| Some personal and shared stuff | Sunday, 19 May 2024 - 5:15 |
After a few years together, it’s easy to bicker with your partner over mundane stuff. Nitpicking each other about the minute details of daily life can feel involuntary—you know you’re being unreasonable and crabby, but it’s just so hard to stop yourself in the moment. Here’s one simple technique to stop bickering dead in its tracks. Read more »
Every day in June, the most popular wedding month of the year, about 13,000 American couples will say “I do,” committing to a lifelong relationship that will be full of friendship, joy, and love that will carry them forward to their final days on this earth.
Except, of course, it doesn’t work out that way for most people. The majority of marriages fail, either ending in divorce and separation or devolving into bitterness and dysfunction. Of all the people who get married, only three in ten remain in healthy, happy marriages, as psychologist Ty Tashiro points out in his book The Science of Happily Ever After, which was published earlier this year.
Social scientists first started studying marriages by observing them in action in the 1970s in response to a crisis: Married couples were divorcing at unprecedented rates. Worried about the impact these divorces would have on the children of the broken marriages, psychologists decided to cast their scientific net on couples, bringing them into the lab to observe them and determine what the ingredients of a healthy, lasting relationship were. Was each unhappy family unhappy in its own way, as Tolstoy claimed, or did the miserable marriages all share something toxic in common?
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You’re a couple in love. Naturally, you’re going to fight once in awhile. However, being frustrated or angry with your partner doesn’t have to be destructive, as long as you know how to approach the argument.
For the purposes of this article, we’re going to talk about romantic relationships. Obviously, any argument with another person can benefit from some of these principles, but different relationship dynamics require different approaches. What’s appropriate for your boyfriend may not be the best solution for dealing with your boss or your crappy roommate. Romantic relationships have their own unique challenges and its best to deal with problems when they start.
