The Seven Deadly Sins of a Relationship | Zen Habits.

I’m quoting a post by someone named Leo, directly:

If you can avoid these seven things, and focus instead on doing the four things above, you should have a strong relationship. I’m not going to guarantee anything, but I’d give you good odds.

1. Resentment. This is a poison that starts as something small (”He didn’t get a new roll of toilet paper” or “She doesn’t wash her dishes after she eats”) and builds up into something big. Resentment is dangerous because it often flies under our radar, so that we don’t even notice we have the resentment, and our partner doesn’t realize that there’s anything wrong. If you ever notice yourself having resentment, you need to address this immediately, before it gets worse. Cut it off while it’s small. There are two good ways to deal with resentment: 1) breathe, and just let it go — accept your partner for who she/he is, faults and all; none of us is perfect; or 2) talk to your partner about it if you cannot accept it, and try to come up with a solution that works for both of you (not just for you); try to talk to them in a non-confrontational way, but in a way that expresses how you feel without being accusatory.
2. Jealousy. It’s hard to control jealousy if you feel it, I know. It seems to happen by itself, out of our control, unbidden and unwanted. However, jealousy, like resentment, is relationship poison. A little jealousy is fine, but when it gets to a certain level it turns into a need to control your partner, and turns into unnecessary fights, and makes both parties unhappy. If you have problems with jealousy (like I once did), instead of trying to control them it’s important that you examine and deal with the root issue, which is usually insecurity. That insecurity might be tied to your childhood (abandonment by a parent, for example), in a past relationship where you got hurt, or in an incident or incidents in the past of your current relationship.
3. Unrealistic expectations. Often we have an idea of what our partner should be like. We might expect them to clean up after themselves, to be considerate, to always think of us first, to surprise us, to support us, to always have a smile, to work hard and not be lazy. Not necessarily these expectations, but almost always we have expectations of our partner. Having some expectations is fine — we should expect our partner to be faithful, for example. But sometimes, without realizing it ourselves, we have expectations that are too high to meet. Our partner isn’t perfect — no one is. We can’t expect them to be cheerful and loving every minute of the day — everyone has their moods. We can’t expect them to always think of us, as they will obviously think of themselves or others sometimes too. We can’t expect them to be exactly as we are, as everyone is different. High expectations lead to disappointment and frustration, especially if we do not communicate these expectations. How can we expect our partner to meet these expectations if they don’t know about them? The remedy is to lower your expectations — allow your partner to be himself/herself, and accept and love them for that. What basic expectations we do have, we must communicate clearly.
4. Not making time. This is a problem with couples who have kids, but also with other couples who get caught up in work or hobbies or friends and family or other passions. Couples who don’t spend time alone together will drift apart. And while spending time together when you’re with the kids or other friends and family is a good thing, it’s important that you have time alone together. Can’t find time with all the things you have going on — work and kids and all the other stuff? Make time. Seriously — make the time. It can be done. I do it — I just make sure that this time with my wife is a priority, and I’ll drop just about anything else to make the time. Get a babysitter, drop a couple commitments, put off work for a day, and go on a date. It doesn’t have to be an expensive date — some time in nature, or exercising together, or watching a DVD and having a home-cooked dinner, are all good options. And when you’re together, make an effort to connect, not just be together.
5. Lack of communication. This sin affects all the others on this list — it’s been said many times before, but it’s true: good communication is the cornerstone of a good relationship. If you have resentment, you must talk it out rather than let the resentment grow. If you are jealous, you must communicate in an open and honest manner to address your insecurities. If you have expectations of your partner, you must communicate them. If there are any problems whatsoever, you must communicate them and work them out. Communication doesn’t just mean talking or arguing — good communication is honest without being attacking or blaming. Communicate your feelings — being hurt, frustrated, sorry, scared, sad, happy — rather than criticizing. Communicate a desire to work out a solution that works for you both, a compromise, rather than a need for the other person to change. And communicate more than just problems — communicate the good things too (see below for more).
6. Not showing gratitude. Sometimes there are no real problems in a relationship, such as resentment or jealousy or unrealistic expectations — but there is also no expression of the good things about your partner either. This lack of gratitude and appreciation is just as bad as the problems, because without it your partner will feel like he or she is being taken for granted. Every person wants to be appreciated for all they do. And while you might have some problems with what your partner does (see above), you should also realize that your partner does good things too. Does she wash your dishes or cook you something you like? Does he clean up after you or support you in your job? Take the time to say thank you, and give a hug and kiss. This little expression can go a long way.
7. Lack of affection. Similarly, everything else can be going right, including the expression of gratitude, but if there is no affection among partners then there is serious trouble. In effect, the relationship is drifting towards a platonic status. That might be better than many relationships that have serious problems, but it’s not a good thing. Affection is important –everyone needs some of it, especially from someone we love. Take the time, every single day, to give affection to your partner. Greet her when she comes home from work with a tight hug. Wake him up with a passionate kiss (who cares about morning breath!). Sneak up behind her and kiss her on the neck. Make out in the movie theater like teen-agers. Caress his back and neck while watching TV. Smile at her often.
8. Bonus sin: Stubbornness. This wasn’t on my original list but I just thought about it before publishing this post, and had to add it in. Every relationship will have problems and arguments — but it’s important that you learn to work out these problems after cooling down a bit. Unfortunately, many of us are too stubborn to even talk about things. Perhaps we always want to be right. Perhaps we never want to admit that we made a mistake. Perhaps we don’t like to say we’re sorry. Perhaps we don’t like to compromise. I’ve done all of these things — but I’ve learned over the years that this is just childish. When I find myself being stubborn these days, I try to get over this childishness and suck it up and put away my ego and say I’m sorry. Talk about the problem and work it out. Don’t be afraid to be the first one to apologize. Then move past it to better things.

