Some relationship models, how they interact, and my best guesses at what to do about the problems they're pointing at

For the past year or so, Kyle and I have been doing an in-depth study of relationships (and ours in particular), with a goal of enabling us to have the best relationship we can have with each other. We also wanted to get a better grasp on what marriage is for and do a deep gut check that we actually want to marry each other (spoiler: we do!).

I started out by looking for books that would teach me about how great relationships work, and had a hard time finding the information I wanted. I ended up reading lots of books, each of which covered a small facet of the total puzzle of how to arrive at a great relationship. As I’ve gathered more and more models, I feel like I’ve gotten a rounder sense of what types of issues tend to arise in relationships and some sense of how to fix them. I want to share what I’ve learned, with some caveats, e.g. people are different, different people need to hear different things depending on where they’re coming from, etc. Even just between the two of us, there have been some books that one of us has found really impactful and the other thought was only okay. So, YMMV.

Rough structure of this post:

1. Brief descriptions of a bunch of models that are about or relevant to how relationships work
2. An attempt to lay out how the models interact in a given situation
3. Some of our takeaways about how to solve the problems that are implied by these models

Relationship models

Nonviolent communication

People do things because they’re trying to satisfy their fundamental needs: things that are common to all humans, e.g. safety, respect, autonomy, etc. Some needs are subsets of other needs, like you might want financial stability in order to feel secure in your ability to take care of your family (and you might want something even more specific because it leads to financial stability, e.g. to be in control of your and your partner’s finances).

The NVC framework says that when you’re communicating with someone you should try to figure out what their needs are, identify your own needs, and come up with a solution that fulfills everyone’s needs. Marshall Rosenberg (author of Nonviolent Communication) endorses having a “Santa Claus attitude” toward sharing your needs: it’s a gift to let someone know how they can help you. I like how this reframes what’s generous and what’s selfish; it can be generous to tell someone what you need because it gives them an opportunity to help you, and therefore gives them an opportunity to live in a world where you’re more happy and fulfilled than you would have been otherwise, which they also benefit from because you’re more pleasant to be around when your needs are met, so plausibly the selfish thing for your partner to do is to make sure you’re happy because it makes the world more pleasant for them. Marshall Rosenberg likes the idea of identifying things that can “make the world more wonderful for us,” which is a really sweet positive framing.

Love buckets

Kind of like Gary Chapman’s 5 love languages, but less restricted. People have needs that fall into a lot of broad buckets: some overlap with Chapman’s love languages (e.g. physical touch), but also I think it’s helpful to apply this concept more broadly to the question of what’s the best way to show your partner you love them (e.g. exploring together).

A key feature of love buckets is that they are all leaky, but they leak at different rates. Some need to be filled every day, some once a month, etc. It helps to know how leaky each of the buckets is so you can fill them at the right rates.

Attachment theory

People’s behavior is often affected by their attachment style (broadly: secure, anxious, or avoidant). As children, people develop one of these attachment styles with their parents, which often flows into their later relationships. Attachment style in a given case both determines and reflects what needs someone has (e.g. someone with an anxious attachment style has a need for their partner to validate them; this might cause the partner to feel like they need more space, which increases the strength of the first person’s need for validation, etc, and then they get stuck in a loop). Hold Me Tight by Sue Johnson goes through this and other examples of loops that partners get stuck in as a result of their attachment styles and how you can get out of those loops (approximately, naming the loop when you notice you’re in it and making the loop your common enemy).

Bonds That Make Us Free

A book by C. Terry Warner. A central theme is the idea of self-betrayal: you know what’s right and sometimes you do what’s wrong anyway, and in order to subconsciously feel okay about yourself you then have to do some mental gymnastics to allow you to believe what you did was justified. This often looks like blaming other people for things, e.g. you were supposed to pick up groceries on your way home from work but you forgot, but you decide it’s your wife’s fault because she didn’t remind you and she knows you have a lot on your mind. (There’s an interesting thing that happens where just before the moment of self-betrayal, you experience a desire to do the right thing - e.g. I realize when I get home that I forgot to pick up groceries, and part of me feels bad because my wife works hard and I don’t want to inconvenience her, but it’s too emotionally difficult to actually own it and apologize, so I then commit to believing that it’s actually her fault.)

