By Jathan Janove (Guest Contributor)–
(Editor’s note: Although based on a true story, this story has been fictionalized to preserve privacy and confidentiality.)
Love Thwarted
“Not again!” I said.
“I’m afraid so,” my friend Mary replied.
“I thought this time you were sure you’d found ‘Mr. Right.’”
“I thought so too,” she said. “And for a while he was. But about six months ago, Mr. Right changed into “Mr. Not Right.” Eventually, he became “Mr. Definitely Wrong!”
Knowing that Mary, a highly successful business woman, had been down this road several times before, I thought to myself, “I wonder if the coaching methods I use with corporate executives might help Mary. Although it’s in the business world, it does involve making decisions about relationships, including whether to invest in them or walk away from them.”
“Do you want to try an experiment?”, I asked Mary.
“What?”
“As a corporate coach, there’s stuff I do to help executives make better decisions. I have no idea if it will help you find a life-mate but I’m willing to try if you are.”
“Sure,” Mary said. “With my track record, what have I got to lose?”
Using executive coaching to help someone find a life-mate
As with corporate executives, I conducted a 360° assessment focused on Mary’s strengths, areas needing improvement and blindspots (things she does that are perceived in ways she doesn’t realize.) This time, instead of interviewing co-workers and professional colleagues, I interviewed Mary’s friends and family members. I even interviewed a couple of her ex’s!
From this assessment, here’s what I learned about Mary:
Strengths: Integrity, compassion, self-confidence, sense of humor, open-mindedness and, as one person put it, “an insatiable appetite for personal growth, adventure, trying new things and meeting new people.”
Improvement Areas/Blindspots: Can be overbearing, over-controlling and intimidating; can be perceived as full of herself; needs to be more patient and accepting of the fact that no life-mate is going to be perfect.
We then got specific about a goal. In Mary’s words: “I will be bonded to my life-mate by December 31, 2018.” (This was early in the year.) We worked out a checklist to guide Mary’s actions. It listed specific behaviors Mary would commit to doing and avoid doing.
After Mary began dating Mark, she checked off the item that said, “As soon as I think someone has potential as a life-mate, I’ll tell him my goal.”
Early in their relationship, while sitting at a coffee shop, Mary said “Mark, there’s something I’d like to share with you.”
“What?” Mark asked.
“It’s February 12th and I have a goal to achieve by December 31st.”
“What’s the goal?”
Mary took a few deep breaths and said, “By December 31st of this year, I want to find my mate for life.”
Half-expecting him to leap from his chair and run screaming from the coffee shop, Mary was happily surprised at Mark’s reaction. “I guess you’re telling me this because you think I’ve got potential.”
With a nervous gulp, Mary said, “yes.”
“Well,” Mark said. “It seems like a reasonable goal. What’s next?”
With another nervous gulp, Mary said, “I’m working with a coach.”
“A what?”
“A coach. Someone to help me achieve this goal.”
Mary explained the process and the assessment work that had been done.
“He interviewed your ex’s?! You’re kidding, right? Whoa!”
“Is he going to want to interview my ex’s?!”
“Not if you or they don’t want him to. Jathan’s just exploring ways to identify strengths, improvement areas and blindspots.”
“I don’t know about this,” Mark said. “It seems pretty intense. But I’m willing to meet the guy and then we’ll see.”
Without Mary being present, Mark and I met. At first, Mark looked at me like I was a creature from another planet. After we started talking, he began to relax, especially after I emphasized that interviewing ex’s was entirely optional.
Mark decided he was game. Mark and Mary jointly adopted this goal: “By December 31, we will decide whether or not to be life-mates.” They also agreed that should one or both of them say “no” to the life-mate question, “We will commit to being friends thereafter and to helping each other find their life-mate.”
My 360° assessment of Mark revealed the following:
Strengths: Sense of adventure; ability to have fun; loving, kind, and generous nature; financial stability; honest; seeks out positive people and places; nurtures relationships.
Improvement Areas/Blindspots: Needs to set boundaries with others; don’t compromise long-term goals and aspirations in favor of short-term satisfaction or to avoid short-term discomfort; in relationships, can be over-controlling and can come off as self-indulgent or self-centered.
