The meaning of Valentine's Day isn't only a reminder to cherish each relationship and everything we put into it — it's also a good moment to reflect on how a couple gets along day to day and on the state of the relationship itself. I once heard of a couple who, on the last day of every month, kept a little ritual of their own: the two of them would sit down quietly and talk about how each had shown up in the relationship that month and how they had felt — what they had appreciated in the other, when the other had left them dissatisfied, and so on.
Some people might recoil at this — it sounds like a performance review with your boss, dry and joyless. Others feel that setting aside time to reflect with the person closest to you is a sign of taking the relationship seriously: it lets you understand each other's feelings and needs more clearly, and cuts out unnecessary friction. But as the saying goes: love was never meant to be rational, and romance has no logic to speak of. With couples out in force on the streets these few days, let's talk about how to have a romance that is both rational and tender.
The friction couples often run into — have you, in love, ever been through any of the following?
When your other half is out with friends and slow to reply, you struggle to hide the feeling of being let down or restless. That emotion may come from a belief that your partner values their friends more, or is happier spending time with them than with happiness; that they only want to have fun, forget about you, and no longer care about you at all. To make them anxious, you start hinting in your text exchanges that you feel unloved, then stop texting and calling altogether. Bit by bit you feel more aggrieved, even angry. When your partner is finally back from being out — still unaware of why you have been sulking on your own — the upset, disappointed you can't help losing your temper, replaying over and over everything they did wrong. The next day, when you see them, your feelings boil over even further.
Sometimes we make judgements grounded in the instant thought of "all or nothing thinking" — and that makes us overlook other possibilities, blinds us to the strengths and weaknesses of our own viewpoint, so that we see only the side we understand, and a fit of temper comes to feel "perfectly justified".
Or take another example: when your other half mentions a friend of the opposite sex in passing, telling you about the funny moments they shared, even if they only mean to share a slice of their life with you, you might find yourself thinking, "He seems especially happy around this friend… compared with this friend, I feel like I fall short… would he rather be with this friend…" Even with the puzzlement and disappointment inside, you don't want to blow a small thing out of proportion, so you keep it bottled up, go home alone, and dwell on all the different little dramas — the more you think, the more uneasy you feel, worried to the point that even your appetite shrinks. When your partner offers no explanation, and doesn't even notice your worry, you struggle to hide the small gestures of sarcasm or sulking, or you lose your temper on purpose hoping they will reach out to comfort and check on you, and so on. These reactions feed off one another, and in the end only add to the suspicion in the relationship, eroding the trust between you both.
Sometimes, we may be oversensitive to a single thing our partner says, or to one small action. And these thoughts all stem from our core beliefs about ourselves. For instance, if your past experiences, or other factors, have made you someone who feels inadequate inside — carrying deep down the thought that "I am not worthy of being loved" — you may readily use that unrecognised inner belief to interpret everything that happens around you. Even small grievances in love will then stir up your unease or other outsized reactions; things that look perfectly ordinary in your partner's eyes turn, in yours, into unreasonable demands. For example, your partner wants to keep up their existing social life, yet you always end up overthinking it. And getting to the root of it, the problem may be the low self-worth and insecurity that come from feeling you are not worthy of being loved.
How do you keep the right person by your side?
Friction doesn't actually come entirely from a clash between the two people; it is the result of the interplay between our own way of thinking, our emotions, and our behaviour. In fact, by observing and recognising our own instant thoughts, and then understanding how thoughts, emotions, behaviour, and bodily sensations interact, we can better handle the difficulties in a relationship.
While opening up your thoughts to your partner is very important to a healthy relationship, King & Emmons (1990) proposed in their paper that one reason people don't reveal their negative emotions to others is partly a lack of awareness of where those emotions come from and how they respond. The Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) that psychologists often use targets our habitual cognitive distortions and automatic thoughts — such as overgeneralisation and all-or-nothing thinking — to reduce the chance that some instant thought leads to negative emotions that affect the relationship.
For most people, psychotherapy may feel some distance removed from everyday life. In fact, the application of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is not limited to those with mental-health problems. Understanding the psychological reasoning and logic behind it can help us, in daily life, take a fresh look at the way we think, reflect on the other facets and possibilities of a situation, and then put it to the test through behaviour. By cultivating the habit of rational thinking, or the habit of certain behavioural patterns, we can gradually break the vicious cycle in which thoughts, emotions, behaviour, and bodily sensations all feed off one another. Put simply, it means steering your own train of thought, steering clear of the irrational thinking that arises under negative emotions such as impulsiveness, anger, and sorrow.
Romance isn't only solemn vows and growing old together. Sometimes, if we can shift our line of thinking and pay a little more attention to our own thoughts and negative emotions, perhaps many a small collision can be turned into a breath of fresh air — and, in this season of love, become the catalyst that brings the two of you more in tune!
King, L. A., & Emmons, R. A. (1990). Conflict over emotional expression: Psychological and physical correlates. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58(5), 864–877. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.58.5.864
Comments
No comments yet — share your thoughts.