Sublime

Principle 2: Many of your repetitious, emotional criticisms of your partner are disguised statements of your own unmet needs.

But couples who “live together first” are actually less satisfied with their marriages and more likely to divorce than couples who do not. This is what sociologists call the cohabitation effect.

He told her that if she wanted to stay married to him, she had to go to treatment for her drinking problem.

Another way to explore the question of ‘who to marry’ is to look at the causes of breakups.

One of the most startling findings of our research is that couples who have maintained happy marriages rarely do anything that even partly resembles active listening when they’re upset.

Recurring episodes of flooding lead to divorce for two reasons. First, they signal that at least one partner feels severe emotional distress when dealing with the other. Second, the physical sensations of feeling flooded—the increased heart rate, sweating, and so on—make it virtually impossible to have a productive, problem-solving discussion. When

I believe this rarely acknowledged issue is one of the main contributors to so many women being unhappy in their marriages today. My best advice to young would-be grooms is this: Don’t take the girl away from her support structure of friends and family. If you want to live in L.A., then marry a girl from L.A. Any man who marries a woman and then mo

they assume the worst about each other to such a pervasive degree that they become trapped in an absorbing state of negativity that I call the Roach Motel for Lovers. This horrible place is marked by endless conflict and bad feelings. Couples “check in” to it and then discover they can’t get out. When couples become trapped in the Roach Motel, they

Psychologists joke that a marriage is a battleground in which two families send their best warriors to determine which family’s culture will direct the couple’s lives.