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National Newspaper Column > Playing Fair
SOLVING THE RELATIONSHIP PUZZLE
By Dr. Tom Merrill, Bobbie Sandoz Merrill
Cox News Service
Published on: 06/24/04
Playing fair
Question: My partner will do something mean, and when I respond with a similar behavior, he complains. How can we develop rules so that we treat each other fairly? --What's the Rule?
Bobbie says: When we fall in love, we put the best we have to offer on the table and hope it will be enough to win the heart of the other person. Because neither party holds anything back during this early stage of a relationship, concerns about fairness rarely surface.
Fairness issues often arise later because we fail to continue to be generous once we are confident the person we love also loves us. At this juncture, we naively start to hold back the very things that won someone's love because we worry that we might be giving more than we are getting. Instead of continuing to give all we've got to the relationship we now carefully watch the "scales of equal measure" to make sure we are getting our fair share.
We begin to think and say things like, "I'll rub your neck if you rub mine." Or, "I don't want to go to your movie because you didn't go to mine." We also withdraw listening when we don't feel listened to, yell if we get yelled at, and want to hurt if we have been hurt.
Holding back replaces our initial generosity and kindness with a sense of contraction, jealousy, competition and argument. It also takes us off the track of giving all we've got in the spirit of generating more in our lives. Choosing this route puts us on a stingy path filled with constrictions and squabbles over not getting enough.
To reverse this trend, which invariably leads to friction, we must remember that love is seeded in a generosity of kindness. Love will die if kindness is no longer active and ample.
I have found that the only way to get out of this "tit" for "tat" arrangement is to give as much as I can, regardless of how my partner is behaving. By doing this I take my own pettiness off the table and stick with being the person I want to be. If my partner continues on the "tit" for "tat" course, in time it will become apparent that I have picked the wrong person.
But if I am steady about being a kind and giving person, and he decides to do the same, then we both act with the generosity of kindness we used during our courtship and are blessed by an abundance of kindness in our home.
Tom says: Rules are great and necessary in games. But relationships are not a game. There is no such thing as a winner or loser in relationships that have gone beyond "just good enough" to something truly special. So, the first thing is to get out of the game business with your partner and into the relationship business.
You will still need to agree with your partner on how to conduct yourselves in the complexities of interacting, but the only rules would be your rules on how you behave and your partner's rules on how he or she behaves.
And that makes it very simple, because there is only one rule you need to follow, and that is, "be nice." Any other rules you feel are necessary will be to accommodate each other when you are not being nice.
What we have observed is that as a culture we set the bar too low on our expectations of and demands for ourselves in relationships while setting the bar higher for our partner. We excuse our "just good enough" behavior by saying, "well you did (fill in the blank )."
If you really stop to think about it, why would you do anything to or with the person you love that wasn't based on being nice? We have excuses for why we feel justified in using unkind behavior, but they are just that. Excuses. And those excuses are the genesis of relationships that are "just good enough to stay in," or "not bad enough to leave."
If you or your partner need help being nice, then get help. When both partners play by the "be nice" rule, the relationship will move from 'just good enough' to one that is as good as it can be, and you are on your way to a relationship of unlimited possibilities.
Tom Merrill, Ph.D., ABPP, and Bobbie Sandoz Merrill, MSW, are married and veterans of the relationship puzzle. Tom, a clinical psychologist, and Bobbie, a therapist and parenting specialist, bring their personal and clinical experiences to this column. They have co-authored 'Settle for More: Finding and Keeping the Relationship You Want...Guaranteed!' to be published in fall, 2004. They welcome reader responses and questions: Merrill@lava.net
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