The Daily Meeting that Is the Fuel and Coolant of my Marriage
Anything not tended, cared for, built or maintained will perish; most living things do this without thinking, but in relationships we need a system.
I want to share a technique that my wife and I use in our marriage. It’s a short, daily meeting, rigorously structured and with simple, immutable rules — the format is designed to facilitate communication and to correct for the entropy that can emerge in relationships due to our psychology. It does so by providing a dependable opportunity to share our concerns and what we appreciate.
My premise is that it’s much easier to destroy than to create: anything not tended, cared for, built or maintained will perish.
Our meeting works, I think, because of two things: 1. It formalizes the discussion of concerns within relationships that can be awkward to discuss, while abstracting them from the feelings that hamper creative discussions; 2. It builds a protected space to talk about what we love about our confidants and what we want to achieve, things that are often neglected in that putting out fires easily takes priority over building for the future.
The inspiration for our meeting came from a seminar that my wife attended — put on by a friend — based on the Emotionally Healthy Relationships system by Pete and Geri Scazzero. The teachings are explicitly Christian, but we found that almost all the advice could be re-framed in a secular context.
My wife took one tool from the course and asked whether we might try it; we adapted it a little and now try to practice every day. We call it our meeting. You can find Pete and Geri’s version, adapted from a structure created by the Virginia Satir Global Network, here.
The meeting itself can take place anywhere in which it’s possible to hear each other, including (perhaps especially) in the car or over the phone. It usually takes around ten minutes. It works well for couples and groups: theoretically the only limitation for larger groups is time. We use it in our marriage, but it can work for households, friends, colleagues, and more.
The Structure
The meeting consists of the following parts, in order:
Appreciations (Compulsory)
We take turns to name something that we appreciate about the other or the relationship.
Notice and Prefer (Optional)
This is an opportunity to raise something that the other does that is bothersome, and what we would prefer they do instead.
Puzzles (Optional)
Did the other person do something that was the source of confusion or hurt?
New Information (Optional)
Updates, news, dates and times, which can often get forgotten.
Ruminations (Optional)
Did you find yourself sleepless because you were ruminating on something?
Hopes and Wishes (Compulsory)
We express our desires and ambitions for the near future.
That’s our meeting; I shall explore, below, how and why it works for us.
Ground Rules
Our meeting comes with ground rules that are as important as the structure itself.
Listen Carefully and Don’t Interrupt
Listening, as Dale Carnegie emphasized quite eloquently, is perhaps the quickest way to bond with another and gain trust. Meanwhile, most people aren’t actually listening when they say (or think) they are: they’re waiting to talk with their argument locked and loaded — you can test this by asking your conversational partner to summarize your own point and see if they got it.
If a conversation were a nuclear reactor, listening would be the coolant circulating and transferring away the heat to produce energy. Interruptions are like shutting off the cooling system: the heat sticks around and becomes dangerous.
Interruptions are inherently aggressive, they stop the flow of information and, when people feel an interruption coming, they often fluff to prevent vulnerable pauses, degrading their speech. The only exception is an interruption for the sake of correcting a grave misapprehension.
No Defensiveness or Raised Voices
To defend oneself against criticism is so natural that it’s practically Newtonian. Defense belongs, however, to adversarial relationships like courts and debating societies. Our pact is that we allow the other person to speak without letting ourselves get defensive, a service which we know will be returned to us.
Disputes in marriage, business and friendship can become debates and sometimes fights when the back and forth raises emotions and the reactor starts to overheat. Rather, we find it more productive to assume, even if we might disagree, that there’s some truth in what the other person is saying—or, if anything, that it is simply worth hearing a person speak their mind.
The rule against raised voices is part of the same project and should speak for itself. Needless to say, if you get defensive or raise your voice, the quality of conversation starts to decline, progress gets harder and responses less fair.
No Tu Quoque
The phrase “tu quoque” means roughly, “also you” in Latin—it’s the act of saying, “Well you’re angry that I did X, you do Y all the time!” Like defensiveness, tu quoque is practically a law of nature. It’s also conversationally useless.
Firstly, it does nothing to advance the discussion: the fact that your spouse has faults, too, doesn’t negate yours, it just means that you both have work to do. Secondly, it’s place to hide and avoid facing up to what you need to change. Thirdly, it’s another way to lower the conversation from listening to tit-for-tat.
Why the Meeting Works
Appreciations
This is perhaps the most novel part of the structure: it shouldn’t take long to imagine or recall ominous family, house, committee meetings in which an individual or group begins with a long and bulletproof list of grievances. Starting instead with what we appreciate at least frames the conversation in esteem. Appreciations are compulsory for this reason.
Meanwhile, we know from Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman that losses loom larger than gains. Losing $100 brings us down more than finding $100 brings us up, you can burn down a house in minutes when it took a year to build.
Tragically, most people are much more likely to take time to criticize their spouse or another than to recognize them for something uniquely special, which redoubles the imbalance. We spend more time on the losses, and the losses already have an out-sized effect on us.
It is, therefore, profoundly valuable to take time, regularly, to recognize what we appreciate about the people around us. If the meeting consisted of just this part it would be valuable enough to do daily.
