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Be a partner who is reliable and accountable 

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Families who make goals together keep goals together.

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Most Esteemed Captain Awkward:

My partner R (she/her) and I (she/her) have been together for 3+ years. She is definitely antsy to get engaged and I thought we’d be planning for children by now, but things have come up that make it hard for me to imagine taking the next step. We mostly have a great relationship, but R often has criticisms that boil down to me not being thoughtful enough. However, I genuinely don’t know how I can fix this. It’s tough because, due to my abusive childhood in a controlling religious (cult) environment, I have a lot of issues with Never Being Good Enough, and I get so triggered by R sometimes. I’m working hard on being less defensive in these situations, but I don’t know how to take accountability and apologize for something that I don’t actually think is wrong without sounding fake.

A few examples:

• A few months into dating, I learned a show I was obsessed with was leaving Broadway and decided to go see it before I couldn’t. I purchased two tickets and told R that I’d love for her to come but that I understood if she couldn’t. (I figured that if cost was an issue, she’d let me know and hopefully let me cover it, but I didn’t want to assume that would be OK or pressure her.) However, she was very offended and said I made her feel like I “wasn’t thinking of her at all.”

• R’s sister has a toddler and asked R’s mom to travel (~2 hr flight) to them to watch the kid while she went on vacation. R asked me if I wanted to join and I said no immediately. R was upset and said that I had “said no too quickly/I wasn’t thinking of her feelings/was thinking only of negatives.”

• I attended a conference that is directly related to my work but also personally important and meaningful to me (think, a teapot convention focusing on gay autistic tea pot makers) While we texted constantly and talked daily, R was anxious and accusatory, asking me if I was distracted or if I’d been drinking. On the first full day of conference activities, R sent me a text making it clear she felt “not like a priority” and was upset with me. I immediately called her, but she would not talk because she said I sounded upset. (Fair! I was!) We talked it out over several hours the next morning, with me missing most of the conference events I’d been looking forward to.

• Recently, it was her birthday. After weeks of asking what she’d like, she told me she just wanted a specific cake, which I promptly ordered. I did some fun decor (balloons, streamers, etc) at our house, too. The weekend seemed OK but on Monday (her actual birthday) she sent me a text saying she didn’t want to have her birthday dinner because I had failed to wish her a happy birthday and bring her coffee in bed. When she got home, we had a really horrible fight where she detailed the ways I have failed re: her birthday- it was detailed: not putting cupcakes on a plate or doing candles correctly, while attributing these failures to (apparently) my fear of vulnerability and inability to follow through. 

I am trying to be less defensive when R brings up ways I’ve hurt her, but I fear that R has expectations that I cannot meet. Sometimes it almost feels like, in R’s mind, a negative emotion = evidence that I’ve done something wrong. With the first conflict about the trip, I can understand feeling a little taken aback and hurt that I was prepared to make the trip solo if she said no, but I disagree that this means I did something wrong. With the child care situation, I get being disappointed that I said no, but I disagree that it’s reasonable to criticize me for saying no too fast. Am I just too set in my ways? Can I help her to understand how this is affecting me? Is this even fixable? Am I a thoughtless ADHD jerk?

Happy Holidays,

Never Getting it Right

Happy 2025 and other holidays yourself!

Don’t marry someone who shits on your enthusiasm or regularly reminds you of what it was like to grow up in an abusive cult, is my advice for fellow ADHD-ers and everyone.

You describe a pattern where your partner continually ruins nice things you do for her and fun things you do for you. You also describe a pattern where you communicate straightforwardly, she does not, and then she punishes you for not having read her mind. Worse yet, instead of arguing about the specifics what you did vs. what she expected with an eye to better defining expectations or finding solutions for the future, the fights devolve into arguments about what kind of person you are (thoughtless). That is a sure sign of bad faith, right up there with “the more effort you make to understand the other person’s point of view and communicate yours, the worse it gets.” And I think you nailed it when you noticed that her negative emotions get recycled into excuses to blame you, which is an extremely common incubator for emotional abuse.

People have choices about how they treat you, so let’s review her choices relative to her available options at the time.

