Intimate relationship skills

Skills
“These qualities or skills are so well known that the list may even seem banal at first glance. Knowing what’s on the list is of no great consequence. It is having the skills and being able to apply them, having practised and internalised them, which makes a difference. And the difference which can be made is not at all banal, it is magnificent. It is the difference between living happily and just existing.”

~ Tony Wilkinson

“Science, when applied to personal relationships, is always just wrong.”

~ E. M. Forster

Advice for love
"My chief desire is to link myself to you week by week by bonds which shall become ever more intimate and profound."

~ Winston Churchill to his wife.

"Familiar acts are beautiful through love"

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

"When one finds their own other half, the two of them are wondrously thrilled with affection and intimacy and love, and are hardly to be induced to leave each other's side for a single moment. These are they who continue together throughout life. No one could imagine this to be the mere amorous connection: obviously the soul of each is wishing for something else that it cannot express. Suppose that Hephaestus should ask "Do you desire to be joined in the closest possible union, that so long as you both shall live, the pair of you, being as one, may share a single life?" Each would unreservedly deem that he had been offered just what he was yearning for all the time.

The craving and pursuit of that entirety is called Love."

~ Plato (427 - 347 BC)

"Forget about learning how to argue better, analysing your early childhood, making grand romantic gestures, or experimenting with new sexual positions. Instead, recognize and admit that you are emotionally attached to and dependent on your partner in much the same way that a child is on a parent for nurturing, soothing, and protection."

~ Sue Johnson

Kindness
"I learned to be kind and loving to all them of my house and family"

~ Marcus Aurelius (circa A.D. 170)

Thinking about thinking
"Your life is what your thoughts make it."

~ Marcus Aurelius (circa A.D. 170){11}

Intimacy
"Loves mysteries in soules doe grow, But yet the body is his booke."

~ John Donne (1572-1631)

Target fixation
"Love is really the only thing that makes life worth living.

We are desperate for touch, for contact, for love. Without it we can survive, but we're like plants clinging to a rock.

Choose where you look, ignore the tree on the bend, keep your eyes on the road and you'll be fine.

Making meaningful connection with people transforms everything."

~ Mike Carter

Conflict
A teacher writes to his pupil, admonishing him to work harder: “I know that you frequently abandon your studies and whirl around in pleasure, that you wander from street to street and every house stinks of beer when you leave it… You, boy! You do not listen when I speak! You are thicker than a tall obelisk 100 cubits high and 10 cubit wide.”

~ Egypt (1580BC – 1350BC) on Papyrus