DEPARTMENT:

Title: Settle for More: You Can Have the Relationship You Always Wanted...Guaranteed!

Authors: Tom Merrill and Bobbie Sandoz-Merrill

Publisher: Select Books, New York, 2005

Price: $21.95

Love, marriage, divorce: many of us, even most, have been there, done that. It’s a safe bet you have too. But if not, stick around. The stats are devastating and so familiar the Merrills (authors of this book and GH’s relationship column) have devised a cute mnemonic—oots and toots. Oots for One Out Of Two first marriages fail, Toots for Two Out Of Three second marriages also bite the dust. And third marriages? Eighty percent don’t go the distance.

So what is to be done? On the positive side, ‘Studies have shown that a supportive loving partnership is the thing people most value and want in their lives.’ The good will exists but few of us know how to get there. Despite our best efforts and intentions we always seem to find ourselves back in the same dreary place.

The Merrills’ reply, in one of their many sly jokes, is that we literally ‘cannot get there from here.’ What they mean is that conventional ways of responding when the string of love finds itself untuned are calculated to sour the music even further. We criticize. We blame. We self-justify. And then we do it all again at a higher pitch.

The writers sum up the ironies by quoting the old saw, ‘If what you are doing is not working, do more of it.’ Or (a variation): ‘When you’ve dug yourself into a hole, dig harder.’

Among the book’s hardest passages to read—hard because so uncomfortably true—is what the authors call a ‘Stick List,’ a long catalog of the stupidly destructive behaviors people resort to when they’re not getting what they want emotionally.

The word ‘sticks’ is used in its physical sense: implements to beat our partners with. In this context they include such things as, ‘Approach disagreements with the assumption that you are the only one who sees or remembers things correctly’ and ‘Obsessively revisit and express your anger about old topics previously discussed and accepted by both of you as having been resolved.’ There are many more—the list stretches over several pages. Each needs to be weighed and honestly confronted.

Nor do marriage/couples counselors—and the Merrills obviously include their old selves—help much. The trouble is, too often sessions turn into contests about who’s right, who’s wrong, with the counselor as a variety of cop. To misquote Clausewitz, counseling becomes a continuation of marital warfare by other means. As a result, ‘couples’ counseling... has not had much impact on the divorce rate or our failure to achieve happy primary partnerships.’

There has to be a better way, and Settle For More is the writers’ answer. What makes it bracing is that they gained their knowledge the old way: they earned it. The book’s centerpiece is the Merrills’ own happy marriage (after several failed earlier attempts on both sides), and if there is a touch of self-congratulatory pride in the way they present themselves, it’s easy to forgive them. They preach what they practice.

The first step is to give up ‘stick behaviors’ (emotionally beating our partner into submission) and replacing it with a new and better model, capitalized: the Model. Graphically presented, it’s a bubble floating above a pile of sticks, supported by the two partners. The bubble is labeled The Ideal Relationship and inside it is a smaller circle labeled Honoring. We rise above the sticks rather than attempting to transform them.

What goes into Honoring may vary from couple to couple, though it’s likely that many of the same elements will always be present. They include such things as kindness, integrity, sexuality, understanding and honesty. Presented in this way, it becomes clear that, as Bobbie writes (the book interestingly includes both authors’ individual voices and a third ‘united’ style)
‘We couldn’t go back and forth between the stick pile and this bubble that represented the kind of relationship we said we wanted and still have that relationship. If we truly wanted the open, loving, honoring, and seamlessly honest relationship we were jointly claiming to want, all—not some or most—but all of our behaviors would need to be consistent with what we had declared we want.’

The Bubble Model is a good one, but the image that really takes over the second part of the book is that of the Apple Bowl. Each apple, appropriately labeled, represents one of the positive qualities the partners bring to their marriage. The point is that, when things go wrong it’s relatively easy to identify which of the apples has been removed or lost. And can thus be constructively restored.
‘As long as we keep all our apples in the bowl, our relationship remains outrageous, unlimited, and expanding. It’s that simple.’
Of course, it’s not always that simple. If it were, we’d all be happily married forever after. So the Merrills provide a strategy for getting there from here, because once you abandon your Stick Behaviors the journey can in fact be made. The key is to Be rather than Do.

Being your perfect relationship means first visualizing it and then creating the necessary conditions to achieve it. In other words, you don’t initially select a partner and then try to transform him/her. You start by defining your own apples, the ones you intend to harvest from the Orchard of Love. Let’s take a big one: sex. ‘While there is certainly an overlap,’ the authors perceptively observe, ‘sex is something you do or have while sexual is something you are...or are not...it is the being part of the equation.’ They add: ‘Be clear that sex is not intimacy. It can be intimate, but it is by no means automatic. Just because we know what to do with our anatomy does not mean we know how to be sexual.’

At the book’s center is the following key sentence: ‘The point is, you create the relationship you want.’

Naturally, once in a relationship, there are still things we need to do—behaviors that must be adopted or modified or eliminated. The final 50 or 60 pages of this book detail them, and they include such useful suggestions as sitting side-by-side (rather than oppositionally confronting one another) when dealing with an issue that has come up. Others include, as Stephen Covey might say, first seeking to Understand rather than to be Understood. What you’re after is writing together ‘the Third Story,’ that is, not the victory or defeat of one side but a united way forward with both partners as ‘Understanders.’ The process includes ‘learning to listen with a gentle ear from a place of softness in your heart.’ Feelings of real connection tend to follow naturally.

There is much wisdom in this book. Its concrete, practical suggestions, offered in the service of an inspiring ideal, make it a great read all couples can benefit from. There are thousands of self-help relationship books out there, but Settle for More is among the very best.

back to top

© Copyright Generations Hawaii. Designed by Trade Publishing