I stumbled across a new word the other day, and I really like it. ‘We-ness’ The moment I read it I thought, ‘Yes! This makes sense!”. It is better than ‘us’, which somehow sounds like the result of a math problem – you plus me equals us. ‘Us’ doesn’t, however, describe the qualities of the partnership. Two people, ‘us’, could be opponents. The sum of 1+1 does not equal ‘together’.  

But ‘we-ness’ is qualitative. ‘We-ness’ can lead us to asking questions about the quality and nature of the ‘us’. In a remarkable book, Karen Skerrett and Karen Fergus (editors) introduce the concept of ‘we-ness’. This appears to be one of the few books that focus on the way relationships between couples contribute to resilience and thriving.  

In addition to ‘we-ness’ they talk about the very helpful viewpoint of ‘we-coping’, which makes sense of how some couples cope and thrive in very difficult places; the kind of places that individuals would struggle to manage.  

One of the ideas that really caught my attention was the impact of couple experience over time. ‘We-coping’ increases over time as ‘we-ness’ deepens. Again, this is somewhat intuitive, but what these authors have done is to document the research that supports this conclusion.

The book is organised in a linear fashion, from a discussion about resilience in couples, an exploration of the ‘we-ness’ and then looking in more depth at what it is about ‘we-ness’ that promotes resilience.