Like Churchill’s paranoid defense of the British state, these qualities were a poison that under just the right circumstances could be a performance-… - Eric Barker

"...the most wonderful form of crazy that love brings: idealization... A 1999 study showed that people in happy relationships spend five times as long talking about their sweetheart's good qualities as bad. As Robert Seidenberg said, "Love is a human religion in which another person is believed in."

...Realism may be accurate, but it's our illusions that foretell our happiness in love. And the more crazy, the better. People who idealized their partner the most felt no decline in relationship satisfaction over a study of the first three years in marriage.

...When researchers ask people in the throes of infatuation about their partner's downsides, they can recognize and identify the bad stuff... But they emotionally discount the negative: it's not a big deal. Or those flaws are even "charming." This attitude helps grease the wheels of a relationship"

one of the reasons the not-nice programs performed so poorly is because they could not forgive and got caught in death spirals.

We’ll see that the fundamental core of relationships is the stories our brains weave to create identity, agency, and community — and how those stories not only bind us together but can tear us apart if we’re not careful.