Commercial Logic Ltd
As I walked through the park this morning, I listened to a recording of the relationship coaching session I had given a couple some time ago.
She had requested the coaching and I asked them how they wanted me to work with them. He was in the process of saying he did not know. What he did want was to come out of the coaching unscathed. He did not want to find out they had any issues and he did not want to lose his partner.
There was something about the way he said he wanted to keep his partner that I missed at the time. There is always so much going on in a coaching session that it is impossible to notice and respond to everything. Listening to the recording now, I hear in that one phrase, a key to the whole relationship and a fundamental problem causing many relationships to fail.
This problem is about having a focus on the other person, rather than on the relationship. When we focus on the other person, and something is going wrong, the cause has to be either you or them. Consequently, we get blame, defensiveness and emotionally intense destructive conflict. Relationships where focus is on the other person, get personal.
John Gottman’s work on observing conflict in relationships shows us that where there is a pattern of these negative personal energies, the relationships are 95% likely to break up. Conversely, Gottman also found that in successful long lasting relationships, positive personal acknowledgements outnumbered negative statements by at least 5 to 1.
Getting personal can be the limiting factor for single people too. So often, I hear single people talking about wanting someone. Common advice is to list the things that you want in a partner. Internet dating websites promise finding the right person, often based on tick box commonalities or preferences. Yet, when we are looking for the image of someone we have created in our own minds, meeting all our ticks, that person cannot ever really exist completely.
What then can we do to avoid the person centred pitfall?
Successful relationships recognise the importance of the relationship, and that the relationship is distinct from any person within it. When we recognise the importance of the relationship, there are at least two people involved. Hence, issues are never just about the other person, and any ‘blame’ is within the relationship and can be shared.
Gottman recognised successful relationships have a 5 to 1 positive to negative ratio during a conflict, because the partners are communicating a very clear distinction to each other, between the person and the interactions of the relationship.
The secret to a successful relationship is therefore to know the difference between the person and the relationship. This leaves the people free to invest time in discovering, learning about, and improving the design of the relationship. The successful long-lasting relationship goes beyond who am I and who are you. It becomes “Who are we?” and what does each of us want that “we” to be.
When we as individuals invest our time in learning about the relationship, we can worry less about being ‘single’ or about losing the other person, and focus more on what we want to create together.
October 2011
John Gottman and Nan Silver 2007 "The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work", Orion House London