She made you feel bad about an objectively awesome thing, like getting tickets to your favorite Broadway show and inviting your shiny new girlfriend along. If she had had logistical or financial concerns that prevented her from saying yes, what stopped her from raising them? Her: “I’d love to but money is tight just now.”‘ You: “I totally understand. My treat!” Her: “Oh no, I’d love to, but that doesn’t work with my schedule.”/”I’m not really into that show.” You: “I totally understand, I had to jump on the tickets to get seats at all. But no pressure! I’ll find an friend to go with and we’ll plan something together another time.”

She couldn’t stop you from going on the work trip outright, so instead she manipulated you into spending most of it on the phone, reassuring her that she was a priority and dodging accusations that you were drinking. So what if you *were* drinking? You’re an adult, was that not allowed for some reason? And so what if your priority during that trip was to do work and make the professional connections you came to make? What would keeping you on the phone for hours get her that the words “Have fun, let’s talk when you get back” wouldn’t solve, besides controlling your time and attention and making you feel guilty? Why is you getting to do a job you care about with people who get you a bad thing? A partner is not a pacifier!

She’s had three birthdays and counting to answer the question “What do you want to do for your birthday?” with “I’d love my favorite cake on the fanciest plate we have, but my dream is to be awakened with birthday coffee in bed.” If you’d known how important it was to her, you would have done it in a heartbeat. And yet, she is mad at you for not doing stuff she never told you about, even when you asked her direct questions about what she wanted. She’s also completely unappreciative of the nice stuff you did do. The fact that she punished herself by canceling her birthday dinner just so she could make you feel extra bad about it is certainly a choice, but it’s not something you caused by existing within a non-standard brain.

I’ll confess, the “You said ‘no’ to babysitting too fast” example made me cackle with self-recognition. If she wanted you to come along, she has a right to be sad that you declined, she’s ultimately claiming to be mad that you didn’t fake interest in going before you declined. She could have communicated her disappointment, asked if there was anything that would make you reconsider, or laughed and said “Wow, tell me how you really feel!” But she couldn’t resist an opportunity for critique.

In my experience, when someone harps that you didn’t ask a question or say no just right, it’s usually because they don’t think you should have been allowed to ask that question or say no at all, but they have juuuuuuuust enough self awareness to know that if they admit that, they’ll definitely lose the argument.

This lady seems like she is very bad at being your partner.  Life is hard enough without turning fun, optional things into arguments! If she wants someone who will never buy tickets to fun shit on the spur of a moment or blurt out an answer, then she clearly wants a different person! She has the option to stop tormenting you anytime and find someone who communicates telepathically.

And yet, your email subject line was “Am I A Big, Thoughtless, ADHD Jerk?” and your question contains a troubling pattern that I’ve observed in multiple letters from neurodivergent people, people with diagnosed mental health conditions, and people with past or ongoing experiences of abuse (and associated Venn diagrams):

a) The assumption that a history of trauma and/or a complicated brain makes you an unreliable narrator of your own life who cannot *ever* trust your feelings or reactions.

b) Leading to the assumption that you are automatically the weakest link in any unrewarding relationship or intractable interpersonal conflict.

c) Followed by the assumption that the best way to repair situations that hurt you is by repairing yourself. You will always be an imperfect being, and there will always be more You to work on, so the fact that self-improvement doesn’t work the first or tenth or one hundredth time doesn’t mean the cycle can’t repeat indefinitely!

I will never argue that trauma, mental illness, and neurodivergence have *no* effect on one’s daily experience or relationships, and if they are interfering with yours it’s worth seeking available treatment. But I will argue that when you are engaging with someone who is unkind to you, “How can I fix myself to be more ‘normal’ and make my reactions to their bad behavior smaller and more palatable?” is not only NOT the solution to the problem, it’s a dangerous trap. There is no amount of “work” you can do — no therapy, no medication, no accommodations or workarounds, no amount of masking or policing your emotions that will magically make someone stop being mean to you once they’ve started. Pretending otherwise only ever serves people who want to continue to abuse and exploit you without consequences (and their enablers).

