Introduction

Your relationship deserves a chance to grow and enhance your happiness and satisfaction. However, becoming partners in a relationship can be a real challenge.

Most of the forces that surround you conspire against creating a truly co-creative partnership relationship with your chosen life partner. You are taught to compete and give in, to be either one up or one down. You may never have imagined doing things differently and have very little idea of what a different kind of relationship even looks like.

What you do know is that you want something different!

When my husband and I married in 1960 (yes, that’s a long time ago) we couldn’t even conceive of anything except a traditional marriage. Gradually, while experimenting and practicing our own partnership relationship as psychotherapists, marriage counselors and teachers, we learned.

We learned that relationships either grow or stagnate. And we learned that, like us, our clients have many misconceptions about how relationships really work. These tips are many of the things I found myself saying over and over again to my clients in order to counter those destructive beliefs and help them evolve their own relationships.

These tips come from that learning, and from a practice that spans over four decades. They have been used by thousands of people to move toward true partnership relationships. Use them any way you like – and if you want to know more about how this project developed, read my story in the acknowledgment section at the end of this book.