Good Agreements Build Relationship Stability
Stable co-regulatory relationships expand our bandwidth for facing life. AND: Most of us want long-term romantic partnerships, while actually experiencing romance as a revolving door of short-term partnerships.
Master couples therapist and author Stan Tatkin* proposes building good contracts into partnerships for more relational stability. I agree and I know that co-regulation is an excellent practice ground for embodied connection and contracting for mutual support.
Relational contracting is not a new idea – for eons, people have had very specific and explicit expectations for their partnerships/marriages. (Note: these agreements have often been oppressive and transactional. For example, men and women have been required to marry a partner of the right class and faith, and produce heirs.)
Currently, in Western secular culture, we tend to prioritize feeling love, attraction, attachment, and emotion when it comes to romantic partnerships. However, our high romantic expectations of modern secular relationships go largely unspoken. And these relationships are often unstable. What if we honor ourselves and our partners with more shared understanding of what we need to receive and how we can and will show up for each other? What if we build skills for agreements and contracting?
I’m looking more closely at this now because Stan, who is a teacher of mine, raised this topic recently at a summit and I found it very helpful to think about how to stabilize my own romantic relationship in ways that are important to me.
What is important to you will vary, based on your nervous system and your values. I am not suggesting what your agreements should be, or that they should eclipse romantic connection. I am suggesting that explicit contracts increase stability. This is especially important to me in areas of life that are fundamental to my emotional health and neurological regulation.
I want to know what I can count on from my partnership. And I want to write it down so I can refer back to it and discuss and negotiate about it. I want to know I can speak up for myself and expect repair or change when the contract has been broken. I want to know what I can expect of you. I want to know what is expected of me and what I will need to do to keep myself available and able to fulfill my side of the contract.
Contracting about money and time, work and ownership is very different from making and keeping agreements about how we handle emotions, our sense of safety, and the sensitivities of our nervous systems. BCR practice offers ongoing opportunities for speaking up about our nervous systems and asking for what we need to feel safe, connected, and relaxed.
For me, stability comes from having agreements about what is important to me, such as:
- How we handle money
- How we handle other sexual partners and attractions
- How we handle thirds (Thirds are anything that has a strong pull on either person, like relatives, children, pets, work, addictions, hobbies, volunteer work, medical issues…)
- How we want to handle our own and each other’s dysregulation and emotional distress
- How we expect each other to respond to each other’s medical issues
- Articulating our experience of sexuality and emotional intimacy
- Sharing power around scheduling and most decision-making
- Communication patterns
I would love to hear your thoughts on all this. What have you learned about coregulation and contracting in your love life?
I believe we can all benefit from contracting and co-regulation in our close friendships as well as in our romantic lives. I think explicit agreements about how we handle our own and each other’s needs for emotional regulation are particularly important in these uncertain times. Let’s bring more stability to our friendships and community relationships, as well as our romantic relationships.
*About Dr. Tatkin: Author, teacher, couples therapist and founder of PACT: A Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy. LINK to Stan’s site.