Relações

Question = What are the core reasons or the core things you see over and over, that either end or make a relationship challenging to be in. What are the challenges that come up over and over that you see?

Answer = There is always three questions, right?

 — What's a thriving relationship?

 — What can go wrong?

 — How do you fix it?

I think there are a number of things in a relationship that become corner stones of the demise. I'm not going to list them in order but they are all part of each other.

— INDIFFERENCE

— CONTEMPT

— NEGLET

— VIOLENCE

These are probably the four most important. I'm not talking about big violence. Micro aggressions are plenty. 

Indifference: when you start to feel like the other person fundamentally is not really caring about you or you don't care about them. What they feel, what they think, what they're about. It's more than losing of interest. It's also when you are indifferent you degrade the other person. They are less important to you. They don't matter. And ultimately what we feel in relationships is that we matter. It's the essential reason for connecting to people. We are creatures of meaning: "I matter to you, to some one. You care about me. You want my well being. You're proud of me. You want good for me. You're benevolent". All of that.

When you are indifferent, the whole thing goes. Then you start to taste that cold that creeps in. That sense of estrangement, that complete disconnect.

Neglet: when people just basically take each other for granted. They take more care of their car than of their partner, or their dog, or their yard, their business. Anything. Everything gets priority. Everything gets reviewed, evaluated, attended to… People have this idea that they put it all in when they were dating and then once they seal the knot, it's like now they don't have to do squat anymore. And they go into this complete sense of complacency, laziness. It's amazing, they just think this thing is going to live on it's own. Like a cactus.

Violence: the abuse, the level of disrespect. Most people talk nicer to anybody else than their partner when a relationship degrades. Because you can get away with it. Because if you talk like this at work you're gone! Because if you talk like this to the police you're gone! Because if you talk like this on the street you're being punched!

But with your partner you've got that sense that they're gonna be there anyway. They're just gonna take it because it's family. And family is this kind of thing that doesn´t dissolve so easily. So you can just lash out at them and talk to them with a tone, and a dismissal. That is phenomenal. I'm not talking about physical violence and those big things.

Contempt: I think contempt is the top one. Contempt is the killer of them all. because in contempt there the degradation: "you're nothing, nothing. I can kill you with that one gaze, with that one eyebrow that goes up… With, what the fuck do you think you are?". And that's it. You're done.