O'Grady Psychology Associates

Psychotherapy, Marriage Counseling, Neuropsychological Assessment

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Look Into My Eyes: The crucial role of eye contact in relationships

Eye contact is crucial in couple and family relationship. People are innately attracted to faces, especially eyes. The human face is associated with our identity; we are recognized more through our eyes than through any other facial feature. ”Because the eyes offer such rich social information, adults and infants alike show a natural attraction to the whole face,” write contributors to the APA handbook of nonverbal communication (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2016, pp. 335-362). Those who have trouble processing or dealing with social information, such as people with autism, schizophrenia, or social anxiety, tend to avoid eye contact; job seekers are told that good eye contact will make a positive impression.

When a relationship is new, lovers can spend hours gazing into each other’s eyes over dinner or while lying in bed, enjoying all the nuances of thought, feeling, and passion that can be communicated through facial expression. Young parents watch their children intently, searching their faces to read emotional reactions to sad or exciting events.

The Importance of Eye Contact

But at some point, we stop making eye contact. The romantic relationship matures, distractions (kids, work, medical problems, financial troubles) come in; kids attend to their devices, ignoring parents; parents chauffer their kids while talking on their phones; we eat dinner in front of the TV or our tablets, looking down every time a notification pops up. Whole days can go by without really seeing our partner’s or our children’s faces. In fact, in a previous post on non-sexual touch, I admit to a time when our twins were young, we were both working a lot, and I failed to notice that my husband had shaved his mustache three days before! That was a wake-up call for me.

In couples’ therapy, I gather a lot of information about how my clients communicate by watching their non-verbal interactions. Let’s take Amy and Paul as an example. If Amy and Paul never look at each other, or if Amy looks at Paul but Paul doesn’t return the gaze—his eyes darting around the room instead—I learn something of their connection. Paul has trouble making eye contact with me as well, which also tells me something.

They are coming to therapy because Amy feels that Paul is distant and disengaged. The two seldom interact, whether after work or on weekends. On a typical evening, Paul will come home and turn on the sports channel. Amy will call out from the other room with a question. Distracted, Paul doesn’t acknowledge her. Amy feels neglected, Paul feels he can never please her, and divorce looms. It is important to make eye contact to know that your partner is really listening. Trying to communicate from different rooms will lead to miscommunication and misunderstanding.

This scenario is very common in relationships. The partner calling for attention feels innocent of blame, saying “He never listens, he never responds.” When I gently point out that she’s trying to get his attention when he’s otherwise preoccupied, she explains that he must have heard her and is just ignoring her.

Maybe, after going on for years, this is has become the case. But often the simpler reason is that Paul is watching the game and he literally doesn’t hear. Or he half hears, but the question never gets into his long-term memory.

As is often the case with couples by the time they get to counseling, their dynamic has become entrenched after many years of hurt feelings on both sides. Each blames the other, Amy criticizing Paul for his lack of engagement, and Paul keeping all his feelings to himself. This apparent sulking serves to infuriate Amy more, and she in turn harps on him with progressive intensity. Walls go up and prevent the vulnerability that is needed for true intimacy. Neither Amy nor Paul realize what they are doing to prevent connection.

Look at me when I’m talking to you!

When someone makes eye contact with you, they’re signaling that you’re the object of their attention. There are cultural differences regarding gaze and respect, but in general, we look at those who are socially relevant to us. An averted gaze, in contrast, signals disinterest, shyness, or evasion (although research is mixed about whether lying causes less eye contact). That’s why parents demand “Look at me when I’m talking to you!” or someone suspicious of another might say “Look me in the eye and say that.” It is astonishing how often couples, and kids and parents, try to communicate without ever looking at each other.

But getting back to Amy and Paul, it was important for Paul to understand how dismissed Amy felt when he didn’t answer her or make eye contact with her. Of course, it was also important for Amy to have Paul’s attention before speaking to him. By taking the time to really look at each other, Amy and Paul began to feel closer. Each felt they were being heard.

Getting the focus where it belongs

If your family or romantic connection feels cold and distant, consider the role that gaze may play in preventing closeness. Here are some tips for getting the focus where it belongs.

