A Marriage of Equals: How to Achieve Balance in a Committed Relationship

Catherine E. Aponte PsyD

May 2019 · She Writes Press

About this ebook

Negotiating collaboratively in your committed relationship is a new way to achieve individual and marital goals, to resolve differences equitably, to manage conflicts, to create and sustain a satisfying sex life, to figure out where you stand on fidelity, to think about having and caring for kids, and to have committed careers and a satisfying family life. Negotiating collaboratively supports you and your partner seeing yourselves simultaneously as individuals and as a couple—enhances the sense of “being in this together” while also having individual life plans. Negotiating collaboratively supports valuing each other as individuals before seeing each other as husband and wife, and allows modern couples to challenge old gender trappings that can undermine the achievement of balance in a committed relationship. Straightforward and accessible, A Marriage of Equals offers couples a road map for how to negotiate collaboratively around the most essential aspects of a committed relationship—and, in doing so, create the equitable marriage they long for.

About the author

Catherine Aponte is a clinical psychologist who is married to a clinical psychologist, Joseph F. Aponte. They married in 1960, a time of significant social change. She and her husband embarked upon a marital journey guided by the basic principle that neither one of their careers was more important than the other’s. She trained as a psychologist at the University of Florida, Duke University, and Spalding University, and worked with couples for more than thirty years in Louisville, KY as a practicing psychologist. During her professional career both as a clinician in private practice and an adjunct professor of clinical psychology at Spalding University, she made numerous presentations about her work with couples. Both her master’s thesis at Duke University and her doctoral thesis at Spalding University focused on gender and marriage. Aponte was awarded a USPHS Traineeship covering the four years she was a graduate student at Duke University, and had the privilege of chairing eight doctoral dissertations at Spalding University testing various aspects of her theoretical model of relationships.