A Special Application of Agreements 2, 3, 4 & 7.
The wood says 'give me more fire,' but the fire says 'give me more wood.' — Ashanti African Proverb
Whenever I taught the 9 Agreements, Agreement 7 was always the one that lit the room up. People would get genuinely excited about the idea of reflecting someone’s greatness back to them — seeing past the surface to the real person underneath. Narelle would tell stories about going through the checkout line at the grocery store, quietly holding a vision of person at the register - of their real and best self, and walking away with these small, lovely little exchanges. She’s the expert at this and listening to her at the workshops was always inspiring.
But to be honest, that’s the easy version of Agreement 7.
Agreement 6 asks you to come down from the tree — to stop hiding in your compromise and show up as your real, best self. Agreement 7 asks you to be Johnny Lingo — to water the flowers, speak to the possibilities, and hold up a mirror that reflects who someone truly is rather than who they’re currently pretending to be. Both agreements are beautiful on their own. But in intimate relationships, they run straight into a wall.
Where the rubber really hits the road is when the person you’re trying to reflect greatness back to is the same person who has most profoundly let you down. That person is almost never your best friend, your kids, or the people at your church. It’s your spouse. That’s where your deepest unmet needs end up pointed. That’s where your childhood stuff resurfaces. And that’s exactly where being Johnny Lingo becomes the most difficult thing you’ll ever attempt.
So while what follows grows directly out of Agreement 7, it deserves its own space — overlaying what we know about love languages and Harville Hendrix’s insight about the keys we place in each other’s hands, and looking honestly at what happens when two people are each waiting for the other to go first. I’m calling it the Johnny Lingo / Mahana Deadlock. It’s where most of us actually live, at least some of the time.
Here is the wall: we tend to attract into our lives the person least likely to play the part we most need played.
This isn’t a coincidence or a cosmic joke. Dr. Harville Hendrix, founder of Imago Relationship Therapy, spent decades studying exactly this phenomenon. His conclusion: we unconsciously seek out partners whose particular strengths and limitations will press directly on our deepest unmet needs — because something in us knows that this is the relationship with the greatest potential to make us whole.
In other words: the Perfect Storm is perfectly designed.
I know this from the inside. Narelle and I are a bull in a china shop. You can probably guess which one is the bull.
I have a general tendency to get impatient — to be terse or short when I’m frustrated, to say things carelessly that land harder than I intended. Narelle, by nature, is warm, gracious, and deeply romantic. She needs tenderness and intentionality in ways that have never come easily to me. Flowers, cards, planned surprises — these are her language, but not mine.
But then there are things that I need that are hard for Narelle to give. When I’m “in my story” so to speak, have my knickers in a knot, the thing I need the most is someone to just sit down with me and understand what I feel. But Narelle is very dignified, almost like royalty. It’s hard for her to get her head around the purpose or reason for someone squawking like an agitated goose. By nature, the last thing she’s inclined to do is enable what to her seems rude or undignified behavior — but that’s exactly what I need when I’m “all shook up” (as Elvis puts it).
So what are we looking at here? The almost universal experience of every marriage, to one degree or another — being the perfect storm, or just what the doctor ordered for each other’s growth, wisdom, and happiness.
What does this storm look like in your relationships? According to Hendrix and many other experts, the pairings are as varied as people are, but here are a few you might recognize: