If, moreover, the two are to function within the guidelines of the task, they must modulate their needs for closeness and their needs for separateness in what are for them novel ways. The partner who, for example, forever runs away from intimate exchange is now expected to look within, to ask himself what he wants from his partner, and to request, in the simplest terms possible, that she meet his need. In the past such behavior would have been—literally—unthinkable for him, because he has difficulty experiencing such a need or wish as anything that exists within himself.

The autonomy-seeking distancer has, by and large, denied wanting or needing much of anything from anyone else. One might suppose that his difficulties in experiencing his own intimate wishes stem from an underlying assumption that it's better not to have such needs at all. If he did have them, he feels, they would be compromised, misunderstood, or otherwise unmet by his intimate partner, or they would be swallowed up in her needs, in some fashion. In any case, his needs will not be satisfied. He has come into the relationship believing that it's better not to have intimate needs or wishes, because the other will certainly deny them. This somewhat crude defensive tactic (which frequently involves infantile feelings that the partner should somehow meet his needs even if he himself is not quite aware of their existence) is accompanied by an underlying rage—for the needs are there within him, and they are not being met.

Unless his partner reads his mind (which she is of course unable to do), she will have to deal with his unaccountable, illogical, and often very subtly expressed anger at her. He, naturally, doesn't know what he's angry about either (if he knows that he's angry at all). His intimate needs are being short-circuited—suppressed before he can even take cognizance of their existence.

Experiencing an intimate need as his own and making a request of his partner that is related to that need are the new things that the emotional distancer must (in order to play by the rules of the task) now begin doing regularly.

The pursuer, for her part, has no such problem in recognizing her emotional needs or conveying them to the mate: this is her area of expertise. It is, however, frequently difficult for her to recognize that he might have symmetrical wishes and desires of his own—emotional matters that he needs to share, and that the two of them have colluded to push out of sight. Now, alternating who makes intimate requests and who fills them, the mates get intensive training in that aspect of the emotional exchange in which each of them is deficient.

In the process, as the alternation of the odd and even days provides an ebb and flow of emotional exchange—experience in recognizing intimate needs and in getting them met—each partner's inner concerns inevitably become much more apparent to the other partner. What the mate wants and needs is often so unaccountably different from the wants and the needs that are one's own! The mate, as an independent center of motivation—a universe unto himself or herself—comes more and more clearly into view. And, just as the autonomy-enhancing first task produced an unaccountable sense of closeness in the couple, so this intimacy-enhancing second task brings with it a sense of the profound separateness and individuality of the members of the pair.

It is, I hope, clear that there will be intimate wishes and needs expressed throughout this process that will not be presented as formal requests and will not be part of the task. To such informal requests the spouse may react as he or she pleases, with "Yes," "No," "Maybe," "Later, if possible," or any other answer. But when an intimacy need is presented as being part of the assignment, the mate is obliged to respond positively and to meet it.

Spouses would, however, be well advised not to move ahead too rapidly. It's most prudent to become completely accustomed to the give and take of intimate gratifications before assuming more and heavier emotional burdens. And as to the ultimate number of requests to be honored each day, there is no external limit on how high any couple should think of going. Rather, the limit should be the internal one of whatever the system seems able to tolerate. Some couples may want to ascend slowly and allow the number of intimate needs expressed daily to grow by just a week; they may decide that they've reached their desired total when they get up to four or five or eight. Others want to increase the figure more. While working on this third assignment, couples ought to monitor their own performance. When they feel they have gone high enough, and worked on this task long enough, it will be time to move forward to the fourth assignment. But the process ought not to be hurried. It is wise to get very comfortable with how it feels to negotiate the intimate exchanges in the relationship before beginning the next task.

If the first exercise (Talking and Listening) is still in use—or even if it's not—variations upon it can be useful as intimate requests. If, for example, a quarrel erupts, a partner may state an intimate need that involves taking ten minutes to discuss his side of the story, and then asking for ten minutes in which to listen to the mate. This is an extremely effective way of preventing fights from escalating—because it forestalls the exchange of projections that can so easily get under way.

