The Policy of Joint Agreement is nothing more than a reminder to be thoughtful. Almost everything one spouse does in some way affects the other spouse. If you have habits that hurt each other, those habits can become excruciatingly painful. You can become your spouse's greatest source of unhappiness unless you deliberately protect your spouse from your thoughtless behavior. So it makes sense to ask, How do you feel about what I do?
If something you want to do is not agreeable to your spouse, the Policy of Joint Agreement offers your spouse protection. Following the Policy means that if something you want to do very much would hurt your spouse, you won't do it.
The Policy of Joint Agreement encourages couples to consider each other's happiness as important as their own. When one spouse considers his or her own interests so important that he or she tramples over the interests of the other, it's a formula for marital disaster, and yet some of the most well-intentioned couples do it regularly. It's difficult to be thoughtful when it means we won't get what we want.
This Policy provides protection from such self-centeredness. It forces a couple to take each other's feelings into account with every decision and every behavior. By following the Policy, a couple makes all of their decisions together, and they avoid final choices until there is an enthusiastic agreement. In this way they build a partnership that will last for life.
The Policy of Joint Agreement Creates a Compatible Lifestyle
Building a marital relationship is like building a house - brick by brick. Each brick is a choice you make about the way you live together. If you follow the Policy of Joint Agreement and make choices that are mutually agreeable, your house will be strong and beautiful. But if some bricks are made by only one of you, those weak bricks will make your whole house an uncomfortable place to live.
When couples follow the Policy of Joint Agreement, they gradually throw out all their thoughtless habits and activities and replace them with habits and activities that take each other's feelings into account. That's what compatibility is all about - building a way of life that is comfortable for both spouses. When a couple create a lifestyle that they each enjoy and appreciate, they build compatibility into their marriage.
Compatibility means that you live in harmony with each other. It means enjoying the lifestyle you created because it is what both of you want and need. Each brick that goes into your house is there because you are both comfortable with it.
Incompatibility, on the other hand, is created when the Policy of Joint Agreement is not followed - when one spouse adds bricks that may be in his or her own best interest but are not in the other's best interest. Incompatibility, therefore, is simply the accumulation of thoughtless habits and activities. The more of them a couple try to tolerate, the more incompatible they become. How To Rebuild Trust After An Affair.
Jon and Sue had failed to take each other's feelings into account when making daily decisions. They had built their marriage with independent decisions that created independent lifestyles. Their independence led to an environment that made Sue's affair possible - bricks that threatened to destroy their house.
You Can Be the Greatest Cause of Your Spouse's Unhappiness
The skill that Jon and Sue developed as negotiators helped make their marriage safe. They learned how to avoid being the cause of each other's unhappiness. Granted, they needed to do more than make each other safe, but that first objective was crucial to achieving any of the other objectives. Without safety, any effort to find marital fulfillment is wasted. You cannot expect to meet your spouse's emotional needs until you have first learned to protect him or her from your selfish instincts. You can't expect to accumulate love units until you learn to avoid withdrawing them. If you don't develop skills of protection, you cannot expect your spouse to love you,
If you have difficulty controlling your Love Busters - angry outbursts, disrespectful judgments, or selfish demands - I suggest a book that will guide you toward a safer marriage. It is Love Busters: Overcoming Habits That Destroy Romantic Love. This book helps to expose the destructiveness of angry outbursts, disrespectful judgments, and selfish demands. Then it shows you how to overcome them so that Love Busters no longer ruin the safety of your marriage.
If you need help learning how to negotiate, I recommend Give & Take: The Secret to Marital Compatibility. This book explains why negotiation in marriage is so important, and how you can learn to apply the Policy of Joint Agreement to each decision you make in your marriage to create a loving and compatible relationship.
By resolving their conflicts with mutual protection in mind, Sue and Jon were already feeling closer to each other. They had created a plan regarding Jon's traveling that encouraged both of them and they were learning how to negotiate on the run. As a result they felt protected and safe. That, in turn, gave them the courage to become more vulnerable to each other and allow their emotional needs to be met.
MARITAL RECOVERY GUIDED BY THE RULE OF CARE
The Rule of Protection guided Sue and Jon away from their instinct to hurt each other at a time when they were very upset. If they had not made an effort to avoid it, they would have both blamed each other for the mess they were in. Any hope for a recovery would have been blown away by their thoughtlessness. How To Rebuild Trust After An Affair
But Sue and Jon committed themselves to the Rule of Protection. They avoided angry outbursts, disrespectful judgments, and selfish demands, and they followed the Policy of Joint Agreement so that they would avoid making thoughtless decisions.
That's why a couple recovering from the ravages of an affair must first focus their attention on protection. Their relationship is usually so fragile that they must be careful not to make matters worse by hurting each other.
But thoughtlessness isn't really what got Sue and Jon into trouble in the first place. It was the failure to meet important emotional needs. More to the point, it was Jon's failure to meet Sue's important emotional needs that was the core of their problem. Now they were ready to solve the problem - they were ready to learn about the second rule to guide marital recovery, the Rule of Care: Meet your spouse's most important emotional needs.
Care is a word with many meanings in our language. When we say we care, it can mean that we are concerned about someone and hope that person will be happy in life. It can also mean that we have strong emotional feelings for the person.
But I use the word care to mean what we do for each other, not how we feel. Care, to me, is meeting important emotional needs. When, during their wedding ceremony, Jon promised that he would care for Sue, he promised to meet her most important emotional needs. But his career got in the way. As his work consumed an increasing amount of his time and energy, he no longer provided the kind of care for Sue that she needed the most - he failed to meet some of her most important emotional needs.
Quite innocently Jon had failed to meet Sue's need for conversation. Jon was away from home so much of the time that Sue had developed interests that were completely independent of Jon. This made what brief conversations they had superficial because they had grown apart from each other and had few experiences in common.
Jon also failed to meet Sue's need for admiration. Before her affair, he had little idea of how she spent her time. He didn't know about the success she was having with the children she taught at school. He didn't know about her recommendations that had been approved by the Lake Restoration Committee. He was unable to admire Sue's achievements as he had in the past and support her in her efforts. He just didn't know about them. He had lost his ability to be her best friend, the one who would be there when she needed him the most, the one to whom she could talk about the significant events of her life. And in Jon's absence, Greg stepped in.
Infidelity and multiple marriages represent ways to adjust to the failure to have emotional needs met in marriage. Over a period of time, as needs go unmet and a relationship falls apart, a new relationship may be created with another individual who satisfies the unmet needs. But learning to meet each other's emotional needs in marriage is far less complicated than going through the agonizing ritual of affairs and divorce. And learning to meet emotional needs is the solution to marital problems, while affairs and divorce make a solution impossible.
Jon and Sue had no difficulty understanding the importance of the Rule of Care. They both saw how Jon's career had stunted the growth of their relationship and had almost killed it. They were ready to solve the problem that had almost ended their marriage. They were ready to follow the Rule of Care. I presented the Rule of Care to Sue and Jon in two parts. The first part of the rule is knowing which emotional needs should be met. The second part of the rule is becoming an expert at meeting those needs. Next post, I'll go into details. Before that, you can check out How To Rebuild Trust After An Affair.
