Marriageology Quotes

“The trick with constructive fighting, then, is to remember that we have to be able to rumble while doing our best to keep the other person feeling safe.”
― Belinda Luscombe, Marriageology: The Art and Science of Staying Together

“An insistence on arguing a point until everybody agrees with you every time is boring, annoying, and counterproductive.”
― Belinda Luscombe, Marriageology: The Art and Science of Staying Together

“(…) familiarity — emotionless or not — is part of the deal. It’s both the reward of a long relationship and its burden. It can make us treat the person we are supposed to love carelessly.
(…)
Northwestern University’s Eli Finkel has studied modern marriage for years and concluded that what people want from their marriages in the twenty-first century lies beyond mere tolerance. It’s enhancement.
We don’t want a person who knows us and accepts us as we are. We want a partner who knows us well enough to coach us into a better, more authentic version of who we are.”
― Belinda Luscombe, Marriageology: The Art and Science of Staying Together

“2018 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper14 looked at data from four million people in eighty lower-income countries and found that TV ownership was associated with a 6 percent drop in likelihood that a couple had had sex in the previous week. And, interestingly, the decline in the sexual frequency of married couples discussed earlier in the chapter started in about 2000, just as broadband Internet was reaching most homes. “The No. 1 recommendation that every sex therapist will give is to get the technology out of the bedroom,” says Canadian sex researcher (a lot of sex researchers are Canadian) Lori Brotto. “The bedroom really should just be saved for two things and two things only.” When your focus in bed is on a screen, it cannot be on your partner. And if your partner is trying to get your attention, it’s disheartening to be ignored for a slab of glass and microprocessors. Dismay and horniness cancel each other out.”
― Belinda Luscombe, Marriageology: The Art and Science of Staying Together

“I have learned that I like to get things done, even if they are a compromise. My husband will endure a lot of hardship for the result he wants. One way of saying this is that I am sloppy and he is rigorous. Another is that I am realistic and he is insane. Understanding that doesn’t only mean that we have a decoder key for some of each other’s behaviors, it means we’ve got a decoder key for ourselves.”
― Belinda Luscombe, Marriageology: The Art and Science of Staying Together

“We write marital quarrels off as little bumps in the road to be avoided or endured, when in fact they are key landscape features, to be watched and mapped and surmounted. Once you understand them, and navigate them, you will know so much more about the topography of your lover and yourself. You’ll also have a rough outline of the least treacherous route forward for the partnership.”
― Belinda Luscombe, Marriageology: The Art and Science of Staying Together