from the
bakery. I think it's just that I want to feel like he's done something for me.
It's like buying my friendship," she says, laughing. "Then he'll rub my back."
ME, MYSELF, AND I... OH, AND YOU
Buying into the Couple's Manifesto does not mean that each partner
gives up a "self" in the interests of the union. A marriage needn't be
oppressive to your personal growth. I can't forget my former husband telling me
when I wanted to go back to school, "I don't want you to grow. I want my
children to grow." What a contrast it was, then, when Stephen said to me, "Be
who you want to be."
Yet sometimes sacrifices are necessary. Not every marriage will permit each
partner to have everything each of them desires, whether due to time or money
constraints, or some environmental consideration (he wants to live in the city
and she prefers suburban life). What do you do when your goals aren't the same,
when you and your partner are competing for free time, use of funds, sympathy,
or some other scarce resource? In the most long-lasting and satisfying
marriages, a Dutch social psychologist and his American colleagues found, both
partners are willing to sacrifice for each other.
Address what you're each willing to give up for each other or for the unit.
See if you agree upon when an action feels like sacrifice and when it doesn't.
Among the couples I talked to, I found that some of them endured stages where an
exchange mentality was later replaced with one that was more communal and more
contented. Mei-Ling says, "The one thing I did come up with when we were going
through therapy was that marriage is never equal. What's important is that with
the two of us together, the life we create is more than just the sum of us."
Eric J. Cohen and Gregory Sterling suggest in "You Owe Me" that when
you let go of an artificial effort to make things equal at every moment, "the
spontaneous flow of giving and receiving can take place with both parties
maintaining an internal sense of everything being fair." The authors explain
that what you end up with is a whole wide base of evenness. So that when your
interaction moves too far outside what feels fair to one partner, threatening
the balance of the relationship (leading one of you, no matter how generous you
are, to feel taken advantage of, it must be dealt with to restore the sense of
flow. When you're feeling even again, you can start anew, if need be, without
counting. I might liken it to changing your accounting method mid-year, and then
when the accounts are balanced, throw away the books and don't look back.
(Better yet, burn them so you can't dig them our later for a big argument.)
We all prefer when we get what feels like "enough." Make a point of telling
your partner what essential needs are met by your relationship, needs that are
not based on actions but on who the other person is. For example, I've
often told Stephen that he makes me laugh, and that's enough. But what I mean by
that is so much more than finding his jokes ha-ha funny. It's about his sharing
my existential aloneness, joining me mentally and emotionally in the ideas that
dominate my life. It's about being part of a family -- in the deepest sense of
the word -- a family that crosses all the usual borders of birth and background.
This
article was excerpted from:
 Loving in Flow: How the Happiest Couples Get and Stay That Way
by Susan K. Perry.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc. ©2003. www.sourcebooks.com
Info/Order this book.
About the Author
Susan
K. Perry, Ph.D., is a social psychologist with a special interest in positive
psychology. She is the best selling author of six books and the award-winning
writer of more than 800 articles, essays, and advice columns. Her most recent
books include
Writing in Flow: Keys to Enhanced Creativity;
Playing Smart: The Family Guide to Enriching, Offbeat
Learning Activities; and
Catch the Spirit: Teen Volunteers Tell How They Made a
Difference. An adjunct instructor of psychology at
Woodbury University (Burbank, California), she has also taught at UCLA Extension
and other university extension divisions. She is a writing consultant, as well
as an instructor for Writer's Digest Online Workshops. Her Internet home is
www.BunnyApe.com
. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Stephen, a New Yorker-published
poet.
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