Wired for Love: How Understanding Your Partner's Brain and Attachment Style Can Help You Defuse Conflict and Build a Secure Relationship

by Stan Tatkin

Couples in distress often look away from one another. This is a big mistake. The loss of continuous eye contact pulls each partner out of real-time tracking of one another and shifts each into a more internal, static, and historical perspective. Averting their eyes deprives the ambassadors of vital information and allows the primitives to take over. When this happens, each partner in effect moves away from the other—even if it’s not a physical move—and into a state of high alert. At other times, the mistake is simply due to poor physical positioning. When partners aren’t face to face in relatively close proximity (no more than about three feet apart), it is more difficult to accurately read one another. A minor issue can escalate quickly into a major problem when partners talk while driving or while walking side by side. (We saw this with Leia and Franklin, who fought in the car in chapter 2.) For this reason, I recommend against couples talking about important or emotional matters unless they can maintain eye contact and read each other’s cues. Why give the amygdalae unnecessary power? Of course, it can be tempting to pick up the phone when you want to work something out with your partner. You don’t want to have to wait until you meet again in person. I can’t stress enough: This is a bad idea! Hearing your partner’s voice without the benefit of eyesight can be very misleading. If your or your partner’s primitives go on high alert, there could be an early rush to war that ...