Partners in unhappy relationships saw it as their responsibility to help their partners become better people. They acted as if they believed that the problem in relationships is that we pair with people who aren’t as perfect as we are. Then it becomes our responsibility to point out to our partners how they can become better human beings. They need us to point out their mistakes. We expect them to be grateful to us for our great wisdom. In miserable relationships our habit of mind is to focus on our own irritability and disappointment, and to explain to our partners how they are responsible for these miserable feelings we have.
from "The Science of Trust: Emotional Attunement for Couples" by John M. Gottman. still chewing through it. it's more focused on hetero monogamous couples than I'd like but there are still a bunch of interesting thoughts.
it's available on Bookshop.org, but if you don't want to fork over 50 bucks for a physical copy or 30 bucks for the ebook, there's always your local library, or alternative means of acquisition
As I mentioned, 69% of the time, a couple’s conflict was shown to be about perpetual issues in the relationship that never got resolved. These lasting issues were due to lasting personality differences between partners. Often the very qualities in our partner we find most attractive during courtship become irritating later on, and these become the seeds of the perpetual problems. These perpetual problems have led family therapist Salvador Minuchin to proclaim that “all marriages are mistakes” (personal communication). Minuchin then added, “But what matters most is what one does with the mistakes.” We found that what mattered most was not resolution of these perpetual problems but the affect that occurred around discussion of them. The goal of happily married couples seemed to be establish a “dialogue” around the perpetual problem—one that included shared humor and affection and communicated acceptance of the partner and even amusement. In this way happy couples actively coped with the unresolvable problem rather than getting trapped in “gridlock.” Therapist Andy Christensen has also emphasized this idea of the importance of accepting each other’s personalities.
another interesting tidbit
(also: nice)