Trysts are usually not about sex but about seeking friendship, support, understanding, respect, attention, caring, and concern.

If you find yourself keeping score about some issue with your spouse, that suggests it’s an area of tension in your marriage.

If you can accommodate each other’s “crazy” side and handle it with caring, affection, and respect, your marriage can thrive.

“enduring vulnerabilities,” a term we borrowed from Tom Bradbury of UCLA.

Rather than creating a climate of disagreement and resistance, they embrace each other’s needs. When addressing a partner’s request, their motto tends to be a helpful “Yes, and …” rather than “Yes, but …” This positive attitude not only allows them to maintain but also to increase the sense of romance, play, fun, adventure, and learning together

Because of these dissimilarities, most marriages (including healthy, happy ones) follow a comparable pattern of conflict in which the wife, who is constitutionally better able to handle the stress, brings up sensitive issues. The husband, who is not as able to cope with it, will attempt to avoid getting into the subject.

Contempt is fueled by long-simmering negative thoughts about the partner.

In whatever form, contempt is poisonous to a relationship because it conveys disgust.

96 percent of the time you can predict the outcome of a conversation based on the first three minutes of the fifteen-minute interaction! A harsh start-up simply dooms you to failure.