Notice and Prefer
The minor annoyances of being in a relationship with someone, living with them, or working with them present a curious contradiction: they can feel trivial, often so much so that it feels bad to bring them up, but at the same time they can be maddening enough to degrade the alliance; at the more serious end, grievances can aggregate to the point where the whole is too large to handle.
The notice and prefer part of the meeting is there to deal with these things. I notice that you put your dishes in the sink, I’d prefer that you put them in the washer. I notice that you immediately start complaining about work when I get home, I’d prefer that you let us settle in for a few minutes.
Bringing up these minor issues can be hard because they are minor, but this part of the meeting works because it’s the appointed time when we talk about these things; you’re not blowing up a small thing, this is the time for small things.
Puzzles
This part is for concerns, hurt feelings, or areas where we’re just confused, and “puzzle” is an excellent term for it, because it assumes that there is some misunderstanding to be explained rather than, necessarily, a wrong to be admitted. Stating issues in this way invites the other party to clarify, explain or, if they were really in the wrong, apologize.
This format protects against defensiveness: instead of saying, “Last night at the party you cut me off. You were so rude and it was very embarrassing for me,” one could say, “Last night at the party I started to say something and you jumped in. This was puzzling because you’re usually so polite.” This invites the other to explain that they didn’t realize they were interrupting due to loud music, or just apologize.
In the case of notice and prefers, and puzzles, much of their power comes from being abstracted from the events in question. If one was boorish after a long day or during a bad mood, immediate criticism is much more likely to provoke anger or at least a less creative response than if the criticism comes at the appointed time and in the context of creative relationship building.
I’m not excusing anger, or un-creative responses under stress: anger is just loud weakness. I’m saying that you’ll get better outcomes by abstracting from the problems.
Thus, part of the meeting’s function exists outside: holding off on immediately chastising or criticizing people, and waiting. You might recognize, dear reader, how concerns that are barely containable in the moment can be discussed rationally the next day, or might not be worth discussing at all.
This brings us back to the earlier point about small annoyances building up into something major. The converse is that constant, unfiltered and immediate criticism has the same effect.
It helps that the meeting structure juxtaposes the recognition of things we appreciate with issues to raise: the phrase that pops into my head is “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down,” but that’s a frightful cliché and demeans the project by association with something tooth-rotting and depth-less. Perhaps the esteem of a confidant helps their honesty go down might be better.
Finally, neither of these to items are mandatory because there might not be anything to say. Appreciations are mandatory because there will be something and because there’s a general deficit of appreciation.
New Information
Sometimes we forget to update spouses and friends about important events or changes: having this be a standard feature of each day is an easy way to avoid this. Sometimes there’s no new information to add, so it’s not compulsory.
Ruminations
This is our addition to the format: ruminate derives from rūmināre, to chew the cud (like a cow). I can speak for myself and many friends when I lament how often I find myself dwelling on resentments, worrying unnecessarily about things over which I have no control or which I’ve already processed. My wife and I use this opportunity to commit to chewing our thoughts no longer than required.
Ruminations are not mandatory.
Hopes and Wishes
This is the ambition and future planning that sets all parties on a creative trajectory to close the meeting. We share what we want to get done, what we want to enjoy, or even our desire for something that we want to gain from others or the environment.
It’s helpful to know, say, that someone hopes for a quiet weekend or to make progress on a particular project, as there might be something you can do to help or a least not scupper the operation — you might be surprised, also, how much of this is never said.
I should note, also, that the meeting is helpful but not perfect: our disagreements sometimes leave us feeling unsettled. This is why hopes and wishes are mandatory, as they’re the road out of the meeting.
Closing Thoughts
Let’s return to entropy; entropy “quantifies the number of microscopic configurations that are consistent with the macroscopic quantities that characterize the system (such as its volume, pressure and temperature.)”
Put it this way: a glass of sand has much more entropy than a glass of silicon microprocessors. There are almost uncountable ways in which you can rearrange the atoms in glass of sand and it have it still be a glass of sand; with the chips, a few atoms out of place and they’re not processors any more. And, to turn the sand into chips requires work (and heat).
The Second Law of Thermodynamics describes how entropy tends to increase: if you put all the gas in one corner of a room (few microscopic configurations) it will spread out and fill the room, undifferentiated (many configurations). If you build a house (ordered), untended it will crumble to dust (disordered).
Evolution gave organisms the ability to hold back entropy, which we call homeostasis: animals use metabolism, behavior and other means to maintain our body temperatures, trees use pressure differentials and gas exchange to maintain the right balance of water and minerals internally.
Our field of cybernetics (from the Greek kubernētikós, “good at steering, good pilot”) is the study of this control. Thermostats and nuclear power station cooling systems are just a few artificial examples.
Ironically, in language we often associate chaos and conflict with heat, when in fact maximum entropy (total disorder) would be perfectly cold; my Mother, having proof-read this piece, noted that a row (which an American would call a “fight”) wastes the heat of a relationship, and to do so continuously means the end of the bond and absolute cold.
Trees, animals, and nuclear reactors don’t create energy, rather their natures guide it to do work. In relationships, evolution offers us no innate means of preventing entropy: we have to do the work to make our relationships work for us.