relationships

“You can't learn a thing about a couple when they're having a good time. You learn everything when they're having a bad time.”

“My great, my high level view of relationships is that it's better to build a life and bring a person into it than it is to try and build a life around a person.”

“All drama in relationships, personal or professional, is caused by unaligned commitments. That's that word commitment. We're not headed in the same direction or unclear and unkept agreements.”

“Your people think that conflict is the issue in distressed relationships. Conflict is the virus. The inflammation is emotional disconnection, that you can't connect with this person, you can't get this person to respond to you, this person isn't responding to …”

“Yes, it's in, in, in distressed relationships, the most common pattern we see is one person is demanding and getting angry and criticizing, and the other person is defending and distancing.”

“Adding another person never makes things easier.”

“To be secure in a relationship is to have both of those things. Is to be able to come back to the harbor, to anchor yourself, to feel rooted, and then to get up, to leave, and to go and play without having to worry.”

“You know, there is a theory that says that basically, whatever you discuss, the difficult conversations, if you want, that you discuss 20 years later, they were all there in the first two dates. People actually know their things, they know their key conversati…”

“You know, I think one of the big conversations that accompanies every relationship is about closeness and separateness. What is together, and what is individualistic, or what individual, you know. How much money do you get to spend alone? And how much money, y…”

“I often say to couples with kids, the relationship's another child. You don't have one child, you have two. It's called your child named, you know, Mary, and then you have a relation, a marital relationship to still nurture, and people don't get that a relatio…”

“This doesn't change the direction. It just changes the volume.”

“There's some evidence that you can make predictions about how a relationship is going based on just the number of those so-called bids that a partner responds to positively. Like when you're asked for attention, you kind of attend back.”

“I think your energy is probably the best flag, and it isn't always about something specific. So if you leave those interactions and You know, you find yourself not feeling great. To me, that's the, always the first flag. And then do you notice there's a patter…”

“No, relationships are an alive organism. They're a living relational system. And, you know, there's a certain point where, no, you can't breathe life into it.”