#that he's inherently miserable or unlovable but it's just not true!!! and the way will helps him see that without looking away from his | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sunflowersandcerulean · 6 years

Link

1. Be together for the right reasons

I asked people who were on their second or third (or fourth) marriages what they did wrong. Where did they mess up?

By far, the most common answer was “being with the person for the wrong reasons.”

Some of these wrong reasons included:

Pressure from friends and family

Feeling like a “loser” because they were single and settling for the first person that came along

Being together for image—because the relationship looked good on paper (or in photos), not because the two people actually admired each other

Being young and naive and hopelessly in love and thinking that love would solve everything

As we’ll see throughout the rest of this article, everything that makes a relationship “work” (and by work, I mean that it is happy and sustainable for both people involved) requires a genuine, deep-level admiration for each other. Without that mutual admiration, everything else will unravel.

2. Have realistic expectations about relationships and romance

You are absolutely not going to be absolutely gaga over each other every single day for the rest of your lives, and all this “happily ever after” bullshit is just setting people up for failure.

Romantic love is a trap designed to get two people to overlook each other’s faults long enough to get some babymaking done. It generally only lasts for a few years at most.

True love—that is, deep, abiding love that is impervious to emotional whims or fancy—is a choice. It’s a constant commitment to a person regardless of the present circumstances. It’s a commitment to a person who you understand isn’t going to always make you happy—nor should they!—and a person who will need to rely on you at times, just as you will rely on them.

3. The most important factor in a relationship is not communication, but respect

Communication, no matter how open, transparent and disciplined, will always break down at some point. Conflicts are ultimately unavoidable, and feelings will always be hurt.

And the only thing that can save you and your partner, that can cushion you both to the hard landing of human fallibility, is an unerring respect for one another, the fact that you hold each other in high esteem, believe in one another—often more than you each believe in yourselves—and trust that your partner is doing his/her best with what they’ve got.

4. Talk openly about everything, especially the stuff that hurts

If something bothers you in the relationship, you must be willing to say it. Saying it builds trust and trust builds intimacy. It may hurt, but you still need to do it. No one else can fix your relationship for you. Nor should anyone else.

5. A healthy relationship means two healthy individuals

Understand that it is up to you to make yourself happy, it is NOT the job of your spouse.

Shitty, codependent relationships have an inherent stability because you’re both locked in an implicit bargain to tolerate the other person’s bad behavior because they’re tolerating yours, and neither of you wants to be alone.

A healthy and happy relationship requires two healthy and happy individuals. Keyword here: “individuals.” That means two people with their own identities, their own interests and perspectives, and things they do by themselves, on their own time.

6. Give each other space

Be sure you have a life of your own, otherwise it is harder to have a life together. What do I mean? Have your own interests, your own friends, your own support network, and your own hobbies. Overlap where you can, but not being identical should give you something to talk about and expose one another to. It helps to expand your horizons as a couple, but isn’t so boring as both living the exact same life.

– Anonymous

7. You and your partner will grow and change in unexpected ways; embrace it

One theme that came up repeatedly, especially with those married 20+ years, was how much each individual changes as the decades roll on, and how ready each of you have to be to embrace the other partner as these changes occur. One reader commented that at her wedding, an elderly family member told her, “One day many years from now, you will wake up and your spouse will be a different person, make sure you fall in love with that person too.

8. Get good at fighting

What Gottman does is he gets married couples in a room, puts some cameras on them, and then he asks them to have a fight.

Notice: he doesn’t ask them to talk about how great the other person is. He doesn’t ask them what they like best about their relationship.

He asks them to fight. Pick something they’re having problems with and talk about it for the camera.

And from simply analyzing the film for the couple’s discussion (or shouting match, whatever), he’s able to predict with startling accuracy whether a couple will divorce or not.

But what’s most interesting about Gottman’s research is that the things that lead to divorce are not necessarily what you think. Successful couples, like unsuccessful couples, he found, fight consistently. And some of them fight furiously.

He has been able to narrow down four characteristics of a couple that tend to lead to divorces (or breakups). He has gone on and called these “the four horsemen” of the relationship apocalypse in his books. They are:

Criticizing your partner’s character (“You’re so stupid” vs “That thing you did was stupid”)

Defensiveness (or basically, blame shifting, “I wouldn’t have done that if you weren’t late all the time”)

Contempt (putting down your partner and making them feel inferior)

Stonewalling (withdrawing from an argument and ignoring your partner)

The reader emails back this up as well. Out of the 1,500-some-odd emails, almost every single one referenced the importance of dealing with conflicts well.

Advice given by readers included:

Never insult or name-call your partner. Put another way: hate the sin, love the sinner. Gottman’s research found that “contempt”—belittling and demeaning your partner—is the number one predictor of divorce.

Do not bring previous fights/arguments into current ones. This solves nothing and just makes the fight twice as bad as it was before. Yeah, you forgot to pick up groceries on the way home, but what does him being rude to your mother last Thanksgiving have to do with anything?

