Magnetic Partners: Discover How the Hidden Conflict That Once Attracted You to Each Other Is Now Driving You Apart

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THE MAGNETIC POWER OF MASTER CONFLICTS

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about relationships in my thirty years of doing couples therapy, it’s that they’re complex. We’d all like to think that we fall in love, choose a life partner, and then the rest is as effortless as riding a bike. But the truth is that relationships require a constant job of adapting, compromising, and keeping pace with our partners so that we avoid growing apart—and that is the easiest piece of the puzzle. The hardest is usually beyond our level of consciousness: I’m talking about knowing ourselves. We must start out with personal insight and an understanding of how we were influenced by our pasts. What’s driving us to do the things we do? What’s compelling us to feel the way we feel? And, as I’ll encourage you to explore as the special focus of this book, what inner conflicts are a constant struggle for you?

Some people may be in relationships that are all smooth sailing. Maybe the stars are aligned in their favor, and these couples have somehow managed to control their conflicts. It could also be true, however, that they’ve decided to settle, not wanting to rock the boat because they don’t believe that a better deal awaits them. And, of course, there are those who are afraid to change. After all, change is hard, and for most of us, relationships are tough to manage. But I don’t say this with pessimism. I’m actually a confirmed optimist, and a big believer in relationships. I’m stressing the difficulty involved because in my practice I’ve seen too many couples give up too easily on their relationships. I’ll never forget one newlywed who decided to divorce her husband after six months because she felt that a “normal marriage should be easy.” Again, not true. To achieve relationship success, you’ve got to be patient, be committed, and work hard. In his book Way of the Peaceful Warrior, Dan Millman wrote: “Stress happens when the mind resists what is.” In Magnetic Partners, we will face reality together.

Through the course of this book, I will share with you my strongest conviction as a couples therapist: an underlying, largely unconscious conflict is responsible for most of the truly intractable relationship problems I’ve helped couples through. Affairs, chronic fighting, troubled sex lives, and most dating dilemmas, I have found, very often can be traced to what I have come to call a “master conflict,” a powerful conflict that largely controls your relationship. What’s more, this same master conflict has very often also acted as a powerful bonding force in the relationship. The great irony about master conflicts is that they are often the underlying force of attraction that brought a couple together with an almost magnetic power, and yet, just as often, the same force is pushing a couple apart.

What is a master conflict? Think of it as an unconscious struggle within yourself—like having two politicians inside you, arguing about some issue, and you just can’t make up your mind as to whom you should believe. The especially tricky thing about this struggle is that one politician is not necessarily right and the other wrong. In this struggle, neither side is necessarily better than the other. But even in those situations when one side does seem to be the more appropriate choice, those two politicians in your head are both scoring points, enough to confuse you—blurring the difference between right and wrong and making it even more difficult for you to make a decision. For example, you may be conflicted about being either powerful or passive in your relationship: being in charge is gratifying but too much work; being passive leaves you with little responsibility but too little control. Or you might be conflicted about meeting your needs: taking care of yourself may feel good but evoke guilt; taking care of your partner may be the right thing to do but may also lead to too much responsibility.

Trying to reach a compromise with your master conflict is usually no easy task. Why? Because compromise means change, and change usually brings with it the anxiety of taking on the unknown and the depression that comes with a loss of the way things were. But there is good news: these feeling-states are usually temporary, so if we can tolerate them, they may lead us to a much better life, one that we never could have imagined. What I’m saying is that underlying fear—the fear of anxiety and depression—makes it difficult for us to choose one side over the other or to strike some sort of compromise between the two sides. Shifting back and forth helps us to avoid the pain that might come from making a choice. Why take charge in your relationship if you fear having too much responsibility? Why be passive if you fear being controlled? Master conflicts can cause us pain, but to avoid discomfort we prefer not to challenge them; we prefer to “stay the same without the pain,” and who can blame us? We may seek help to stop the suffering but not to change the internal master conflict. I’ll show you what I mean.

Take the case of Seth, who at age fifty-five was still a bachelor, though in a painful, dead-end relationship. He couldn’t move on because a master conflict had a tight grip on him; he was torn by the inability to decide whether to commit to a lasting relationship or to remain free of the responsibilities that such a relationship requires.

He slowly shuffled into my office one day and began to tell me his story in a soft, monotone voice. He was dating Denise, thirty-nine, a tall, lanky graphic artist whom he wanted to marry. But Denise gave Seth numerous signs that she wasn’t genuinely interested in him—canceling dates at the last minute and acting preoccupied when they were together. Most of us have been subjected to indifference at least once in our dating careers; it’s no fun at all. It’s also not at all hard to pick up on. Seth’s friends could clearly see the truth; they had told him that they felt Denise wasn’t the least bit interested in him, pointing out that she saw him only when she had nothing else to do and that she refused to have sex with him. But Seth had brushed off their comments. Then one night his cousin Barb joined the happy couple for dinner, and afterward she told Seth: “There’s no way that girl likes you. My God … she seemed more interested in watching the restaurant television than hanging out with you. Women know women … you dip! Forget about her.” That hit Seth hard, and shortly after this he came to see me.

As I talked with Seth, I quickly discovered that he wasn’t at all clueless about how Denise was treating him. The real problem was that her indifference actually suited one side of his master conflict just fine. He was under the sway of the commitment vs. freedom conflict, which led him to commit to distant and “unavailable” women and to reject other, more available, female partners, thereby guaranteeing his freedom. It was his unconscious way of not having to choose between commitment and freedom.

When I pointed his conflict out to him, he resisted the notion. “Listen, I want to be married,” he said to me, “I’d like nothing better. I’d love to marry Denise.” But, like most people who are in the grip of a strong conflict, Seth blamed his partner. “Denise keeps her distance: I just can’t pin her down,” he said. Okay, but even when I advised him of his futile situation, he refused to move on. His excuse: “I’ll never find another woman my age as hot as...