This is similar to the loops described in Hold Me Tight - couples can get stuck in loops of seeing each other uncharitably and blaming each other for their own failings (probably as a result of their own needs not being met), rather than joyously serving each other, which I think you can only do once you’re securely attached and trust that your own needs are going to be met.

The solution proposed by the book is something like opening yourself up to having a change of heart about the person you’re seeing uncharitably. You can’t force a change of heart, but you can make space for one. The action items here are really fuzzy and difficult to explain, but I think the motion is similar to stepping outside the Hold Me Tight spirals by noticing that you’re in the spiral and that you don’t want to be. It seems like there must be a piece of this that also includes making it okay to believe negative things about yourself, which isn’t covered in the book but seems like an important part of the process of allowing yourself to have a change of heart.

Jackpots

Don’t Shoot the Dog! (a book nominally about animal training but also about how to change your own behavior and that of other people) includes a concept that I think is relevant to the gist of Bonds That Make Us Free, which is that sometimes an animal will become ~resentful and stop making an effort, and one of the things you can do is give them an unexpected jackpot (whatever reward you usually use for training them, e.g. a bunch of fish), which often causes them to start making an effort again (in the case of animal training that means starting to try random things again to see what’s rewarded). I think it’s true that people need this sometimes in order to feel motivated, appreciated, loved, etc, and that providing it can clear the air in terms of giving each party more charitable priors about the other. This could look like cooking them a nice dinner, giving them a massage, doing childcare for a day so they can spend a day alone, etc.

I’ve heard people say that in a healthy marriage each person should feel like they’re doing 60% of the work, because you don’t see all of the work your partner does. I think sometimes if someone feels like they’re doing 60% of the work it can make them feel uncharitable toward their partner, and jackpots might help with breaking them out of the uncharitable pattern.

Communication style

People have different communication styles in terms of things like how rude it is to interrupt, how long a silence can be before it becomes rude not to fill it, differences in guess/ask/tell cultures, etc, which can make it hard to hear what someone means even if you both think you’re communicating clearly and honestly.

Meta-communication

One book about this is That’s Not What I Meant! by Deborah Tannen. Things people say often have subtext that might not come across; e.g. if I ask you how your day was, I might be trying to communicate that I want to renew my sense of connection with you, and if you say you can’t talk right now I might hear that to mean that you don’t value maintaining our relationship, when what you really meant was that you have already committed to doing something else right now but you’d like to connect with me another time.

Expectations

This seems obvious but is maybe not always easy to notice: people have different expectations for what they can get from their relationships and what roles they are supposed to play, and being on different pages about this can be rough.

The All-or-Nothing Marriage by Eli Finkel talks about how the purpose of marriage has evolved over time, from being primarily about survival and reproduction (pre-industrial) to being primarily about love (post-industrial revolution) to being primarily about self-actualization (starting sometime in the 1960s). The progression over time correlates with marriage being expected to meet progressively higher needs on Maslow’s hierarchy. This means we now have the potential to have a great marriage but that the median marriage is a letdown compared to our expectations. Adjusting our expectations seems like a reasonable step in making ourselves happier, particularly in difficult periods e.g. with a new baby.

One specific way in which our expectations might be letting us down is that people used to have more of a village to fill their needs and now we’re more isolated and we’ve started assuming that our partners can fulfill all of our needs. This seems obviously crazy, and we often set ourselves up for disappointment when we assume this is possible. Changing expectations and asking people other than our partners to fulfill some of our needs can be really helpful.

