Everyone has relationship problems, but the real choice is finding a partner willing to work on them. Modern romance expects one person to provide emotional, social, and spiritual support that used to come from an entire community, leaving couples under-resourced and forced to negotiate everything through communication skills most people never learned.
Chapters
Everybody has relationship issues they need to address. Everybody, me included, everybody. The only thing is not if you're gonna do it, but with whom. Who is the person with whom you're going to say, "I'm ready to do this work." So we have never expected more from romantic love than we do today. Seriously, we want literally one person to give us what usually an entire village used to provide. And this is happening at a time when we have the complete under-resourced relationships with the loss of the traditional structures, no social hierarchies, no community, no— for many of us in the West, no religious guidance. And so everything is negotiated. Everything is negotiated. And that means that we need to have very good communication skills. But we don't have the communication skills because nobody's talking to each other.