We then modified the checklist to fit both assessments. From then on, the checklist governed their interactions as they explored the potential for a lifetime fit.
Success!
Nothing happened quickly and there were many ups and downs. However, at 11:10 pm on December 31, 2018, I got an email from Mary. “We’re going for it!” the message said. “Life-mates!”
Mary and Mark share their experience
About a year later, as they approached their wedding date, Mark, Mary and I got together to do a debrief. Here’s what they had to say.
According to Mark, “we read the checklist to each other on a daily basis.” Checklist items included how they needed to interact with each other, such as:
- Act at all times with integrity, candor and transparency.
- Actively listen to each other.
- Acknowledge and express the positives we give each other.
“This helped us with self-discipline and accountability,” Mark said. “It also helped us separate the wish list from the must haves.”
Mary especially liked this item on the checklist:
- When upset:
- Confront the other person with a statement of what upsets you and why.
- Make it brief and state it matter-of-factly.
- Ask an open-ended, curiosity-based question (no cross-examination.)
According to Mary, this approach allowed each of them to express frustrations in a constructive way. “We could say what’s on our minds directly, without beating around the bush. The open-ended question, such as ‘What do you think?’ Or ‘How do you see things?’ enabled us to respond to each other without defensiveness.”
Mary and Mark cited as key a challenging checklist item:
- No hidden grievances; proactively confront problems or issues with a solution-oriented vs. blame-oriented approach.
“Your concept of the well from the Book of Genesis really tested our relationship early on,” Mark said. “Grievances tend to fester, and then come out much worse.”
According to Mary, “the checklist made us be open about pet peeves, personality quirks, family circumstances, past traumas and all the kinds of things that can potentially derail a relationship.
Mary shared something she hadn’t shared with other ex’s – that she’d been a victim of rape.
“I’m glad she felt comfortable enough to share this with me,” Mark said. “Our candor with each other gave us a much better understanding. We also took a personality test, which helped our understanding as well.”
“You really challenge your own thoughts,” Mary said. “You get to look at your relationship with more of a logical lens than an emotional lens.”
Sex
Another checklist item had to do with taking your time before having sex.
With a laugh, Mark said, “We didn’t wait until December 31st. However, we didn’t rush into bed either.
“In the past, I think I had sex too early in my relations with other women. At least for me, early sex tends to cloud the judgment and complicate things in trying to sort out if you’re truly meant for each other. A better indication of a life-mate is not whether you have great sex, it’s whether you’ve created a foundation for a lasting friendship.”
Speaking of sex, Mary made an adjustment based on input I received from one of her ex’s. During the assessment interview, he told me: “Something that really bugged me: Mary and I would have a romantic evening together, make passionate love and fall asleep in each other’s arms.
“The next morning, I’d awake slowly, still in last night’s glow. I’d look over at Mary. She’d be sitting bolt upright in bed, fingers flying on some device, buried in social media. I’d lean toward her and say, ‘Morning honey.’ I’d get a quick smile and ‘morning honey’ in return. Then she’d go right back to her social media universe as if I didn’t exist.”
When I shared this with Mary, her reaction was, “He never said a word to me!”
Going forward, however, Mary no longer keeps her social media devices at her bed stand. “When Mark awakes, he gets my full attention. Social media and electronic devices come in a distant second.”
Periodic check-ins
In addition to their daily check-ins, Mary and Mark also followed this checklist item:
- Schedule monthly check-ins where we ask each other: “What’s working well?” and “What might we do differently going forward?”
These sessions sometimes included me as their coach. According to Mark, “the monthly check-ins really made us focus on progress and obstacles.”
Prenup?
One obstacle was the issue of a prenup. Mark and Mary had a checklist item: “Arrange financial affairs with fairness to ourselves and to those who will inherit our wealth.” However, it didn’t address what would happen in the event of a divorce.
“My mother,” Mark explained, “had given me a sizable amount of money to purchase a home. She’d been divorced and I’d previously been divorced. She was concerned about money and really wanted me to have a prenup.”
