Wired for Love (18 page)

1. Throughout the week, make a note each time one of you “goes to” the other. Jot down the reason for doing so. It can be something consequential for your relationship or something that just feels important in the moment. For example, it might be to complain about the loud music your neighbor’s teenager is playing, and to decide who should speak to his parents. Or it might be to get a backrub for sore and tense shoulders. Or to share a crimson sunset visible from the kitchen window. My list would include the many times throughout the day that my wife and I go to each other to share momentary, sometimes silly, experiences.
   
2. Of course, even if you have agreed to be each other’s primary go-to people, you will both go to various others throughout the week. Make note of your interactions with some of these secondary go-to people, as well, and your reasons for going to them. If you’re doing this on your own, you may have limited information about your partner’s secondary go-to people.
   
3. You may choose to record (or summarize) your go-to data in a chart that illustrates your go-to network.
   
   1. If you and your partner are doing this exercise together, you can each take a separate piece of paper and start by drawing a big circle in the center to represent yourself. Now place your partner in relation to you. Are you both in the circle? Add others to whom you go for help, gossiping, hanging out, or whatever. Where are these people in relation to yourself and your partner? Are any in competition with your partner? Compare your charts and see if you appear to be the primary go-to people for each other. If not, talk about it and redraw your chart so your placement as the first to know everything is clarified.
      
4. At the end of the week, sit down and review your experience—either by yourself or with your partner. Did you and your partner actually go to each other as often as you thought you might? Were there times one of you wanted to go to the other, but didn’t? If so, why didn’t you?
   

1. Do you notice anything about your secondary go-to people that you might want to change? For example, when one couple compiled their chart, she discovered he had gone to his mother about organizing his dad’s birthday party several days before he mentioned it to his partner. He apologized for this oversight and promised to keep her more informed about his side of the family in the future. He then pointed out with a smile that he could have fixed the stuck drain himself if she had asked him before she called in the handyman.
   

Sixth Guiding Principle

The sixth principle in this book is that
partners should serve as the primary go-to people for one another.
I have observed that partners who create and maintain a tether to one another experience more personal safety and security, have more energy, take more risks, and experience overall less stress than couples who do not. When you commit to serving as a go-to person for your partner, you open the door for your partner to do the same for you. Then you both can enjoy free and unencumbered access to one another in terms of time and of mind. In this way, you build synergy in your relationship, such that you are able to operate together in ways that are greater than if you each lived as essentially separate individuals.

If you recall, this notion of “two can be better than one” was our descriptor of an anchor in Chapter 3. Our sample anchor couple, Mary and Pierce, acted as go-to people for each other and explicitly stated that they could tell each other everything. Similarly, by agreeing to become go-to people for each other, you and your partner can take a giant step toward ensuring that you become anchors for one another.

Here are some supporting principles to guide you:

1. Make a formal agreement to be available to each other 24/7. Couples often find that formally stating their agreement gives it added oomph. It is easier to hold to an agreement later, in the heat of the moment, when it has been explicitly made and both of you have bought in.
   

   This also gives you a chance to voice any resistance, hesitations, or trepidations. If one of you is an island or wave, you might discuss how you feel about being tethered to your partner. Look both at what scares you and at how you stand to benefit from maintaining this tether. Brainstorm ways to handle any situations in which you might be tempted to withhold yourself.
   

   It can be mutually reinforcing to verbalize your agreement regularly. Remember the Emote Me Game? Saying “I’m always here for you, darling” or “You can talk to me about anything, anytime” or “I’m all yours, 24/7” can move your partner.
   

2. Develop go-to signals with your partner. Especially initially, you and your partner may find it helpful to have ways to let each other know you are in need of contact. If your partner is an island, for instance, he or she may appreciate a signal that helps ease into being fully available. You might say, “Excuse me, I realize you’re in the middle of XYZ, but I need a few minutes to talk about…”
   

   Signals don’t have to be verbal. You can give a certain look or make a certain gesture to communicate to your partner that he or she has your full attention. For example, taking both your partner’s hands in yours might be an indication that everything else needs to be dropped so you can focus on each other and the needs of the moment.
   

3. Recognize your need to be tethered. At first blush, the idea of relying on one person may seem too threatening. You may think that the more people you can rally to your support, the more secure you’ll feel. After all, compared with relating to your partner, relating to others is a piece of cake, right?
   

It may seem that way. But don’t be fooled. Yes, of course, no other relationship comes with the same burdens of expectation, dependency, and needfulness you experience with your primary partner. But herein lies the saving grace. The expectations you and your partner have of each other may be higher, but so are the potential rewards.

Often, I think, we don’t take the time to get clear about our expectations of one another. We don’t get specific about what we need from our partner. Yes, you want him or her to make you feel safe and secure, loved and cared for. But how? What do you actually want and need from your primary go-to person?

This is a question I can’t and wouldn’t want to answer for you. You must do that yourself, or with your partner, for the answer to be meaningful. However, I can report what I have observed among happily tethered couples. These partners are there for each other’s deep emotional needs. This means being able to share and discuss all their feelings, worries, concerns, and doubts, as well as all the joys and emotional highs. It means sharing old secrets and memories. It means revealing crushes and infatuations and fantasies. At the same time, these partners are available 24/7 for things that to anyone else outside the relationship might seem trivial or not worth a moment’s time: anything from the way your toenail is growing in, to the sound the ice maker in your refrigerator makes, to the latest joke someone sent you in an e-mail.

