For Couples
At some level, your partnership is
-- or was --
supposed to be about love, right?
Please join me in considering playwright Tom Stoppard's concept of love, as:
"something which is very, very deep in us
and is very easily obscured,
and is also very easily denied,
which is the instinct towards the other person,
other than toward the self."
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Some harder thoughts:
Psychologist John Gottman’s research is well respected in the couples therapy field. His predictions regarding which couples will end up splitting have a 91 percent accuracy rate.
Among the other problems in communication, these four are statistically the worst. Gottman calls them "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse":
Criticism ("You are always whining"),
Contempt ("You're a basket case")
Defensiveness ("I'm not the problem, you are!")
Stonewalling (withdrawing or becoming silent).
Hopefully, none of those apply to you or your partner. Still, if your (or your partner’s) body language tends to be cold or defensive, or if either of you experience the other as starting conversations with an air of hostility, your relationship has entered “slippery slope” territory.
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. . . . and a somewhat lighter thought:
I believe there’s a word missing from the “for better or worse” part of the marriage ceremony.
That word is “quirks”, as in “for better, quirks , or worse.”
Hopefully, you’re only dealing with quirks – tolerable ones. If it’s more than quirks, perhaps we should talk.
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