The Self-Transforming Couple

Differentiation occurs by maintaining yourself in the presence of important persons, not by getting away from them. The difference between running away and walking away after you’re “unhooked” is a critical distinction.

(Passionate Marriage pg 64)

Differentiation is the ability to maintain your sense of self when you are emotionally and/or physically close to others— especially as they become increasingly important to you.

Differentiation permits you to maintain your own course when lovers, friends, and family pressure you to agree and con-form. Well-differentiated people can agree without fe

Differentiation is the ability to stay in connection without being consumed by the other person.

The intimacy in a self-transforming marriage

The image of an adult relationship that is genuinely intimate- sex-ually, but in every other respect as well-brings to light again the theme of reciprocity first seen in the interpersonal balance. Traveling once more over familiar psychological terrain, the evolution of mean-ing, in the interindividual ba

The possibility of a self-transforming couple

Among those supports least studied and of which we are most in need of increased understanding are those supports which assist individuals and couples to evolve not only to that place where each can guarantee to the other his or her distinct identity, but which allow persons to share their identities as

Marriage between two institutional partners

In contrast to the prior alliance, the partners might be expected to share a common meaning for the marriage. Each partner's personal psychological autonomy and distinctness is con-firmed, supported, celebrated; and at the same time each party protects the other against the overrunning of these boundaries.

The hidden risks of a Stage 4-Stage 3 (traditionally male-female) couple:

The institutional partner, that one can be so distinct as to be completely and irremediably alone; for the interpersonal partner, that one can be so close as to lose oneself unrecoverably-are held at bay by the assurance of the continued countervailing influence from the partn

The culture which holds, recognizes, and remembers the institutional balance is the culture of ideology. It takes its most obvious form in the domain of work but can (and usually does) operate just as powerfully in the construction of loving relations which get organized around the exercises and preservation of one or both parties' self-contained i