Are You Getting What You Want?

The New Rules of Marriage: What You Need to Know to Make Love Work
by Terrence Real

In his extraordinary new book, Terrence Real, distinguished therapist and bestselling author, presents a long overdue message that women need to hear: You aren't crazy-you're right!

Women have changed in the last twenty-five years-they have become powerful, independent, self-confident, and happy. Yet many men remain irresponsible and emotionally detached. They don't know how to respond to frustrated partners who just want their mates to show up and grow up.

Enter the good news: In this revolutionary book, Real shows women how to master the new rules of twenty-first-century marriage by offering them a set of effective tools with which they can create the truly intimate relationship that they desire and deserve. He identifies five non-starters to avoid and shares practical strategies for bringing honesty, passion, and joy back to even the most difficult relationship. Using his experience helping thousands of couples shift from despair to profound emotional closeness, Real guides you through the process of relationship repair with exercises that you can do alone or with your partner. With this program you'll discover how to

• identify and articulate your wants and needs
• listen well and respond generously
• set limits, and stand up for yourself
• embrace and appreciate what you have
• know when to seek outside help

The New Rules of Marriage will introduce you to a radically new kind of relationship, one based on the idea that every woman has the power to transform her marriage, while men, given the right support, have it in them to rise to the occasion.

We have never wanted so much from our relationships as we do today. More than any other generation, we yearn for our mates to be lifelong friends and lovers. The New Rules of Marriage shows us how to fulfill this courageous and uncompromising new vision.

Chapter 1

Outgrowing the Old Rules

Are you happy with the relationship you're in today? Or are you frustrated, knowing that no matter how hard you try, the open-heartedness that first drew you and your partner together seems awfully hard to win back? Perhaps you're in a difficult relationship that needs substantial change, or perhaps you are in a good-enough relationship that could be made better. Maybe you're looking for a new relationship that doesn't repeat the mistakes of the past. In any case, if you are reading these words, chances are you feel that something has been missing. It may be tempting to avoid acknowledging that feeling, but I'd like to ask you to trust your instinct. Twenty-five years of helping couples change and grow has taught me that if you feel things could be better, you're probably right. A lot better, in fact.

People may tell you that what you're looking for is unrealistic. I don't think so. Well-meaning friends and family may focus on your need to compromise. I don't want you to. Your relationship is too important for compromise. Your work may be rewarding, your kids great, and your friends wonderful, but in the end, your bond with the person you live out your life with - the one you grow up and grow old with - is the single most important connection you will ever have. I want you to go after what it is that you want - with skill and with love - and get it.

Both in counseling couples and in workshops I've lead around the country, I have taught people from all walks of life how to turn bad relationships into good ones, and good relationships into great ones. Because great is what you're really after. Great is what you deserve. Not merely a relationship you can live with, but one that is truly alive - passionately, tenderly, maddeningly filled to the brim with unexpected twists and turns, with comfort and solidity, with the sense of knowing and being known, and loving one another anyway. How do you get such a relationship? You don't get it, you build it, thoughtfully and skillfully, brick by brick.

Do you have the skills to do this? Have you been taught the craft of creating and sustaining a truly great relationship? If you're like most of us, your upbringing - that curious mixture of what you've picked up about how to be close from society in general and from your family in particular - has not only failed to give you the tools you need, but has actively filled your head with a bunch of unhelpful nonsense. Nonsense like "You'd better not make him too angry." Or, "If she really loved me, she'd ..." Or, "I could be happy if only you'd ..."

Like a tennis player who's performed well enough with rotten technique, in order to master relationships you don't just have to learn how to do it; first you have to unlearn all your bad habits. Think of me as your intimacy coach. Together, we're going to strip down your usual relationship routines and redo them, from the very basics. Will it be comfortable? Probably not. If it is, it means I'm not doing my job. Imagine going out on a tennis court with a totally new grip after years of holding your racquet in one familiar way. Comfortable? No. But does the new, proper grip give you a more effective stroke? Once you get used to it, there's no comparison.

Reading this, a part of you may be wondering, "Has the game of love really grown so technical that I need an intimacy coach just to have a decent relationship? Whatever happened to falling in love and, well ... just getting along?" That kind of spontaneity is fine - if it's working for you. Ask yourself: Is it? If you're like most people, the honest answer is somewhere between a definite no and "Not as well as I wish it would." If that's the case, don't be embarrassed; you're in an awfully big boat. The truth is that navigating your relationship by simply doing what "comes naturally" actually stacks the odds against achieving lasting happiness. Roughly half of all marriages fail altogether, and of those marriages left standing, how many are really fulfilling? How many truly great relationships do you see around you? Everywhere you turn, it seems that people who can be terrific parents, friends, workers, and neighbors fall short in the one arena that matters the most. As if that weren't sobering enough, consider this: The grim picture of relationships I'm describing has been relatively stable for the last forty years. The emergence of couple's therapy in the 1950s has done nothing to change it. Self-help and psychology haven't put a dent in it. Multimillion-dollar government programs and church initiatives have been helpless in the face of our current intimacy crisis. What is going on?

Twenty-first Century Love

Try as they might, most "experts" aren't helping much because they fail to address the fundamental issue. What's robbing your relationship of the closeness and passion you deserve is history; or, more precisely, your particular moment in history. If you are like the millions of men and women who feel dissatisfied, you have been trying to negotiate a twenty-first century relationship using twentieth-century skills. Your expectations of what an intimate relationship is - emotional sharing, mutual support, responsibility, vitality - belong to a new kind of marriage, one very different from your parents' or grandparents'. But your old rule book, and your bag of relationship tools - your game plan and ways of coping - are not nearly as fresh as your vision is.

Copyright © 2007 by Terrence Real. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher

About the Author

Terrence Real is the author of the national bestseller I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression. A family therapist and lecturer for more than twenty years, he is a member of the senior faculty at the Family Institute of Cambridge and director of the Gender Relations Program at the Meadows Institute in Arizona.