Romance or romantic love is a feeling of love for, or a strong attraction towards another person, and the courtship behaviors undertaken by an individual to express those overall feelings and resultant emotions.
Contempt is an attitude towards individuals, social groups and eventually ideologies, that evokes a sense of superiority and the right to judge, amid feelings of disgust and anger. This set of emotions generally produces maladaptive behaviour. Other authors define contempt as a negative emotion rather than the constellation of mentality and feelings that produce an attitude. Paul Ekman categorises contempt as the seventh basic emotion, along with anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise. Robert C. Solomon places contempt on the same emotional continuum as resentment and anger, and he argues that the differences between the three are that resentment is anger directed towards a higher-status individual; anger is directed towards an equal-status individual; and contempt is anger directed towards a lower-status individual.
Couples therapy attempts to improve romantic relationships and resolve interpersonal conflicts.
Active listening is the practice of preparing to listen, observing what verbal and non-verbal messages are being sent, and then providing appropriate feedback for the sake of showing attentiveness to the message being presented. Active listening is listening on purpose. Active listening is being fully engaged while another person is talking to you. It is listening with the intent to understand the other person fully, rather than listening to respond. Active listening includes asking wide-eyed questions such as, "How did you feel?" or "What did you think?". This form of listening conveys a mutual understanding between speaker and listener. Speakers receive confirmation their point is coming across and listeners absorb more content and understanding by being consciously engaged. The overall goal of active listening is to eliminate any misunderstandings and establish clear communication of thoughts and ideas between the speaker and listener. It may also be referred to as Reflective Listening. By actively listening to another person a sense of belonging and mutual understanding between the two individuals is created. Active listening was introduced by Carl Rogers and Richard Farson, in 1957.
A sham marriage or fake marriage is a marriage of convenience entered into without intending to create a real marital relationship. This is usually for the purpose of gaining an advantage from the marriage.
John Mordechai Gottman is an American psychologist, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Washington. His work focuses on divorce prediction and marital stability through relationship analyses. The lessons derived from this work represent a partial basis for the relationship counseling movement that aims to improve relationship functioning and the avoidance of those behaviors shown by Gottman and other researchers to harm human relationships. His work has also had a major impact on the development of important concepts on social sequence analysis. He and his wife, psychologist Julie Schwartz Gottman, co-founded and lead a relationship company and therapist training entity called The Gottman Institute. They have also co-founded Affective Software Inc, a program designed to make marriage and relationship counseling methods and resources available to a larger audience.
Financial infidelity is a negative money behavior, known as a money disorder, in which financial deceit is performed toward a romantic partner. Couple patterns of behavior related to money, including financial infidelity, can significantly influence relationship satisfaction and stability. In a 2018 exploratory study, 27% of participants reported hiding a financial secret from their romantic partner at some point while 53% of participants indicated they had engaged in behaviors that would be classified as financial infidelity. Examples of financial infidelity include lying about purchases, hiding a gambling problem, having a secret savings account, and hiding debt.
Diana Adile Kirschner is an American psychologist and author. Early in her career she was involved in the field of integrative psychotherapy, a movement that seeks to find the best practices from among the major schools of therapy. Kirschner's work involved integrating individual therapy, couples therapy, and family therapy into an approach called Comprehensive Family Therapy. The book she coauthored, Comprehensive Family Therapy, was nominated by the American Psychological Association as one of the 100 most important books on family psychology.
Meta-emotion is "an organized and structured set of emotions and cognitions about the emotions, both one's own emotions and the emotions of others". This broad definition of meta-emotion sparked psychologists' interest in the topic, particularly regarding parental meta-emotion philosophy.
Stonewalling is a refusal to communicate or cooperate. Such behaviour occurs in situations such as marriage guidance counseling, diplomatic negotiations, politics and legal cases. Body language may indicate and reinforce this by avoiding contact and engagement with the other party. People use deflection in a conversation in order to render a conversation pointless and insignificant. Tactics in stonewalling include giving sparse, vague responses, refusing to answer questions, or responding to questions with additional questions. Stonewalling can be used as a stalling tactic rather than an avoidance tactic.
