Editor’s Note: Last week we featured relationship coach Blair Glaser’s post about moving away from relationships based on the “personal growth model” in favor of using leadership/business skills to focus a relationship on a common goal. Here is one of Blair’s follow-up articles illustrating how that worked for one real couple; future columns in this time slot will feature posts by other relationship and sexuality writers. — Amanda
Recently I’ve been talking about how real life couples are using leadership skills to make their relationships better. Here’s a story of Sheila and Tracy.*
Sheila and Tracy finally had a date night. When they came in to talk with me, they laughed about it: “We finally get a night off, and we spend the entire meal talking about our kids.”
And why not? The couple had a clear relationship vision and task: To raise the three children they adopted. At first, they thought they were just raising the two-year-old boy that Tracy met and fell in love with somewhat accidentally, when visiting a foster care institution in her job as an education consultant. Sheila and Tracy agreed to adopt thoughtfully. It all seemed manageable until they discovered two other children in foster care homes that were siblings of their son, and the couple decided to adopted them all.
As you can imagine, it was quite a game changer.
18 months into the venture the two women had managed to get their three kids into decent schools and all were adjusting pretty well to their new lives. The baby was put in day care so they could both return to work. They were satisfied with their efforts, but thoroughly exhausted.
They thought it might be the exhaustion that was causing them to bicker. They were worried. They didn’t want the kids to see them fighting or be exposed to more damaging behavior from adults.
But Sheila and Tracy found themselves arguing mercilessly about logistics. Who was doing more household tasks? How was the middle child going to get to piano on Wednesday? When would Tracy have time to go back to yoga? Who was going to figure out the logistics of getting them to a family reunion in August? The stress became overwhelming, and threatened to destroy them.