If things get too heated, take a breather. Remove yourself from the situation and come back once emotions have cooled off a bit. This is a big one for me personally—sometimes when things get intense with my wife, I get overwhelmed and just leave for a while. I usually walk around the block two or three times and let myself seethe for about 15 minutes. Then I come back and we’re both a bit calmer and we can resume the discussion with a much more conciliatory tone.

Remember that being “right” is not as important as both people feeling respected and heard. You may be right, but if you are right in such a way that makes your partner feel unloved, then there’s no real winner.

9. Get good at forgiving

To me, perhaps the most interesting nugget from Gottman’s research is the fact that most successful couples don’t actually resolve all of their problems. In fact, his findings were completely backwards from what most people actually expect: people in lasting and happy relationships have problems that never completely go away, while couples that feel as though they need to agree and compromise on everything end up feeling miserable and falling apart.

To me, like everything else, this comes back to the respect thing. If you have two different individuals sharing a life together, it’s inevitable that they will have different values and perspectives on some things and clash over it. The key here is not changing the other person—as the desire to change your partner is inherently disrespectful (to both them and yourself)—but rather it’s to simply abide by the difference, love them despite it, and when things get a little rough around the edges, to forgive them for it.

10. The little things add up to big things

Of the 1,500 responses I got, I’d say about half of them mentioned at some point or another one simple but effective piece of advice: Don’t ever stop doing the little things. They add up.

Things as simple as saying, “I love you,” before going to bed, holding hands during a movie, doing small favors here and there, helping with some household chores. Even cleaning up when you accidentally pee on the toilet seat (seriously, someone said that)—these things all matter and add up over the long run.

11. Sex matters… a LOT

But sex not only keeps the relationship healthy, many readers suggested that they use it to heal their relationships. That when things are a bit frigid between them or that they have some problems going on, a lot of stress, or other issues (i.e., kids), they even go so far as to schedule sexy time for themselves. They say it’s important. And it’s worth it.

12. Be practical, and create relationship rules

Then there’s how relationships actually work.

Messy. Stressful. Miscommunication flying everywhere so that both of you feel as though you’re in a perpetual state of talking to a wall.

The fact is relationships are imperfect, messy affairs. And it’s for the simple reason that they’re comprised of imperfect, messy people—people who want different things at different times in different ways and oh, they forgot to tell you? Well, maybe if you had been listening, asshole.

The common theme of the advice here was “Be pragmatic.” If the wife is a lawyer and spends 50 hours at the office every week, and the husband is an artist and can work from home most days, it makes more sense for him to handle most of the day-to-day parenting duties. If the wife’s standard of cleanliness looks like a Home & Garden catalog, and the husband has gone six months without even noticing the light fixture hanging from the ceiling, then it makes sense that the wife handles more of the home cleaning duties.

It’s economics 101: division of labor makes everyone better off. Figure out what you are each good at, what you each love/hate doing, and then arrange accordingly. My wife loves cleaning (no, seriously), but she hates smelly stuff. So guess who gets dishes and garbage duty? Me. Because I don’t give a fuck. I’ll eat off the same plate seven times in a row. I couldn’t smell a dead rat even if it was sleeping under my pillow. I’ll toss garbage around all day. Here honey, let me get that for you.

13. Learn to ride the waves

The man said something like, “relationships exist as waves, people need to learn how to ride them.” Upon asking him to explain, he said that, like the ocean, there are constant waves of emotion going on within a relationship, ups and downs—some waves last for hours, some last for months or even years. The key is understanding that few of those waves have anything to do with the quality of the relationship—people lose jobs, family members die, couples relocate, switch careers, make a lot of money, lose a lot of money. Your job as a committed partner is to simply ride the waves with the person you love, regardless of where they go. Because ultimately, none of these waves last. And you simply end up with each other.

#relationships #love #marriage #markmanson

1 note · View note

recentanimenews · 5 years

Text

Mind over Matter: Mob and the Foil, Mogami

There are days where even if we’ve won the battle, we feel like we’ve lost the war.

I’m talking about the days where you studied hard and you didn’t quite get that grade you were hoping for on your quiz; where you aligned yourself up for a promotion, but it came with huge consequences, or maybe you mustered the courage to asked someone out, and you managed to say it out loud, but it didn’t work out. These are sometimes, the most painful days. You tried your best and somehow, it just didn’t make the cut.

Mob Psycho 100 is ultimately a show about breaking through these kinds of days and focusing on self improvement. It views every day and chance as an opportunity to better oneself, no matter how messy the predicament is. Through its main character, Mob, we’re exposed to a world where a boy’s incredible powers are highly irrelevant to his own image of popularity and confidence. Sure, Mob can wipe out an entire crowd of spirits and perhaps, even people, but at the end of the day, the show, through the suave con man Arataka Reigen, tells us this: being kind is what matters. Empathy and good will precede any other ulterior motive, and the more patient and aware we become of other people’s emotions, the better we can be to them, and help them become better to themselves and others. Kindness pays forward.

