Self-reflection is a key step to fixing relationships

I was certain that it took one person to ruin a relationship and that it takes two committed people to make it work. Then I saw Harville Hendrix say the opposite in the attached link: www.harvillehendrix.com/watch.html.

What's your take? It seems to me that if one person walks away or refuses to be committed/faithful to the relationship, then it's failed and therefore, conversely, it takes two to make it work. What do you think?

-- T.F., Detroit

Ah, Harville Hendrix! He ranks at the top of my list of people who have made the most significant contributions to the work of great relationships and thriving marriages. His book "Getting the Love You Want," originally published in 1988, has deservedly sold millions of copies. He recently published a new and revised version of the book, and I recommend it highly to this day.

The driving force of his message to couples is the necessary work of "family-of-origin" issues. Hendrix correctly observes that couplehood must inevitably provoke in individuals the missing pieces and psychic injuries that all of us sustain in our upbringing. Our caretakers (parents) are imperfect. All of us reach adulthood bearing both the gifts and the wounds of childhood. The intimacy of couplehood shines a bright light on the parts of our selfhood as yet unfinished. Couplehood brings to fore the dramas of injustice, insecurity, ego and fears yet unresolved from our past.

Intimate couplehood is designed to do this. This provocation is actually built-in to marriage. It's why, I think, David Shnarch, another of my heroes in the work of great relationships, calls marriage "a people growing machine." It's a good thing. Though, sometimes a decidedly uncomfortable thing.

Hendrix's view is why I spend so much time and energy encouraging people to stay in stressed or conflicted marriages, or marriages in outright crisis. The desire to flee is, in most cases, a "bill of goods" we have sold ourselves. It feels like we have married the wrong person. It feels like we're no longer "in love." But it's much more likely that the discomfort has more to do with the yearning of our souls to grow and develop. I'm saying that, most of the time, the discomfort is not evidence that your marriage isn't working but precisely that it is working. The marriage is confronting you with the work of selfhood.

Selfhood is sometimes damn hard work.

Hendrix's view explains why divorce and remarriage so frequently do not successfully resolve the question of happiness and creative living. Meaning, you can run but you can't hide. Flee the marriage, but it's you with whom you will flee. All roads lead to Rome. It is impossible to simultaneously embrace intimacy and ignore the work of our own needed development. It's both. Or neither.

Now, to your question ...

I watched the video at the link you sent me. Watch it again. Hendrix is not disagreeing with you. Indeed, it does take two committed people to make a relationship work. And, equally, if there is a pervasive imbalance in that commitment, the relationship will and must eventually founder. But, in the video clip, Hendrix is not talking about one committed spouse and an uncommitted partner. He is discussing a marriage wherein one spouse is awakened to the work of change and growth in the relationship and the other is still stuck in resistance or even denial.

Let me say what Hendrix is saying in my own words:

Sometimes the best and most strategic move we can make in service to the marriage is to stop confronting our partner and single-mindedly confront ourselves! We decide what kind of mate we most want to be, the kind of mate we would most respect ourselves for being. We decide, in self-respect, what we can negotiate and what we will never negotiate. And we live that out with constancy. We make changes to reflect it. We live and relate differently.

Hendrix is suggesting, and I agree, that this unilateral move often creates a space in which the resistant partner might respond. If nothing else, the resistant partner might become curious about the changes in us, and move closer.

Worst case, if giving our all to becoming the partner we most respect still does not succeed in wooing our mates to come to the table and make changes, then at least we might have clarity about what is our work and what belongs to our mate. There is a scenario, then, when there will be nothing left in your bag of tricks but an ultimatum.

And then, yes, we might have to leave.

Steven Kalas is a behavioral health consultant and counselor at Las Vegas Psychiatry and the author of "Human Matters: Wise and Witty Counsel on Relationships, Parenting, Grief and Doing the Right Thing" (Stephens Press). His columns also appear on Sundays in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Contact him at 227-4165 or skalas@reviewjournal.com.