There is a corollary for relationships. Some relationships are hard, or even impossible, to change. As an individual, you grow—but your father won’t acknowledge that change or adapt to it, and the relationship gets stuck. Other relationships are fluid and open-ended, they grow to fit you better and better the more time you invest in them, like an... See more

This makes the importance of conversation noticeable to me. Whenever we drop below a certain level of talking, friction accumulates. We get more stuck in our ways, we get stressed and don’t have time to maintain the shared context necessary to understand each other.

What most couples don’t understand is that all couples create a patterned style of communication around difficult topics. This interaction frequently takes on a life of its own. The interaction is actually bigger than both people. In reality, the problem is created and maintained by both people: there is not such thing as one-person problems, and

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