Why Be a Couple and Free?

How to Be a Couple and Still Be Free
by Tina B. Tessina, Ph.D.

For over two decades, this book has been recognized as the established handbook on relationships between equals. It introduced the concept: cooperation instead of compromise or competition. It gives clear instructions to show you how to be true to yourself and true to your partner at the same time. Thoroughly revised and expanded, this new edition is written as a manual and includes fresh and new step-by-step instructions and guidelines to create a mutually supportive partnership allowing each individual to be equal in a relationship. It introduces the Negotiation Tree, an ingenious tool that can help any couple turn a struggle or fight into a cooperative problem-solving session. The book is designed especially for:

- People who seek a model for equal partnership.

- Couples who want to transform struggle into teamwork.

- Couples who are married, cohabiting, or dating.

- Couples who are in a traditional or alternative relationship. How to Be a Couple and Still Be Free is the perfect tool for designing and creating a relationship unique to your individual personalities and situation. With it, any couple can learn to work together to create a loving, sustainable, healthy, and equal partnership that you will treasure.

Why did you pick up this book? Are you intrigued to think it is possible to be a couple and still be free?

How can you be true to yourself and true to your partner at the same time? If you honor yourself, will your partner leave? Can you and your partner have a loving, committed relationship without compromising - without each of you giving up some of who you are and what you need? Is commitment a kind of bondage? Isn't it selfish to insist on having what you want? Doesn't true love mean that you joyfully give everything to your beloved? Does having freedom mean having affairs?

You are not alone in your questioning. Most of the people who come to us for help with their intimate relationships are struggling with questions like these. If you are competing to find satisfaction in your intimate relationships (like many couples we have worked with), you may be struggling with your partner while searching for a way to be happy together:

• You may have experienced a sequence of relationships that were destructive and didn't work.

• You may be with someone new and fear you will repeat old, painful patterns.

• You may have a basically good relationship with some specific problems (such as financial struggles, disagreements about parenting, sex, housework or time schedules) that you can't find a satisfactory solution for, or:

• You may fight all the time unable to resolve even minor family problems or conflicts without a painful and exasperating struggle, which leaves one or both of you feeling hurt, angry, resentful, deprived, cheated, or frustrated.

These are common couple problems. Sustaining a long-term intimate relationship with a partner is difficult. If you have had experiences like these, you may believe that you have to choose between taking a stand for yourself and having a committed relationship - you can't have both at the same time.

We have found that you most certainly can have both. Not only can you have both, but when you feel free to speak up and say what you want, confident that you will be heard and confident that your partner will work with you to find a solution, the love will flow more easily between you. That is the purpose of this book.

This New Expanded Edition

In 1980, when How to be a Couple and Still be Free was first published, it introduced a radical concept. Cooperation instead of compromise or competition. When one or both partners compromise needs on behalf of one another, it invariably leads to a troubled relationship. One partner becomes a resentful caretaker, while the other feels oppressed and belittled. One will be alert to the moods of the other - often walking on eggshells not to upset the other. one will threaten to leave in order to get his or her way. one wants more together time and the other wants more space - and neither is satisfied with the compromise. Compromises and self-abandonments like these lead to resentment, hurt and power struggles.

When a couple struggles, the flow of love between them can be blocked - even when they truly love one another. On the other hand, a couple who have the tools to negotiate and who are committed to equality and mutual satisfaction are far more likely to create love and partnership they deeply treasure.

In the twenty years since the book was first published, we have developed many tools and techniques couples can use to create cooperation and freedom. We have expanded this edition to include many step-by-step instructions and guidelines, and we've added the Negotiation Tree, a tool that can help you turn any struggle into a cooperative problem solving session. Through the addition of these components, we have created a manual you can use to create or restructure your current relationship into a free couple partnership.

Couples and Freedom

Because we aren't talking about having affairs or "playing the field" when we use the word "freedom", and we aren't thinking of any lack of commitment to each other when we say "couple" it is necessary to define both terms. Since these are the terms that attracted you to this book, we invite you to check our definition against your own. Knowing what they mean to you will better enable you to create the kind of relationship that fits exactly who you are.

What We Mean by Couple

As a Newsweek special report put it, "The American family does not exist. Rather, we are creating many American families, of diverse styles and shapes. In unprecedented numbers, our families are unalike. We have fathers working while mothers keep house, fathers and mothers both working away from home; single parents; second marriages bringing children together from unrelated backgrounds; childless couples; unmarried couples, with and without children; Gay and Lesbian parents. We are living through a period of historic change in American Family life." The trouble is, that many relationship books offer patterns and role models based on this nonexistent "American Family" and do not adequately consider these other kinds of relationships, or not recognize the changes that have taken place.

