The Partnership

Both organizations and families are systems. For a system—marriage—to work successfully, four roles must be fulfilled. First: fulfilling many duties—taking care of each other, maintaining the home and children, ensuring the family’s income, and so on.

As a system, the family needs discipline and rules—otherwise there will be no order. Order must change depending on circumstances, because marriage is a choice for many years, and over time, to remain functional, it has to evolve. And finally, a family should be ruled by unity and agreement, based on closeness, mutual help—and… love.

So, four different roles must be implemented in a family so that all these actions become possible: Production (Production — P), Administration (Administration — A), Entrepreneurship (Enterpreneurship — E), and Integration (Integration — I). Together they form the acronym PAEI. If one or more roles are not carried out, something will be missing in the marriage, and it risks breaking apart.

All four roles PAEI cannot be performed simultaneously by the same person, and no one can fulfill them alone at the same time. Thus, marriage is a complementary team, where one of the partners takes on one part of the roles and the other partner takes the remaining part. That explains why opposites attract.

The trouble is that when people with different behavioral styles come together, conflicts arise among them. Conflict can shift into a destructive phase and lead to divorce. Or it can help further development and self-fulfillment. It depends on whether mutual respect and trust are present in the family.

This book is about mutual respect and trust—and how to develop and nurture them in your family.