Love is wonderful, love is joy, love is the greatest thing in the world… Love is also an enormous pain in the ass. Marriage is hard work. Older people are nodding right now while young people are probably sticking their fingers in their ears and reciting their favorite lines from “The Notebook.”)
So how do you make relationship last? What myths about love are leading us astray and what do you have to do to have a loving relationship that stands the test of time?A lot of what you’re about to read is very unsexy and very unromantic. Sorry about that. But this isn’t fairy tale time. We’re going to see what it takes to makes real relationships last so you can get as close to the fairy tale as possible. Everyone asks how you got married. Nobody asks how you stayed married. Time to find out the answer to that often-ignored second question…Looking for similarity is founded on the belief that if you share things in common, you won’t have problems. But over the course of a lifetime, every couple has problems.So the only type of similarity that matters for relationships that last is in an area known as “meta-emotions.”It means how you feel about feelings. You want someone who handles emotions the same way you do. Here’s Jonah.Meta-emotions are the real signal variable in terms of predicting whether or not a marriage will last. Do you believe you should express anger? Or do you believe in holding it in and waiting for it to fizzle out? Do you think happiness should be shared but anger should be suppressed? Sharing your meta-emotional style gives you a common emotional template, a common language.
With long-term relationships you should be less concerned with characteristics that reduce the likelihood of conflict and pay more attention to finding someone who has a similar style of dealing with conflict. Because there is always going to be some.
“Choosing a partner is choosing a set of problems.” There is no partner with whom we’re not going to fight and get annoyed and complain about. The question is how you deal with those problems. Finding has shown that people who have clashing meta-emotional styles, they have a really tough time dealing with conflict. Even minor annoyances tend to become huge fights, because one partner wants to express and the other partner thinks you should hold it in and then all of a sudden it explodes. In contrast, when you have compatible meta-emotional styles — when people agree on how feelings should be expressed — they’re able to diffuse these tensions before they get too big and dangerous.
I remain your darling Relationship pathologist
CoachMan. +2348057810394
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