The Rough Patch Quotes

“When we’re self-aware, we reflect on the source and effect of our emotions. When we’re self-responsible, we face our impact on the other person and commit to adjusting our behavior. People who want to stay married can live with a lot—a lot of limits, a lot of annoyances, even a lot of deprivations. But feeling they are being heard is one of the basic requirements for feeling loved. And the flip side is also true: not feeling heard is what people find most corrosive to their sense of trust and potential in marriage. Self-awareness means we’re listening to ourselves. Self-responsibility means we’re listening and responding to the other.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together

“I’d go so far as to say that, even when the offending behaviors don’t seem to be budging, what makes the biggest difference between hope and hopelessness is whether partners demonstrate self-awareness and self-responsibility—acknowledging their impact on each other, and taking responsibility for trying to do something different.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together

“When you can’t feel or act in a way that connects you to your bigger-picture goal of warmth and harmony, it’s worth attempting a “bottom-up” rather than a “top-down” strategy, focusing on the in-the-moment possibilities for awareness, kindness, and responsiveness. A finer-grained attention to what you are each doing to cause bad interactions can enable you to notice what each of you could do differently and gently lead you away from dwelling in a miasma of emotional negativity that toxifies the whole relational atmosphere. Attention to process, not outcome; awareness in the moment; tuning in to your own emotional weather—these are valuable mindfulness techniques under any circumstances, but they are particularly important to creating the moments of repair or attunement that can then promote a more positive big picture. As”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together

“Even when a marriage is basically good people are not always happy. Marriage is a crucible for becoming a more mature, compassionate person. It offers an unflinchingly up-close-and-personal example of how we treat another human being. We see our minds in action, both our worst tendencies and our best. In this light how can we even judge the viability of our marriages without making sure we've gotten enough sleep, exercised, eaten right, and developed some means of reflection, prayer, or meditation? Our emotions and bodies whip us around, and we're so often mystified as to what's causing a given mood. It's so easy to blame the person at hand, which in marriage, unfortunately is often one's spouse.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together

“In a couple allowing each other aloneness is part of allowing each other to explore, have interests, and play. One puts oneself in the other's place through sympathetic imagination. Each person recognizes that "my partner has to do this to be who (s)he is". Each can tolerate the idea "you will forget about me, will forget I'm alive" for some stretch of time, and each accepts, supports, and respects that. At the same time, they share an understanding: "I need you to come back and remember I'm alive and that I need things from you". In a good relationship we are constantly calibrating and adjusting the elastic band of distance and closeness. Sometimes it's pulled tighter and sometimes it's more slack. But the security built over time allows for solitude and immersive experience.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together

“Development in adulthood, and in marriage, requires using the past to animate the present. We lose many things in life. We lose people we love, our younger selves, our children's babyhoods, and the crazy-in-love phase with our partner. We mourn the losses and keep the memories and past selves alive in us-through rituals, reminiscence, and loving action toward othres, investing in the future- is one of the greatest gifts of mature adulthood. From midlife onward, perceiving oneself as generative gives people not only a sense of meaning, but appears to relate to greater health and longer health.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together

“Exaggerating my partner's position allows me to fight with him, rather than ask myself the hard questions about what I believe we can afford. I delegate certain attribute to my partner -for example, recasting his reasonable concern as his "negative" approach to money- while claiming other attributes for myself- I spend as a way to "stand up for myself" in the face of my partner's "control" or to express my "sense of adventure in the face of my partner's" "inertia”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together

“Yet without her taking steps to guide him, he may not know how to discover her most erotically alluring self. In these situations, neither partner takes the risks that would lead to discovery, and they both retreat to their own lonely, disempowered corners.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together

“, venues, playacting—the emotional atmosphere has to allow for discovery and play.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together

“People are after a more elusive experience of seeing themselves and their partner in a different, more erotic light. To”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together

“I’ve said we’re more likely to fulfill our desires for emotional closeness with our partner if we’re compassionate and caretaking toward our own emotions. A”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together

“Heartfelt apologies are enormously meaningful to people. They are an essential aspect of repair. But when they work, it’s because they are based on something even more fundamental: understanding.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together

“peace and tranquillity is to take all the blame. Any time you demand (or, better, request) an apology, it’s hugely important to take responsibility for your own part first. And if you believe you had no part? That’s your clue that some self-reflection is in order.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together

“Insisting one’s partner apologize is often an attempt to find evidence of these attributes. Although it’s a blunt instrument, trying to get an apology is a way of saying, “I don’t yet have faith that you’re fully aware of your own behavior in this bad interaction. Until I feel you are taking some responsibility for your part in it, I can’t trust you.” In practice, the problem with such communications is how often their stealth message seems to be “I won’t even talk to you until you admit that my bad feelings are all your fault.” Over time, it becomes unbearable”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together

“The people who can’t circle back and think about what happened tend to get stuck in their negative emotional reactions. They become lost in absorbing negative states that feed on themselves. They don’t behave with each other’s best interests at heart. They don’t behave in their own best interests, either. They self-destructively redefine their own best interests as not letting the other person off the hook. In that state of mind, they are incapable of accessing the thought “Is my partner my friend or my enemy? Overall, (s)he’s my friend, and if I treat him/her nicely, I am likely to repair this painful moment and restore good feeling.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together

“to disengage when things get hot, and giving each other the needed space in a loving and nonpunitive way. When we do these things, we feel attuned to and want to attune to each other. When we attune to each other, give each other the benefit of the doubt, and trust in each other’s good intentions, then we continue to act as friends. It’s a virtuous circle.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together

“And the larger goal in couples, if you think about it, is maintaining a sense of closeness and friendship.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together