The structure of the assignment is this: The overall schedule for each partner remains unchanged. However, the person who is in charge for the day—say, the husband—may make as many intimate requests as he wants. The wife must respond positively to all of his requests, with one important exception. If she reaches the point at which meeting a particular need feels like too much of a demand, she has the power to announce to her partner that she is canceling the game for the rest of that day.

She cannot, in other words, say no selectively. If she responds negatively to one of his intimate needs, that day's assignment is over; the rules decree, furthermore, that the partner cannot argue with this decision: Once she has said that the intimacy is over for that day, she is under no obligation to say yes to the intimate requests that he puts forward subsequently. The task is finished—until the following day, when the game resumes with the players in reversed positions.

At this point the wife is in charge of the intimacy in the relationship, and she may ask her husband to meet as many of her intimate needs as she wishes to have met. He, of course, now has the power to stop the game.

The new instructions enable the spouses to feel in charge at the same time—each person's control is non-competitive with the other's. Both spouses can negotiate their intimate needs from a position of strength and entitlement, because each maintains control of a different yet important domain.

In this system a wife who meets fifteen of her husband's intimate needs on a given day still retains the capacity to cancel the agreement. She is ultimately not trapped in their relational system, for she can choose to say, "That's enough; I won't play any more today." Thus, while he retains control of the intimacy within the emotional system, he has meta-control—she can decide whether she wishes to stay in the game (a metaphor for the ongoing intimate interaction) or to take a breather. This option—choosing to go outside the system, when necessary—combats the terrible feelings of being trapped and powerless that are endemic in polarized marital systems.

The rules of the fourth task introduce the partners to a system in which saying no to the mate's need in a given circumstance is an available option. This is of particular importance to the inveterate yea-sayer in the relationship, who often feels manipulated by the spouse. (Frequently, each partner is certain that he or she is under the control of the other. Both experience themselves as the controllees in the relationship and fail to comprehend that it is the system that regulates the behavior of them both.) The realization that saying no to the spouse is both acceptable and possible renders saying yes a real act of freedom.

When this small set of new rules is introduced into the homework, interesting things usually begin to happen in the relationship. As might readily be imagined, each partner is a bit reluctant to refuse one of the other's requests (thereby canceling the game for the rest of the day), because it is so clear that the other partner can, on the following day, retaliate in precisely the same manner. And what has been learned about the partner in the course of carrying out the preceding assignments is now very handy information to have.

Each person knows (from the Talking and Listening task) what matters are foremost on the partner's mind. Each person knows also (from the Odd Day, Even Day homework) which particular intimate needs and desires are of critical importance to the mate. Negotiations with the partner are, as a result, far more easily manageable because such information makes it easier to trim the sails of one's own intimate needs to the winds of the relationship's reality. Going too far on a particular day would tempt the partner to cancel out of the game entirely—and so requests are usually phrased empathetically, with the knowledge of what emotional burdens the system and the intimate other can tolerate.

The sequence of exercises, in its entirety, is directed toward blocking the tendency to polarize around vitally important issues—such as who has the power and control, who is actually feeling which feelings, and who should give those feelings expression. These are large problems, which many bright and good-hearted people—people who really are committed to their marriages—struggle blindly and fruitlessly to resolve. The tasks can serve to resolve these issues so simply and readily that the members of the couple are at a real loss in attempting to comprehend the nature of the wonderful thing that has hit them. Their relationship may change profoundly without either one of them being able to explain what has happened, or exactly why.

By way of illustrating this statement, let me talk about the great differences possible in a marital relationship, depending on how successfully each partner has differentiated his or her own separate, distinct self from the family context in which that self developed. The framework that I shall use in the following discussion is the ingenious and wonderfully illuminating one devised by Stuart Johnson for use in the teaching of clinical trainees.

There are in Johnson's schema five possible ways for intimate partners to relate to each other—which differ according to the degree of separation and individuation that the members of the couple have achieved.

