“Here are some suggestions to help love flow freely between you and your mate.” – New Woman Magazine

“A relationship model [and] a negotiation method where both parties get exactly what they want. ...a clear understanding of how love is essential to being free in a relationship.” –The Association for Humanistic Psychology Newsletter

“A clear, gentle and pragmatic how-to book centered around a method for problem solving where everyone gets exactly what they want.” – Booksource

“Clear-thinking. Convincing. Meaningful.” – Synergy

If you're asking "What is a healthy, functional, relationship and how do we get one?" How to Be a Couple and Still Be Free is designed to answer your questions and teach you (either individually or together with your partner) how to create and sustain a fully functioning partnership between equals.

For two decades, this has been the established handbook on relationships between equals.

In 1980, when How to be a Couple and Still be Free was first published, it introduced a radical concept. Cooperation instead of compromise or competition. Couples who have the tools to negotiate and who are committed to equality and mutual satisfaction are far more likely to create love and partnership they deeply treasure.

This expanded edition includes many step-by-step instructions, guidelines, and the Negotiation Tree, a tool that can help you turn any struggle into a cooperative problem solving session. This is a manual you can use to create or restructure your current relationship into a free couple partnership.

Excerpt
How to Be a Couple and Still Be Free will teach you to work together to create whatever kind of relationship you want, free from the restrictive patterns of your parents, your past experience, and social pressures. Once you learn the communication and problem solving skills in this book, you’ll know how to create the kind of teamwork and mutual benefit that supports the growth of intimacy and satisfaction -- a relationship of equal partnership and autonomous cooperation.


How to Be a Couple and Still Be Free is a manual that provides intimate partners with a proven, step by step guide for working together as a team to overcome negative relationship patterns and master the positive new skills you'll need to know to create a successful, satisfying and sustainable relationship that fulfills both your individual needs. It has been used and recommended by many therapists to help couples in therapy.

How to Be a Couple and Still Be Free is a guideline for transforming an unsatisfying relationship into a loving, sustainable, healthy, partnership between equals who support each other and work together cooperatively to ensure that each partner gets what he or she wants. We call this equal, mutually supportive partnership a Free Couple relationship.

In How to Be a Couple and Still Be Free you will learn how to work together smoothly to solve the very problems which created competition, pain and struggle between you and your partner in the past and build teamwork and cooperation where you previously had fighting, frustration and despair. Your problems are probably solvable; relationship problems feel overwhelming and difficult only if the partners involved lack the skills they need to solve them.

This book will introduce you to a relationship of equality:

* Designed to meet your unique needs as individuals and as a couple,

* In which both partners feel equally important, equally powerful, equally free to express their wants and needs,

* In which both partners work together, to find a mutually satisfactory way to get what both of you want every single time,

* In which you support each other in making sure you both are satisfied in the relationship,

* Which contains far less conflict, frustration, anger, and fewer arguments, disputes, and feelings of deprivation than most couples experience, and

* Which is easy to sustain because you both learn how to get what you want from it all the time!

When you master all the skills and exercises taught here, you will have a full set of "tools" that will enable you to fix any problems that may arise in your relationship, before you and your partner are so frustrated and angry that your problem becomes too big to handle.