Shanli Liu and her spouse Laila took a divorce-prevention course right after getting married. They learned to spot common triggers like money stress and parenting disagreements, then practiced concrete fixes: giving each other space after work, not dumping the day's frustrations on each other, and interpreting ambiguous statements charitably instead of defensively.
The first thing that Laila and I did when we got married is that we went through a divorce course because we were like, well, shoot, inversion, right? We're like, well, let's just find out all the reasons that people get divorced and let's handle all of those things now. What are the reasons? Money's a big one. Kids are a big one. And then a lot of it is actually really tactical preferences. Like when I come home from a long day of work, do I want you to then unload all of your day's woes on me? Probably not. She learned to just give me space. Like I usually just want to be left alone for a minute to basically let the dust settle in my head so that I can be fully present for her. I could see somebody who didn't know that assuming that if I don't want to talk to you when you get back, you don't love me. And so it's really just dissecting these issues and saying, instead of saying like, you hate me, or extrapolating this to our relationship forever and always, just as a preference in behavior and rounding up, I call it rounding up, which is like, if I said something and there's two ways of taking it, a bad way and a good way, I meant the good way. We're married. I love you.
