It might be everyone's secret fantasy to be in a rock 'n' roll band, but try starting one with your live-in boyfriend, and things really start to get complicated.

Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac, a band that included and subsequently led to the demise of two couples, once said that being in his band was like being in group therapy. The same could be said about The Mamas and The Papas, a band that despite its success broke up three years, several in-band affairs, countless reconciliations and one divorce later. The White Stripes continue to make beautiful music together, but their marriage fell apart.

All of which raises the question: is musical collaboration between a couple a relationship death-sentence?

Here's hoping not. For the last year, I have been in a band with my boyfriend. Our songs generally grow from the jungle of our one-room apartment in the South Bronx, which we share with a senile Dalmatian and a bipolar, tri-colored cat we call "Rumsfeld."

Our relationship as the front-people of our band, The Lisps, has to our surprise generally improved the way we communicate, collaborate, and compromise at home. How did it get to this point, and what are we doing right?

The truth is that similar to the success of our band (I use success in the purely spiritual sense) things got disastrously worse before they got better.

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When we began rehearsing for the first time, my voice was not in prime shape. While my boyfriend is a conservatory-trained composer and multi-instrumentalist, I am primarily an actress, with no formal musical training, very strong opinions and a limited musical vocabulary consisting mostly of "I like it" or "that hurts my ears."

It's one thing to be tone-deaf, but to be told so by your boyfriend is quite another. "Not tone deaf," he says, "You just had absolutely no cognitive control over your pitch whatsoever."

And that was just the first five minutes.

On stage, things weren't much better. As it turns out, pretending to be someone else on stage is considerably less terrifying than actually being yourself. I told bad jokes, had no idea what to do with my hands and if anything unrehearsed occurred — a skipped verse, an embellishment or vocal harmony — I became angry and paranoid, convinced that my boyfriend was purposely veering off course to test my improvisational skills.

Dinner time, subway rides and walking the dog would inevitably turn into an impromptu band meeting, where he would criticize my stage persona and I would criticize his song-writing. While some girls might dream of falling asleep to the gentle lull of an acoustic guitar, I grimaced under the covers amid fantasies of throwing it out the window.

Kyle Forester, our bass player and friend, affirms: "You often use with each other what I would consider to be 'fighting words.' In rehearsals it often feels like there's something going on that has nothing to do with the rest of us."

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Creative differences? It may be more than that, according to Carolyn Alroy, a clinical psychologist and professional musician.

"Criticism could be a veiled communication about something that's wrong in the relationship. It might be more about the personal relationship," she says. "You don't have to say everything that's on your mind, but you do need to weigh why you're saying it. If you're trying to get someone to change, you need to ask yourself, 'Is this really going to do it?'"

All of a sudden we had a venue in which all of the problems at home had to be brought to the table in order to move forward as a band, and as a result, we were forced to deal with those same problems in our personal relationship.

I was feeling insecure, out of my element, and combative and he was in an artistic crisis, trying to convert a rocky relationship into a vehicle for musical success.

The turning point in our band's direction was a song called "I'm Sorry." In the song, we bring up and defend all the terrible things that we've done and continue to do to one another, followed in each verse by an "I'm sorry," the earnestness of which is up for debate.

The song is a call and response, with one of us asserting, "I know you" and the other responding, "You don't know me" simultaneously. The song is funny, unexpected and cathartic and was the first song that made use of our dynamic, rather than resisting it.

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Around the same time, we began to structure our band-relationship and our home-relationship as separately as possible.

We tried at all costs to avoid rehearsing in the apartment, even if it meant freezing rehearsals on the roof of our building. We also tried to treat anything band-related like any other professional project by setting a date and time. Most importantly, we made a verbal pact before each rehearsal that we would only criticize constructively, a pact that seemed to extend beyond band practice most of the time.

I think in the end we realized that our band and our music is a reflection of the kind of relationship we have outside the band, and that is ultimately imperfect, a little tumultuous, quirky, intimate, and often comical. That acceptance, while it may not have been our original vision for the band, is what makes us authentic.

On our debut EP, you can hear the occasional telephone ring and dog bark (often eerily on pitch) and that's just how we like it. As artistic collaborators, our partnership works because we are committed to our music in the same way that we are committed to each other.

Our audience members often invite us on double-dates at the end of our shows, rather than buying us shots. And while that may not be rock 'n' roll, I still like it.

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The Lisps: http://www.thelisps.com/

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asap contributor Samantha Tunis is an actress and singer for The Lisps.

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