In interpersonal communication, an I-message or I-statement is an assertion about the feelings, beliefs, values, etc. of the person speaking, generally expressed as a sentence beginning with the word "I", and is contrasted with a "you-message" or "you-statement", which often begins with the word "you" and focuses on the person spoken to. Thomas Gordon coined the term "I message" in the 1960s while doing play therapy with children. He added the concept to his book for parents, P.E.T.: Parent Effectiveness Training (1970). Not every message that begins with the word "I" is an I-message.
Michele Weiner-Davis is a licensed clinical social worker, marriage and family therapist and author in the field of family therapy. She is frequently quoted in the media and has been interviewed significantly on television news programs regarding divorce prevention. Weiner-Davis has often been referred to as The Divorce Buster after coining the term “divorce busting” at an American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy conference in 1989. She currently writes a regular column, Divorce Busting: Musings From an Unabashed Marriage Saver in Psychology Today.
Behavioral marital therapy, sometimes called behavioral couples therapy, has its origins in behaviorism and is a form of behavior therapy. The theory is rooted in social learning theory and behavior analysis. As a model, it is constantly being revised as new research presents.
Family therapy is a branch of psychotherapy focused on families and couples in intimate relationships to nurture change and development. It tends to view change in terms of the systems of interaction between family members.
Homogamy is marriage between individuals who are, in some culturally important way, similar to each other. It is a form of assortative mating. The union may be based on socioeconomic status, class, gender, caste, ethnicity, or religion, or age in the case of the so-called age homogamy.
Relationship forming focuses on the decision-making process leading to a relationship. It therefore differs from relationship therapy which focuses on improving an existing relationship. Put differently, relationship forming is about "making the right choice", while relationship therapy is about "making the choice work". Discontent at failure to achieve such a relationship is on occasion referred to as TFL ; although some TFLers may have life satisfaction despite not forming a relationship.
Marriage and health are closely related. Married people experience lower morbidity and mortality across such diverse health threats as cancer, heart attacks, and surgery. There are gender differences in these effects which may be partially due to men's and women's relative status. Most research on marriage and health has focused on heterosexual couples, and more work is needed to clarify the health effects on same-sex marriage. Simply being married, as well as the quality of one's marriage, has been linked to diverse measures of health. Research has examined the social-cognitive, emotional, behavioral and biological processes involved in these links.
Julie Schwartz Gottman is an American clinical psychologist, researcher, speaker, and author. Together with her husband and collaborator, John Gottman, she is the co-founder of The Gottman Institute – an organization dedicated to strengthening relationships through research-based products and programs. She is the co-creator of the Sound Relationship House Theory, Gottman Method Couples Therapy, and The Art and Science of Love weekend workshop for couples, among other programs. In addition to her internationally recognized clinical work, Julie Schwartz Gottman is the author or co-author of six books – Ten Lessons to Transform Your Marriage, And Baby Makes Three, 10 Principles for Doing Effective Couples Therapy, The Man's Guide to Women, The Marriage Clinic Casebook, and The Science of Couples and Family Therapy. She is also the co-author of over 30 peer-reviewed journal articles.
The Cascade Model of Relational Dissolution is a relational communications theory that proposes four critically negative behaviors that lead to the breakdown of marital and romantic relationships. The model is the work of psychological researcher John Gottman, a professor at the University of Washington and founder of The Gottman Institute, and his research partner, Robert W. Levenson. This theory focuses on the negative influence of verbal and nonverbal communication habits on marriages and other relationships. Gottman's model uses a metaphor that compares the four negative communication styles that lead to a relationship's breakdown to the biblical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, wherein each behavior, or horseman, compounds the problems of the previous one, leading to total breakdown of communication.
Co-therapy or conjoint therapy is a kind of psychotherapy conducted with more than one therapist present. This kind of therapy is especially applied during couple therapy. Carl Whitaker and Virginia Satir are credited as the founders of co-therapy. Co-therapy dates back to the early twentieth century in Vienna, where psychoanalytic practices were first taking place. It was originally named "multiple therapy" by Alfred Alder, and later introduced separately as "co-therapy" in the 1940s. Co-therapy began with two therapists of differing abilities, one essentially learning from the other, and providing the opportunity to hear feedback on their work.
