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  So whether the desired behavior is sex, affection, or conversation, if one spouse does not have a very strong emotional need for it, it’s incumbent on the other spouse to be sure that it’s enjoyable and that its consequences are enjoyable. Otherwise, the spouse with the lesser need will come up with a host of excuses to avoid it.

  Suppose your spouse wants sex and you are too tired to even think about it. Should you meet your spouse’s need even if it violates the rule, or should you wait until you are enthusiastic about doing it?

  As I mentioned in the last chapter, you can be enthusiastic about trying something new to see if it might be an enjoyable solution to a problem. It’s the “try it, you’ll like it” approach to resolving conflicts. But would having sex when you can hardly stay awake be part of that temporary plan? I doubt it. It’s more likely that it would be a way of getting your spouse to stop bothering you or to stop trying to make you feel guilty.

  If you were to help your spouse understand what you enjoy most about making love, and the conditions that are most favorable for you, you may agree to try making love that way for a while. You may also suggest that after making love, your spouse meet your emotional needs, such as conversation and affection, as an enjoyable consequence for you.

  At first, your offer may not be carried out exactly as planned. Your spouse may need to have a better understanding of what it takes to make it enjoyable for you. And the affection and conversation that follow may need improvement. So you wouldn’t necessarily be enjoying the process that much. But if your spouse were to eventually meet all your conditions, you’d find yourself as enthusiastic about making love as your spouse.

  The goal should be to eventually meet each other’s important emotional needs with mutual enthusiastic agreement. But the path to that final outcome may temporarily require you to be less than happy as you are trying to discover the best way to meet each other’s needs.

  Spouses have difficulty meeting each other’s emotional needs when they have not been motivated. They don’t enjoy meeting those needs, and they don’t enjoy the consequences of meeting them.

  Such reasoning is insulting to many spouses. Why should I reward my spouse for making love to me? Or having a conversation with me? Or being affectionate with me? If my spouse really cares about me, wouldn’t he or she want to meet my needs without being rewarded?

  Can you see how that way of thinking will make it harder for you to meet each other’s emotional needs, regardless of how caring you might be? Short-term sacrifice to reach long-term mutual enjoyment makes sense. But unless your ultimate plan is to create mutual enjoyment and mutual reward, your plan will not work. Temporary sacrifice will turn into permanent sacrifice. And that will lead to an aversion to meeting each other’s emotional needs. You will hate the very thought of it.

  What are the best rewards for meeting each other’s emotional needs? It’s meeting each other’s emotional needs. If one of you has a craving for sex and the other has a craving for affection and conversation, combine them. Make sex the reward for affection and conversation. Make affection and conversation the reward for sex.

  Another essential consideration is how you make love and express your affection, and what you talk about. The one with the lowest need should be given preference because if your need is to be met, you must make the experience as enjoyable as possible to the one meeting that need.

  In most cases, it’s the wife who has the lowest need for sex, and the husband who has the lowest need for affection and conversation. So if the husband wants more sex, and the wife wants more affection and conversation, they must both commit themselves to meeting those needs, which may mean a temporary violation of the POJA. But during that trial period, it’s incumbent upon the spouse with the greater need to learn to make the experience enjoyable to the spouse with the lesser need. When they have it figured out, they will be meeting each other’s emotional needs with enthusiastic agreement.

  When you find yourselves failing to meet each other’s emotional needs, don’t let another week go by without addressing this problem. Think of a plan that will lead to a solution. Remember that if you want your emotional needs to be met, your spouse must come to enjoy meeting those needs and be rewarded for doing so. Don’t get bogged down with the illusion that your spouse owes it to you, or that you shouldn’t have to consider rewards. And also remember that if meeting your needs is at all unpleasant, that’s the quickest way to squelch your spouse’s willingness to meet them.

  Part 2

  Resolving Common Marital Conflicts with Negotiation

  Now that you’ve learned the goal and rules of effective marital negotiation, you’re ready to address some of the most common conflicts that married couples face. If you resolve them the right way, with win-win outcomes, your lifestyle will be enjoyable and your love for each other will grow. But if you resolve them the wrong way, with win-lose outcomes, your lifestyle will be very disappointing—and you’ll wonder what it was that you ever saw in each other.

  I can’t put too much emphasis on the fact that the way you resolve these and other marital conflicts will determine whether your marriage will be a success or a failure. By addressing each of these five common conflicts using the negotiating strategy I’ve introduced to you, you will not only be approaching these problems the right way (with respect and mutual understanding), but you are also more likely to find the wisest solutions possible.

  In the following five chapters, I will not only encourage you to practice resolving your conflicts the right way, but I will also describe some of the differences I’ve observed in the perspectives of husbands and wives when these conflicts arise. You will either respect and accommodate these differences in a final resolution that solves the problem once and for all, or you will be disrespectful and ignore them, leaving the problem unresolved. The choice is yours.