  • Ban screens of any type (TV, computer, phone, or game) and reading at the dinner table so you can all converse face to face.
  • Make a point of turning to look at someone when they speak.
  • If someone isn’t meeting your gaze, don’t assume they don’t care. They may be preoccupied with work stress. Ask if there is a good time to talk and make a point of coming together a bit later.
  • Kids can be big distractions. If your kids continually interrupt your conversations, let them know that they need to respect adult time.
  • Make sure you have your partner’s attention when talking to them. Don’t try to talk from different rooms.
  • Turning toward your partner builds intimacy.

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Division of labor in relationships: How to make it work

Division of labor in relationships -- learning to talk about without conflict.
Artwork by Peter Berkowitz

Conflict is inevitable in marriage, and how to divvy up chores is one of the most common conflicts. Virtually every couple I have seen for counseling over the last twenty years has argued about the division of labor in their marriage. As the mental scorecard of who does what grow longer with each year, the couple’s friendship and good feeling is eroded.

First, a few words about conflict in general. We know that not all conflict can be resolved. That’s to be expected; learning to tolerate conflict is something all people who live or work together must do. Some issues will come up many times over the course of a long-term relationship, but this is not a sign of failure . Think of managing conflict rather than resolving it. Framing disagreement this way gives you the opportunity to talk over issues and work toward compromise. Remember, couples that never fight are not necessarily happier. Anger that’s papered over, denied, or unexpressed doesn’t disappear; it tends to compound over time.

In fact, anger and conflict can strengthen relationships when you express your needs in ways that will be heard (as opposed to harping, nagging, constant complaining, criticism, and negativity).

For example, don’t go into a conflict discussion with guns blazing. A softened startup helps set a friendly context that will determine the way the whole thing goes. Being able to follow basic rules of good-faith engagement will lead to deeper understanding and more productive discussions. Of course, screaming, threats, sarcasm, name calling, and criticism are never okay.

Common areas of conflict around division of labor

Disagreements can arise in several ways. Couples can have very different ideas about what “clean” means, for example. The stereotype is the slob who claims not to see the dirt paired with a hygiene-obsessed neat freak. While it’s easy to understand the role of laziness in conflict, over-vigilance can also be problematic. An over-controlling gatekeeper may set onerous rules and methods for exactly how housework gets done, what kids can eat, how much screen time they can have, and so on.

Women tend more toward gatekeeping—of course, this is a generalization, and roles are fluid and changing today. But in the case of a conflict around a gatekeeping mother, a deeper understanding of the pattern might include appreciating how women often feel heavy cultural pressure to run perfect households. Stay-at-home mothers, especially, may feel that their power in the husband-wife relationship lies in setting domestic rules. But like everyone, such mothers need a break with housework and kids sometimes—and that means letting their partners do things their own ways, within reason (children aren’t neglected and chores get done).

If one partner makes up all the rules, the other will feel resentful. If there are significant differences in how things are done, find ways to communicate about them and find solutions both can agree on. Stepping up on the one hand, and accepting good-enough help on the other, can go a long way toward resolving this conflict.

Another common but not always acknowledged conflict is, for couples with children, agreeing on what counts as time with the kids. Mothers typically consider activities such as shuffling kids to activities, packing lunches, or coordinating after-school activities as parental involvement. But dad may think that throwing around a ball or playing a video game together counts equally well. Fun is important, but no one parent should have to shoulder all the mundane activities.

Dividing household jobs

As hinted above, gender plays a role in labor division, even if not deliberately. Often, gender roles established by the couple’s parents become the template of how household and parenting jobs are divided. Some couples will consciously avoid doing things the way their parents did. But certain jobs are still likely to get divided along gender lines—men take out the garbage, pick up dead animals, do the yard work, and plunge the toilet, for example.

Even when both partners have jobs, women do considerably more housework. Data from the National Survey of Families and Households conducted by the University of Wisconsin shows that women who don’t work outside the home spend about 38 hours a week on housework compared to 12 hours for their husbands. Working women continue to do the bulk of the cooking and cleaning, around 28 hours a week, while husbands of working women contribute about 16 hours a week on chores.

Assessing labor division is further complicated when some work is invisible. Certain time-consuming jobs routinely fall to women but don’t count as “housework,” such as planning the social calendar, play dates, childcare, and birthday parties, including buying birthday gifts and supervising thank-you note writing. This work matters: teaching good manners and assuring that children don’t get left out of the ever-shifting social hierarchy of childhood is important to their development and happiness.

When this issue comes up in counseling, men will routinely tell their partners not to worry so much, but unfortunately this does just the opposite of reducing conflict. It feels and is dismissive.

