Ruth Schwartz, director of Conscious Girlfriend Academy, teaches lesbian relationship skills based on 41 years of research and Gottman Institute findings. She covers how to navigate intense emotional conflicts and break common patterns that damage partnerships.
Chapters
So why a lesbian relationship skills 101 masterclass? Why would any of us need such a thing? I'm Ruth Schwartz. I'm the director of Conscious Girlfriend Academy. I have had the great privilege of teaching lesbians and queer women from around the world about lesbian dating, relationships, and sexuality for almost 10 years now. And what I see over and over again is that lesbians can have amazing relationships. We love hard. We are committed, we are determined, we work hard. And there are some characteristic problems that we run into in our relationships. Some of them are just human problems that straight couples or gay male couples also, of course, deal with. But I also see that 2 women together tend to have particular patterns. And since if you're watching right now, you are probably in the category of motivated and determined and wanting to have a happy, healthy, beautiful, lasting lesbian relationship, wanting to perhaps save your current relationship or find out if it can be saved, or else you're single right now wanting to understand what happened in the past and wanting to make sure that if and when you fall in love again, you can do it differently. I would love to invite you to come to the Lesbian Relationship Skills 101 Master Class because there is hope, there is help. Knowledge is power and skills are power. So much of what happens between us as 2 women can be so emotional and it can be so intense. I'm speaking for myself here, and really painful and confusing. And maybe you've had the That you're with a girlfriend or partner, you're having just a kind of normal casual conversation, and all of a sudden something happens, and it's like, oh my God! We have plummeted into trouble here, and suddenly you are feeling a lot of feelings: hurt, anger, disappointment. Everything she's ever done or not done. Is flooding up and filling you up, and you're starting to say things that you might later regret, or you're clamping down, preventing yourself from saying those things, and, you know, then you're also not communicating. Or maybe this is happening with her. These moments can be so painful and frightening and confusing and hard to understand. And so if you've ever had one of these moments, or many of them, first of all, you're not alone. I've been there too. So has everybody else. But second of all, there are ways to understand what happens in these moments and navigate your way out faster and more easily than you probably yet know. And for me, this kind of information is life-changing and life-saving, as well as love-saving, heart-saving, soul-saving, because it's devastating to find yourself suddenly in the midst of conflict with this person who is often the most important person to you on the planet, or certainly one of them, and to not know how to get out of it. So that's what we're going to be covering in Lesbian Relationship Skills 101. I'm going to be talking about some of the research from John and Julie Gottman, founders of the Gottman Institute, who have done incredible amounts of videotaping about what they call the Four Horsemen of the Relationship Apocalypse. So we'll look at some of their findings. We'll also look at some of the original research and tools that I have developed as someone living and loving women over the last 41 years, um, and so much of what I've learned from running Conscious Girlfriend Academy over the last 10 years. So I would say all in all, this is going to be material that you will not likely find anywhere else Because it's specifically about us. It's about relationships in general, and it's about our relationships, lesbian relationships in particular. And it is a compassionate class. Nobody gets made wrong here. It is an empowering class. You will leave this class with more understanding, more skills, more tools. And again, whether you're single or in a relationship, Whether you've had good relationships, whether you're in a good relationship now, or in a relationship that's struggling now, or both— because good relationships do struggle— I would love to welcome you to this class to help make lesbian love easier and better. Hope to see you there.