There are lots of other possible examples here, e.g. cultural expectations about gender roles: it’s fine if you’re on the same page about things like a woman doing more of the childcare, but damaging if you disagree, especially if you don’t notice the disagreement because you assume you’re on the same page.

Internal family systems (IFS)

There are different parts of you that want different things, and they can be in tension with each other.

Managing around weaknesses

There’s a management concept of “managing around weaknesses” which I think is analogous to the idea of not meeting all of each other’s needs; you don’t need to fire an employee just because they have some weaknesses, as long as you can find a way to make those weaknesses irrelevant (or less relevant) to their job. In the case of a relationship, that would mean designing a role for each partner such that each person is well-suited for their role, and isn’t being asked to do too many things that are outside of their strengths (or their ability to grow in a certain direction). It’s to be expected that not all of the pieces of your role will be perfectly suited to you, but it should be possible to design a role that’s a good fit for you most of the time, and sometimes challenging but fulfilling overall. If this isn’t working, it probably means either that you’ve done a bad job of creating roles (i.e. allocating fulfillment-of-needs in a way that doesn’t match each partner’s strengths) or you’re not compatible enough to maintain a long-term relationship. If it seems like you might not be compatible, it seems worth checking whether you’ve done a good job of creating roles.

Moral foundations theory (from The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt)

There are ~6 moral foundations (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, liberty) that people value to different degrees. Unidentified differences in values can be a cause of conflict. Maybe this is a subset of needs/love buckets.

Tanha & dukkha

A couple useful concepts borrowed from Buddhism: tanha (craving/grasping) and dukkha (suffering/unsatisfactoriness/“a difficult emptiness”).

Grasping at a desire for things to be a certain way can cause us a lot of dissatisfaction, which we don’t need to have. Changing expectations such that sometimes hard or surprising things will happen and we’ll have to deal with them and that we’re capable of dealing with them can release us from this suffering.

Taken too far, these could lead to not wanting anything to be different from how it is, which isn’t something I think would be good to believe, but they can help to resolve dissatisfaction by e.g. taking chores from boring/laborious to serene/meditative.

Inherited patterns / inherited trauma

People inherit a lot of things from their families; it can be helpful to understand each of your family dynamics and how they’ve shaped you and whether it would be good to undo any of that shaping or shape the two of you together in a new direction. E.g. you can shape your conversational culture (guess/ask/tell, how rude/polite it is to interrupt, how much silence is an okay amount), create new rituals and stories/mythology around how things work in your new family culture, etc.

Some people also claim that trauma can be passed down between generations, e.g. that people who were directly impacted by the Holocaust internalized some part of that trauma and passed it on to their children and grandchildren, and that you can only stop passing it down if you fully process it. Some version of this seems true to me when thinking about my own and Kyle’s family histories and the particular neuroses we each have (e.g. Kyle is really into the idea of having wilderness survival skills and lots of citizenships, so as to be able to escape any given situation; his grandmother had to leave the country at a moment’s notice to escape persecution). I also see this in less specific ways, e.g. my grandfather spent most of the war in concentration camps and was an alcoholic as my mom was growing up, which resulted in her being anxious/insecurely attached, which resulted in me being anxious (or something like that).

Working memory

A limitation that we often run into when having difficult conversations is running out of working memory, especially when a lot of cognitive load is going to emotional regulation. Writing things down while talking can be extremely helpful for keeping track of conversations.

Introversion / extroversion

Most people seem to place themselves somewhere on the introversion/extroversion spectrum. I think it’s probably true that in general some people tend to recharge more when they’re alone and some people tend to recharge more by being around people, but it doesn’t feel like a very neat divide and it often seems like this model is obscuring the thing that’s actually going on. I used to believe I was an introvert, but I’ve noticed that as I’ve become more confident in general I’ve also become more extroverted (I think this happened to my mom also). My level of introversion or extroversion also varies a lot by situation, and I think includes factors like how well I know the people involved, how confident I feel in my role in the social interaction, how much status I feel like I have, etc. A telling example is that I still often have the feelings that I would associate with being introverted, but I can spend just about all day every day with Kyle and not feel like I need to go be alone to recharge.