The longer you focus on your reactions to an abusive person’s behavior, question your own judgment, and sink more and more effort into fixing and sustaining the relationship, the longer you linger in harm’s way, and the longer you reinforce the lie that if other people are assholes to you, it’s most likely because something inside you made them treat you like that.

Let’s talk about how your childhood history is rippling through this situation. Often when people invoke trauma triggers, they talking about problems like a) flashbacks and outsized reactions to present stimuli inspired by reminders of the past or encountering similar circumstances in the present and b) behaviors that helped them survive in a stressful environment that don’t translate well to *dissimilar* contexts.

If a zero-abuse world is impossible, it would be super cool if everyone only ever encountered *one* abusive situation or person in life, and that once you got through yours, you get to mark yourself safe and be done for good. But life doesn’t work like that. For abuse survivors, the necessary skill isn’t automatically banishing every troublingly familiar warning bell or negative feeling to the emotional spam filter while you take more deep breaths or count yellow things nearby or remind yourself that it’s probably all in your head. Skills for self-soothing and grounding oneself in present circumstances can be quite useful! But so are discernment and pattern recognition: Asking: “Am I reacting to something that is happening here, and now, in this room or am I reacting based on past experience or manufactured future fear?” only works if everyone understands that one possible answer is “YES, RUN AWAY, NOW!”

In other words, if your partner’s brand of making you feel like you’ll never be good enough (so that you’ll blame yourself and try harder to anticipate her needs) reminds you of how you felt growing up inside an abusive cult, the simplest answer is that it feels familiar because it is familiar. That defensiveness, anger, and sense of unreality you feel about the situations you described aren’t overreactions or artifacts of past abuse, they’re understandable reactions to how you’re being treated in the present. And your reluctance to tie the knot and your timely request for help aren’t a sign that your brain works “wrong.” These are your self-preservation instincts trying to protect you from committing to someone who makes you unhappy. Can you imagine trying to plan an entire wedding with someone who can’t answer basic questions about what she wants honestly, thinks everything you do is wrong, and everything that goes wrong is somehow your fault? NO!

You asked: Is any of this fixable?

Not from inside the relationship and not on any kind of predictable timeline. Once you break up, a lot of stuff will get instantly fixed for you, in that you won’t be around a person who continually steals your joy and erodes your sense of self. You’ll be able to lick your wounds and find a compatible, nice person who is enthusiastic about you when you’re ready.

For your partner to fix anything, she’d have to own the problem, go to a therapist, ask, “Why do I belittle, blame, and try to control my partner whenever I feel bad?” and do whatever years of work are involved in unpacking that question and choosing a different way to be. Somebody who can turn theater tickets and birthday cake into an excuse to be mean to you does not seem likely to do *any* of that anytime soon, and I think attempting to talk to her into it is only going to buy you more bullshit.

Be swift, be quiet, and go. Then pick up your loud, beautiful life where you left off before this person crawled up inside it. Love and solidarity, always.

Make the new year the best year yet for your relationship.

The post How to Make (and Keep) New Year’s Resolutions for Your Relationship appeared first on The Gottman Institute.

Ahoy Cap!

You have taught me a lot. I love how you parse situations. I thought of you while this was happening but am not sure I played it right…what do you think? Edit if you need, I know it’s long.

I am a chronically single geeky cishet woman in my 30s coming out of a several years’ bout of depression and anxiety. A few months ago, I got up the guts to turn on my dating profile. I am always stressed when dating, as I constantly worry I’m doing it wrong and in my awkwardness and low self-esteem will get myself into a situation I’m actually not happy in. It’s hard to envision myself in a relationship; I don’t know what I’d be like in one. But I figured I could not conquer this unknown without trying. 

Happily, I quickly began chatting with a clever, funny, geeky guy a few years older than me. We met for a first date, and I actually had butterflies! We chatted for three hours easily. I was nervous, but excited. 

