User blogs

Trust and commitment are built every time we choose our partner.

The post What Do Trust and Commitment Look Like in a Relationship? appeared first on The Gottman Institute.

Recognizing and embracing your partner's enduring vulnerabilities, as well as your own, will strengthen your relationship.

The post Why Do We Get Jealous in Relationships? appeared first on The Gottman Institute.

The what's App Business API is a powerful tool designed to help businesses streamline customer communication, offering efficient, personalized, and secure messaging solutions. With WhatsApp’s vast global user base, the API allows businesses to connect with customers where they are most active.

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To explore how the WhatsApp Business API can transform your communication 

visit A2ZSMS.

How to cope is the biggest psychological challenge individuals, couples, and  families face during the fires in Los Angeles and in their aftermath. When it  comes to disasters that are […]

The post Coping In Unimaginable Times appeared first on The Gottman Institute.

Howdy Captain,

Thanks for your work and for cat photos.

All players in this story are mid 20s. I (call me Emm, she/her) have been in a wonderful, spellbinding relationship with Ell (he/him) for about a year and half now, and we’re getting engaged in a few months! He has gotten along swimmingly with all the people I care about in my life except…I’ve been unable to get May (she/her), one of my longest-tenured friends, to meet with him.

May and I lived together for three years in college. We’ve been super close since then and she means a lot to me. May has never been in a relationship and has told me she’s insecure about that fact and feels stuck, but doesn’t want to try online dating and works in a field where she has little free time or energy to go out. She’s surrounded by people in serious relationships (both her siblings, her work friends, and mutual friends from college) and I was her last and only single friend –something she was vocally very aware of.

She’s known about my relationship with Ell since shortly after we became official, but the two have yet to meet. Whenever I try to broach the idea of a meeting, she balks.
Examples of this include:
“Hey, I’ve wanted to show Ell this great restaurant that we’ve been to a few times. How about the three of us go on Thursday?” Either ignored or pushed away, with her saying she only wants it to be the two of us.
Okay, maybe it’s because May doesn’t want to be a third wheel. No problem…
“Cee (she) and Ess (he) [college friends, engaged to each other] told me about this cool escape room. Can I tell Ell about it, and the five of us give it a try one Saturday this month?” gets the same sort of response.

We can’t really do low-key, low-effort hangouts at any of our houses since May, Ell, and I all live with our parents. The only event I know of in the near future in which Ell and May will both be in attendance is…Cee and Ess’s wedding in which May and I are both bridesmaids. And by that point, Ell and I will be engaged. It’ll really hammer in the “wow, May, everyone you know is in a committed relationship but yoooooouu” feeling that I know really gets to her.

How can I navigate this situation and have two of the most important people in my life meet with as little stress as possible?

All my best,
Middle Manager

Dear Middle Manager:

Stop doing work about people who aren’t doing work about you.

If May wanted to hang out with you and Ell, she would. You’ve invited her. You’ve suggested. She declines consistently. That puts the ball firmly in her court. She will throw it back when and if she wants to, and she will feel however she feels about it when the time comes. If you want to hang out with May, make plans to spend time with her solo for her own sake. But until she says “I’d love to meet your fella” of her own accord or you’re throwing a general gathering (“Everyone, come have birthday drinks!”), stop trying to cross these streams. Occam made a whole razor about this, and Bartleby walked so that May could prefer not to run.

It’s understandable that you want people you care about to like each other. It’s understandable that you’d like to get the showdown over before you’re at…and in…somebody else’s wedding. You are trying very hard to head off potential awkwardness, but that’s not really possible when the other person in the situation wants completely different stuff than you do, if it’s ever really possible. (Usually trying to head off potential awkwardness later just creates different but equal awkwardness now, and you end up having to pick between which kind is the least worst.) One potential upside of handling the introductions in the midst of being busy at a wedding is a) being too busy with the wedding and too aware of the occasion to have much energy to fight b) there will be lots of other people around to buffer things, including lots of new people neither of you have met, of which Ell will be one more face in the crowd. Either way, it’s time to make peace with the scenario where it probably won’t go how you want it to and there’s nothing you can do about it now.

When the time comes, probably tell May you’re officially engaged the same way you would anyone else in your life who you expect to be happy for you, and let her reactions be whatever they are. “Great news, we’re engaged! The wedding will be around [time].” Until then, maybe tell people within your circle you trust to be happy for you and not convert your good news into a personal attack on them. You’re not getting married at May, and the more you try to manage her reactions, the more you risk being unintentionally patronizing. Just know, there is literally no way you can tell her, no timing, no inviting, etc. that will change an unpleasant reaction into a pleasant one. That’s all up to May. Let’s hope she says “Congratulations!” and takes her complicated feelings about ubiquitous coupledom to:

• a therapist or counselor
• other friends & family members
• online communities of like-minded people
• her diary
• a weekly kickboxing or pottery class where she can convert emotional energy to kinetic energy
• literally any option that isn’t “taking it out on a supposedly close friend for existing and being happy with her life.”

People can have complicated feelings, including scorn, spite, shame, and other not-so-pretty ones, but they also have choices about how they treat you. Part of growing up is to separate the process of feeling our feelings from making choices about how (or whether) to act on them. If you tell May your good news and she is a jerk to you about it, maybe don’t default to how it’s your job to reassure her about why she was a jerk to you or second-guess how or when you caused her to be a jerk to you. There’s never a perfect way to tell people stuff they’re determined not to hear, and if you treat people with scorn when they tell you good news, one reasonable result is that they will eventually avoid telling you any stuff.( Bonus: If you have fantasies of May being *in* your wedding, maybe let go of those until after you see sustained evidence that she’s willing and able to be nice to you about the fact of getting married and nice to Ell in general. )

I hope this all goes more like you hope it will than I fear it might. And congratulations on your happy news!

Here’s a recent Henrietta Pussycat photo drop for your winter viewing. Mood: BABY, but also MURDER