James Cordova

And she would find herself just feeling left out, sort of left behind, ignored.

which she found really hurtful.

And she expressed that to him as, and the change that she was pushing for was, you need to talk to your son about how rude he's being to me and how thoughtless he's being to me because he needs to include me more in the conversations that we're having.

And the husband said,

would defend his son to her and would just like not confront him in that way he would ask her for change like you just need to throw yourself into the conversation right like maybe read the paper in the morning and like you know in the service of like we're gonna have a conversation about this stuff later so so that's where they got stuck he's trying to get her

to jump more enthusiastically into their conversations.

And she's trying to get his son to be more respectful towards her.

I think what I started to realize and what colleagues of mine as well started to realize is that we had done everything that we could to help couples change the things that they were asking for change in the relationship.

And again, the discovery that what is left are the things that arise out of naturally occurring differences between people.

And it became clear that in our studies of different types of couples, that it's really not the presence of unsolvable problems that is the problem that is corrosive, but how couples approach and relate to those perpetual problems.

And for some couples...

they can bring a kind of sense of humor to their perpetual issues and they can maintain a sense of hopefulness as they confront yet again, what are we going to do on Friday night?

And for other couples, they get stuck in a place where they are trying to coerce each other to change.

And the coercion just becomes more and more exaggerated.

And rather than

collude with the couple in their ongoing efforts to change each other, we began to shift towards what does it look like to accept these naturally occurring differences between partners?

What does it look like to become intimate with the parts of our relationship

the friction points in our relationship that usually make us turn away from each other.

Can we actually find a way to use those points of friction to create deeper connection rather than disconnection?

So often the toxicity in the relationship arises right out of that sense of you're trying to change me in a spot where I can't change.