This week during the my readings and studies I noticed that Grottman focused a lot on how friendships form the basis of good marriage. I have seen this in both my relationship and in the lives of those around me. My husband and I started out as friends and our relationship grew from there. Now it was rather fast but it started out as friends and we were able to just talk for hours about anything. I actually wasn’t looking forward to our first date but something just clicked and I had a great time.
We have always been super open and honest with each other, although in my husbands family they never communicated their feelings with each other. He is still working on the sharing his feelings all the time part, since it is new for him. But that honesty has allowed us to communicate our feelings and work through problems. Gottman mentions the Magic Ratio, which means that the good in a relationship must outweigh the bad. I do agree with this but one thing that I have seen is that in some relationships people will tend to focus on the negative things and forget the good times that they have had. I agree that it is important to be happy in a relationship, otherwise why would you be in it.
Now as has been mentioned earlier about the magic ratio that there will be difficult times. I can attest to that our marriage has had its ups and downs already and we have only been married for thirteen months. We have had conflicts and as Grottman has said you need to find healthy ways to deal with it. One of the ways that we have found is to first just talk about the problem. We have understand where they are coming from and where they stand on the issue before we start to try to solve the problem. One funny example that is pretty simple is our sons name. He wanted to call him Grayson and I wanted Levi, and neither of us would budge but we both talked and gave our reasons why we didn’t like the other name we decided on Everett, then came the middle name. In his family they give the oldest son the fathers first name as his middle name and it is a pretty big tradition and I wanted the name to flow and sound good. Well in talking I realized how big of a deal it was to him and how much it meant to him. So I caved and we are using his name as the middle name.
Marriage and Family 