This is meant to be a quick read — and a pleasurable one — about how cultivating tenderness together can sweeten and deepen your relationship. It’s also a love story.
Hello, dear readers. The book you see above is scheduled to be published in June, 2025. This website exists to give you a taste of the book and encourage you to buy it through Amazon or another bookstore.
The Introduction is included here, and you’ll also find the complete Table of Contents after the Introduction. Much of the original poetry from the book is here, as well as the Exercises from the book, in PDF format for easy downloading. We’ve also included some photos.
INTRODUCTION
Most couples would benefit from a relationship sweetener, to help counter the daily stresses that keep us from connecting heart-to-heart. We believe that cultivating tenderness together is the best way to create the closeness that most of us inwardly crave.
SIX WAYS to SWEETEN and DEEPEN YOUR RELATIONSHIP by CULTIVATING TENDERNESS TOGETHER
We think of tenderness as a gentle and caring sensitivity to each other’s feelings.
These “Six Ways” are at the heart of cultivating tenderness together, and are six of our seven chapter titles:
- Honoring Feelings: Becoming Fully Known and Deeply Loved
- Taming Criticism, Anger and Blame: Gentling Our Communication
- Resolving Conflict Tenderly
- Celebrating Our Love: Embracing Romance
- Eroticizing Tenderness; Reframing Desire
- Growing in Tenderness Together: Choosing Closeness
Any of these Six Ways can enhance your tenderness, and in combination they have the potential to create an exquisite closeness that is precious beyond words.
A LOVE STORY
We feel like we’re living a love story, and we’re hoping that if you’re reading this as a couple, you’re living your own love story and want to learn something new to sweeten and deepen it.
TENDERNESS, YOU SAY?
Some will say it is out of date, old school, like the waltz in a world of modern dance. And there’s no going back.
Others will say the growth of tenderness is exactly what is needed to counter the coarsening of our culture.
Still others will say cultivating it is a good idea, but it is bound to be a soft voice in a loud room, and therefore won’t be heard.
Let’s just focus on the two of you for now. Consider this book as a love letter from the two of us to the two of you, passing on what we wish we had learned earlier. (Hoping, of course, that there are two of you, at least at some point.)
We are saying that cultivating tenderness together is the best way to connect intimately with each other and to bridge our distracted distances. We are also saying that the rewards can be exceptional, and can fulfill us on the deepest of levels — including our major purpose of learning to love one another.
MUCH TO LEARN ON OUR JOURNEY
Some of what we are sharing here we learned from conflicts that arose fairly early in our relationship. At the beginning, we thought our journey together would be smooth sailing. We had seen many of the same relationship books on each other’s bookshelves. We had each been married and divorced, and knew that we wanted to do things differently this time.
To our surprise, we were in couples counseling before the end of our first year together. That popped our expectation bubble, but it showed us that we were determined. We agreed early on that we would make this one work.
Conflict itself was the obstacle in our path. We were stuck. One of us was conflict assertive and one of us was conflict avoidant. Each of us felt abused in our own way. And neither of us wanted to be wrong. We also were not feeling heard by each other during our disagreements.
We had so much to learn — mostly about ourselves through each other — about honoring feelings, banishing blame, transforming anger and resolving conflict tenderly.
Fortunately, one of us soon started a master’s degree program focused on conflict resolution, and we collaborated on the assignments. We came to accept conflict as a natural result of our inevitable differences. We gradually learned to appreciate conflict as an opportunity.
Most importantly, we also learned to treat each other tenderly during conflict.
TENDER CONFLICT RESOLUTION and EROTICIZING TENDERNESS and MUCH MORE
Our chapter on Resolving Conflict Tenderly and our chapter on Eroticizing Tenderness are the two that we believe you will find most impactful as a couple, but the other four Ways also make a major contribution to the joy of living tenderly together. They all help you cultivate tenderness in key areas of your lives as a couple, which creates the long-term trust and deep closeness to produce a rock-solid relationship.
In our conflict chapter we’re going to walk you through what we call Tender Conflict Resolution. We’ve included an exercise called the S.A.V.E. Process to show you the steps so you can use it.
Most of the chapters include suggested exercises, and every chapter includes original poetry. We’ve also included at least a dozen examples from our own life together to illustrate how the Six Ways apply in real life situations.
Each of the exercises in these pages is a PDF that can be downloaded for your use.
EXAMPLES OF ISSUES THIS BOOK AIMS TO HELP YOU WITH
— Not enough closeness with each other
— Feeling disconnected from each other
— Unsatisfying conflict resolution
— Not hearing each other’s point of view
— Absense of spontaneous desire for each other
— Disconnected lovemaking from depersonalized fantasies
— Hurt feelings
— Unexpressed feelings
— Venting in anger
— Bottling up anger and creating resentment
— Blaming each other: “This is your fault!”
— Criticizing each other: “You never . . .”
— Hurtful sarcasm
— “I’m right; you’re wrong!”
— Interrupting during disagreements
— Stonewalling
— Withholding apologies
ABOUT US
We’ve been a couple since 1984. Cheryl is a retired hospice social worker and Bob is a retired family mediator. We both have a university certification in conflict resolution that we earned while Bob was completing his master’s degree.
In 1995, we were certified as a Leader Couple in the Association for Couples in Marriage Enrichment, later known as Better Marriages. We have presented workshops at marriage enrichment conferences at the local, regional and national level. Our topics have included “Living Tenderly Together,” “Tenderness, Fun and Romance,” “Tenderness and Desire” and “Beyond Anger: Embracing Conflict and Each Other.”
A favorite story of our relationship is about the love poem Bob wrote to Cheryl for Valentine’s Day some years ago. It has become a sweet and tender love song by popular singer-songwriter, Erin Bode: “The Moon Is Ours Tonight.” The story is in our BLOG (see in headings above, or in CONTENTS, above, if you are viewing this on your phone). The song is available on Spotify, iTunes, YouTube and elsewhere.
THE PATH OF SWEET TENDERNESS
We’re still learning, because a great thing about these Six Ways is that there is always room for growth in each of them to sweeten and deepen our relationship. It’s a lifetime journey.
We’ve come a long way down the path of sweet tenderness during our years together. Our goal is to illuminate that path for you, in case you’re headed in the same direction.
