the 7 C’s of Successful Couple Relationships™©: mapping the territory

the 7 C’s of Successful Couple Relationships™©: mapping the territory

The 7 C’s of Successful Couple Relationships©™ is a skillset that stands alone and links together to provide couples in romantic relationships with a roadmap into the territory of loving relationships and into domains or areas in which couples can make changes or continue to thrive, seeking to answer questions such as, what makes a good relationship? or am I getting real love?

Each domain can be dipped into as each couple sees appropriate, to effectively check out the glue in the relationship or work at domains that are not so strong, to essentially refit or restrengthen the couple relationship.

Restrengthening is putting more glue in the relationship, refitting is getting into the relationship at a deeper level and often involves a certain amount of unpacking of both the couple relationship and the meaning and purpose of being in a couple relationship, seeking to answer questions such as why relate? Or what potentials can this relationship unlock in us?

My principal two therapeutic modalities are the psychodynamic and the systemic-often known as the “well and the web”- the well being the sum of our psychoemotional history that creates our personality and the web being the multiple social contexts we find ourselves in. This is shared most potently in a couple relationship.

I use these modalities to explore with couples their own couple fit, based on Henry Dicks work developed in his book Marital Tensions. Henry Dicks was working in the late 1960s, yet I think his insights and achievements translate well into the 21^st Century with its more digital demands, expectations and expressions.

Dicks suggested that we have 3 areas of couple fit: the socio-economic, the aspirational and the a dynamically unconscious fit, and that two out of three “fits” are required to make a working couple relationship.

I also use the systemic model to explore what John Burnham calls The Social GRRAACCESS, the multiple contexts we might find ourselves in and might influence us; these might be gender, geography, race, religion, age, ability, appearance, class, culture, education, ethnicity, sexuality and its orientation and spirituality. See http://www.aft.org.uk/SpringboardWebApp/userfiles/aft/file/Events/2014%20conference/JonesReeve2014.pdf

Dicks’ Couple Fit and The Social GRRAACCESS implicitly lie behind any inquiry into The 7 C’s of Successful Couple Relationships™©.

From a systemic perspective, these 7 C’s also work in other contexts, such as an agency or organisational context (though we’d best take the more overt sexual context out).

here is a brief introduction with some afterthoughts:

1. Commitment

• What is our relationship vision and intention?
• Why are we in this relationship?

2. Connection and creativity

• How many ways are there to connect? -physically and virtually
• Who is sensual, who is heady?
• What is our shared meaning, motivation and dreams: aspirations, values?
• What was in our unshared history that caused us to meet?
• What does sex mean to us?

3. Communication

• Grounded in active listening skills: what’s underneath what’s being said?
• We are never not-communicating
• Rapport and report styles of communication
• who is the thinker/feeler?

4. Care and compassion

• Self-care and other care
• Respect, admiration, appreciation; you matter to me
• How to grow compassion bit by bit
• Discovering our self-critic

5. Compromise

• Not always 50/50
• Putting yourself second
• Needing to be happy is more important than needing to get my/your own way

 Capacity

• How can I grow on my own and bring my growth into the relationship?
• How do we balance separateness and togetherness?
• How do I stand in my own sense of truth in a way that enables rather than disables the relationship?
• The relationship as a psychological and potential spiritual container for wellbeing and growth

7. Conflict resolution

• Who has different areas of power and control?
• Boundaries and the bottom line
• Constructive and destructive conflicts
• conflicting fairly
• making up

I think, as we enter more deeply into what could be called a new era of economic and political discourse, that the impact this will have, in terms of the expectations and stresses that are part of the territory in loving relationships, demands a clearer yet flexible map into which couples in turn can locate where they are and where they might travel to.

So, we can use the 7 C’s as a kind of fun SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) test on our relationships or we can take a bigger plunge into the developmental possibilities that our relationship can co-create.

And in turn, we can be getting real love.