Kelly E. Johnson, M.D.

Welcome to your life.

Allow me to introduce you to yourself. I want you to stop whatever else you have planned for the day and take this challenge. Look at the partner you've chosen. Take a look at your job, home, children, and all of the people with whom you have a personal relationship. Then realize a fundamental truth about all of these things: You have created it all! This is what you have done in the world. Do you like what you see?

Or are you desperately unhappy and secretly wish that someone else would make it better? Maybe you have fooled yourself into believing that your time will come and, if you just wait long enough, everything will just "magically" change. Well, I've got news for you--Your time is now. Success in your personal relationships will be measured in how you choose to spend this precious time, by becoming an active participant in your life.

So it's time for a wake-up call. I would like you to repeat out loud the following statement, no matter how uncomfortable it may sound to you:

I am a creator. My relationships are a direct result of the choices that I have made. I will only be able to achieve true happiness when I take personal responsibility for my life decisions. If a change needs to occur, I am the only one with the power to effect it. If I continue to be unhappy in a relationship it is because I am allowing this unhappiness.

Say these words over a few times. Concentrate and focus on what this means for your life. How does this feel to you? Does it feel awkward to admit that your relationships can only happen as you choose? If you're like most people, it's usually easier to blame someone else for your life failures. Don't get me wrong-- I'm not trying to be overly critical of a coping skill that most of us have evolved into an art form. But the fact is that you must begin to take ownership of your life relationships, before we can go any further. You are not a child anymore and thus cannot depend on someone else to blaze a path for you. My father would have put it more succinctly, "Wake up and smell the coffee!"

I was describing this concept of creation to one of my patients once and he proclaimed, "Reality stinks!" To which I countered that his relationships weren't all that good, but they are what they are. His personal feeling on the subject did not change the stark reality of his life, that he was mired in an unhappy marriage and wasn't doing a thing about it except to complain to me. No one had forced him to marry a woman he didn't love, and he certainly wasn't being held hostage to stay with her. Yet, like millions of other people, he had never bothered to understand his motives and consequently stayed in a bad relationship! Moreover, he had a laundry list of complaints of things he didn't get from his wife.

But did he ever tell her of his feelings? No, because in his own words, "She's just supposed to know what I want." This relationship was doomed. They were divorced several months later, mainly because he was along for the ride. He didn't grasp the crucial idea that this was also his relationship to make or break, and that he had a major part in creating the failure. He chose to let the relationship get to a point of no return by doing nothing for years, except to suffer in silence. He refused to face reality. He didn't get it.

The Concept of Personal Ownership

You own many things. I have asked hundreds of people over the years to list all of their important possessions, from top to bottom, and they all invariably come up with similar lists. Houses, cars, furniture, stocks ... and other material goods usually rank highly. Then I tell them that they have overlooked the number one valuable commodity in their life. They usually look at me with a blank stare, because the majority of us do not ever think of our personal relationship as something to be owned.

Why is it so difficult to accept the truth that you are the owner of a relationship? After all, you initially saw something that you wanted, took steps to obtain it, and then made a decision to keep it in your life. Sounds like a possession to me. But there's something inherently more complex about a marriage or long- term committed relationship that makes it harder to quantify. Perhaps it's because there is no definite point when you actually "buy" a relationship. Maybe it has something to do with the notion of love and romance, as most of us get caught up in the notion that we "share" a special relationship and it would appear greedy to claim ownership. But whatever the reason, I have run across few people who enthusiastically embrace the idea of seeing themselves as an owner. It's easier to just let it happen and hope for a good result. Avoiding the thought that you are responsible for the relationship also lets you avoid accepting the blame when something goes seriously wrong.

Being an owner also carries with it the responsibility of learning about your product. Unfortunately, you probably have never read a set of instructions that accompany your life relationships. The reason is simple—there is no instructional manual that covers all of the various situations that you will encounter as you put together your own relationship!

If you are lucky, you and your partner basically agree on the same set of instructions and the relationship works for many years. If you are not so lucky, you both attempt to construct the relationship in very different ways, and it breaks down. It then either has to be fixed or thrown on the scrap pile as unusable. Can this be avoided? Of course, if you take the time to educate yourself about the product you own and make it a top priority.

The Relationship Contract

So it is time to inject a little reality into your life. You and your partner are co-owners of what will be known as a "Life Relationship." As such, you will from this point be subject to the rules and conditions of said ownership, including the acceptance of the following Relationship Contract:

1. The owner shall be charged with the responsibility of caring for and maintaining the relationship in good working order, by exerting whatever effort is needed to nurture and grow it in positive ways.

2. If a problem arises with the relationship, the owner will make this his or her top priority and do whatever is necessary to make it right.

3. The owner will strive to understand the reasons for his or her behaviors in the relationship, and if these actions are self-destructive, will seek out help.

4. The owner will understand that it is not selfish to verbalize his or her needs in the relationship, and expect the co-owner to at least consider and try to meet these needs.

5. Instead of blaming the co-owner for everything that goes wrong during the course of the relationship, the owner will always search inside to acknowledge his or her part in causing the problems.

You may think that the above looks like some kind of legalese, but you cannot escape the fact that a successful relationship is grounded in these conditions. Simply stated, those who accept these truths will greatly increase their odds at an intimate, loving, committed relationship. Those who believe that these concepts don't apply to them will most likely run into major relationship problems, and have few skills to solve these problems.

I'll bet that you didn't say these things during your marriage vows or when you first decided to exclusively date your partner. It's tough enough to decide that you've found a person with whom to spend a lifetime. But this doesn't change the fact that the above five conditions form the basis for your personal happiness! This is the soil from which your relationship will flourish. Ignore it and the relationship has a good chance of dying. You'll be going nowhere fast. Accept these conditions and you have a realistic chance of developing a wonderful relationship. The choice seems obvious to me and I hope that it does to you also.

I have started out this book with the idea of personal responsibility for one simple reason. If you refuse to see the relationship as yours, you will probably never do the work necessary to insure success. You will continually disregard the ideas in your relationship contract, because it's just human nature to care less about things that aren't our own. So memorize and try to apply these principles each day-- I'll bet you will be shocked at how many times you or your partner will break one of the conditions. Copy and post this relationship contract somewhere that you can reread it every day.