Diego Perez

it takes time to learn how to care for someone.

Like learning how to care for them compassionately, trying your best to understand, you know, their emotional history, understanding how they like to be supported.

Like these are things that you're developing over time and they don't just happen.

It's not like your relationship's supposed to be easy all the time and exciting.

Like this is stuff that was fed to us by, you know,

clever storytelling for romantic comedies where like you meet someone and then you have one sort of problem that you have to overcome and then you're happily ever after.

Life is not like that.

The same way that you have ups and downs as an individual, you are going to have ups and downs in your relationship.

And there are clever ways to try to deal and face those ups and downs.

I mean, one of the biggest points is really, especially in the moments when you're having arguments,

Doing your best to not strive to win the argument but instead putting your energy into trying to understand each other like one of the Sentences by Thich Nhat Hanh that has really inspired the chapter the art of arguing in the book is Love is understanding

And it's absolutely 100%, like it just couldn't be said more clearly.

But how do you get there?

How do you get to that point?

And that's where I talk about selfless listening.

That's where I talk about taking turns describing the series of events and how things move for each person and doing your best to see where your partner's coming from.

And in the act of seeing each other, the tension slowly starts melting away and it's

It's something that is, you know, it's hard because we're really wired for defensiveness whenever we feel threatened, but we have to train ourselves to understand that like, oh, like I don't need to win this.

I actually, my goal should be to try to understand like, why is this happening?

And let's talk it out.