The Relationship Handbook

For one thing, I want Paula to want to have a child, too. It has to have her blessing too or it wouldn’t be right.

feeling of compatibility in a relationship will diminish when one person is troubled by thoughts about the other.

The fact you want a child means a lot to me.

By requiring your partner to be in charge of your emotional state, you are not only giving them an immense, impossible job, but also disregarding your own power over your thoughts, feelings and emotional reactions.

It wasn’t that Linda wasn’t a nice person. It was just that she did not meet some of my specifications for Princess Charming.

If we think a characteristic is incompatible, then we will get a negative feeling from that thought. The negative feeling is what we call “incompatibility.”

The thinking that creates low feeling states often has many of the following characteristics:

When couples don’t know where intimacy comes from, they have to exert lots of energy to get a little intimacy.

intimacy leads to good teamwork. Closeness brings out the best in each person.

When people lose sight of the source of feelings, they mistakenly attribute their feelings to outside sources. They mistakenly think that our feelings inform us about the world at large.