It takes two to make it work and one to stuff it up!

It takes two people to make a committed couple relationship or marriage successful!

It takes just one person, acting all alone, to make a good and successful relationship fail!

It is difficult to see how one person alone can make a couple relationship or marriage work. Perhaps one partner’s relentless accommodation and selflessness in putting the other partner’s requirements forever ahead of their own could conceivably make a relationship survive, but I doubt it. I don’t imagine there are too many people left in the western world who now accept that kind of Neanderthal survival as their definition of a successful relationship. Maybe there are a few crazed rampant right fundamentalists in the intellectual and social backblocks who still believe in this I suppose!

What I do know is that most of us know how to stuff up a perfectly good relationship and most of us know how to do it without any assistance from anyone else. What’s even more disconcerting is that most of us, in perfectly good and successful relationships, have made a reasonable tilt at stuffing things up without any consultation with our partner at all. It’s true and we did this without even thinking twice about it. Yes! “Look Mum, no hands!”

The common idea peddled by the marriage counselling and therapy industry throughout the western world, for the last one hundred years or so, is that it takes two people, acting in some kind of concert, to produce a relationship or marriage difficulty. This is patent nonsense! This idea does my own unique ability to screw things up, all by myself, a complete and total disservice. I need no help in this and neither do you!

I have at my disposal a whole repertoire of ways to stuff things up. I have my whole family history to call on. That’s why it’s great having a wild and vast extended family as I have. They are an endless source of fascination and inspiration in ways to achieve this. Perhaps stuffing things up has genetic characteristics. Perhaps it is imprinted on our DNA!

Go on, go to the bathroom and have a long hard look at yourself in the mirror, for maybe ten long minutes, and contemplate your own personal power and one off brand of stupidity in this regard. That’s a good place to start. As you gaze into the depths of yourself, just for one moment reflect upon the fact that your partner has made the most amazing decision to live with this. Get grateful!

“You know I’m right”

Perhaps a useful task for most people in a good and successful relationship would be to make a full inventory of the ways in which they alone, without the collaboration of their partner, could totally wreck this perfectly good and successful relationship over the next twelve months. Make the list and put these ideas and practices in rank order of preference! I’m sure you could come up with all kinds of unique ways to achieve this ignoble end.

Post your list to this site and lets see what we get.

Remember, you have to be in a perfectly good and successful relationship to participate in this exercise. Experienced wrecking ball experts stand aside! Your turn will come later. When we need your advice we will certainly call for it.

Please leave this to those who want to explore their outer edges, their own unique capacity to stuff things up; those who haven’t done so yet and those who may just be contemplating it without really knowing it.

And one more thing. Please don’t fake it, don’t cross dress this as your partner’s repertoire, and no photographs or video clips!

Your relationship is going through one of ‘those’ patches. You look at him and it doesn’t glow in quite the same way. You look at her and feel a degree of disappointment. What to do?

You know in American movies they go to therapy and see some Woody Allen type who makes matters worse but you also have heard that sometimes it can help. Would you dare?

Here is some good news. Researchers in Sweden decided to ask this same question and also to ask if the sorts of things therapists do in America also work for couples in other places and cultures. They took a look at a group of 16 therapists and their clients, 317 couples and studied them for two years. The couples filled out a range of questionnaires about themselves as individuals, their relationship and their family.

At the conclusion of the study they found that despite the fact that both men and women came to therapy with serious problems the outcomes were positive. Not only that, they were still positive two years later. Most people only needed to attend for a short time, on average for five sessions, although of course some situations did require more meetings.

The authors concluded that many of the couples made positive gains from the treatment and may well have protected themselves from more serious problems later in their relationship.

So, perhaps its worth another thought……..

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