Page 18 - SILFlip

The Turning Point: The Beginning of Real Love
People ask me if there is a way to tell if a relationship is going to last. I think there is a way to tell and I am not going to beat around the bush because it is too important:
You won’t know if your relationship has real staying power until you see your partner in a selKish, unfair, irritable and unlikeable form of themselves. Then you have to evaluate what they do when they are in that state, how it makes you feel, and what you both do to recover from the injury it causes to the relationship. And you also have to evaluate how you behave when you are in that state of irritability and selKishness and what you contribute, if anything, to repairing it.
Usually when people are at their worst and they are in conhlict with one another they will often try to insult their partner. When that happens there is a shift in the focus of the relationship. The shift moves people from focusing on the maintenance of the relationship to a focus on the “maintenance of the self.” They must protect themselves from the injury of being told they are “bad” and wrong. They might be motivated to retaliate or punish. The types of insults and injuries partners engage in are important to rehlect on. In times of conhlict or disagreement if your partner says and does things that attack your value as a person, that’s a potential red hlag—a big one. We are going to be talking about how people hight and when you should walk away from relationships where people disagree in unhealthy ways later.
Staying in Love: Secret Recipes For Making Love Last 18