How to Be a Couple and Still Be Free is designed to help you create a relationship that is suitable for you, whether your relationship is gay or straight, traditionally monogamous, or non-traditional, such as an open relationship, group marriage, bi-coastal, two-career relationship, or committed- living- separately relationship.

More people are choosing not to marry, or not to stay married today. Instead, they are redefining couple relationships in many ways. There are many possible variations of satisfying relationships, and this book is about creating the kind of relationship that satisfies you and your partner, whether you are married or not. Therefore, we offer a broad definition of "couple" so that you and your partner can use the tools here to develop your own mutually satisfying definition, which is specific to your individual relationship.

We define a couple as two people who are committed to being with each other more intensely and/or more often than with others. This usually implies a degree of love and intimate contact. It could be a dating relationship, living together, married or not married. it could be a deep intimate and sexual commitment, sexually exclusive or not. Our intent is to help you and your partner develop a relationship that is mutually satisfying, by your own, unique and specific definition. With specific, step-by -step techniques and guidelines, this book will teach you the negotiation and communication tools and skills you can use to create a relationship that ensures that both of you get what you want. In short, a relationship that is secure and committed, but within which you both feel free.

What We Mean by Freedom

By its very nature, freedom is defined differently by each individual. Each person has individual needs for closeness and personal space as well as other needs to feel nurtured, understood and autonomous within a relationship. Individual people define their freedom in very different ways. Some want the freedom to be close and comforted, others want the freedom to be autonomous and unfettered.

Understanding these components of freedom requires self-knowledge. To know what you need, you must focus on your self, see yourself as clearly as possible and accept what you find there. Knowing what you want and what you feel are skills essential to creating a mutually satisfying intimate relationship.

In this book, you'll find specific exercises designed to help you clarify what you want and feel, to create a personal definition of freedom and to communicate that to your partner. By learning and using these techniques, you'll create a mutual understanding and cooperation in helping each other get exactly what you want.

Whether your reasons for wanting to be a couple are romantic or pragmatic, social or cultural, based on passion or a need to create a healthier family than you grew up in, a desire to have children, simple loneliness, or a spiritual or "soul mate" connection - it is important to you, and we want to help you create it as you see it.

The Desire for Intimacy

Most couples are drawn to enter relationships because of the possibility of intimacy. Intimacy, or lack of it, is also what creates most of the struggle in relationships. Creating a satisfying couple relationship means meeting the individual intimacy needs of each partner.

You need intimacy just as you need food and shelter. Just like the other basic needs, no one needs intimacy all the time and some people need more than others. It is possible to be intimate without being a couple - but, the development of emotional closeness over time, and the easy availability of physical closeness make couple relationships the ideal opportunity for intimate contact:.

It takes less energy and decision-making to have intimacy in a couple relationship because it doesn't take much planning to get together. Friends, family and the culture support and endorse your togetherness. When things go well, the teamwork of partnership (common goals, successfully solving daily problems and doing chores together) creates a feeling of mutuality and appreciation that enhances your closeness. In a couple relationship, intimacy can become a constant and free you to focus on other areas of your lives.

In a healthy relationship, intimacy grows with time. Two people who have been together for twenty years can have a deeper connection than they did when they were only dating for three months. Time together doesn't guarantee intimacy, but it does create an opportunity for intimacy to grow. It takes time to know and trust each other. As trust builds, you open yourselves. Over the months (or years) you reveal yourselves. If you nurture your closeness through the years of each partner's personal growth and changes, you will know more about each other than anyone else and your contact will be deep indeed.

Once you learn the communication and problem solving skills in this book, you'll know how to create the kind of teamwork and mutual benefit that supports the growth of intimacy and satisfaction - a relationship of equal partnership and autonomous cooperation.

Cooperative Problem Solving

Most people don't believe that it is possible for a couple to be so adept at solving problems together so both of them are fully satisfied. They believe that you can have either intimacy or freedom - that is, you can have what you want; or you can be close. They see couple relationships as an extension of other types of competition. Because this competitive attitude is so ingrained in each of us, it usually takes a shift in belief and a lot of practice to learn how to do stop fighting, arguing and insisting you are right or to stop being afraid you won't get what you want.