LEVEL 5: PARADOX

At the very lowest level of differentiation on the developmental ladder are those mates who exist in a world that Johnson calls "Paradox." In this world neither of the two major human needs—to be a separate self and to be emotionally connected to another human being—can be met, because being close to a partner and not being close to a partner are equally terrifying prospects.

For someone as poorly differentiated as are those at this level, to be intimate with another person is to negate one's separateness entirely. Getting closer to the partner is experienced in the internal world as virtually being absorbed by that person, so that one's distinct self disappears into the relationship. Intimacy is a merging and fusion of the self and the other—which involves the threat of losing one's own separate personhood. Every step nearer is therefore accompanied by terrible anxiety, for it feels like a step closer to self-annihilation.

The very natural reaction to this threat of losing one's own separate personhood is to move away—to run for the hills, psychologically speaking. This withdrawal from intimacy is automatic, but in its wake a new difficulty inevitably develops—for, it turns out, being alone and autonomous is not the solution either. To be alone is, on the contrary, experienced as a terrible emptiness—an abandonment, a sense of awful nothingness, of non-being. Autonomy is experienced as not mattering to anyone—as the absence of a necessary confirmation and validation of one's existence. In the paradoxical way of these emotional complications, the move toward separateness has produced the same result as did the move toward greater closeness—the threat of self-annihilation. As a result, the driving impetus to move toward the partner returns, and the vexed cycle repeats itself.

Intimacy in this person's world is the very negation of autonomy; autonomy is the negation of closeness. This is an unresolvable problem—and many of the people at Level 5 are schizophrenics or suffer from severe borderline disorders. Their close relationships tend to be difficult, transient, and unstable. How could they not be, since being close and being separate feel equally dangerous?

LEVEL 4: PROJECTIVE IDENTIFICATION

The first step upward on the differentiation scale is called "Projective Identification"—it is that relational world in which so many married partners become mired for long periods of time or even their entire lives together. There is, it must be said immediately, a marked contrast between couples at this level and those at the one below it. At Level 5 the problems of one's needs for separateness and one's needs for emotional connectedness are equally insoluble. At Level 4 the dilemma has been partially worked out.

People at this stage of differentiation are capable of taking conscious ownership of half the closeness-separateness polarity. They can be intimate or autonomous, but they experience intimacy and autonomy as mutually exclusive. There is in their interpersonal system a clear-cut choice to be made: you can assert and express your need for warmth, openness, and nearness to the partner or your need for distance and personal space in which to develop your own separate self—but you cannot do both. While Level 4 mates are both struggling with an inner conflict—about being close and achieving a separate, individual identity—they deal with it by dividing the needs up between them. Each splits off, represses, and projects into the partner whichever side of the internal dispute he or she has disowned.

At Level 5 neither need could be met. At Level 4 each partner expresses one of them—and retains contact with the repressed need through the thoughts, feelings, and behavior of the mate. Thus, a person who is fully aware of her need for autonomy, but has rejected her need for intimacy, finds someone in a complementary position. She tends to fall in love with someone who, for reasons of his own, can be intimate but has difficulties recognizing and legitimizing his need to be a separate, self-sufficient person.

Suppose that she was raised in a traditional, somewhat sexist family and that she was strongly affected by the feminist movement during her late adolescence and early adulthood. At the time of meeting the man who is to become her partner she is in rebellion against what she considers to be the woman-trap—becoming the intimacy-carrier in the family. By observing the experiences of her mother and the other women in the family, she has seen how thankless a position this can be; she is aware, moreover, of the new possibilities opening up for women like herself.

Such an intellectual position would be fine if she did not—as an individual at this emotional level tends to do—deal with the softer, more pliant, adaptive, and closeness-seeking aspects of her inner self by splitting them off and repressing them decisively. The result of this unconscious maneuver is that she loses touch with her own intimate needs so completely that she experiences herself as totally lacking them—as being sufficient, emotionally speaking, unto herself.