“I was totally against a prenup,” Mary said. “It seemed like the opposite of what a life-mate relationship should be. Although Mark had a higher net worth, my income was greater. And unlike him, I had children from a prior marriage. So I could have asked for a prenup.”
Mary added, “I think if you need to have a prenup to make a marriage happen, it’s probably not worth happening.”
To resolve this issue, I made a suggestion. “What if you make a commitment that if you get married and the marriage subsequently ends, you’ll part like a mensch?”
“What the heck is a mensch?” Mark asked.
“It’s Yiddish for being upstanding, honest, reasonable, fair and so on. I don’t suggest this language would be legally binding. Yet it may be a way to bridge the gap. You intend to be together for life. But if for whatever reason, this doesn’t happen, you’ll remember the commitment you made to each other.”
Mark and Mary then agreed to the following checklist item:
- Should one or both of us ever decide to part, it will be done with integrity, transparency, and a desire for mutual fairness.
This got them over the prenup hump, including getting Mark’s mom’s approval.
The MIDAS Touch Apology
The following two checklist items proved to be interrelated.
- Email or text messages will never be used to convey criticism or hurt feelings.
- No “but” apologies; use the MIDAS Touch: Admit mistake; acknowledge causing injury; commit to do things differently; make amends; and then be silent – no excuses, justifications, etc.
According to Mark, “When not together, Mary and I will often communicate through email or texting. And I had a bad habit of sometimes putting negative thoughts in writing.
“One night I got aggravated about something, and sent her a harsh text. Mary was in a hotel room, preparing for a client presentation the next day. She later told me she cried herself to sleep that night.
“I felt terrible and followed each of the five elements of Midas apology, including a commitment to always to read my messages before hitting “send.” If there was anything negative, I would instead send a message to arrange a time to talk.
“This worked fine until I screwed up again. I sent Mary a message I shouldn’t have. I knew I had to make serious amends.
“Mary had previously dropped hints about how she likes clean-shaven men. Having grown accustomed to my bushy face, I had ignored these hints.
“However, this time, to make amends, I took out a razor. Gone was my mustache! Gone was my beard!”
Said Mary, “I absolutely love his amends!”
Having a deadline
“I had trouble with the Dec. 31st deadline, the finality of it, the pressure,” said Mark. “At one point, I was prepared to just end the whole thing.”
What saved the day? “Jathan suggested an alternative,” Mark said. “He said, ‘you can always fire the coach.’”
Reflecting back, Mark acknowledged that the deadline had value. “It forced us to accelerate our communication and address issues.” He now agrees that having a timetable is a good idea. “Early on, it encouraged us to share the stories that shaped us as people. We learned to be vulnerable, including knowing how to make up when we had a fight.”
Mary added, “Without a timetable, weeks can turn into months, and months can turn into years.”
Despite their success, both Mary and Mark expressed that they still feel like their relationship is just beginning. “We want to continue to work towards the principles of the relationship checklist. We realize we can do better and more importantly we want to do better. Learning to trust, listen, and to pause with compassion is our path forward together.”
Their last piece of advice: “Finding a life-mate is probably the most important thing you can do in life. Don’t leave it to chance.”
Postscript
I often get asked, “When should I share my life-mate goal with a potential candidate?” “ASAP” is my typical response. Like Mark, if that person truly has potential, he or she won’t be scared off.
Another question I get asked, “What kinds of questions should I ask on the first date to help me determine if the person has life-mate potential?”
8 Great Questions
Here are eight great questions, adapted from Arthur Aron’s 36 questions to fall in love study:
1. Given the choice of anyone, whom would you want as a dinner guest and what would you talk about?
2. What’s something in your life for which you feel grateful?
3. If the current you could provide real-time advice to the much younger you, what would it be?
4. What would you change about the way you were raised?
5. What’s a treasured memory?
6. What’s an embarrassing moment in your life you’re willing to share?
7. Your house, containing everything you own, catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final 10 second dash. What would you save and why?
8. Is there something that you’ve dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven’t you done it?
Jathan Janove is Principal of Janove Organization Solutions, http://www.jathanjanove.com. Through consulting, executive coaching and training, he works with employers to create fully engaged workplace cultures. He also practiced law in Salt Lake City, Utah and Portland, Oregon.
