Fixing your relationship

What is a relationship if not a continuous interplay between the desires of the partners? Problematic relationships occur when people are vocal about their own personal difficulties but are hypersensitive to the problems of their partners.

Being attentive to this interplay means being attentive on how we project our own personality problems onto others. Furthermore, we also tend to interpret the characteristics of our partners in terms of our own preferences for the qualities they have.

A study by the University of California and Michigan State University focused exactly on that, because interpersonal sensitivity is a quality rarely examined by psychologists but one that play a major role in relationship problems.

Interpersonal Circumplex (IPC) modeling was used to understand the relationship problems people were facing from their perspectives but also to understand the person’s perception of others (see the IPC map below).

Your personality (in IPC modeling) can be described by where you find yourself within the dimensions of Warmth (ranging from affectionate to remote), and Dominance (measuring from controlling to passive). That is the personality you bring to your relationship. It is also what you use to interpret the source of your relationship’s difficulties.

EXAMPLE: Imagine you have a deadline for a project and you have to work from home a bit in the evening. Your partner wants to spend some time to discuss some personal issue. The issue doesn’t seem urgent and you understand that your partner just wants to chat. But you feel he/she is invading your space and wants to change your priorities. Are you just being selfish or is your partner too demanding?

Where you fall into the IPC may show, for the above example, that you are hypersensitive to being controlled by others, therefore you interpret your partner’s need for a chat as a method of controlling you.

Do you get angry when you are next to someone you perceive as an antagonist? Do you get irritated by someone controlling? The answer may lie in the fact that you might be a bit more selfish than you think (for the first question), or a tiny bit more dominant than you think you are (for the second).

So, next time you get irritated by your partner, be attentive to your reactions and take your time to think if it’s really them, or YOU.

Always question, everything (especially why you feel the way you feel in your relationship),