  8

  Conflicts over Friends and Relatives

  The Policy of Joint Agreement forces a couple to put each other first—to make each other their highest priority. So when there’s a conflict over friends and relatives, the POJA makes each spouse’s interests more important than the interests of any friend or relative. No one can come between a husband and wife that follow the Policy of Joint Agreement, and that helps guarantee a couple’s love for each other. But it also seems difficult to justify at times.

  A few years ago, I spoke to a group of couples from China about what it took to maintain romantic love in marriage. I needed a translator because most of the audience could not speak or understand English. After my speech, I took questions from the audience, and one was particularly insightful. The question came from an older woman who felt threatened by the POJA. She asked, “If my son follows the Policy of Joint Agreement, would he not be putting his wife’s interests above those of his parents? It is our custom to serve our parents above all else.”

  China is not the only culture that puts the interests of parents above those of a spouse. It’s common throughout the world. But even where that value is not outwardly stated, it’s very difficult to ignore. People often assume responsibility to parents that can override their responsibility to their spouse.

  That same kind of thinking can apply to siblings and possibly even to extended family members—if any of them are in trouble, we will be there to give them a helping hand even if our spouse were to object. Or consider friends you’ve known since childhood who may have helped you at a time of great personal need. After all, isn’t that what friends are for: to help and support each other?

  Given our sense of responsibility to our family and friends, along with our enjoyment of their company, the following question almost invariably comes up after marriage: What do I do when I face a conflict with my spouse over friends and relatives?

  If a member of your family or a friend needs your help, should you be there for them even if you don’t have your spouse’s enthusiastic agreement? If your mother cannot care for herself and wants you to care for her, possibly in you
r own home, should you provide that care even if your spouse considers it to be an invasion of your privacy? If one of your friends is about to move and that friend has helped you move in the past, should you help your friend even if your spouse would prefer that you spend the weekend at home with your family? If you simply want to relax and have a good time with your best friends, should your spouse have the right to ruin it all by objecting? And what if one of those best friends happens to be of the opposite sex? Should you abandon that friendship forever just because your spouse is jealous?

  Those are tough questions, and in many cases they come up in situations that require answers almost instantly. When one of these conflicts arises, you usually don’t have the luxury of days or weeks of negotiation with your spouse. So take some time now, while you can carefully think it through, to resolve some of the conflicts that you may be having now, or in the future, over friends and relatives.

  Reviewing Your Options

  In this book, we’ve discussed five marital problem-solving strategies. I called the first approach the sacrifice strategy. It’s voluntarily letting your spouse win while you lose as an act of care. Your husband wants to invite his parents over to your house for dinner. You would rather spend the evening doing something together as a family, like riding bikes, but as an act of care for your spouse you agree. You are upset about having to get a special dinner ready on such short notice, but you don’t let on because that would spoil your husband’s fun. And the next time your husband wants his parents over for dinner, you agree to it again.

  The sacrifice strategy is very common while dating and early in marriage. But it doesn’t take a couple long before they realize that sacrifice eventually becomes both expected and unappreciated. Lifestyle decisions based on sacrifice backfire.

  A second option is the dictator strategy. It’s the use of demands, disrespect, and anger to try to force your spouse to do what you want even when it’s not in your spouse’s best interest to do so. Your spouse tells you that his parents will be coming over for dinner (selfish demand). If you object, he blames your reluctance on an uncaring attitude (disrespectful judgment). And finally, when all else fails, he raises his voice, stomps from room to room, and throws things around until he gets his way (angry outburst). If you’re too tired or too afraid to argue, you give in and prepare dinner.

  Another strategy that is similar to the dictator strategy is the dueling dictators strategy. Spouses who both struggle for control use this approach. Instead of merely objecting to your husband’s dinner invitation to his parents, you make a demand of your own: Tell your parents that we have decided to spend the evening going on a bike ride together as a family. Your children, upon hearing this, run up to you begging to go on that bike ride. When your husband says, No, your grandma and grandpa will be joining us for dinner, the fight begins. With your children siding with you, and you telling your husband that his parents are more important to him than his own children (disrespectful judgment), you both start screaming at each other (angry outburst). The children run for cover.

  The dictator and dueling dictators strategies are not the right way to go about resolving marital conflicts, and most couples who fight know it. Those strategies not only fail to help them resolve their conflicts, but they destroy the love they have for each other. So when spouses find that they only make matters worse, they try another approach. They use the anarchy strategy: If you don’t enjoy having dinner with my parents, I’ll go out to dinner with them by myself. And you respond, Fine! The children and I will go on our bike ride without you. It’s not mutual agreement, but rather a unilateral choice that is sprung on a spouse with little or no notice. This strategy leads to marital alienation that will cause the couple to eventually lose their emotional bond. Instead of being lovers, partners, and best friends in life, they become ships passing in the night.

  The fifth approach to marital problem solving, the democracy strategy, is the only one that actually resolves marital conflict to the satisfaction of both spouses. It helps find solutions that strengthen a couple’s emotional bond and builds romantic love for each other. When you use this strategy, you’re making your spouse an equal partner in deciding how to resolve any conflicts that may appear by following the Policy of Joint Agreement (making a final decision only after you both agree to it enthusiastically).

