If your negotiation turns sour and one of you succumbs to the temptation of becoming a dictator (demands, disrespect, or anger), end the discussion by changing the subject to something more pleasant. After a brief pause, the offending spouse may apologize and wish to return to the subject that was so upsetting. But don’t go back into the field until it has been swept clear of mines.
Guideline #2: Identify the conflict from both perspectives.
Once you’ve set ground rules that guarantee a safe and enjoyable discussion, you’re ready to negotiate. But where do you begin? First, you must state the conflict and then try to understand it from the perspective of both you and your spouse.
Most couples go into marital negotiation without doing their homework. They don’t fully understand the conflict itself, nor do they understand each other’s perspective. In many cases, they aren’t even sure what they really want.
So, at least while you are first learning to resolve your conflicts the right way, I recommend that each of you use a notebook (or smartphone) to document everything you learn about a certain conflict. On the first page, state the issue. What do you want to do, or want your spouse to do for you? Then, on the next few pages, describe each other’s conflicting perspective. You might put a happy face at the top of each page to remind you to be cheerful. In the margin, remind yourself to avoid demands, disrespect, and anger. An example of how your notebook should be laid out can be found in appendix A, the Marital Negotiation Worksheet. Use it as a guide to help you find win-win solutions to any conflict you face.
Respect is key to success in negotiation, and it’s particularly important in this information-gathering phase. Once the problem has been identified, and you hear each other’s perspective, try to understand each other instead of trying to straighten each other out. Remember that your goal is enthusiastic agreement, and that can’t happen if you reject each other’s perspective out of hand. You may eventually be able to respectfully change each other’s point of view, but that should be attempted only after you thoroughly understand it. The only way you’ll reach an enthusiastic agreement is to find a solution that accommodates both of your perspectives.
This last point is so important that I will state it another way: you will not solve your problem if you are disrespectful of each other’s perspective. Both perspectives must be accommodated. In this stage of negotiation, you are to simply gather information that will help you understand what it will take to make each other happy. If you reject the information provided by your spouse, you will be ignoring the facts. You should not interrupt or talk over each other, or even use mannerisms (such as rolling your eyes) that could be interpreted as disrespectful.
It’s much easier to negotiate the right way when your goal is enthusiastic agreement. It helps eliminate all the strategies that attempt to wear each other down with abuse. But when some couples can’t be demanding, disrespectful, or angry, they feel helpless about discussing an issue. They’re so accustomed to being dictators that being respectful seems unnatural and phony. They feel as if they are communicating at a superficial level when they’re actually learning how to communicate at a much greater depth of understanding.
Is that how you and your spouse feel? If so, remember that with practice you’ll begin to feel more comfortable approaching every conflict with respect and the goal of mutual agreement. You’ll learn to ask each other questions, not to embarrass each other or to prove each other wrong, but to gain a fuller understanding of what it would take to make each other happy. And when you think you have the information you need to consider win-win solutions, you’re ready for the next step.
Guideline #3: Brainstorm with abandon.
You’ve set the ground rules. You’ve identified the problem and discovered each other’s perspective. Now you’re ready for the creative part—looking for mutually acceptable solutions. I know that can seem impossible if you and your spouse have drifted into incompatibility. But the climb back to compatibility has to start somewhere, and if you put your minds to it, you’ll think of options that please you both.
You will be tempted to sacrifice—to give in to your spouse’s wishes. But as I have mentioned earlier, that approach will ultimately get you into trouble. It’s not a win-win outcome. Your goal should be mutual happiness with neither of you gaining at the other’s expense.
You also won’t get very far if you allow yourself to think, If she really loves me she’ll let me do this, or He’ll do this for me if he cares about me. Extraordinary care in marriage is mutual care. That means both spouses want the other to be happy, and neither spouse wants the other to be unhappy. If you care about your spouse, you should never expect, or even accept, sacrifice as a solution to a problem.
A subtle form of sacrifice is the “I’ll let you do what you want this time if you let me do what I want next time” solution. For example, if you want to go out with your friends after work, leaving your spouse with the children, you may suggest that you take the children another night so that your spouse can go out with his or her friends. But this isn’t a win-win situation if one of you ends up unhappy whenever the other is happy. And once you’ve made this agreement, it can easily turn into a habit that pulls you apart.
Win-lose solutions are common in marriage because most couples don’t understand how to arrive at win-win solutions. Their concept of fairness is that both spouses should suffer equally. But isn’t it better to find solutions where neither spouse suffers? With a little creativity, you can find solutions that make both of you happy at the same time.
With both sacrifice and suffering out of the question, you’re ready to brainstorm. And quantity is often more important than quality. So let your minds run wild; go with any thought that might satisfy both of you simultaneously. When you let your creative juices flow, you are more likely to find a lasting solution.
