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the key to reviving or divorce-proofing a relationship is not simply how you handle your disagreements but how you engage with each other when you’re not fighting.
Principle 1: Enhance Your Love Maps
emotionally intelligent couples are intimately familiar with each other’s world. I call this having a richly detailed love map—my term for that part of your brain where you store all the relevant information about your partner’s life.
Principle 2: Nurture Your Fondness and Admiration
If a couple still have a functioning fondness and admiration system, their marriage is salvageable.
Fondness and admiration are two of the most crucial elements in a rewarding and long-lasting romance.
The Antidote to Contempt
By simply reminding yourself of your spouse’s positive qualities—even as you grapple with each other’s flaws—you can prevent a happy marriage from deteriorating. The simple reason is that fondness and admiration are antidotes for contempt.
the key to reinvigorating fondness and admiration is to get in the habit of scanning for qualities and actions that you can appreciate. And then, let your partner know what you’ve observed and are grateful for.
Principle 3: Turn Toward Each Other Instead of Away
Each time partners turn toward each other, they are funding what I’ve come to call their emotional bank account.
The first step in turning toward each other more is simply to be aware of how crucial these mini-moments are, not only to your marriage’s trust level but to its ongoing sense of romance.
what makes romance last and gets you through hard times, bad moods, and major life changes. Below 12: Your relationship could stand some improvement in this area. By learning to turn toward each other more during the minor moments in your day, you will make your marriage not only more stable but more romantic. Every time you make the effort to listen and respond to what your spouse says, to help him or her, you make your marriage a little better.
Two Obstacles to Turning Toward
1. “Missing” a bid because it’s wrapped in anger or other negative emotion.
Sometimes, and especially if a relationship is going through a rocky period, a spouse may not recognize when the partner is making a bid for connection because it comes out sounding negative.
So before you reply defensively to your partner, pause for a moment and search for a bid underneath your partner’s harsh words.
Coping with Your Partner’s Sadness, Fear, and Anger
But we did find that the happiest, most stable marriages in the long run were those in which the husband did not resist sharing power and decision making with the wife.
Perhaps the fundamental difference between husbands who accept influence and those who don’t is that the former have learned that often in life you need to yield in order to win.
The Two Kinds of Marital Conflict
Perpetual Problems
Despite their differences, these couples remain very satisfied with their marriages because they have hit upon a way to deal with their unmovable problems so that they don’t become overwhelming.
Marriages are successful to the degree that the problems you choose are ones you can cope with.
Avoiding conflict over a perpetual problem leads to emotional disengagement.
The characteristics of a gridlocked problem are: • The conflict makes you feel rejected by your partner. • You keep talking about it but make no headway. • You become entrenched in your positions and are unwilling to budge. • When you discuss the subject, you end up feeling more frustrated and hurt. • Your conversations about the problem are devoid of humor, amusement, or affection. • You become even more “unbudgeable” over time, which leads you to vilify each other during these conversations. • This vilification makes you all the more rooted in your positions and polarized, more extreme in
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(1) make sure your start-up is soft rather than harsh, (2) learn the effective use of repair attempts, (3) monitor your physiology during tense discussions for warning signs of flooding, (4) learn how to compromise, and (5) become more tolerant of each other’s imperfections.
situational
The Keys to Managing Conflict
No one is right.
Focus on fondness and admiration.
When couples are not able to do this, sometimes the problem is that they are unable to forgive each other for past differences. It’s all too easy to hold a grudge. For a marriage to go forward happily, you need to pardon each other and give up on past resentments.
couples lose their way when trying to persuade each other or settle disagreements.
1. Soften your start-up. 2. Learn to make and receive repair attempts. 3. Soothe yourself and each other. 4. Compromise. 5. Process any grievances so that they don’t linger.
taking some responsibility for the problem is a very important part of softened start-up.
The best soft start-up has four parts: (1) “I share some responsibility for this …” (2) Here’s how I feel … (3) about a specific situation and … (4) here’s what I need … (positive need, not what you don’t need).
If you feel too angry to discuss the matter gently, your best option is not to discuss it at all until you’ve calmed down. Follow the steps for self-soothing before talking it out with your spouse.
Here are some suggestions to ensure that your start-up is soft:
Make statements that start with “I” instead of “You.”
Be appreciative.
Don’t store things up.
Step 2: Learn to Make and Receive Repair Attempts
Getting the Message Through
Remember that the key factor in whether a repair attempt is effective is the state of the relationship.
I Feel 1. I’m getting scared. 2. Please say that more gently. 3. Did I do something wrong? 4. That hurt my feelings. 5. That felt like an insult. 6. I’m feeling sad. 7. I feel blamed. Can you rephrase that? 8. I’m feeling unappreciated. 9. I feel defensive. Can you rephrase that? 10. Please don’t lecture me. 11. I don’t feel like you understand me right now. 12. I am starting to feel flooded. 13. I feel criticized. Can you rephrase that? 14. I’m getting worried.
I have found that in the vast majority of cases, when one spouse does not “get” the other’s repair attempt, it’s because the listener is flooded and therefore can’t really hear what the spouse is saying.
the cornerstone of any compromise is the fourth principle of marriage—accepting influence.
Step 5: Dealing with Emotional Injuries
If emotional injuries aren’t addressed, they tend to become constant irritants—like a stone in your shoe that you keep walking on. People tend to ruminate about these incidents, and emotional distance can build up over time.
When there’s conflict in one of these seven common areas, usually it’s because you have different ideas about these tasks, their importance, or how they should be accomplished. If the conflict is perpetual, no amount of problem-solving savvy will fix it. The tension will de-escalate only when you both feel comfortable living with your ongoing difference. But when the issue is solvable, the challenge is to find the right strategy for conquering it.
