you're having an argument with your partner and you say you're a stupid person and you've always been a stupid person and as far as i can tell as far into the future as i can see you're going to remain a stupid person so what are they supposed to do what are they going to do when you say that they're going to cry like if you mean it they're going to get angry if you mean it and they don't like you very much and why is that well it's like it's it's assault basically the only way
really the only thing that you can do in a situation like that is walk away ignore it respond in kind or it degenerates into violence that's it because there's no discussion you haven't left the person anywhere to go you've gone right to the top of their hierarchy and said everything about you is wrong and worse than that all the mechanisms that we could use to correct it won't work so those are fighting words so don't do that unless you want to have a fight so then you might say well what would you do instead and
the answer is deliver the least amount of information you possibly can and so let's say you come home and your person is watching tv and you were kind of hoping they'd greet you at the door you can't you shouldn't break down into tears and say you're a stupid person you've always been a stupid person and you're going to be a stupid person in the future you should say i have this peculiarity and that is that when i come home i don't have enough confidence to just be happy i would like you to come and say
just shut the tv off for two minutes come to the front door and say hello then you can go back and watch your tv would it be okay if you did that and they'll think well you'll have to pay for it somehow but then they'll they'll probably do it and so but the thing is is you got to specify the routine that you want transformed at the highest possible level of resolution and you want to you want to recommend the minimal necessary change that will satisfy you so you can't say if you love me you'd
know how to greet me at the door not helpful because they're stupid right and so are you so you have to spell it out it's like what do you want exactly what would make you satisfied and then you have to have your person like grudgingly practice that a few times and you have to let them do it very badly and also in a bad temper and then you have to reward them for it and then maybe three months later they'll do it properly but people love reward and they love attention people love attention more than
anything else and so if you're what you watch through the day and when your partner does something that's good say man that was good or something like that you can be invented and then they'll do it more and if you do that a whole bunch like for a year they'll be doing things that are good for you just all the time but you have to be patient which is very annoying and you have to suppress your response to only respond to negative things you know because what we know about the expectancy models is that a
deviation from expectation produces a burst of negative emotions you know so you come home and the whole house is clean but there's like i don't know the dog has shed on the rug or something and the person overlooked that's like you're not going to see the clean house you're going to see the rug with the dog fur on it going to say why didn't you clean up the rug with the dog fur and they're going to say good luck getting me to clean up the house again and you know because the thing is is the
exception stands out and what's done doesn't and the reason for that is you can just ignore what's done because it's done it doesn't get in your way so it gets invisible really quickly so you really got to watch that tendency one of the things nietzsche said was that if you really want to punish someone you don't punish them when they do something wrong because they expect that that's not a punishment they expect that they might even be relieved by it you want to punish them when they do something right because then you'll really hurt them
and so that's something to think about and you're if you're in a relationship man if someone's done something right do not punish them you do that two or three times and that's it and you're not going to get them due to do that anymore so judiciousness watch what they're doing if something happens that good that's good notice it and you know if they've done a bunch of things don't concentrate on the things they did wrong that's not smart it's really hard on them too like this in some sense this sounds manipulative and selfish you know
because i'm teaching you how to train your partner also teach them how to train you because it would be really nice if you could come home and the person would say well what did you do today and you say you know here's a bunch of things i did and they said you they say well this looks really good and that was great and why don't you do some more of that you're like oh boy it was a great day and so you know you can train them to train you properly and that's a really helpful
thing especially if you do it over a few years you know you can that's how you have a good relationship because you're both clueless as hell to begin with you don't know even what would make you happy much less what would make the other person happy and so you've got to figure these things out bit by bit and then you have to inform each other and then you have to be patient enough to let your partner do these things really badly i'll give you another example sometimes sometimes i i see couples sporadically in my in
my clinical practice i'm not a couple's counselor and so but sometimes when i'm working with someone there's an issue that needs to be discussed with with both people because otherwise it's just stupid and one of the things i often recommend to people especially once they have kids is that they set aside to use an anachronistic phrase date date nights well everyone hates that idea it's like they say well you know they'll just say that's i'm not doing that that would be one object we're just not doing that you know that's what we did before we
got married um they'll say well my partner would never go for that um they got a bunch of excuses why that isn't going to work and so i've heard all those excuses i know all of them and then maybe i convince them yeah yeah sure i know this is stupid it's awkward it's it's it's uh artificial that's okay just try it once so then they go and try it and then they come back and they say we had an absolutely miserable time really we had a miserable time we couldn't agree on what movie to go
to and then you know she took me to her movie and i really didn't like it so we fought all the way home we're never doing that again and i say well really you've got 30 years 400 days that's 12 000 days okay so you're not going to do that you're going to spend the next 12 000 days without having any real romantic evenings and interactions with your spouse that's your plan you know people can go for a long time with no romance at all say well no maybe we'd like some of that well how
much once a year well no once a month well no once every two weeks well sometimes people are really busy it's like okay that beats the hell out of zero once a week twice a week okay whatever we're gonna we're gonna start with the range okay what would a good evening look like like if you could both get exactly what you wanted what would it look like well then they have to think about that because the previous theory was my stupid partner should know what i like and that's what their the partner is thinking too
it's like good luck with that because no they don't have a clue especially if they're men they don't have a clue so you have to tell them what you want and how they could deliver it and vice versa which is very awkward and horrible and then you have to practice it for six months because you know it takes a lot of practice to do something sophisticated really well and then if you do that it's like poof you got it for the rest of your life
