How to Work With, Not Against, Your Partner

Key points

Collaboration means working with your partner, not on them.

Love is an active practice of care and responsibility.

Real connection takes relational heroism—the courage to drop defenses and learn to be vulnerable.

Working together turns conflict into creativity.

When couples first start therapy , they often come in as opposing attorneys. Each has their case, their evidence, and their opening argument: I’m right, and if you’d just see that, we’d be fine.

But love doesn’t thrive in a courtroom. It thrives in a laboratory—a place of curiosity, open communication, experiment, and discovery.

That’s what collaboration is about. It’s the third step in the PACER model of relationships we describe in our book Love. Crash. Rebuild. , the space where partners stop defending