christine

That lower left quadrant, where your marriage lacks real feeling or fulfillment and is held together by plans, obligations, mutual friends, and complacency, is so terrifying to me

Which leads me to— how to avoid this? A lot of long term relationships do seem to ultimately land on ritual and friendship.

My friend suggested that as long you 1) recognize you have a choice, 2) intentionally be kind & put in effort 3) have balance of space and being together, you can ensure sustainable long term fulfilling relationship

So far the most compelling idea for me is scheduled check ins— regular couple check ins, annual check ins with yourself, and maybe five year check ins to “opt in” to your marriage again.

I just read about these 5 phases that lead to fallout— 1. differentiating (you start to emphasize your differences over your similarities), 2. circumscribing (conversation becomes superficial and is kept to specific topics), 3. stagnating (communication comes to a standstill),

4. avoiding (physical separation and avoiding eachothers presence), and 5. terminating (you end the relationship). pretty depressing! but it leads me to think that another step to avoid that scary lower left quadrant is things like emphasizing your similarities over differences

I like this idea a lot because it's more specific than "be kind" and "make an effort". Instead of "Be kind", it's "talk about how you guys are similar to eachother." Instead of "make an effort", it's "Make sure to talk about the hard things/elephant in the room."

Something that comes to mind is the idea of the Relationship Escalator, and how there are actually ways to de-escalate a relationship without it necessarily meaning that you are about to break up. https://offescalator.com/what-escalator/