Even couples that have full time childcare don’t escape the division of labor struggles. Surprising to couples who do not have live-in childcare, even managing the nanny has to go on the list of who does what. No one turns over the care to their children without giving sufficient time to forming a good working relationship with the person charged with caring for them.

When you think about who does what, pay attention to the little things, such as taking out the garage, cleaning up the dog poop, getting oil for the car, taking clothes to the dry cleaners—they may seem like minor errands, but they add up.

The list of common household jobs below shows many things that go into running a home and managing a family. Use it to discuss who does what in your relationship. Next to each activity, put the initials of the partner who does that job. Then go through the list again and see if there are chores you’d like to restructure.

Remember that things don’t have to be balance out 50/50, so long as you each agree on how to structure the tasks that need doing. If there are things that no one wants to do, consider taking turns or finding other ways to make up the difference. It’s also worthwhile to consider which chores are occasional or seasonal and which are weekly or daily tasks.

 Who does what in the relationship?

General household tasks

  •  Going to the cleaners
  • Washing windows
  • Planning the food menu
  • Grocery shopping
  • Cooking dinner
  • Setting the table
  • Cleaning up after dinner
  • Cleaning the kitchen
  • Cleaning the bathrooms
  • Putting out clean towels
  • General tidying up
  • Getting the car serviced
  • Putting gas in the car
  • Sorting incoming mail
  • Paying the bills
  • Managing investments
  • Balancing the accounts
  • Keeping social calendar
  • Returning phone calls or e-mail
  • Taking out garbage and trash
  • Recycling
  • Washing clothes
  • Folding the laundry
  • Ironing
  • Putting the clean clothes away
  • Vacuuming
  • Washing floors
  • Replacing light bulbs
  • Repairing appliances
  • Making the beds
  • Cleaning the refrigerator
  • Shopping for clothing
  • Planning travel
  • Making home repair
  • Remodeling
  • Buying furniture
  • Redecorating the home
  • Buying items for the home
  • Buying new appliances
  • De-cluttering
  • Organizing kitchen cabinets and drawers
  • Doing yard work and lawn maintenance
  • Banking
  • Caring for house plants
  • Straightening and rearranging closets
  • Getting house ready for guests or a party
  • Buying gifts for family members and housewarmings, etc.
  • Keeping in touch with family
  • Preparing for holidays
  • Planning vacations and getaways
  • Arranging couple dates

Childcare tasks

  • Coordinating kid’s activities
  • Taking children to school
  • Picking children up from school
  • Doing or arranging childcare after school
  • Preparing child meals and lunches
  • Spending time with kids
  • Planning family outings with kids
  • Taking children to medical, dental, and similar appointments
  • Supervising homework
  • Supervising child baths
  • Meting out child discipline
  • Supervising bedtime with kids
  • Dealing with a sick child
  • Handling child crises
  • Dealing with a child’s emotions
  • Attending teacher conferences
  • Communications with the schools
  • Attending special kid events
  • Arranging kid birthday and other parties
  • Arranging kid lessons
  • Arranging kid play dates
  • Shopping for kids’ stuff

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“I’d be better off single”: Distress-maintaining thinking

6523102125_059d03f888_bHow may times have you gone to bed thinking that you hate your partner, fantasizing how you would live on your own? Your thoughts snag on difficulties like how to tell your kids, your family, and the neighbors, and how much it would cost to live in two households.

If you’ve had such thoughts, you are not alone. Transient feelings of anger, dislike, or even hatred toward a partner are not uncommon. “Transient” is the important word: we all have those feelings from time to time, but they don’t become harmful unless we nurse these feelings of discontent, disappointment, and grievance—until they add up to a permanently negative perspective. Therapists call this “distress-maintaining thinking.”

The fantasy that life would be better without your partner feeds the cycle of negativity and keeps you unhappy. This is a huge danger zone, making our relationship vulnerable to secrets, even affairs. Thinking that there is a more perfect person out there who will meet your needs is usually wrong. Blaming your partner for your unhappiness is easier than understanding what role you play in the disharmony.

Fantasies of escape can abet distress-maintaining thinking, but so can fantasies of perfection. We grow up listening to fairy tales, and often form our expectations from them: The princess must love the toad, the knight gives freedom to the hag, and the beauty falls in love with the beast. Real marriage, though, requires confronting what you bring to the relationship—not just looking at your partner’s flaws or imagined imperfections. The fantasy of the perfect partner who always loves and understands you is a child’s fantasy. Children want to be loved unconditionally, but adult relationships take effort on both sides.

