Becoming a team.

This lesson looks at the two of you as one unit, and at the agreements that make that unit a safe place to stand. Tatkin's claim is that a secure relationship is something two people do, not something they have to be.

Two people, one system

You each bring a style of closeness and a nervous system into the relationship, and together they make something new. Tatkin says a couple has a combined style and a combined nervous system that cannot be read off from the two people separately.

Two people who are jumpy on their own can turn out to be a calm pair, and two quiet people can become an excitable one. Some pairs, he says, simply grate on each other at the level of the fast, threat-spotting brain, even when both are kind and clever. Nobody fully understands why, and he treats it as nobody's fault.

From this comes the central idea of the lesson. Once you are each other's main person, you form a two-person psychological system: what one of you does lands on the other, and if one goes under, both do. That is already the case, he says. The only open question is whether you act on it, or deny it and carry on as two individuals, each guarding their own side and bargaining with the other.

The couple sets the tone

Tatkin pictures the couple as the king and queen of their land and the roof of the house. He says himself that he speaks of opposite-sex couples only because it is easier in speech, and that he means every couple. Read the image as the two people in charge of a household, whoever they are.

His point is that everyone under that roof tunes to the pair, which he calls the master nervous system of the home. When the two of you are not all right, nobody around you is: not the children, not the pets and, he claims, not even the household objects. Children feel safe when they can see their parents looking after each other.

It applies to the two of you as well. He says people do their best around someone who believes in them, and do badly in a home where they are looked down on. Part of being a team is deciding to back each other, in private and in front of others.

What you are together for

Many couples try to get back to how it felt at the start. Tatkin calls that a mistake: you were not quite yourselves during courtship, and there is no way back to it. Looks change, and shared tastes and opinions drift or are changed for you by illness, money trouble or children.

So something else has to hold you together, and he asks you to name it. Why are you a couple, and what do the two of you serve? His sharpest version of the question is this: what does each of you do for the other that no paid outsider would?

Plenty of what partners do for each other could be hired out. What cannot be hired is a person who has studied you closely: who knows what flattens you and what gets you back on your feet, who can make you feel loved and safe within moments, and who keeps track of you when everyone else is busy with their own life. That knowledge, he says, is what makes each of you irreplaceable to the other.

Agreements you can both defend

For Tatkin, vows should be real agreements: the couple's own constitution, not words borrowed for the wedding and forgotten afterwards. He calls the result a principle-based relationship. Its ground rule is true mutuality, meaning that whatever you do has to be good for both of you.

This is also how he defines fidelity. It is wider than not having affairs: it is loyalty to the principles you have both agreed, and it counts most when you do not feel like keeping them. That is what agreements are for.

He offers examples, not a fixed list:

• We tell each other everything. Home should be the place where you can say what is true. He expects islands to object, and asks why you would choose one person out of everyone and then keep them in the dark.
• The relationship comes first. Everything else flows from the two of you, so neither pushes the other down the list.
• We guard each other, at home and in company. You know each other's weak spots and do not expose them. If you slip, you put it right quickly.
• It has to work for both. He calls this good housekeeping: checking as you go that both of you are all right, so that nothing unfair is stored up for later.
• We can always reach each other. Day or night, for something serious or something silly, and the answer is friendly. He ties this to a small child's need to trust that a caregiver can be reached. The spirit counts, so a surgeon in the middle of an operation is excused.
• We are the first to know. Important news reaches your partner before anyone else. In a family, he adds, that includes what the children tell one of you.

Make your own, and put each one through three tests. Is it good for both of you, can each of you say why, and is it broad enough that you never have to argue about whether it applies this time? An agreement you cannot defend, he says, is one you will probably not keep.

Enforcing one should take very little. A light reminder that this is what the two of you agreed is enough, and the other person concedes and corrects course.

Never threaten the relationship

From here on Tatkin speaks of secure functioning. The term describes how two people operate, not what they are like as individuals. You do not both have to be anchors to build an anchor relationship.

One principle he puts above the rest: you never say or hint that the relationship itself might end. The relationship is your secure base, the ground you both stand on, and nobody behaves normally on ground that might give way. He describes partners who, after many years together, still act as if they were auditioning for a part they were never sure of getting.

He also says that if failed relationships could be examined afterwards, you would usually find at least one partner who was only half in. So he wants it agreed between you: whatever happens, neither of you is going anywhere.

A note from us: Tatkin states this rule, and the other agreements in this lesson, without exceptions. They assume two people who are safe with each other. Coercion, control or violence are a different situation: they call for safety planning and qualified help, not for better teamwork.

Security questions and reality questions

The same principle shapes how you answer certain questions. Tatkin separates reality questions from security questions and says many people confuse them, waves and islands more than anchors.

The mistake is to answer a security question as if it were a reality question, for instance by remarking that nobody can promise the future. That may be accurate, and it is no use to the person who asked. The secure answer is a plain yes, I will be here.

Is that dishonest? Tatkin's reply is that telling the truth is not what the question is for. He compares it to a frightened child who asks whether they are going to die: a parent who lists the ways it could happen has answered the wrong question. The child needs to hear that they will live for a very long time, so that they can get on with the day.

Partners who give each other this certainty, he says, have more energy and courage for everything else. They are not facing the world alone.

Timing is part of the answer. He says the fast brain reads signals far quicker than words, so a pause before your yes is heard as doubt. Reassure first, and at once.