3 Quotes Tagged: romantic-relationships

Most couples wait too long to go (to marriage counseling). There's an average six-year delay between the first cracks in a marriage and actually getting help...

When entropy decays the happiness of a marriage over time, it's not just a linear downward progression for everyone. Often, there's a phase change (like water to ice)... In marriage this goes by the appropriately intimidating term negative sentiment override.

Idealization hasn't faded — it has flipped. If love is positive delusion, NSO is utter disillusionment. You are biased against, not toward, your partner. The facts haven't necessarily changed, just your interpretation of them. Rather than attributing problems to context, attributions now lie in someone's poor character traits.

"...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"

"Sixty-nine percent of ongoing problems never get resolved. No, I'm not saying that to depress you. The point is that it's not what you talk about, it's how you talk about it. Everyone thinks the issue is clarity, but studies show that most couples (if they do talk) are actually pretty clear...

It's about regulation, not resolution of the conflict. War is inevitable, but you have to obey the Geneva Convention rules. No chemical warfare. No torturing prisoners. Maya Angelou once said, "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.