The Free Couple

Free couples embody five qualities: 1) love easily expressed, 2) mutual respect, 3) a sense of equal power in the relationship, 4) the willingness and ability to express desires, needs, satisfactions, and 5) the willingness and ability to resolve conflicts cooperatively - without power plays, manipulation and unsatisfying compromises.

How to Be a Couple and Still Be Free will teach you to work together to create whatever kind of relationship you want, free from the restrictive patterns of your parents, your past experience, and social pressures.

When you and your partner know how to cooperate to solve problems and resolve differences, you can freely express your desires, needs, and satisfactions. You can share your worries and your joy without fear of being manipulated by them. You both feel equally empowered. You can say what you want, knowing you will work together to make it happen. When you experience and express mutual respect, love flows more easily between you. You are equal partners. Equal. Partners. You understand how to cooperate to create a truly satisfying life - as two free individuals working together. You can be a couple and still be free.

Emphasizing Function Rather Than Dysfunction

Many books have been written about relationship problems - with an emphasis on dysfunctional, codependent relationships, compulsive or obsessive love, domestic violence and sexual molestation. These books focus on the emotional and psychological (and often physical) damage these relationships cause, how to recognize them and how to free oneself from them. Simply recognizing, describing and suggesting ways to end this has been an enormous task.

All of these books focus on unsatisfying or unhealthy relationship patterns and how to recognize and overcome them. Little is said about how to create and sustain a healthy, functional, non-codependent relationship. You may be very familiar with the frustration of being told how not to do it, but not really ever understanding what to do instead.

So, if you're asking "What is a healthy, functional, relationship and how do we get one?" How to Be a Couple and Still Be Free is designed to answer your questions and teach you (either individually or together with your partner) how to create and sustain a fully functioning partnership between equals.

How to Be a Couple and Still Be Free is a manual that provides intimate partners with a proven, step by step guide for working together as a team to overcome negative relationship patterns and master the positive new skills you'll need to know to create a successful, satisfying and sustainable relationship that fulfills both your individual needs. It has been used and recommended by many therapists to help couples in therapy.

How to Be a Couple and Still Be Free is a guideline for transforming an unsatisfying relationship into a loving, sustainable, healthy, partnership between equals who support each other and work together cooperatively to ensure that each partner gets what he or she wants. We call this equal, mutually supportive partnership a Free Couple relationship.

The central idea of this book is a method for Cooperative Problem Solving which involves both of you working together as a team. Through this process, any problems, difficulties, obstacles, differences or struggles that arise can be identified, negotiated and solved to the mutual satisfaction of you and your partner.

This book will lead you, individually and together, through a series of carefully planned exercises designed to help you develop the skills (such as problem-solving, cooperation, clear communication and teamwork) that will enable you to use the Cooperative Problem Solving process to build and sustain a healthy relationship.

In How to Be a Couple and Still Be Free you will learn how to work together smoothly to solve the very problems which created competition, pain and struggle between you and your partner in the past and build teamwork and cooperation where you previously had fighting, frustration and despair. Your problems are probably solvable; relationship problems feel overwhelming and difficult only if the partners involved lack the skills they need to solve them.

The basis of this approach is "the Negotiation Tree" - a step-by step guide to working smoothly together to solve all the problems and disputes partners can encounter in the course of a relationship. It will guide you safely through the five steps of solving any problem and help the two of you reach a solution that is wholly and non-competitively satisfying to both of you.

This book will introduce you to a relationship of equality:

• Designed to meet your unique needs as individuals and as a couple,

• In which both partners feel equally important, equally powerful, equally free to express their wants and needs,

• In which both partners work together, to find a mutually satisfactory way to get what both of you want every single time,

• In which you support each other in making sure you both are satisfied in the relationship,

• Which contains far less conflict, frustration, anger, and fewer arguments, disputes, and feelings of deprivation than most couples experience, and

• Which is easy to sustain because you both learn how to get what you want from it all the time!

How The Book Is Organized

The first chapter, "How to Be a Couple and Still Be Free", explains what an intimate partnership between equals is, why it works so well, and how you can achieve it. Also, Cooperative Problem Solving is introduced and explained, as well as the Negotiation Tree, a step by step guide that you can use to help yourself through the Cooperative Problem Solving process much the same way we help our clients, by outlining and guiding you through the five steps of the process, referring you back to the proper information and exercises whenever you have difficulty, and helping you to know when you are ready to go on to the next step.

