…With your friends, your family, and your spouse / romantic interest?
I don’t think a friend catch-up session is complete without this question.
I support probing directly and following up specifically. The conversation is always enlightening and sometimes brings us closer. As one friend of mine likes to say, “People should pry more.”
Relationships are the lifeblood of happiness. They deserve to be discussed and analyzed!
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Ariel Levy’s review of Elizabeth Gilbert’s new memoir on marriage is decent. I liked this paragraph:
Ultimately, Gilbert is clear about what she, like most people, wants: everything. We want intimacy and autonomy, security and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can’t have it. Gilbert understands this, yet she tries to convince herself and her readers that she has found a loophole. She tells herself a familiar story, that her marriage will be different. And she is, of course, right—everyone’s marriage is different. But everyone’s marriage is a compromise.
From a course I have taken on interpersonal relationships, the most interesting thing I recall is ‘relational dialectics.’
We want opposing objectives usually. Autonomy and connection, stability and spontaneity, personal-space and openness.
A quick overview is on wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_dialectics