Second date a week later, he wanted to meet me at his place and then go out for dinner. This made me a little uncomfortable, as for safety reasons I don’t want to be alone with someone in their home until I know them well, but I felt it would be impolite to wait outside his door and instead hurried us to dinner. The conversation was different this time. I felt like every third minute he was giving me ridiculously exaggerated but heartfelt compliments, to the point I became uncomfortable. I finally said something like, “If I’m the most interesting person you’ve met in years, you need to meet more people!” But he laughed it off and kept going. After dinner, he wanted to go back to his place and watch a movie. Now, important note: I want to save sex for marriage, this was clear on my profile, and he claimed he did too. What he wanted to do at his apartment was kiss me (that was welcome,) cuddle (I squirmed away and said I wasn’t comfortable with that,) and then give me a foot massage (I definitely wasn’t comfortable with that, especially since he asked by just grabbing my foot.) I was disoriented and discovered around that time that I needed to leave. 

By the time I got home, I had my head on straight again, so I texted him that while I appreciated the gesture, cuddling and foot massages were too intimate for me to feel comfortable with at this point. I paid close attention to his response: without a trace of pouting or guilting me, he apologized and asked what I was and wasn’t comfortable with. Since he had responded well, I decided to give him another date.

Third date a week later lasted a full day, again full of compliments and vague, maybe-not-literal (?) hints that he would like to buy me expensive presents or take me on trips. But nothing at his place and no attempted nonconsensual massages. I was trying to walk the line of being kind and appreciative of the very real effort he was putting forth without enticing anything further, as I felt he was moving very fast. He told a story about how he was making so much effort because he thought that’s what a woman deserved and to tell him if it was too much. I agreed that it was on me to tell him if it was too much. We did both agree that we had no desire to see other people going forward.

A week later, I requested we just get breakfast instead of spending the full day together, as I was becoming very exhausted and drained from all this and needed a weekend off. He was disappointed but agreed. At breakfast, he again started with the compliments, requested again that I tell him if this was all too much, and then said he really wanted to treat me right and not scare me off because he knew what he wanted, I was it, he loved me.

As soon as he said “love,” the first thought that went through my mind was: “shit, there goes that.” After breakfast, I stalked angrily through the grocery store having imaginary arguments with him about how he didn’t know me near well enough to know if he loved me. I called him later that day to break up with him. I told him that I was concerned not that he had strong emotions, but that he was not questioning these emotions and instead was rushing to judgement and action instead of reflecting critically. 

He was miserable. He did not try to guilt me but expressed that he wished he hadn’t told me he loved me. He expressed doubt that it was such a big deal to say “love”, as “love” to him just means “like a lot”. He asked if I could keep seeing him knowing that he just meant to communicate that he “liked me a lot”.

I said no. This man was older than me, claimed to be experienced with relationships, and had lived in the U.S. (where I am) for 30 years. I don’t know how he could get the idea saying “I love you” just means “I like you a lot” to your average American; it seemed either a last-ditch deception or a strong indication that his social skills were even worse than mine. I said I couldn’t imagine how we could move forward while both keeping our heads now that I knew he had such strong feelings. I would feel pressured to move faster than I wanted, and he would feel resentful of my delay. He promised he would go at any pace I wanted and would not in fact resent it, but I said I couldn’t risk it. He ended by saying that I didn’t have much relationship experience, and one day perhaps I will change my mind. If so, he would be ready. 

In the months since then, he has occasionally sent little notes and texts – not any discussion of what happened, but funny, flirty things like he sent before. I haven’t responded.

I felt gutted but decided about my choice to end this until one friend I told did a very bad job disguising her disagreement. While she was trying to be supportive, her questions clearly signaled she thought I was self-sabotaging by breaking up with a man for…liking me. She questioned whether the early L-word use might be cultural (his family immigrated here) or else a honest mistake by a socially awkward, fallible human. She seems to think I have massively overreacted out of my anxiety around relationships. It was enough to kick off my self-doubt vicious cycle. It now grates on me for hours every time he texts. Each time I remind myself I shouldn’t text back, I feel like I’m sucker-punching the sweet small town guy in the Hallmark movie that only wants to be good to the bitchy, cold-hearted big city lady.