The next five chapters correspond to the steps of the Negotiation Tree: Chapter Two: "Define and Communicate the Problem", Chapter Three: "Agree to Negotiate", Chapter Four: "Set the Stage" Chapter Five: "State and Explore Wants", and Chapter Six: "Explore Your Options and Decide."

These chapters explain each step, why it is important, what happens if you don't cover that step in negotiating, and the problems you may encounter in that step, and gives information, exercises and guidelines that teach you skills for overcoming each problem as it arises. All these chapters present examples of couples engaged in negotiating to demonstrate how your new skills will work. Each exercise builds on what you learned in previous exercises, so your familiarity with and competence at the skills of Cooperative Problem Solving increases as you go along.

The last chapter, "The Free Couple", outlines ideas for using Cooperative Problem Solving and the Negotiation Tree to improve various aspects of your relationship, and thus, over a period of time, transform it into a relationship that is wholly satisfying to both of you, which will enhance your pleasure in being together and make your relationship easy to sustain.

Using The Exercises

We recommend you begin by reading this book through in its entirety to gain an overview of the stages of the Negotiation Tree and the relationship skills that accompany them. You may be tempted to begin right away by using the Negotiation Tree to solve a problem you are having, but if you do, you could find yourself feeling lost and frustrated because, without reading the rest of the book, you might not have enough understanding of what is meant by many of the suggestions and steps of the Negotiation Tree.

The exercises in this book are designed to teach every skill needed for and explore every barrier to achieving a healthy relationship. The exercises build on each other, with the later exercises drawing on skills you learned in prior ones. Each exercise is prefaced with a complete explanation of what it is designed to teach, and when it might be needed in your relationship. Step-by-step instructions help make the exercises easy to follow and easy to do.

Because of the sequential nature of the exercises, and because you will be building on the skills you learned in the earlier exercises, you will probably find that the skills you learn are easy to remember when you are involved in negotiation or interaction within your relationship.

Each exercise will give you criteria for determining when you have mastered each skill, or deciding when you still need more practice. If you find you need help with certain skills, or you need help at a particular point in your negotiation, the Tree will refer you to the proper exercises and examples. At any time, you can pause in your negotiation long enough to go through a needed exercise, to help you overcome any difficulty or confusion you're having, and then return to the Negotiation tree for the next step.

If you have read other self-help books, had couples' therapy, or participated in workshops, some of the skills presented here may already be familiar to you, and you may go on to those that are less familiar or more needed. We have included exercises you can do on your own, and exercises you can do with your partner. We recommend you do the exercises in the order they are presented because they build on each other, and they follow the Cooperative Problem Solving process. The exercises themselves will refer you to other related exercises that might be helpful. We have written this in the sequence we feel will meet the needs of the broadest number of readers, but each couple has individual negotiating strengths and weaknesses, and the Negotiation Tree will help you adapt the guidelines and exercises to your own unique situation. Experiment with the Negotiation Tree, and as you use it, you will see which techniques you and your partner most need, and which guidelines are most helpful.

The Negotiation Tree is a "negotiating road map" to the five steps of Cooperative Problem Solving. Once you feel you understand the steps of the Negotiation Tree, the book will guide you to try using it on a simple "practice" problem. You will both be astonished to discover how easy it is to use and that you both can find a solution in which you both get what you want!

By the time you have mastered all the skills and exercises taught here, you will have a full set of "tools" that will enable you to fix any problems that may arise in your relationship, before you and your partner are so frustrated and angry that your problem becomes too big to handle.

By reading this book, doing the exercises and following the Negotiation Tree, you will give yourself the best possible chance of creating a relationship you can both enjoy, feel proud to share, and in which you will feel comforted and supported.

We invite you to open the following pages and begin building your Free Couple Relationship.

Copyright © 2002 Tina Tessina

About the Author

www.tinatessina.com
Tina B. Tessina, Ph.D., has twenty years of experience as a licensed marriage and family counselor. She is the author of seven books, including: The Real Thirteenth Step: Discovering Confidence, Self-Reliance and Autonomy Beyond the Twelve Step Programs, Gay Relationships: How to Find Them, How To Improve Them, How to Make Them Last and Lovestyles: How to Celebrate Your Differences. She co-authored (with Riley K. Smith) How to Be a Couple and Still be Free and True Partners A Workbook for Developing Lasting Intimacy. Dr. Tessina has appeared on national TV and radio shows including: Oprah, Donahue, Dateline: NBC and Larry King Live.