Drs. Ellyn Bader and Peter Pearson on Building a Shared Vision for Your Relationship
Without a clear reason behind the partnership, without some real enthusiasm for what a couple is building and why, people tend to sink under the sheer weight of keeping a household running. That weight grows heavy fast once children arrive. Someone cooks, someone shops, someone does the laundry, someone drives the kids around, someone sits with them over homework. The list keeps going. None of it disappears on its own.
Peter joked that this is the part Prince Charming and Cinderella never had to think about. Ellyn agreed. The storybook version skips right past it.
So one of the things they do at the Couples Institute is sit down with partners and ask about vision. Before touching any of the problems, they ask what relationship the two people actually want to build together. Ellyn encourages couples to slow down and give that question real time at the start. The Couples Institute blog has a few pieces on setting and creating a vision with your partner, along with questions couples can work through and a way to begin picturing what they want to make together.
When a couple first walks in, Ellyn often opens with a version of that question: what kind of relationship do you two want to co-create, and what does it look like? She has each person write out their own answer separately, to see what surfaces for each of them. Then comes a question she considers more important: why does that kind of relationship matter to you? The why is where values start showing up, along with interests, priorities, worries, and hopes. That is the engine that turns a wished-for relationship into a real one. She asks it because, as the saying goes, when we lose our why, we lose our way. Staying aware of why you are together, and what you want to build, keeps a couple oriented.
Her third question follows from the first two: what do you think will be asked of each of you, individually, to bring that relationship about? She is firm about the framing. Don't list what your partner needs to do. That part is easy and a little too comfortable. Look at what you yourself will have to bring.
Erik noted how much personal responsibility runs through all of this. He had heard others make a similar point, that it helps when each person focuses on what they can contribute rather than what they expect to receive, moving away from a more fused way of relating.