Your Relationship Blueprint
The Blueprint is a schematic or diagram of four critical components of a relationship.
Through extensive research early in my career, I found that strength in these four areas is essential to the success of long-term partnerships.
Your partnership is at its BEST when you are able to manage these four critical components effectively:
Bond between you,
Emotional Health of each partner,
Sources of Social Support and Stress that affect you, and
Transitions over Time you encounter.
B – We need a Bond strong enough to keep us warmly connected and flexible enough for us to discuss differences and resolve conflicts.
E - We need two Emotionally healthy partners who can see situations and hear messages accurately, regulate their emotions, think through issues constructively, and act with kindness and compassion towards themselves and their partner.
S – We need a shared Social support system that accommodates our differences and protects both partners from external sources of stress.
T – We need to know how to traverse Transitions over time together as a collaborative team, flexibly negotiating roles and responsibilities as needs change.
Relationship Blueprint
When we represent each one of these components on paper, together they create a Relationship Blueprint.
This schematic shows how each component interacts with the others, and how a change in one can reverberate through the whole system.
First component: Bond
Your BOND is a result of the interactional process between you, including the ways you show your love for each other, argue, make up, tease, discuss differences, and resolve problems. We diagram this process as an Interactional Circle. Understanding your exchanges as circular helps you see that
“How I feel depends not only on how you treat me, but on what I said or did before that prompted you to treat me as you do.”
We also add details to the Interactional Circle, allowing us to focus on specific aspects of your exchanges. When you Perceive an Action from your partner, you have an Emotional response and Thoughts about the message you took in before you respond with behavior or Actions of your own.
Second component: Emotional Health
Each of you brings different Perceptual, Emotional, Thinking, and Behavioral skills and habits to your relationship. You have learned these skills and habits over the course of your lives, and you continue to update them as you encounter new experiences and interact with each other.
Observing your Individual Process helps each of you learn to be your best self with each other,
regulating your EMOTIONS so you are supportive and not destructive, thus maintaining trust, respect, and closeness. We draw self-reflective arrows within the Interactional Circle, spotlighting each individual’s process and their ability to reflect on their behavior and regulate their emotions.
Third component: Social
Your individual and shared SOCIAL Your individual and shared SOCIAL contexts can bring support or stress to your relationship, affecting your interactions. Your social context includes your extended family, culture, and social, economic, and cultural influences. Any of these external influences can be a source of strength or strain on your relationship, and some may provide a little of each or may be a support for one partner and stress for the other. Extended family, for example, can provide a lot of help, but may also create more tension. When you are able to view outside pressures as socially constructed you are less likely to blame your partner for conflicts they didn’t create and work as a team to resolve them.
Knowing this helps you understand that as a team you need to work together to protect your partnership and manage external pressures that could otherwise cause conflict between you.
Lowering stress and building social support by understanding and resolving external problems together will help you solve stubborn conflicts and avoid blame and resentment. We list these sources of support and stress in brackets on either side of the Interactional Circle.
Fourth component: Transitions
Satisfaction with relationships can fall during times of TRANSITIONS (courtship to marriage, dual-career to children, empty nest, retirement). This is because there are new situations that require you to communicate and negotiate new solutions at the same time that you are both stressed by the anxiety of novel situations.
Anticipating the challenges you may face as you move through transitions over time helps you plan ahead so you can approach major changes effectively as a team.
Resolving issues as they arise helps you lay down a positive history with few triggering memories that can erode your closeness over the years.
So you need to learn to recognize changes as they occur and develop adequate skills to resolve the conflicts and create new constructive interactional patterns.
If you have any difficult memories thus far, you can defuse them when your stress is low enough to do this delicate work, so they don’t accumulate to create resentments.
New Perspective
As you begin to internalize the four components of the Blueprint, you will find that you are building a kind of Internal Scaffold you can use to elevate your perspective so you can see your whole relationship system.
From this vantage point, you can view what strengths you two already have in place as well as what areas you might want to work on to make sure your relationship is at its BEST.
For example:
If one individual loses a job (Transitions over Time),
It will affect that partner’s mood
(Emotional Health),
And change the income flow
(Social Support).
Both of which could damage the partners’ (Bond),
In a relationship, if any component is weakened, the whole is at risk.
So it is important for partners to:
Identify stressors
Talk about them constructively
Find solutions to problems that satisfy both partners
Before they begin to blame each other
And build up resentments.
We will use the Blueprint as a guide to help you see what’s working and where the weaknesses are so you can employ the most effective tools to support your marriage or partnership.
What can we do to take care of our relationships?
No matter which component is under stress, you’ll need some tools to help you improve, rebuild, and care for your relationship.