Take your notebooks with you throughout the day so you can enter possible solutions as they come to you. Modify your entries as you think of ways to improve upon them. Try to think outside the box. Come up with a long list of ways that you and your spouse might resolve the conflict with enthusiastic agreement.
Guideline #4: Choose the solution that meets the conditions of the Policy of Joint Agreement—mutual and enthusiastic agreement.
After brainstorming, you’ll have a list of both good and bad solutions. Good solutions are those both you and your spouse consider desirable. Bad solutions, on the other hand, take the feelings of one spouse into account at the expense of the other. The best solution is the one that makes you and your spouse most enthusiastic.
Many problems are relatively easy to solve if you know you must take each other’s feelings into account. That’s because you become aware of what it will take to reach a mutual agreement. Instead of considering options that clearly are not in your spouse’s best interest, you think of options you know would make both you and your spouse happy.
Consider the problem we mentioned above. You would like to go out with your friends after work, leaving your spouse with the children. Before you followed the POJA, you may have simply called your spouse to say you’d be late, or worse yet, arrived home late without having called. But now you realize that if you want your spouse to be in love with you, you must come to an enthusiastic agreement prior to the event. It certainly restricts your freedom of choice, but on the other hand, it protects your spouse from your thoughtless behavior—and it safeguards your love for each other.
After having presented your case, you’d probably hear immediate objections. Your spouse might feel that he or she does not appreciate you having fun while he or she is home battling the kids. “Besides,” your spouse might mention, “our leisure activities should be with each other.” In response, you might suggest that your spouse drop the children off with your parents (whom you will call to make the arrangements) and join you.
If your spouse enthusiastically agrees, your conflict is resolved. Your parents take your children for a couple of hours, and y
our spouse joins you wherever it was you were planning to meet your friends. In fact, if going out after work with friends becomes a regular event, you can plan ahead for it by arranging the childcare in advance.
Getting in Shape to Negotiate
Reading these four guidelines is the easy part. But putting them into practice will be a challenge for you. As I’ve said earlier, the democracy strategy is not easy. But it’s the only one that actually resolves your conflicts and keeps you in love with each other.
So to help you start applying these guidelines to your conflicts, I suggest the following exercise. It will not require notebooks since each conflict will be rather simple. The purpose is to help you begin to think about each other when you can’t agree.
Go to a grocery store together, without your children, and for about fifteen to thirty minutes find items for your cart that you would both be enthusiastic about buying. This shopping is to orient you to making mutually enjoyable choices, and you don’t necessarily have to purchase your items when you are finished. I recommend grocery shopping for practice because there will be so many different choices that you are bound to find some that you would both enjoy.
Make sure that every item that goes in the cart is chosen with an enthusiastic agreement. The very act of asking each other how you feel regarding each item in question, and holding off on making a decision until you have agreement, is an extremely important habit to learn if you want to create a mutually enjoyable lifestyle.
It’s perfectly okay to try to persuade each other by accepting an item on a trial basis. “Try it, you’ll like it,” is a legitimate negotiating strategy if one of you isn’t sure how you would react to it. If your spouse is willing to try the item, take it home and taste it. If it’s acceptable, add it to your cart the next time you practice. If not, leave it on the shelf. You can be enthusiastic about trying something that your spouse likes just to see how you would react to it. But if your enthusiasm disappears after sampling it, the trial should end.
When you think that you’ve gotten the hang of coming to an enthusiastic agreement about groceries, tackle some real conflicts you’ve been unable to resolve, this time using the notebooks I recommended. You’ll probably be amazed at how quickly the POJA takes root.
Practice Makes Perfect
If you follow the four guidelines I’ve suggested, negotiation can be an enjoyable way to learn about each other. And when you reach a solution that makes you both happy, you’ll make substantial deposits into each other’s Love Banks. In the end, the Policy of Joint Agreement not only helps you become a great negotiator, it also protects your love for each other.
If you and your spouse have found yourselves acting more like dictators than sweethearts, it may sound overwhelming to switch to successful negotiations. The four guidelines may just seem like too much to remember.
But thankfully, once you establish the habit of negotiating with each other, it will be easy to run through the steps whenever there is a problem to solve. It’s like learning to type. At first it seems impossible, but with practice it eventually becomes almost instinctive.
I often repeat a very accurate observation about my own marriage: Joyce and I have a conflict just about every hour we’re together. But almost every conflict is resolved quickly and with enthusiastic agreement. Conflicts are to be expected when two people who are very different share life with each other. That being the case, knowing how to resolve these conflicts enjoyably and safely is absolutely essential to marital satisfaction.
By the time you become experts in finding win-win solutions to the problems you face, you will have learned what Joyce and I now know: we both need each other’s perspective and judgment to have fulfillment in life.
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In the second part of this book, I will be introducing five of the most common conflicts in marriage. As you read through the examples of how to go about resolving these conflicts, you will have an opportunity to practice negotiating with each other. And the more you practice, the easier and faster it will be to resolve other conflicts.
