thoughts on relationships
read if your curious to hear about the fighting couple on the bridge and the 6 indicators of divorce
(here’s a pretty shit laptop recording of the first 50 seconds of the song playing on my frame TV if you’re interested LOL)
When I listen to songs it goes a little something like this:
Me: “OOO this SLAPS I love this beat / lyric / instrument / voice / etc”
Me: puts a song on perpetual repeat until I’ve soaked up all the sparkle and move onto a new song.
I was in the above pattern with a song by Vancouver Sleep Clinic called “Love You Like I Do”. The breathy vocals, ethereal instrumentals, beautifully placed crescendos, and strummy moody guitar just did something to me one day when I was sitting at a George Howell sipping on a latte looking out the window at a rainy yet bustling Boston. My lil shit laptop recording doesn’t do it justice lol. In the song, there’s a line that goes “there ain’t a mountain we can’t move”, in reference to what I’m assuming is a romantic partner. What a dreamy line, right? To be in a partnership with someone that is so strong, so solid, so trusting, so powerful that you can really believe you could move a mountain together? #Inspo.
I love this idea. I guess I’m a romantic at heart and that’s why. Perhaps it’s societal conditioning. perhaps it’s what I really love. perhaps it’s what I’m meant for, IDK. I can really overthink this one but I just choose not to and follow what feels good. And the idea that you can feel like you could move mountains with your partner is just an idea that feels good.
On this same day that I was sipping this latte and falling in love with this song I was walking over the Charlestown bridge and happened to be behind what I assume was a romantic couple that was RIPE in the middle of a heated tiff. Like, I could feel the tension from where I stood – WOOF. Obviously, I was invested in observing WTF was going on, and here’s what I saw…
A man, say 6’2, in a tightly zipped, really heavy ice cold grey parka with a fluffy fur hood. A woman, say 5’5, in a similarly heavy purple, unzipped, parka. Unzipped on purpose as if she was letting heat out. At one point the woman attempted to speak to the man and he completely dismissed her. He looked at her, turning his tall, stiff body towards her, and then abruptly turned forward again, not speaking to her, and never missing a step in his swift-paced walk. I could feel the frustration pour out of her, like boiling water foaming down the sides of a pot. She walks towards me and heads towards the railing of the bridge, throws her hands up in what seemed like a combination of disbelief, frustration, anger, and disappointment, and then swiftly turns back again to run and catch back up with the man. This time, though, she was conscious to stay a solid 3-4 feet behind him…the entire rest of the way. They crossed the bridge, then the busy street into the north end, and down a main drag finally out of my sight. He never looked back at her once. I saw him shake his head a few times. She never tried to engage him again and kept her distance from him.
I obviously had my own destination and didn’t go out of my way to follow them (#creepy) but was so captivated by what I was witnessing! I felt all the feels too. Perhaps because I’ve been in a seemingly similar situation where my partner didn’t know how to communicate their emotions in ways other than outbursts of anger, leaving me to trail behind like a puppy until the moment was safe to approach and seek to understand.
Present-day me rolls my eyes at the dumb amount of patience I awarded those moments and the general naivety old-me had in that situation… but hey, you gotta live the hard and weird times to appreciate the easy and fun I guess?
Regardless, I felt for the two of them. It looked painful. Hurtful. Inconvenient. Frustrating.
It made me think about how relationships are WORK – often in the best way – but work nonetheless, ESPECIALLY if you have people in a partnership that cannot effectively communicate their emotions/needs. I really appreciate John Gottman’s work on marital stability and relationships and found myself thinking back to one of his studies on divorce prediction. He had 130 newlywed couples at the “Love Lab” apartment at the University of Washington spend 15 minutes trying to resolve a disagreement while wearing sensors on their bodies to gauge their stress levels. Based on his observations, he was able to distill 6 indicators that could / tend to predict divorce. You can read the 6 here.
As I think about the couple I witnessed crossing the bridge, I couldn’t help but think I might’ve seen two of these 6 things:
a failed repair attempt when she tried to talk to him and he totally shut her down
what seemed like flooding – he seemed shocked or perhaps so freaking pissed he couldn’t engage with her
Now, I had literally no idea what was going on with them so it’s unfair to assume it could have gone any differently…BUT(!) how often can we say we’ve experienced something similar!? Right? Just me??
What I’ve learned in those situations and from relationships, in general, is that communication is key. How simple and tacky of a sentence but it’s fucking true. If you’re so pissed you can’t speak words, the least you can say to your partner is exactly that, “Hey – I’m so pissed right now that I can’t effectively communicate or engage in conversation right now. Can we revisit this later today after I’ve had time to process and cool off?” It’s comforting to know there’s a name for this – Gottman calls this behavior ‘stonewalling’ and defines it as when a listener withdraws from interaction, shuts down, and simply stops responding to their partner #science.
For me, it’s providing the window of transparency into your felt experience so you don’t leave your partner hanging, that tells them where you’re at and that ultimately you care enough to revisit the conversation and that IT WILL be revisited.
This is just one example, though, and I love how Gottman writes about the “Four Horsemen” in conflict discussions: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. Here’s a straightforward article written by one of the people who write for Gottman’s blog, explaining the Four Horsemen. Here’s also a cool image from his Instagram / the blog that defines the 4 and provides antidotes for them because we love a good visual, honey.
Yas, we love a solution to the problem(!) moment.
Anyways.
Cheers to staying curious in relationships, with yourself and others, my friends. We can only serve others as well as we serve ourselves, so join me in filling our cups and teaching ourselves these skills. It’s comforting to know that we as humans aren’t perfect and we’ll mess it up and sometimes get it so right but at the end of the day we’ll always be learning because there is no final destination. You’ll ALWAYS be in a relationship - even if you’re single because you’ll be in a relationship with YOURSELF (arguably the most important relationship you’ll ever have). It’s a blunt realization but I hope you can see it as inspiring. It took me a while to see it as inspiring - for the longest time in my young 20’s it felt discouraging and like more work, like “dang it, I thought when I had the relationship then I was done and we could graduate to the next milestone together and never have to work on our relationship because we were already in it??”
Silly baby Jess. Post lots of life experiences - both painful and joyous - I’m so grateful for the opportunities to love others, and myself, and continuously learn how to be better for myself and others.
Don’t they say that the best things in life are the ones you have to work for? or something like that? ;)
Ciao ciao for now mis amores.