 For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

 Equally distress-maintaining is simply giving up on a relationship. I had a client who had grown so detached from his partner that he was paralyzed by his inability to leave the marriage. In his despair, he told me the phrase I was to hear many times from other partner-providers: “It’s cheaper to keep her.” He had resigned himself to a passionless life because paying spousal support would have significantly diminished the retirement accounts and portfolio he’d taken years to build. But despair and casting oneself as the victim also means taking no agency in improving the relationship.

Relationship Enhancing Thoughts

In contrast to distress-maintaining thinking, cultivate relationship-enhancing thoughts. This practice doesn’t deny a relationship’s problems, but allows you to think about them in a way that brings understanding and insight to the challenges you face. Giving time and attention keeps friendship strong, leading to more engagement and more passion.

Don’t wait to redefine yourself by imagining a life with a different partner. Don’t just give up. Look at what you want for yourself now. How can you change the way you think about your marriage? As I was writing this post, a friend called to tell me about something I said to her several years ago that really stuck with her. I had mentioned the importance of making bids for contact and the “turning toward” concept, and how failing to do this will weaken connections, leading to negative perspective. She told me the image that come to her mind was one of a stack of neglected vinyl records stacked on top of each other without their sleeves, collecting dust and warping. Each time she ignored a bid or turned away from her lover, it was like adding another record to the pile, making the music increasingly unplayable.

Expecting perfection and continually ignoring opportunities to appreciate and admire each other compounds our marital problems, setting us up for escape fantasies. When we do the work of love by making a conscious effort to notice how attracted we are to our mates, when we make a point of noticing their positive traits, we feel comforted and loved.

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Falling in Love Again with Your Partner: Love Maps, Friendship, and Staying Connected

_MG_2038When love is new, we ask questions to get to know our partner well. As Mandy Len Catron wrote for The New York Times in her charming summary of a study 20 years ago by psychologist Arthur Aron, we like learning about the person we love, but over time we forget to keep learning. In Dr. Aron’s study, researchers tried to find out if they could make strangers fall in love with each other by having them ask and answer a series of 36 questions that become more intimate and probing as they went. These questions get deep pretty fast. For people who hardly know each other, this is a low-risk exercise, but for couples once close and now estranged, it’s more challenging. I’ve seen this when I assign  couples the Love Map exercise at the end of our first session. Developed by Dr. Gottman, these 62 questions range from super-easy ones such as “Where was your partner born?” to more difficult ones like “Does your partner have a secret ambition? What is it?” I have clients answer the first two or three questions in the office, so I can coach them if they screw it up. As simple as these questions sound, if you don’t know where your partner was born, or what her favorite color, flower, or musical group is, the experience can turn from being fun and playful experience into hurt and disappointment, in turn leading to criticism and increased negative feelings. “She doesn’t know where I was born? After all these years?”

So I set some ground rules: One, it’s okay not to know all the answers—it’s even good—because you can learn something new about each other; it’s an opportunity to re-connect and update in a way that isn’t too challenging. If you don’t know something, make that a topic of conversation, even for just a minute or two.

The second ground rule is to understand that it’s not necessarily the fault of the partner who doesn’t know the answer! Communication is a two-way street. If you don’t take the time, or are passive about seeking knowledge about your partner, or just plain uninterested, preoccupied, or prefer to watch TV, then you need to make a your partner a bigger priority.

Third, I tell couples not to rush through this exercise the night before our next appointment. Take several nights over the week between our sessions to go through five to ten questions at a time, using them as a springboard for getting to know each other again. We refer to this exercise as updating our love maps. Daily obligations leave little time for talk, especially in our wired world, so we can’t expect to know everything about each other when our lives are busy and changing. When couples come back the next week, they usually feel good that they could get most questions right.

Expressing our Dreams Requires Vulnerability

What Dr. Aron’s study points to is that learning the deep, innermost feelings of your partner are what help us love them. When we express those ineffable or unspeakable feelings—those things we hardly tell ourselves—we make ourselves vulnerable, and that is attractive. Often couples have dim knowledge of their partner’s inner world. Dr. Aron’s 36 questions are the type we ask when getting to know someone—and spouses tend to already feel that job is done. Exploring the terrain of the soul with an attentive listener builds an emotional bond rarely experienced for some people with anyone but a therapist. This is why affairs feel rewarding.