What do you think? Did I gut punch Brayden? Or, alternatively, do you have any ideas of how I could have played this better so I can learn from the experience?

-Not a Lawyer, but that would be cool

Dear Not A Lawyer:

Your “readiness” for *a* relationship is not the issue with why this particular relationship didn’t blossom, and it’s not something you need to “work” on. Realizing that you are not on the same page with someone during the early stages of dating is not a failure. It’s what the early stages of dating are for!

Let’s review: You had a pretty good first date which did its job, which was to give you enough information to know whether you’d like a second date. The second date was incredibly Not Good. You felt cornered and coerced. After you squirmed away from him all night and told him you how uncomfortable he’d made you, he decided that for your third date, nothing remained for him but to assure you in the most animated language of the violence of his affection. When “I love you” did not have the desired results, he tried to both walk it back and blame your “lack of experience” for your rejection of his “love,” while also promising to wait for you.  Yikes on trikes on pikes near dykes! And your friend not only fell for this blatant ‘negging’ but tried to double down? No likes!

If you go on three dates with someone and each date is successively less enjoyable, that’s a great reason to not go on any more dates. If someone declares that they’re in love with you, and your gut instincts say “ohhhhhhh noooooooo,” that’s not a sign that you need to work on yourself until your feelings rhyme with theirs. It’s a sign that you need to stop trying to talk yourself into developing feelings for someone whose texts make you flinch and feel annoyed for days at a time. You gave guy multiple chances, and everything you described about his attempts to escalate intimacy well beyond your stated desires and boundaries made me flinch for you. ( I actually yelled “NO!” when he pounced on your unsuspecting foot.) “I flinch from your touch….and also your words…and also whenever I’m reminded that you exist” is an incredibly good reason to not date someone or be friends with them. The only script or explanation you need is, “Sorry, I’m just not feeling it.”

Good job tuning out your friend’s shitty advice and her excuses for this guy’s cloying behavior! If he’s so great, she can date him (I don’t advise it, but she certainly can.) Good job spotting red flags, sticking to your boundaries, and recognizing that this guy is “in love with you” the way Pepé le Peu is “in love” with the poor cat he’s mistaken for a skunk. He wants to be in love so bad that the closest being that sort of fits his template will do, and he’s trotting out his strategems* for “how to treat women” instead of listening to you about how to treat you. 

*Exhaust them, mostly.

This skunk has chased you long enough, I think, and you owe him nothing. I recommend that you block his number, block him on all the apps, and see if you can preemptively block him from being able to follow or see any social media accounts you have. Do not attempt to notify, explain, or apologize, and do not reply to *anything* he says or does to get around the blocks. Blocking someone after they declare their love, get dumped, and keep right on texting despite receiving no response is not an unclear or mysterious move. It means: “I don’t want this. Stop.”

If you are indeed worried that a lack of dating experience is holding you back in some ways, it has never been easier to go on more low-stakes first dates with more nice people and see if something clicks. Meeting more people will give you more information about what you like. It sounds like what you like is someone who treats you like a friend with the possibility of romance, and you don’t like surprise feet stuff or people who come on strong with boilerplate romantic declarations. (Hard same, honestly!) We are all flawed beings, but please get out of the mindset that your flaws mean you have to put up with stuff that gives you the ick. Feelings aren’t fair, and everything about your story is a reason to be more discerning (“picky”) about who you spend time with, not less. So continue to move at your own pace, and pay attention to reciprocity, safety, and your own enjoyment, and trust that the right people for you will not make you feel like you’re being chased. And remember, someone can be very nice, very into you, and do everything technically right, and still not be your person.

Thank you for your letter. Please allow me to build a general 2025 precept, akin to “Do Less Work” upon it:

Feelings are information. Stop talking yourself into or out of your feelings. Especially stop beating yourself up for not feeling what you think you should feel, and start listening to what your actual feelings are trying to tell you. Not every feeling is helpful or needs to be acted upon, but good news, you can decide what you want to do about your feelings later, as its own separate step! Just, it’s very hard to both make good decisions about a feeling and talk yourself out of having that feeling at the same time.