Self-awareness / expanding circles of understanding

You have to understand yourself before you can do a good job of relating to other people. If you don’t, you might end up doing something like advocating for a need that you think you have but being wrong about what the need is, so fulfilling it doesn’t solve the problem you had.

Example of how these play together

Okay, that was a lot of models. Let’s take an example scenario and use these frameworks to think about what’s happening. The original example here is from Bonds That Make Us Free, which just highlights the first perspective; I’m attempting to build on that. Some of the models above don’t quite apply here (e.g. introversion/extroversion) so I left them out.

Scenario: Person X wakes up at night to his baby crying. His wife is asleep. He briefly has the thought that if he gets the baby, his partner can keep sleeping, and this would be a nice thing to do – he loves her and she’s been stressed lately and he wants her to have a break. But he’s tired and doesn’t get up, and begins to rationalize his behavior: e.g. his wife doesn’t work as hard as he does, she’s better with the baby, he got the baby last time, etc.

• [Bonds] He knows it’s right to get the baby and has betrayed himself by not doing so. He makes up stories so that he doesn’t have to consciously believe he’s in the wrong here.
• [NVC/attachment] He has a need to feel like his wife supports him and that they’re on a team together. Maybe part of his reluctance to get up and get the baby is coming from a need to know that his needs will also be met / he’ll also be cared for.
• [IFS/self-awareness] Part of him wants to get up and get the baby so his wife can rest; other parts feel petulant about his need for support not being met. This leads to internal conflict that he may or may not be aware of; becoming aware of the conflict would be a good first step in resolving it.
• [Attachment/expectations] If he got up with the baby a bunch of nights in a row, despite an expectation (whether communicated or not) that this would be a shared responsibility, he might develop an avoidant attachment style because his wife keeps not meeting his need for support and he eventually gives up on expecting that need to be fulfilled and becomes bitter and distant instead. He still has a need for support, but won’t express it anymore and might push away attempts by his wife to fill this need in the future.
• [Expectations/communication] Maybe the couple hasn’t set clear expectations about whose role it is to take care of the baby at night, and they have different cultural expectations. He has an implicit belief that women should do more of the childcare, and she believes they should be equally responsible. They either haven’t talked about it – maybe because their own position was so obviously right to each of them that they didn’t think to bring it up – or haven’t been able to get on the same page about what they’re each responsible for.
  • [Self-awareness] Or maybe his wife has stated that she believes they should be equally responsible but pushes him out of certain childcare responsibilities that she subconsciously believes he won’t do a good job of so she believes she has to do it herself, and he feels less competent at these things because she hasn’t given him enough opportunities to practice, and also feels like his effort isn’t wanted so he’s less motivated to do these things. She feels frustrated because he’s not pulling his weight, and doesn’t realize that she’s playing a huge role in that.
• [Meta-communication] Maybe he and his wife have talked in the past about how they should split responsibility for this work, but they misunderstood each other in those conversations so they now believe they’re on the same page but in fact aren’t, so they keep not meeting each other’s needs in this area.
• [Expectations] Maybe he expects that their marriage will help each of them achieve self-actualization, and for him that means crushing it at his job, which he can’t do when he’s sleep deprived. He feels like his wife is letting him down by not waking up to take care of the baby.
• [Self-awareness] Maybe he consciously believes that what he needs in this situation is to get a good night’s sleep so he can do a good job at work the next day, but in fact the primary thing he needs in the moment is to feel supported by his wife. There are a couple ways that could go:
  • He tells his wife about his need to do a good job at work the next day, and she helps to come up with a way to make that happen (e.g. she sleeps in a room with the baby and he sleeps somewhere else). He feels supported, and everyone is happy. That was lucky; doing the thing he thought he needed ended up fulfilling his need to feel supported, even though he wasn’t aware of what was going on.
  • He unilaterally decides that he’s going to sleep on the couch and leaves his wife to attend to the baby. He feels guilty about it and this doesn’t meet his need to feel supported. He’s confused about why he still feels bad even though he did the thing that was supposed to meet his need, and maybe makes up a reason to resent his wife about it.
• [Managing around weaknesses] Maybe he is a kind of person who does particularly poorly when underslept, and they should structure their roles such that he consistently gets enough sleep (while fulfilling needs his wife has related to this, e.g. getting childcare during the day and allowing her to sleep later in the morning).
• [Tanha & dukkha] It’s harder to do things when you believe you’re suffering. Part of his failure to actually get up and get the baby might be about how he’s framing it as a difficult thing to do, rather than just as a thing that new parents must do.
• [Moral foundations] Maybe he has a particularly strong fairness foundation, which goes into his desire to know that this work is being split equally between him and his wife.
• [Inherited patterns] Each of their upbringings probably factors into what they think is the correct culture to have or the correct way to negotiate problems like this. Maybe he grew up in a household with traditional gender roles and she grew up in a household where work was split equally, and this gives them different assumptions about how things should be.

