The Rough Patch Quotes

“To tell a story is inescapably to take a moral stance," wrote the psychologist Jerome Bruner. Every story we tell, of marriage or life involves judgement about the salient facts, the details to amplify, the impression we wish to leave. The techniques that great storytellers use to draw us in are not unlike the ones that intimate partners use with each other to promote fruitful conversation. Both ease the listener into their story by speaking in terms of possibilities rather than certainties. When one partner wants to invite the other to consider his perspective, he signals his belief that he doesn't have sole access to the truth...In doing so he invites curiosity...Trouble couples insist their partner's meanings are unambiguous.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Midlife and the Art of Living Together

“One of people's biggest barriers to change is the illusion that they should have figured thing out by now. The reality though is that we're facing weird, new stuff, and the most fitting orientation, might be disorientation. After all, the cost of believing we've got it figure out is often a sense of stasis. One benefit of recognizing our confusion can be an openness to exploration and change”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Midlife and the Art of Living Together

“But is it extraordinary to witness the impact when a partner expresses awareness that his feelings are a product of his own mind rather the direct results of his partner's behavior. It is instantly soothing and mentally organizing to the other partner, giving him space to consider rather than react.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Midlife and the Art of Living Together

“Research findings on attachment, emotional regulation, metacognition, and mindfulness all demonstrate that being able to narrate our inner experience is one of the most powerful ways we can change how we feel. Telling a coherent,accurate story about our experience directly relates to our ability to modulate and modify our emotions. Each helps the other: a coherent story helps organize emotion, and modulating our emotions helps us tell a coherent story.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Midlife and the Art of Living Together

“Using an instrument called the Adult Attachment Interview researchers find that an adult's ability to tell a coherent story about her own attachment history is what predicts the attachment security of her child. In other words, if a woman now a mother can reflect upon and coherently describe her relationship with her own parent, however insecure it may have been, that becomes a decisive factor in whether the attachment between her child and herself is secure.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Midlife and the Art of Living Together

“In American, we're particularly enamored of the "hero's quest" narrative, where we're called to a special destiny from an early age. We speak in terms of "epiphanies", "discoveries," and "turning points: and reiterate a common theme of progress versus decline...If the cultural story about marriage is boring stability, it is easy to lump marriage in with repose. Indeed the discourse of martial leave taking often lays claim to the adventure narrative; "I needed more" "I couldn't grow" - and deposits repose int he "static" partner or the marriage itself.

In reality marriages are rarely stable or boring. People feel enormously affected by their martial partners. When people freeze over they do so for many dramatic and meaningful reasons. When they invoke the word boring it's often because they've stopped listening or paying attention.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Midlife and the Art of Living Together

“Cultural stories are also cliches. Without the frameworks they provide, people find it hard to know how to live life. We are barraged with competing messages, and in constant danger of mistaking slogans for personal experience. As the psychology Dan McAdams observes "People pick and choose and plagiarize selectively from the many stories and images they find in culture to formulate a narrative identity.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Midlife and the Art of Living Together

“From my perspective working on sex in marriage means taking an active role in creating the conditions under which you can have the experience of discovery. Like other areas of relating it's about using our mature capacities for thinking and planning to create situations where we can feel creative or surprised or out of control. Conceived in that way it's not actually the work that is the stumbling block the work is at least as fun as planning our kid's birthday party, and arguably more so. No the problem is the inhibition we feeling in undertaking the working, in acting intentionally to fulfill our own and our partner's desires and needs.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Midlife 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...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: Midlife 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.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Midlife 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 move in a flexible and balanced way between care taking ourselves and care taking each other. Each of us imagines what it feels like to be the other person and tries to communicate in way that our partner can understand and constructively respond to. If all goes well when we can't recruit our mature capacities when we react poorly or blame for no reason then our partner steps in and helps co-regulate us.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Midlife and the Art of Living Together

“If we can't take care of our own emotions, it'll be harder for our partner to take care of us. It will be hard to communicate a plea for our partner's help or comfort that is unsullied by projection, pressure, or blame. Our partner won't have a prayer of delivering the response we desire if we can't find an effective way to express our feelings.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Midlife and the Art of Living Together

“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: Midlife and the Art of Living Together

“He also identified what makes contemporary marriage both an ingenious psychological creation and a demanding emotional balancing act. Marriage is a mature relationship in which we affirm each other as lovable people through accepting each other's childlike--read human--dependence. In fact marriage is a "mature union" insofar as it creates an atmosphere where partners can gratify each other's "unashamed dependence." When Dick alludes to "childlike needs", "caressing words and actions," and "cherishing" he's talking about the desires for tenderness, shared pleasure, and excitement that are at the core of emotional closeness.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Midlife and the Art of Living Together

“In adulthood, we hopefully begin to see that changing our internal perspective is at least as important as changing our outward circumstances when it comes to improving our emotional connections with others. We look within and realize some of the ways that our own emotional style affects our behavior with our partner. In the best case, we perceive that being happy is better than being right, that the golden ring beats the seesaw every time. We begin to feel secure enough in ourselves an our relationships to relinquish a need for certainty. "The older I get, the less I know' is one way people express a growing comfort with complexity.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Midlife and the Art of Living Together

“Entering into the other person's experience while holding on to ourselves; listening and sharing differences directly and non-defensively; expressing difficult emotions without becoming over-reactive or withdrawn--these prove to the essentials of fulfilling intimate relationships”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Midlife and the Art of Living Together

“In the seesaw scenario one partner feels she needs or wants, and she anxiously presses her partner to respond or agree. In the grip of her own emotions, she can't think about him as a separate person, with needs and constraints of his own. If he doesn't respond as she hopes it's hard for her to imagine a nuanced or exonerating reason (for example that he didn't understand what she was asking for or has a different point of view). Instead she's likely to chalk it up to rejection or neglect. Instead of coming to her air her partner is deciding to stay "up" and leave her "down". Each partner must vie to be heard, seen, or responded to. The two individuals each fear that one's fain is the other's loss; there's not enough to go around. The atmosphere can quickly deteriorate to one of blame, defensiveness, taking things personally and feeling wronged.

In the golden ring mind set, a partner may feeling the same intense need as in the seesaw example, but she has the emotional wherewithal not to panic, to withstand frustration, and to trust in her partner's good intentions. Rather than propel her experience into her partner she is able to place her need in a ring that we'll call the relationship. Her partner does the same. The relationship then becomes a shared space for expression. Each partner brings his or her individual feelings into the ring and they think together about the problem at hand. Both implicitly recognize that there are tow people each with a complex mind and body which means that they can't expect their communication to be magically, telepathically received.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Midlife and the Art of Living Together

“I tell couples that the single most important things they can do to stay connected is to hold on to the feeling of wanting to stay connected. Viewing the sweep from first pregnancy to middle age, I've concluded that the most significant risk of new parenthood is that couples will stop taking their own emotional needs serious enough. They will let their needs slide, out of the best intentions only to realize in midlife that their fuel tanks are empty.”
― Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Midlife and the Art of Living Together