The Making of a Third
Sara Slater, MSW, LICSW
Seattle, WA
PACT Level III candidate
Apparently the pregnant couple in my office didn’t want to talk about preparing for baby at all. Instead, in the first minutes of their first session, Meg launched into her frustrations about their house and the dog and Rob’s work and their finances. Her hands were folded protectively over her belly, while Rob remained silent, leaning back in his chair, arms folded behind his head. The more she escalated, the calmer he appeared. Neither looked much at the other; both frequently turned to me, with a look that said, “See what I’m dealing with?” No one mentioned the baby, except to answer that she was due in about six weeks.
So, what was happening here? Instead of nestling into their couple bubble, joyfully anticipating the baby to be, or supporting each other through fluctuating anxieties and preparations, they were retreating into attacking, blaming, and generally feeling abandoned by one another. The growing presence before them was actually coming between them. They were literally making a third, with all the potential for mismanagement and an ensuing threat to their relationship.
A third, as defined from the PACT perspective, is anyone or anything that intrudes on the couple bubble, or makes it difficult to form one. In Wired for Love, Stan reminds us that “couples who handle thirds poorly typically do so before they even enter into their relationship.” And here it was: descriptions of one another that were neither complimentary nor constructive; blame for their conflict on things or people outside of themselves, and efforts to engage me in validating the rightness of one over the other. It wasn’t hard to see that these behaviors, left unaddressed, would soon become part of their parenting. Baby would simply serve the role they were trying to get me to play.
Successful management of thirds comes from the shared conviction that everything outside the two partners is indeed outside, and must be handled accordingly. It involves a commitment to putting the couple first, and a willingness to form agreements and make plans about how to manage the demands of people, objects, and tasks outside of the dyad. What I was seeing reflected an inability to effectively attach to one another and to form a safe and protected space for themselves. It is from this space that partners support one another in navigating the world outside them—and that includes how they handle their children.
In a securely attached couple, both partners are willingly the go-to person for the other; their ability to be curious and interested in one another leads to productive discussions about how best to handle the many things that can trip them up, leaving both feeling unsafe and unsupported. Visits with in-laws, time apart, challenging work situations: those are the thirds, and how they are handled is either the stuff of separateness and conflict or of deepening understanding and closeness.
In their fights about the house, for example, both Meg and Rob were putting “self” above “us.” They were replicating what was familiar to both from their earliest memories: neither expected a caregiver to understand or care about his or her needs, so both got stuck in handling things “my way,” which left them feeling unseen and alone. Once they understood this and were able to declare that each truly wanted to take care of the other, they could then talk about what they wanted their home to feel like, and how they might create that space together.
Did this new insight mean they were ready for baby and would never let her come between them? Undoubtedly, they would make mistakes, but they had begun to feel the warmth that comes from knowing what to do for your partner, and the strength of handling situations collaboratively. So when they began to argue about their birthing prep (another third), we “went PACT:” up from the rolling chairs and over to the couch to explore moment by moment what was happening, so they could figure out how to do this thing together. They sat down and turned their attention toward one another.
