Your Brain Works Against You When You Argue With Your Significant Other

First comes love, then comes marriage (or some modern equivalent), then comes the inevitable really stupid fight you keep having over who threw whom under the carriage last time you went over to that person’s place for that thing. Spats with your significant other—there are infinite varieties—are unavoidable. But they don’t have to be so bruising or so frequent, according to Stan Tatkin, therapist, researcher and author of the new book We Do: Saying Yes to a Relationship of Depth, True Connection and Enduring Love.

Tatkin studies couples by filming them during a fight and then doing video microanalysis (a slow-motion, frame-by-frame examination of the footage) to see what’s really going on. Through this analysis, he has found that the human brain has a set of characteristics that can make fights with our loved ones worse...:

• You’re relying too much on your memory
• You’re expecting perception to be objective
• You’re overestimating how well you’re communicating
• You’re not looking at each other
• You’re seeking compromise but not collaboration

...continue here.

-- Belinda Luscombe