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“This Is What Happens to Couples Under Stress”: An Interview with Esther Perel
Creating routines
Too much is expected of modern relationships: your partner is supposed to fulfil roles that historically used to be spread out within communal structures. Your partner is supposed to be your best friend, lover, psychotherapist, child-care co-worker, and dishwasher.
What is essential during a crisis is to create boundaries, routines, and rituals. As best as possible, separate daytime and evening, week time and weekend, working time and idle time, family time and individual time. Routine creates a structure and brings a certain sense of order.
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Key Ideas
Creating routines
Too much is expected of modern relationships: your partner is supposed to fulfil roles that historically used to be spread out within communal structures. Your partner is supposed to be your best friend, lover, psychotherapist, child-care co-worker, and dishwasher.
What is essential during a crisis is to create boundaries, routines, and rituals. As best as possible, separate daytime and evening, week time and weekend, working time and idle time, family time and individual time. Routine creates a structure and brings a certain sense of order.
How to respond to the "invisible work"
During the pandemic, being at home with a partner reveals the "invisible work" they're doing, which may be taken for granted. This expanded view of ourselves and our partners can go in two directions.
- In one direction, you are curious and say, "I never knew. I really appreciate it. I realize how I let you do everything." It becomes a source of connection.
- It the other direction, it becomes a source of blame where you want to complain and tell your partner just how much you are doing. This way, you're not going to get help.
How people should fight
Couples go through harmony, disharmony, and repair. So they will inevitably get into arguments. However, what matters is how you fight. Don't highlight everything negative while taking the positive for granted.
Start by saying to yourself, "What are the one or two things that they have done that I can appreciate?" If you start with that, you will fight differently.
Stay focussed on the one thing that you're upset about at this moment. Don't end up talking about other things.
The positive side of a crisis
During disasters, our priorities get reorganised. The extra often gets thrown out. Changes get made. "We will move. We will change jobs. We will live closer to our parents." There are so many new openings.
The cracks in relationships may be amplified, but the cracks can also let the light shine through.
The one thing to improve relationships
While couples are stuck together during this crisis, it's important to know that they'll turn on each other and take things out on each other. This is normal.
Instead of fighting, admit it together, and go from "I and you" to the "we." "What is this doing to us? What does 'us' need at this moment?"
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The form fights take
- The first dynamic of an argument: you gather the information that reinforces your beliefs and neglect information that challenges them.
- The second dynamic: the negative attribution theory. If I’m treating you poorly, it’s because I had a bad day.
- The third dynamic: the negative escalation cycle. This is when we instigate from a person the very behavior we don’t want.
Mistakes during arguments
- "Holding: the absolute truth: We think that when we say something during a conflict, it is an absolute truth rather than a reflection of an experience. If I feel it, then it must be a fact.
- Using the words "always" and "never:" I always do all the work/You never help with the work. Nobody likes to be defined by someone else.
- Chronic criticism: It happens when you criticize so much that you leave the other person feeling like he can never do anything right.
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