But before you begin learning how to resolve the five most common types of conflict in marriage, I’ll introduce you to some important exceptions to following the Policy of Joint Agreement. While finding win-win solutions to marital conflicts should be your goal, there are some situations in which the default condition, doing nothing until an agreement is reached, can be unhealthy or even dangerous. In those situations, you must be able to protect yourself.
7
Exceptions to the Rule
Never do anything without an enthusiastic agreement between you and your spouse.
The Policy of Joint Agreement (POJA) is simply a rule to help couples remember that just about everything they do affects each other. And their wisest choices are those that take each other’s feelings and interests into account. In other words, win-win outcomes in marital problem-solving are far superior to win-lose outcomes. The POJA reminds couples of that fact.
When a mutually enthusiastic agreement is reached, everyone would agree that a couple has discovered an ideal outcome. But anyone who has had a marital conflict knows all too well that enthusiastic agreements are often difficult to discover. And the default condition, never do anything, can sometimes have very unpleasant, if not disastrous, consequences.
With those dangerous consequences in mind, I recommend a sensible exception: the POJA should not be followed if doing nothing puts the health or safety of a spouse at risk. When a spouse is being subjected to physical or emotional abuse, infidelity, or abandonment, it makes no sense to follow this rule. Self-protection trumps thoughtfulness in those cases.
If a spouse is the victim of physical abuse, that spouse should report the abuse to authorities and separate for his or her own protection, even if the abusing spouse does not agree to that response. The same can be said in the case of infidelity or drug addiction. Some of the most effective ways to treat those problems and provide protection are usually opposed by the unfaithful or addicted spouse.
But in addition to health and safety issues, there is also another situation in marriage where a temporary suspension of the Policy of Joint Agreement can make sense: when you are trying to find a way to meet each other’s most important emotional needs.
What should you do when your spouse has an emotional need that you are not enthusiastic about meeting? Does the POJA get you off the hook? Or are you obligated to meet each other’s important emotional needs even if you are not enthusiastic about it?
The answers to these questions are found in understanding the purpose of the Policy of Joint Agreement. It’s a rule to help you resolve conflicts with mutual care and consideration. The default condition, don’t do anything, is not designed to be a permanent solution to any marital problem. It is what you do while you are trying to discover a solution.
If you’ve read my book His Needs, Her Needs, you already know that I put a great deal of emphasis on spouses meeting each other’s most important emotional needs. Failing to do so should not be an option in marriage. But I also emphasize the importance of meeting each other’s emotional needs with mutual enthusiastic agreement. So what should a spouse do when he or she does not enjoy meeting an emotional need? The solution may require doing something reluctantly on a trial basis as part of a plan to find an enjoyable outcome. But the trial should not persist very long. Either it should show promise almost immediately, or the couple should go back to brainstorming for other methods.
I once had a job stuffing envelopes. It was such a mundane and repetitive task that at first I could hardly wait until it was finished. But when the project ended after about three weeks, I actually missed the job. I had modified my envelope-stuffing technique until I did it quickly and almost effortlessly. And I had also made friends with my associates while we worked together. In fact, I was able to figure out how to enjoy most of the jobs I had while in college.
The same thing can be true in learning how to meet emotional needs. Let’
s take sex and conversation as examples. Most men have a craving for sex, and most women have a craving for affection and conversation. Men can’t understand why their wives would give up an opportunity to have sex. What’s so tough about making love? And their wives wonder why their husbands resist being affectionate and talking to them. What’s so exhausting about giving me a hug and talking to me for a while?
The problem, of course, is that men and women differ in what they enjoy most. It’s not that women never enjoy sex or that men never enjoy affection and conversation. It’s just that they don’t usually enjoy it as much.
So if a wife is not enthusiastic about having sex with a husband who is craving it, should she violate the POJA to meet his need? And what about a wife who needs her husband’s affection and conversation? Should he try to meet her need even when he doesn’t feel like doing it? Is the spouse who wants their emotional needs met at all costs being selfish and uncaring?
The problem with violations of the POJA in meeting emotional needs goes beyond the issue of selfishness—one spouse gaining at the other’s expense. It also inhibits the ability of the reluctant spouse to meet that emotional need in the future. The less you enjoy doing something, the less likely you’ll do it again. If a husband or wife want their emotional needs met often, their spouse must do it with enthusiasm. They must enjoy doing something that they don’t crave in the same way. They must learn to do what I did, to enjoy stuffing envelopes when I didn’t have a need to do it.
How to Enjoy Meeting an Emotional Need That You Don’t Have
There are two primary motivators in life. The most powerful is to enjoy doing something, and the next most powerful is to enjoy its consequences—the closer to doing it the better.
He Wins, She Wins Page 5
