Session Notes

Thought Catalog

Then one day, Jeremy invited me to a theatre a couple of blocks away from his apartment. My closest office friend wasn’t convinced. She told me that he was going to ask me back to his place, just so he could make a pass at me.

Jeremy did invite me to see his apartment, and he did make a pass. The next day he asked me to marry him. Here’s where I have to admit that I was a commitment-phobe myself.

Stafforini

In 2010 the psychological researcher Arthur Aron (and four other authors) released the results of their study which asked if an intimate connection between two newly acquainted people could be created simply by causing them to become incrementally more vulnerable with each other by way of answering a series of thirty-six increasingly personal questions.

It finally got noticed by the mainstream media

Business Insider

The masters, by contrast, showed low physiological arousal. They felt calm and connected together, which translated into warm and affectionate behaviour, even when they fought. It’s not that the masters had, by default, a better physiological make-up than the disasters; it’s that masters had created a climate of trust and intimacy that made both of them more emotionally and thus physically comfortable.

Gottman wanted to know more about how the masters created that culture of love and intimacy, and how the disasters squashed it.

Good Men Project

It was ordinary. Not fluffy, not overly romantic. Real. The kind of real I coveted in couples who married shortly after high school, in wrinkled older spouses walking down the street, still holding hands. I had wanted “real” so badly I often wondered if I had given so much power to the fantasy relationship that I couldn’t hack it, that I sabotaged it so I could never have it for myself.

What I missed when assessing other people’s relationship was their reality. I saw sugar topping the cookie, not the month-old flour involved in the baking.

Psychology Today

All of us are attracted to a certain type that stops us dead in our tracks, be it a physical type, an emotional type, or a personality type. Let’s say that there is a “spectrum of attraction,” from 1 to 10; the people at the far end aren’t physically or romantically attracted to us at all, but those at the upper end are icons-they’re compellingly attractive, leaving us weak in the knees and triggering both our longing and our insecurity.