Chapter 7

Protecting the Couple Bubble: How to Include Outsiders

We humans may appear at times to be animals that run in packs, but we are basically creatures who form twosomes. We start as a twosome with our birth mother and branch out to other twosomes. If another adult, such as a father, competes for our mother’s attention, we learn at a young age to move over and accept being squeezed out of their exclusive relationship from time to time. It’s a bummer at the time, yes. But it also prepares us for threesomes, foursomes, and more to come. We learn how to be a third wheel around our parents, and this ability to take a backseat allows us to form other twosomes, while understanding the value of and need for exclusivity.

This matter of twosomes and threesomes is a very important aspect of the owner’s manual to your relationship. As we’ve discussed, our security is dependent upon our ability to become tethered to one person. We choose one person with whom to form an adult partnership, much as young children know to whom they can run when scared or in pain or excited. Through this adult twosome, we look to one person above all others for comfort and immediate care.

Yet we as couples are not alone in the world. We may be two, but there is always a third to be found somewhere. By a
third
I mean third people, third objects, third tasks, or anything else that could intrude on a couple bubble or make it difficult to form one. For example, third people can include children, in-laws, other extended family members, friends, business partners and bosses, and even strangers. Third things can be work, hobbies, video games, TV shows . . . and the list can go on and on. On occasion, thirds can be easily incorporated into a couple bubble. For example, if you and your partner both enjoy bird watching, you will naturally bring this hobby into your life together. But if you like bird watching while your partner prefers football, it is likely to be more challenging to bring your respective thirds into the relationship.

In this chapter, we focus on how couples handle thirds. Specifically, we look at how couples handle four of the most important types of thirds: in-laws, children, drugs and alcohol, and affairs.

The Threat of the Third

Couples who handle thirds poorly typically do so before they even enter into their relationship. A good couple therapist can spot this pattern immediately by noticing how partners talk about other people, and most strikingly, how they talk about each other in front of the therapist. These folks constantly marginalize their primary partner. They betray one another by forming exclusive and excluding pairings with other people and things. For example, one partner might take his sister’s side over his partner’s side, while the other partner is more wedded to her wine than to her spouse. Both form unholy alliances with their children. Neither serves as the go-to person for the other, or is dedicated to the other’s safety and security. They are either unable to form or unable to maintain a true couple bubble.

To be sure, these are not bad people. In fact, they are normal, everyday people who simply have never developed productive ways of relating to outsiders—people and things outside their twosome. They aren’t wired for secure love. These partners may be either islands or waves, or they may simply be young and inexperienced. Perhaps their own parents at times broke their couple bubble and inappropriately let their children in, setting the stage for later confusion.

Overactive Primitives, Underactive Ambassadors

Having overactive primitives and/or underactive ambassadors can make it difficult for couples to include outsiders in their relationship. If an island’s primitives are constantly sounding the alarm, for instance, her or she may opt to focus on an object or task. To the primitives, time spent with this third—be it work, or a hobby, or an addiction—is safer and more relaxing than time with a partner.

Very young children engage in this kind of isolated behavior. Psychologists call it
parallel play
, and it is most typical among children aged two or three. Several children play together in the same room, each with their own toy, but without engaging each other. As children age and their ambassadors mature, they become adept at playing together. Two children learn to play amicably with the same toy. Later they’re able to include additional playmates—thirds—as well. If adult couples depend on what is essentially parallel play, we can deduce that their ambassadors are being railroaded by their primitives.

Waves also can fall under the sway of their primitives. They are less likely than islands to engage in parallel play, and more likely to seek out other people as thirds. Their primitives may drive them to do this as a means of punishing a partner whom they perceive as unavailable or rejecting. Instead of bringing a third person into their relationship in a nonthreatening manner, they shuttle between the third and their partner. This tug-of-war leads to endless friction and strife, typically sending the ambassadors further into hiding.

Partners who don’t know how to bring thirds into their twosome find themselves continually destabilized by others who come along. Often they run into particular trouble when they have children. To their chagrin, either parent, and sometimes both, can be dethroned at a moment’s notice. They feel left out, lonely, insecure, or threatened. Many fights and breakups center on the failure to properly include thirds, without either partner recognizing this is the problem. Usually, the partner feeling betrayed focuses on the third person or thing he or she perceives as a threat, without stopping to notice how he or she may be threatening the relationship in the same manner. The inability of partners to effectively include outsiders in their duo almost always is reciprocal in nature.

Many of the couples featured in this book do a poor job of handling threatening thirds. See if you can go through the chapters you’ve already read and find which ones.

Exercise: Who Are Your Thirds?

In the last chapter, you mapped your network of go-to people. Possibly some of your or your partner’s secondary go-to people function as thirds in your relationship. I suggest you take a fresh look now and identify the people who most often make your relationship a threesome.

Who might they be?

1. Other family members, such as children and parents, make natural thirds. You may not think of them as outsiders because you’re all in the same family, but they are outsiders with respect to your twosome.
   
2. Other common thirds are friends with whom you engage socially. When you and your partner socialize with another couple, they count as a third together.
   
3. And don’t forget thirds that aren’t people. What activities do you and your partner do that function as thirds in your relationship?
   

As you make a list of your thirds, notice which are included effectively within your relationship. How do you feel in the presence of these thirds? What makes for smooth relating with them from the vantage point of your couple bubble?