Feel free to ask me any psychology questions that you might have- I know a little about most things, and quite a bit about social and developmental topics.
Links:
Top 10 Reasons Why Couples Break Up
10: Criticism
Not only is criticism flat-out destructive to a relationship, it often doesn’t budge an issue. Most behaviors never change—because most relationship problems are unresolvable. Gottman calculates that 69 percent of all marital problems are immutable, arising from basic personality differences between partners.
9: Lack of Fairness
One irony is that couples that try to slice all responsibilities down the middle wind up the least happy. Research indicates that’s because in trying to be scrupulously fair, they spend all their time measuring, comparing, and arguing over where the dividing line falls.
8: Personality Conflict
Much irritation can be avoided just by understanding the differences between you and your partner—and accepting that it’s OK, even inevitable, to be different.
7: Flirting with others
Feeling a lack of closeness often manifests itself in flirting with others. The flirting may be innocent in that it doesn’t lead anywhere, but it can be hurtful and humiliating to a partner.
6: Lack of sex
It helps to just fondle each other instead of fighting over what you’re stressed over (like a hard day at school or work).
5: Feeling controlled
This one doesn’t take much thought, no one wants to feel like they can’t do anything (like eating cereal at five pm) without approval.
4: Feeling unappreciated
“It’s up to each of us to communicate what it takes to make us feel appreciated,” says Sollee. “You can’t assume your partner knows what to do.”
3: Feeling unloved
“We need that connection, that praise, the understanding; we need to have somebody who is going to be there and not run. That’s how you break somebody’s pattern.”
2. Messiness
In every relationship there’s someone who is messier, but there should be an understanding of this.
1. Deliberate actions
Many of the things people do without noticing are usually the number one cause of a break up; couples who really love each other will learn to love these perks (perhaps snoring reminds you that they are sleeping next to you, and their taking so much time to get ready reminds you that they care about looking good for you.)
The Brain on Love
The most successful people recognize that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation.
It is not the number of arguments that partners have, nor the method of dealing with angry feelings, nor even whether they successfully resolve disagreements, that make a difference in defining success or failure in a relationship. The important defining factor is the ability to sustain emotional engagement and to reconnect to each other following arguments.
Recent studies confirm that insecurely attached people who are married to securely attached partners can, within a period of 5 years’ time, modify an insecure attachment pattern.
The bonds of love in adults represent an accumulation of the loving attachments developed early in life. […] Marital disagreement may constitute a ‘surface narrative’ used to explain unresolved, deeply painful attachment yearnings and defensive emotional disengagement that leads to anger and despair.
What we frequently see is that the growth-seeking part of the person, yearning to heal the early injury, seeks intimate connection with a partner whose conscious and unconscious qualities are reminiscent of significant parental figures. What then happens is a repetitious pattern […] in which the internal working models of each trigger the underlying unconscious emotional reactions that created the original difficulty. This creates a counterreaction and eventually shapes the partners’ responses such that each becomes a reenacting figure similar to the original inadequate caregiver.
There's No Such Thing as Everlasting Love
Anyone who talks to me about relationships knows that I think the way that we conceptualize “true love” is really dangerous. This article backs up this idea in a really fascinating way.