As couples get further along in counseling, I have them do what Dr. Gottman calls the Dreams within Conflict exercise. This exercise, which takes place over several sessions, relies on the theory that gridlock results from life dreams in conflict. A powerful part of this exercise is to have each partner fully express a dream or wish that is fundamental to them. For this to happen, each partner needs to feel safe, because the dream is very close to the core of who they are, and it is fragile.

The first step is for one partner to pick a wish or dream, such as the desire for family connectedness, or the wish for adventure and travel, or to express their creativity. Once they think of the dream, their partners will ask a defined series of deliberately redundant questions, in order, without much commentary or discussion. This helps avoid an automatically defensive reaction.

For example, if one partner says “I’d really like to have more thrilling travel,” their partner may immediately respond with objections—and here’s what the mind does—“Oh no! How can we afford it? Will he want to take the kids zip-lining? What if he wants to go to a dangerous country? How can I take time off work? I really hate travel! I’d much rather stay home and have a stay-cation to putter in the garden and get caught up on all my novels… “ and on and on. This stream of thought can take place in seconds, but the effect can last a lifetime for the relationship.

So I ask the listener-partner to just ask the questions, not blurt out their thoughts and fears. Believe me, the stream of thoughts that go through the mind can if articulated, easily lead to squashing their partner’s elaboration of their dream. This Dreams within Conflict process opens up long-shut windows, allowing fresh views of each other, helping return the sweet to a relationship gone sour.

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Turning Toward Each Other Every Day: You Don’t Have to Wait for Date Night

Building closeness doesn’t happen only on date night, the subject of my previous two posts. Turning toward each other creates little and big ways to increase closeness—not just on dates, but in the routine tasks of life.

It’s easy to ignore the moments in a day when you can make a connection. For instance, when making a meal, we tend to stick to a routine; if our partner comes in to offer a hand, it is not uncommon for the cook to decline. That can be a missed opportunity to build some shared experience. It’s in a small way, but the small things will add up if they are done with sincerity.

When James and Lorie started therapy, they were barely speaking to each other. As a couple, they seemed to be DOA. But I have learned that in even the most damaged marriages, couples can turn things around and heal their relationship.

Division of Labor in Marriage Requires Flexibility

In conventional relationships, where one partner is the wage earner, and the other takes care of the kids and household, problems arise when chores become inflexibly assigned to the domain of just one partner, and the other is excluded. Both partners work hard at what they do, and when this arrangement works, it is terrific for everyone. But trouble stirs, when the roles or division of labor is too tightly woven, making for inflexibility.

In the case of James and Lorie, James worked long hours and was rarely home for meals with Lorie or their two sons. Lorie resented this but found ways to adapt by getting her needs met through her many friendships and social activities.  Meanwhile, James was irritated, feeling that Lorie putting her social life ahead of him.  When he was home, she was out at meetings. Over the years this patterned congealed into, both partners feeling increasingly that their roles were unappreciated. They felt disconnected.

I asked how James could help in the mornings by taking care of their sons, before school. They both rolled their eyes. James said, his “Lorie hates to have me in the kitchen.,” said James. Lorie confirmed this, saying, he “He comes in and tries to help with homework, or making breakfasts or lunches, but he just makes a mess. He takes everything out of the fridge and it just irritates me.” James is equally angry, saying, “ She has her way of doing things—nothing I do is ever right. ,” James added. “She is such a control freak.”

Over the years, he began to keep to himself, avoiding going into the kitchen, making it more difficult for him to connect with the boys. Yet being a family together in the mornings, —even when they are hectic, —can be an opportunity to turn toward each other. But in the case of James and Lorie, it created hard feelings.

 Making Everyday Tasks Joint Activities

Turning toward each other begins with the often trivial things we do daily, such as cooking dinner, cleaning up, and working in the garden. For James and Lorie, they decided to make an effort to be pleasant to each other. This wasn’t easy after so many years of tension. Lorie began to see how her judgmental attitudes toward James, were kept leaking out, on a regular basis. This affected their children. Kids who witness their parents showing disrespect to each other may end up having trouble with intimacy themselves. Lorie worked to be looser about James’ way of helping with the breakfast. She quit trying to micromanage their mornings. And rather than automatically slipping into resentful isolation, James swallowed his pride and asked Lorie for advice on how to get breakfast on the table, and began paying attention to the other details of morning routines.

Over time, they found activities they could do together, making even routine tasks opportunities to turn toward each other.
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