Marriage and Relationships

The Art of Marriage

How the Little Things Make or Break a Relationship (psychologytoday.com). Over time, all of the seemingly insignificant moments of daily life in a relationship turn into something of immense importance. Gottman identified four different responses that people typically utilize when their partner sends an emotional bid in their direction. Each can either support or tear down a relationship’s sense of togetherness and security. We can turn toward our partner; turn enthusiastically toward our partner; turn away from our partner; or turn against our partner.

Essentially, an emotional bid is a small way that we daily ask our partners, “Are you here with me?” or, “Do I matter to you?”…By receiving a metaphorical “Yes!” to these questions consistently throughout your relationship, you strengthen your trust and connection to each other.

The secret to a happy marriage may be an emotionally intelligent husband (businessinsider.com). The husband who lacks emotional intelligence rejects his wife’s influence because he fears a loss of power. And because he is unwilling to accept influence, he will not be influential…Statistically speaking, Dr. Gottman’s research shows there is an 81% chance that a marriage will self-implode when a man is unwilling to share power.

Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person (nytimes.com). The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn’t exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently — the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the “not overly wrong” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.

Staying Together by Living Apart (in a Duplex) (NY Times). My girlfriend and I were interested in the two tiny houses…We intended to each live in our own little place. It was a plan that seemed to make people uneasy.

Two of the Profound Rewards of Staying Single (psychcentral.com). There were two ways in which the lives of the people who stayed single improved over time, compared to those who stayed married. First, they experienced more personal growth. Second, people who stayed single, compared to those who stayed married, also reported increases in autonomy and self-determination.

Hard Times in Marriage

The Secret to a Happy Marriage Is Knowing How to Fight (NY Times). People who study marriage, or work with couples in therapy, as I do, talk about the need for a “we story,” a collaboration between partners about values and goals. But if couples are going to collaborate, they have to figure out how to have a productive conversation. A conversation — as opposed to parallel monologues — involves two people who are making an effort to understand each other. In the grip of strong emotion, productive conversation can be surprisingly hard.

No Sound, No Fury, No Marriage (nytimes.com). Shakespeare had it right: “My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart, concealing it, will break.” I never spoke of the anger in my heart, the mounting resentments and hurts, and neither did he. I never demanded attention or care, and neither did he. And that’s why we broke.

How Not to Hate Your Husband This Weekend (nbcnews.com). For Tom and me, weekends are a lingering source of tension. When time is less structured and all family members have conflicting agendas, skirmishes tend to erupt. My friend Marea says that for stay-at-home mothers like herself, weekends are especially complicated, because they often don’t feel comfortable or justified in asking their husbands to pitch in.

Decent men have affairs all the time. I know, because I’ve been with them (mamamia.com.au). From my brief yet insightful interactions with them, they weren’t arseholes. Quite possibly I screened out this sub-species with my thorough selection process because -without exception, ALL seemed like nice men. Family men. Decent men.

“I guess the lesson here is: don’t get divorced.” (qz.com). I have a friend who works as a crisis counselor and sometimes he uses me as an example of the guy who always ends up in the eye of the hurricane, in the perfect storm. He tells people who are in trouble: “It can always be worse. Things will turn around.”

Love

There is Only One Piece of Dating Advice That You Will Ever Need to Know (Medium). If someone is into you, they will find a way to be with you. No exceptions.

There’s Only 1 Reason a Guy Ever Lets a Woman Go (Yes, Really) (popsugar.com). Because the truth is, if he let you go, he simply did not love you.

What Love Really Looks Like (psychologytoday.com). Anyone who has seen a movie starring Hugh Grant or read a romance novel on the beach knows some version of this story. But how would the conventional plot points of romantic fiction play out in the real world?

Why Does Love Fade Over Time? We Asked Experts & Here’s What They Said (bustle.com). Maybe you’ve experienced love fading after a certain point in past relationships or maybe you’re currently very much in love and want it to stay that way forever. No matter what your situation, it can be totally normal to wonder about why love fades over time — and how you can stop it. The truth is, there’s no fool-proof way to keep the love alive, but understanding how our brains play a role can help you protect yourself, and your relationship, from the erosion of time.

Just for Tonight, Pretend You Don’t Know Me (NY Times). But this is also a hazard of relationships: You can take your partner for granted and quit trying to impress. Couples forget how to flirt, or that they’re attractive to anyone else, and get bored — with each other, and themselves. Until the day it emerges that one of them has a whole secret life: an affair or erotic correspondence, a hidden kink, an ex of some unexpected type or gender.

Five things to learn from the man you love by Natasha Badhwar. I’m here to admit today that even though my husband, like most husbands, is a well-loved spoilt brat, I have secretly been taking notes all the time and this is my very first list of things that I have learnt from watching him surreptitiously while he thought I was immersed in work or my daily social media duties.

Why Work Is So Much Easier than Love (theschooloflife.com). We’re a culture that’s highly attuned to what’s beautiful and moving about love; we know its high points and celebrate its ecstasies in films and songs. By comparison, work is the dull, tedious bit – the thing we have to do to pay the bills. And yet what’s striking is how often work, despite its lack of glamour, in fact turns out to be the easier, more enjoyable and ultimately more humane part of life.

Real Men Get Rejected, Too (NY Times). For these men, it is precisely the power imbalance that’s erotic. And to fix that, you have to change male sexuality. I think of this as eroticizing reciprocity, and it goes beyond enthusiastic consent. Men need to be aroused by the fact that women are aroused. They need to like the fact that women are into whatever they’re doing.

Monogamy?

Humans are terrible at monogamy. So why do we want it so badly? (Vox). Vox tackled this question in the first episode of our new show with Netflix, Explained.

Why We Need to Challenge the Culture of Monogamy (vice.com). As someone who identifies as polysexual, I’ve often experienced negativity from those who don’t think outside of how their relationships function. At times, this judgment has come from those close to me. “You’re just slutty,” or “Your man is OK with that, really?” are things I’ve heard over and over again—not to mention the times people have tried to rat me out to my primary partner for what they think is “cheating.”

Marriage and Sex

12 real couples reveal why they don’t have sex anymore (insider.com). Sometimes a couple’s sex life gradually decreases until it becomes nonexistent. And unless both people are happy with that, it’s inevitably going to lead to problems.

Women and desire: the six ages of sex (theguardian.com). Six women across six decades talk about how their sex lives and sensuality have changed, and what they’ve learned about the politics of pleasure.

Books