Disraeli: "No success in public life can compensate for failure in the home." Maslow measured mental health by the ability to enter long-term intimate loving relationships. Standard: make your home "the crown jewel of your emotional life" and settle for nothing less.
Six keys to successful intimate relationships
- Similarities attract — especially values (children, money, sex). Top argument causes: money #1, sex #2, leisure time #3. Concentric model of compatibility: values (core) → ideas → emotional temperament → physical (least important).
- Opposites attract only in temperament — extrovert/introvert balance. The conversation test: compatible pairs fill talk-time with ~10% easy silences (a 30% talker fits a 60% talker; two 70% talkers clash over airtime).
- Total commitment — Scott Peck: "love is the total commitment to the full development of the potential of the other." Get in 100% or get out.
- Similar self-concepts attract — you're compatible with someone about as happy as you (the 1–10 happiness scale); trying to lift an unhappy partner is "a fool's game."
- Liking and respect matter more than being in love — the best-friend test: your mate should be your best friend. If you keep secrets and confide in others more, the prognosis is poor.
- Communication — requires high quality and quantity of time. Tracy's exercise: 3–4 hour car trips with his wife, no radio, no kids, just talk. Men are not mind readers; men are direct, women more indirect; men interrupt women 95% more than the reverse — discipline for men: ask about her day first and listen without interrupting.
Six major relationship problems
- Lack of commitment — "trading relationships" ("you do your share, I'll do mine").
- Trying to change the other — Flip Wilson: "what you sees is what you get." Unconditional acceptance often produces change; demands never do.
- Jealousy — rooted in "I'm not good enough" (Adler's inferiority complex). Cure: "I like myself." Deliberately provoking jealousy is simply cruel.
- Self-pity — imitated from a parent; cure: get busy on your goals (law of substitution).
- Incompatibility — first the laughter goes, then the friendship. Try to patch it up, especially with children.
- If irreparable: accept it without denial and without guilt — "it's like the rain... nobody is guilty, it just happens." Don't stay for fear of what others might say: "nobody cares as much about your relationship as you do."