  This democracy strategy begins with the first of our Four Guidelines to Successful Negotiation: you guarantee each other a pleasant and safe discussion by being cheerful and by avoiding demands, disrespectful judgments, and angry outbursts. If either of you cannot make that guarantee, you postpone the discussion until you can.

  The second guideline is to introduce what it is you want, and learn how your spouse would feel about fulfilling your request. You tell your spouse that you would like to invite your parents over for dinner, without having discussed it with them first. Then you ask your spouse how he or she would feel about it, letting your spouse reveal any objections without countering with disrespect.

  With your request on the table and your spouse’s objections understood, you are ready for the third guideline—brainstorming. Your goal is to reach an enthusiastic agreement regarding having your parents over for the evening. So under what conditions would your spouse be enthusiastic about that? What are some of the ways that you could have your parents over without having to cook a meal and clean up after a busy day at work?

  Finally, you’re ready for the fourth guideline. You come to an enthusiastic agreement or you continue to brainstorm. If you can’t agree in time for the event, no invitation is given—you don’t invite your parents over. But your final decision may be to invite your parents to join your family in a bike ride instead of dinner. It would set a precedent for future invitations if it worked out well for both of you.

  The illustration I’ve used here regarding having parents over for dinner is a fairly easy conflict to resolve with enthusiastic agreement. We’re assuming, of course, that your parents are delightful to entertain. But what happens when your spouse simply doesn’t want to get anywhere near your parents? Perhaps your parents are disrespectful or downright cruel to your spouse. If he or she feels obligated to be with your unpleasant parents, you risk making Love Bank withdrawals every time he or she even thinks about them.

  If you follow the POJA from the beginning of your marriage onward, that won’t happen. Neither spouse is obligated to spend time with people who make them unhappy because of the default condition (do nothing until an enthusiastic agreement is reached). You can’t force your parents to treat your wife with respect, but you don’t have to spend time with them, either. If you resolve this conflict the right way, your parents will come to realize that they won’t be seeing much of either of you until they change their ways.

  The Policy of Joint Agreement helps form and reshape your relationships with friends and relatives to satisfy both of you. Unless they treat both of you thoughtfully and respectfully, and you enjoy their company, you shouldn’t make them a part of your lives.

  Men and Women Interpret Relationships with Friends and Relatives Differently

  Don’t be surprised if you and your spouse have different perspectives when it comes to friends and relatives. When a conflict arises, you may notice that you don’t always agree on how to deal with it because of the way you look at the situation.

  Remember what I said earlier about the corpus callosum, the band of fibers that connects the neurons of the left and right hemispheres of the brain? In a woman’s brain, it’s much thicker, which means that there are many more fibers. Their brains are much more interconnected. From a functional standpoint, that means women have the capacity to take more information into account when they make decisions. A wife might want more recreational time to be spent with their children and would also be concerned about everyone in the family getting enough exercise every day. So a family bike ride after dinner would be just the ticket. Her husband, who had a brief conversation with his mom and dad that day, co
uldn’t see why having them over for dinner would be a problem. For him, it was a simple matter of having them included in a meal that was already scheduled.

  This example resonates with Joyce and me. Prior to our marriage, my friends and I would get together impulsively. I’d show up at their house and they would show up at mine without formal invitation. My door was always open to my friends and theirs were open to me. I thought I was being particularly thoughtful in dating Joyce by giving her a one-hour notice that I’d be over to take her out for the evening.

  So imagine my surprise after marriage when Joyce didn’t want my friends coming over uninvited. In fact, she didn’t even want me to invite them unless she first agreed to have them come. For me, having a friend over was nothing but fun. If we wanted privacy, we simply wouldn’t answer the door. But for Joyce, even having her own friends over was work. She had to clean the house, prepare something to eat, and plan games for the evening. For me, none of that mattered.

  It’s the differences in our brains that were at the root of our conflict. She imagined what the entire evening would be like, and I didn’t give it much thought.

  We often have a similar conflict when preparing for a trip. Joyce methodically goes through every day we’ll be gone and plans precisely what she will be wearing each day with a few extra options just in case. On the other hand, I like to throw a few clothes into the suitcase an hour before we leave. Joyce plans for the future while I take it as it comes.

  Depending on your perspective, and whether you’re male or female, you will see value in either Joyce’s approach or my approach to inviting friends over. Each one has its advantages and disadvantages. For us, the conflict was resolved by developing an entirely new set of friends. The impulsive singles that had been my friends prior to marriage were replaced by couples we both enjoyed and with whom we had more in common. As is the case with most couples, they didn’t just show up—they had to be invited before coming to spend the evening with us. And I didn’t show up at their house without an invitation. I learned to plan our evenings with friends more carefully, but Joyce also eased up on the conditions she felt were necessary.