simcha's postings about love, connection, parenting & personal growth
A client shared this with me, and I share it with you: some sound, stern relationship advice from the great Noël Coward, in the form of an invaluable letter he sent to his good friend, Marlene Dietrich, in 1956. He was replying to a recent, downbeat missive from Dietrich, in which she had detailed the latest in a long line of depressing “episodes” involving her on-off lover of a few years, Yul “Curly” Brynner. Coward clearly couldn’t bear to see her suffer any longer.
Adapted from Are You With the Right Mate? by Rebecca Webber (Psychology Today, 1.1.2012)
Are you with the right mate? Is there some MORE right person waiting for you somewhere? And if you could find that one special person, would you then, finally, find fulfillment and happiness?
Although we cannot always anticipate or avoid situations that we know have the power to undermine relationships (such as chronic exposure to non-marital stress — medical, financial, and so forth), much can be noticed and considered when we set out to make our choice to commit for the long haul. We know, for example, that couples who share core values and goals have a greater chance for a happy long-term relationship.
Based on Elizabeth Bernstein’s Wall Street Journal article, Nagging: Meet the Marriage Killer
Once again – there is good and bad news. Starting with the latter….
Nagging — the interaction in which one person repeatedly makes a request, the other person repeatedly ignores it, and both become increasingly annoyed — is a toxic communication issue that is one of the leading causes for discord and divorce. We nag when we feel we can’t get what we want from our partner, and we keep on asking in the hopes it will happen. A vicious cycle is set in place: The irritated recipient of the nagging, feeling scolded like a little boy, withdraws in protest, inviting the nagger to nag some more.
A new State of Our Unions report (entitled “When Baby Makes Three”) from the National Marriage Project (NMP)* at the University of Virginia and the Center for Marriage and Families draws on data from three nationally representative surveys (2,870 couples in total) to answer four important questions about contemporary family life:
From marriage researcher Dr. John Gottman’s experience working with thousands of couples, he determined that a long-term reationship is likely to be successful if, very simply, there are more good moments than bad moments. (He speaks of a ratio of at least 5 positive to 1 negative interactions as a predictor of a satisfying relationship.) Where the “emotional bank account” has been fed with a multitude of generous acts, kind words and thoughtful behaviors, negative interactions are more likely to be dealt with with greater equanimity or let slide.
Different people express love differently. They also tend to crave those same expressions of love from their partners, and often find themselves disappointed.
In Dr. Chapman’s best-selling book, The Five Love Languages (over 7 million copies have been sold since it debuted in 1992), the now-73-year-old Southern Baptist pastor and author identifies five primary ways that we tend to express, and consequently interpret, love:
The search for love is on…. online. In October of 2011, the major dating sites had more than than 593 million (!!) visits in the United States, according to the Internet tracking firm Experian Hitwise. Of the romantic partnerships formed in the United States between 2007 and 2009, 21 percent of heterosexual couples and 61 percent of same-sex couples met online, according to a study by Michael J. Rosenfeld, an associate professor of sociology at Stanford.