“But in principle, mindfulness is a useful technique for cultivating nonjudgmental awareness of our moment-to-moment perceptions, feelings, and thoughts.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together

“Metacognition is the ability to recognize that our thoughts are thoughts, and not a direct representation of reality. When faced with an angry mother, a child who has achieved metacognition can replace the idea “I am a bad person” with the idea “Mommy is treating me like I am a bad person, but sometimes she’s been wrong about things in the past.” When a wife employs metacognition, she can move from the thought “My husband is a son of a bitch” to “My husband can say mean things sometimes and it’s not okay, but I also know he’s extremely anxious in this moment”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together

“Through metacognition, we understand that subjective reality is not objective reality; that our perception of reality, and other people’s perception of reality, are colored by our respective desires, beliefs, and goals.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together

“One useful starting point is to stop dumping on our “childlike” emotions. They are the wellspring of our desire to connect and our need to be close. The problem is that we spend energy judging and blaming ourselves and each other for these emotions, instead of becoming as skilled as possible in expressing them. We can actually cultivate the needed capacities and skills. Mainstream psychology refers to these capacities as “emotional regulation,” broadly defined as the strategies people use to “influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express these emotions.” We regulate emotions through a variety of different methods, but two of the most adaptive ones—metacognition and mindfulness—rely on reflective functioning, or what I’ve called the feeling-with-and-thinking-about process.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together

“How can we move more smoothly between mature and “childlike” positions without grinding the gears excessively, or busting the gearshift altogether? How do we endure when strong emotions breed accusations and irrational statements, then repair and really listen to each other’s point of view? How can I think while staying connected to my feelings, and feel while staying connected to my thoughts? How can I struggle with all these things and simultaneously give you the opportunity to do so too?”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together

“Now, beset with strong feelings in the moment, you lack a clearly marked mental path to self-reflection that can help you self-soothe or communicate effectively. A common difficulty in intimate relationships is not feeling seen and loved in our difference. As a child, if the people you depended upon either got lost in your distress and couldn’t maintain a separate point of view, or required you to suppress your feelings and take their point of view, it taught you that being a separate individual with a different perspective was somehow a problem. If my experience taught me that separate points of view create ruptures in empathy, it’s no wonder I might fight with my partner tooth and nail to enforce agreement. By passionately insisting that you should see things as I do, I both echo and warp the original protest, at the heart of every human, that I should be loved as myself.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together

“If our parents fell short in soothing our emotions and thinking about what we needed, we’re more likely to regard our partner’s failure of responsiveness as an emergency. Say you are trying to talk to your wife and she appears bored or critical. If you grew up in a family where people responded to your needs and emotions, and misattunements were generally followed by repair, you will likely apply a nondire lens to this situation. Uncomfortable and frustrating, yes; desperate, no. But what if the adults you depended on were dismissive toward your emotions or so easily overwhelmed that they couldn’t offer a calming perspective? What if they were so depressed or self-absorbed or even, frankly, crazy that you had the repeated experience of being left alone with your fear or anger or sadness without any reassurance that comfort would be reliably offered? Perhaps you were even blamed or punished for having your feelings at all. In that case, when your wife fails to tune in empathically, you will likely be sent right back into the soup of your troubling childhood emotions. No one helped you make sense of your emotions back then, after all; no one received your signals in a way that helped you integrate them into an understanding of what they meant, or how to manage them.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together

“Neither could see that their difficulties accepting and caring for their own emotions lay at the heart of their bitter blame of their spouse for not doing so. Diana’s criticism of Stephen for being “oversensitive” expresses a criticism she continuously, if unconsciously, levels against herself. If she felt less critical toward her own dependency, she might be less judgmental toward his. If she didn’t feel such acute shame at her own wish to be indulged, she would spend less time shaming Stephen. So we arrive at still another turn of complexity: Diana’s recoil from affirming Stephen’s lovableness mirrors an internal move directed toward herself. Little is more anti-erotic than shame, so Diana’s criticism doubtless inhibits her own capacity for excitement, as well as Stephen’s. Escaping such patterns is as much a matter of self-acceptance as accepting the other. “Mutual affirmation” includes reinstating both our partner and ourselves as lovable people.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together

“Yet when our inner reserves are depleted and we want the demands to stop, we can find ourselves redirecting our resentment toward our spouse. While we know it’s entirely unfair to get angry at our children’s needs, it can seem almost reasonable to get angry at our spouse’s.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together

“The hope in marriage is that both people manage to take care of their own and their partner’s emotions. We”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together

“Is my partner taking care of my emotions?” We can hardly keep from jumping there. But in the process, we can lose track of a prior step: the need to engage our caretaking capacities on our own behalf. We need to use our developed capacities for thought, sustained attention, patience, sensitivity, and tact in the service of expressing our own deep, tender, and body-based emotions. It’s both staying in touch with our vulnerable emotions and acting as a caretaker and communicator of these emotions that I consider to be the hallmark of emotional maturity.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together

“When we express our body-based needs and desires with our partner, we take a risk. We want to be treated as lovable, to feel understood and valued, yet we also risk being ignored, rejected, or simply misread. These risks come up in any marriage, any day. It’s in the nature of being human that we never get over wanting to be affirmed as lovable and never stop feeling hurt when we aren’t. The astonishing yet normal reality of marriage is that we never feel cared for once and for all. The reservoir of goodwill needs to be replenished through loving words and actions. And if emotional communication works well, it can be replenished. This is the peculiar, hopeful truth at the heart of every meaningful human attachment, including marriage.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together

“desires for tenderness, shared pleasure, and excitement that are at the core of emotional and sexual closeness. Troubled relationships can often be recognized by the ways their members treat dependence as a problem, relegating sexual and emotional longings to the territory of shameful need.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together