If your marriage isn’t collaborative, you’re guaranteed persistent conflict …

Imagine a married couple who consistently builds conflict into their marriage. That couple is supplying their relationship with all the building blocks for failure … a relationship can only tolerate so much conflict before people want nothing more than to bail out.

If you’re not building a collaborative marriage, you’re likely building a marriage based on compromise; and if you’re doing that, you’re guaranteed persistent conflict in your relationship.

COMPROMISE V. COLLABORATION
You’ve probably heard from pulpits and have been taught that compromise is essential to a good relationship. That’s bad philosophy, and bad theology! When you compromise, you’re negotiating against someone to get something you want that they don’t. That’s not a good framework for a marriage, especially because we tend to feel deeper, and remember longer, the things we have to give up when we don’t want to. The result is compromise often sows resentment into a relationship; and if you’re consistently having to compromise, you’re persistently sowing the seeds of resentment and conflict into your relationship.

That’s why healthy marriages aren’t built around compromise; instead, the couple focuses on collaborating with each other to build something that couldn’t exist without both partners contributing to it. In other words, when couples collaborate, they’re purposely pulling in the same direction with each other. Collaboration is the key to this question pondered by Amos …

“Can two people walk together without agreeing on the direction?” – Amos 3:3.

No, they cannot. Compromise is not agreeing on a mutual direction, it’s negotiating to get your partner to give up something so you can gain something. Collaboration is the act of agreeing on a direction and moving toward it together.

7 DIMENSIONS OF A COLLABORATIVE MARRIAGE
As a certified instructor for the nationally-acclaimed, award-winning Couple Communication I program, we teach couples this: In marriage, collaboration involves a strong man and a strong woman — two strong individuals — who can bridge to each other, committed to building a mutually satisfying and fulfilling relationship, across a lifetime together.

These 7 relationship dynamics go into developing and sustaining a collaborative marriage:

Committing to the partnership. Commitment is what brings husband and wife together to pull in the same direction.

Caring actively for self, other, and us. A compromise-mentality focuses only on caring for self. But a marriage isn’t about focusing only on the other person, either. It’s caring well for yourself, for your spouse, and for the “us” you’re building with God’s help.

Considering life’s concerns and opportunities. Life has its opportunities, as well as its challenges. Facing them together and collaborating through them builds a mutually satisfying relationship.

Communicating with skill to connect. What more than 700,000 couples have learned through the Couple Communication I training is that developing highly effective communication skills are key to successfully collaborating with your partner. Without honing these skills, you talk “at” each other from a demand and compromise mentality more than you’ll try to walk together in agreement.

Cooperating to resolve issues. Couples who have participated in a Couple Communication I workshop have learned how to harness specific communication skills and use them in a specific process for making decisions and resolving conflict. There’s a LOT of nonsenical teaching that at this point, couples just need to know how to “fight fair” and “fight well” – nonsense! By harnessing key communication skills to a particular process, you can avoid fighting by using your communication skills to collaborate on resolving conflicts or for making decisions together.

Celebrating your life together. Collaboration and cooperation isn’t just for working through life’s opportunities and challenges, but also for enjoying your relationship and blessings of life together.

Contributing to life around you. You’re sharing the planet with 7 billion other people – one of the greatest opportunities and blessings you have is learning how, together, to contribute to others beyond yourselves.

CONCLUSION
Are you more consistently sowing the seed of conflict into your marriage, or have you learned how to walk together in agreement by living out a collaborative marriage? Reaping the results of conflict WILL harm (and potentially ruin) your marriage; but reaping the results of collaboration is the means for enjoying a mutually satisfying, life-long relationship.

Scotty