Some possible solutions to the issues that arose in this example

• Better introspection resolves a lot of the issues: it helps the guy in the example above understand what his needs are, notice when he’s not acting in accordance with his values or beliefs, notice that he feels avoidant and infer that it means he has a need that’s not being fulfilled, notice underlying differences in values, notice internal conflict, etc. There are lots of ways to get better at introspection: focusing (see book by Eugene Gendlin), internal double crux (identify some parts of yourself that want different things and facilitate a conversation between them), meditation, circling, journaling, goal factoring, aversion factoring, therapy, etc.
• One piece that I kind of lump in with introspection but is probably separate is humility, which is an important part of noticing that you’re wrong or not acting in accordance with your values. At least in my experience, you’re way, way, way more likely to be wrong in some aspect of communications or understanding of yourself or your partner than seems possible in the moment, and the amount of humility required feels really unnecessary in the moment (similar to the amount of humility/pessimism you need to apply to your estimates of when you’ll get something done in order to have an accurate estimate).
• Self-compassion (see book by Kristin Neff) is a good tool to enable introspection and humility, in part because I think people often fail to do a good job of understanding themselves because they might find something ugly there that they’re not willing to accept. Self-compassion can allow people to see more of themselves by accepting the existence of each of the parts. I personally enjoyed watching home videos from when I was really young as an exercise in self-compassion by noticing that I felt like the kid in the videos was precious and I wanted her to thrive.
• NVC/attachment/love buckets: once you’ve done a good job of introspection, make a list of each of your and your partner’s needs and details like how often each bucket needs to be filled, and make a plan for who’s responsible for filling each need, being particularly explicit about needs that you think should be largely met by people other than your partner.
• Over-communicating about expectations, and where necessary, developing a better understanding of what your own expectations are. If you have expectations that are hidden from you, you can probably find them through the introspection techniques above and through being curious about what comes up when you talk with your partner about it. More generally, an attitude of curiosity can go a long way.
• Noticing and maybe changing expectations for what each person will get out of the relationship in the short term, and checking that they have similar or compatible expectations.
• Having charitable priors and cultivating compassion toward your partner can help with a general feeling of companionship/teaminess.
• Our culture really de-emphasizes how much work it takes to maintain a relationship, and on reflection maybe that actually makes sense given a longer historical perspective. For almost all of history people didn’t have the luxury of investing time in having good relationships, because they were just trying to survive. It’s still really recent that we’ve even had the concept that marriages should include love, which means there’s not very much wisdom to learn from our elders about how to do this well. I guess I could imagine a world where our culture had figured out relationships by now, but I’m not very surprised that it hasn’t. So it seems reasonable to take away that if you want to have a better relationship than people did a hundred years ago, you’re going to have to put in a pretty substantial amount of effort.