Your partner is forty minutes late to dinner. No text. Your phone is face up on the table, and somewhere around minute twenty-five, a verdict forms. He doesn’t respect my time. He’s selfish. That’s who he is. Now flip it. You’re forty minutes late. Your boss caught you at the elevator, your phone died at eleven percent, and you’re white-knuckling the steering wheel. Is there a verdict on you? No. There’s a story. “You don’t understand what my day was like.” Same behavior. Two explanations. His is a flaw in his character. Mine is context. That gap sits under more arguments than you’d believe, and you can’t feel it while you’re standing inside it. So I brought someone to help me show you. Christopher Reeve: Superman, 1978 Truth, justice, and the American way. If you …

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Gottman Method Couples Therapy is quite explicit about mind reading in relationships: Healthy partners are expected to know each other well, but they are not expected to mind-read. This brings up an important distinction between attunement and mind reading. Gottman’s “Love Maps” support knowing your partner, but not predicting every need The Gottman’s concept of Love Maps is the idea that partners should have an increasingly detailed mental map of each other’s inner and outer worlds: stresses, preferences, fears, hopes, important people, current concerns, etc. (The Gottman Institute). So there is a legitimate expectation: “I should know my partner reasonably well.” But that is different from: “If my partner really knows/loves me, they should know exactly what I want in this particular situation without my telling them.” The Gottman’s own research actually describes the second …

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Let’s talk about Gilbert and Sullivan. You’ve probably heard the names, but you probably don’t know much about them. This lovely gentleman here, Rowlf from The Muppets, sings a song called “Tit-Willow” or something like that. You can look it up on YouTube. It’s a cool little thing. Anyhow, it’s a song from Gilbert and Sullivan, and so I got curious about that because I liked it. Basically, he’s playing the piano to Sam the Eagle, who’s like, “How dare you do something that is… You are all weirdos.” And it’s a cute little skit. But I saw that on YouTube and I thought, I don’t know a darn thing about Gilbert and Sullivan. And why am I telling you this? What does this have to do with relationships? Well, Gilbert and Sullivan basically bucked …

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Quick show of hands: How many of you out here have ever been in a fight with your partner and said, “I hear you,” and you had absolutely no idea what to say next? Now, if I could see you, I’d count the hands, and chances are there’d be a lot of them. And if I asked, how many times has it happened more than once? I think every hand would mostly go up. And that weird feeling you get about going, “Yeah, I’ve done that, I just don’t know what to do.” That doesn’t mean that you’re bad at this. It’s a sign that nobody ever actually trained you how to have a relationship with a partner. We watched our parents or the adults in our lives. But that did not teach us how …

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I’m often asked about the Gottman Sound Relationship House, in part because people ask, “What exactly is this, and why is it in a pretty little fancy house?” I’m going to explain that and try to translate it for you. The Gottman research is excellent, amazing, 50 years’ worth of data, and dry, dusty, boring. Along comes Julie Gottman. She’s a trauma therapist, and when she meets her husband and sees the research, she essentially says, “Lovely, I love what you’ve done with all this research, and it’s boring.” I’m exaggerating here. “But let me help you.” So she came up with the Sound Relationship House theory: A little pictograph of a house. How does that house work? Basically, the relationship is built in layers. Each layer has to do with one aspect of the …

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I want to talk about two superheroes and one villain. Captain “Fix-It”, Lieutenant “Yes But,” and The Evil ScoreKeeper. Spoiler: They’re all terribly bad for your relationship. Captain “Fix-It” Someone turns up more often than you’d want to acknowledge in your kitchen. He will be known as Captain Fix-It. When your spouse gives you a challenging situation, he appears out of nowhere and comes up with a solution, a timeline, three bullet points, and a strategy before she finishes speaking. Now, let me tell you about Captain Fix-It. He isn’t evil just because he’s unmotivated or uninterested. Since he excels at what he does, he is a villain. You figured out early on that being there for someone implies you can solve their situation. Quick enough that he will have already begun to fix it …

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So I’m going to just kind of ramble for a minute. This is my plant. I got this at the store the other day, and basil, anybody? It’s not doing well. It looked pretty. I put it in the pot. I just kind of left it there. I watered it, gave it sun, but not really enough, apparently. And to be honest, I don’t exactly know what I’m doing here. So the problem with this is I made some assumptions. I can just get this. It’s wonderful. It smells great. It’s a culinary delight. And I was excited, and I didn’t take care of it. Now, this is my curse. I’m not very good with plants. This does not have to be your curse. You do not have to be poor at relationships. You may …

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You know Aquaman? Talks to fish, breathes underwater, looks like it all comes easy to him. Early in that movie, he fights his own brother for the crown, one on one, and loses. Badly. What follows isn’t some five minute training montage. It’s a long grind. Hunted, ambushed, nearly killed along the way, before he ever reaches that trident. And even then, nobody just hands it to him. He has to prove himself worthy to the thing guarding it before it becomes his. Keep that picture. Because that’s this entire video. You are waiting for a moment that is never going to arrive. You know the one. The conversation where it finally clicks. Where your partner finally gets it, or you finally say the thing exactly right, and something shifts, and from that point on …

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