It’s a strong message that hits like a truck every week, but realistically, how long can a mindset like that last? In a world where Arataka Reigens are as rare as they come, and Body Improvement clubs are far more a representation of toxic masculinity than supportive friendships, life can—and will—wear you down. It’s easy to feel lost, unstable, unloved, and alone. Good intentions mean nothing if they aren’t recognized, and what happens if someone like Mob, who is fortunate to have caring people around him, is ripped away from those kinds of positive circumstances?

Mob Psycho 100 cleverly renders this scenario in the form of the Mogami arc, creating the ultimate foil of Mob, Keiji Mogami. Like Mob, Mogami is a being of unmistakable psychic power. He also is intimately aware of the thoughts and presence of those around him; he also once tried to help people and use his powers for good. But unlike Mob, who has a strong support group to guide him through his troubles and empower his growth, Mogami found himself alone, desperate to support his dying mother in the only way financially possible: assassination. Moral corruption encroached his soul to the point where he physically discarded his body and in an attempt to cast revenge on a society (and mother) that disowned him, became a malicious spirit.

At first glance, Mogami sounds like a typical “tragic baddie gone full villain” story, and that’s not unnecessarily true. He is relentlessly malicious, scheming, and devious, and has no remorse for his actions. In most cases, this kind of behavior would feel trite, especially in a show like Mob Psycho 100, which goes out of its way to consistently poke fun of flip inside-out the laws of what it means to be a genuine hero. But it’s precisely because Mogami is insidious that his actions, behavior, and mindset carry such a heavy weight; he is the foil of Mob, who represents the ultimate virtuousness, integrity, and patience of humanity. They are both opposite sides of the coin: stemmed from similar circumstances, but completely different in their approach to the world and people around them. One is fueled by bitterness, and the other one is fueled by kindness.

Mob Psycho 100 dives into this dynamic when Mogami traps Mob in a hell of his own making: a world where he has no powers, no supportive family or friends, and no motivation for self improvement. He steals every kind of factor or potential seed for Mob’s growth and turns it upside down, as Mob is physically and mentally assaulted consistently for over six months. It’s a painful sequence of events to watch as our hero is kicked around, thrown food at, and verbally manipulated again and again. Eventually, Mob breaks. He uses his powers to almost destroy his bullies, but is saved by the presence of Dimple, who reminds him of all the people who care about him in the real world.

Is Mogami’s theory true? Mob Psycho 100 doesn’t really answer this question, and while it’s left up to the viewer as to whether his treatment of Mob would have made him into a Mogami-esque figure or not, I also think that Mob Psycho 100 realizes that ultimately, that kind of answer doesn’t matter. This is seen in the climax of the arc when Mogami and Mob go head to head with each other in a mental landscape unlike anything we’ve seen before. Red ghosts swamp the screen, flailing miserably as they try to drown Mob in pain and suffering. Buildings fragment into dust. Mob is once again, assailed by negative emotions and maliciousness, but now stemming from the loneliness of a man who only wanted Mob to understand that the world is cruel. It is unforgiving. It does not miss a soul when it fades.

And Mob tears up. Maybe he’s won a battle, but lost the onslaught of the war. Maybe his kindness is not enough. The six months he endured are still very real, and the emotions of hatred and bitterness are still embedded in his heart. And Mogami’s negativity is so very powerful and overwhelming. He almost gives in, but then he realizes: he’s here to save somebody. Maybe all of those things Mogami was saying are true. But here, and now, Mob is capable of doing something good. And he does. Mogami is expelled, but not without telling Mob that maybe he was wrong. Maybe he was right. He’ll be watching Mob, to see if his choice was better.

This all ends with one of the most emotionally affecting scenes in the arc, when the girl who bullied Mob in his mental hell apologizes for being such a mean person. Mob, being Mob, instantly forgives her, but there’s a certain momentum behind this action: people can change for the better. Our personalities, mindsets, and behaviors are always in a turmoil based on our circumstances, but we always have an active choice, or the inherent capacity, to progress.

The first step to moving forward is to be aware of your own faults and find the courage to overcome that. The person we are today doesn’t have to be the person we are tomorrow. Mogami and his arc are a haunting realization that if we let those battles become representative of the wars we lose, then we lose altogether. But with him, comes the potential of Mob, and the message that courage isn’t in the form of being physically strong or psychically powerful; it’s about battling your own fears and finding a way to a better tomorrow.

Do you think the Mogami is the best arc of the second season so far? Do you have any other favorite moments from these two episodes? Let us know what you think in the comments!

----

When not finding ways to doom all her ships, Natasha can often be found on her twitter as @illegenes, or writing more about anime on the blog Isn’t It Electrifying! Feel free to swing by and say hi.

By: [email protected]

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

0 notes