This video was taken and produced by Chad Barczak. That’s his 5-year-old son Caden on the snowboard, and Timmy on skis, at 3. Timmy and Caden play together at school, and Chad was a Palo Alto Software employee for several years. At the end they’re going down the Summit lift, Bachelor’s finest. This was filmed in late March, 2008.

A stairwell. Transition. A few days between the cruise and Madrid. So far from the Gatwick airport. The early morning flight, the extra bags, seeing Cristin at the bus, lines, lugging, my nervousness at the airport, and we’re off.

A sigh. Another chunk ticked off. The cruise done. Now the next chunk. Going to Granada. The airport at Malaga, hot, long line. What next? The transfer solution. Megan and Vange asleep, a well-built highway through a sunny dry landscape, a very old but somehow stylish city, cobblestone streets, the Alambra, a very nice hotel. El Ladron del Agua. And we have a beautiful room in this hotel, at the very top, with a beautiful view of the Alambra above us.

Stairwell, and transition, because it was a step in between. Granada was planned because it wasn’t Madrid. We had wanted to see it because of the way Paul talked about it.  But it was a lot about helping Megan between Oxford and Madrid. Hair appointments. Laundry. It all worked. The hair guy, Pablo, stylish, trendy. The little old lady who did the laundry.

I took this picture from our hotel window, right after we arrived. We were tired, but what a room. The room had a name, “Generalife,” not a number.
	If you can see the outline in red, that’s our room at Hotel El Ladron de Agua, taken from one of the towers of the Alambra. You can imagine how beautiful it was.
We ate several times at El Azafan, with big windows looking out to a small park and up to the Alambra. This is a picture of that restaurant, among other things, as Megan looked out from a balcony in the Alambra.
	True, the one day we went up to the Alambra together was cold, and clouds covered the views of the Sierra Nevada, but we were able to see it a bit, just below the clouds, at one point.
And we saw the Alambra.

Noah took this on March 9, 2008. Timmy seems to have taken a big step up with his skiing the last few weeks. He went up to the summit at Bachelor a couple times last weekend — he calls it “the grown-up hiill” and skied down by himself. He’s skiing a lot of runs now, ending up tired and happy.

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Originally uploaded by tim_berry

This is Boyan as he looked on Feb. 24.

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Originally uploaded by tim_berry

Boyan was less excited with the affair than me or Eva.

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Originally uploaded by tim_berry

We took advantage of the moment on Saturday to take Eva for a haircut at Whippersnippers, in Tribeca. She had mixed feelings.

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Originally uploaded by tim_berry

Eva and her daddy enjoying the Cat in the Hat

Fenruary 17, 2008

I woke up earlier than Vange or Cristin, much earlier in fact, dressed haphazardly, got onto the computer for a while …

Full of thoughts:

• Yesterday was the best skiing I’ve done in 10 or 15 years. Exhilarating. Tast, smooth, rhythmic, the mountain was crystal clear, my physical condition made a huge difference. No burning thighs, no need for long pauses. Cristin was delightful company, the snow was ideal, the view was fabulous. We skied the Outback Express lift, which had really nice runs and very small lines. We repeated the Kangaroo run a lot.
• Paul sent an email: your beautiful granddaughter. Beautiful pictures of Eva. That’s another warm, happy thought. 
• The exhilaration tempered by reality. I’m 60 years old.
• Walking to the coffee place two  blocks away at 7:30. The day is delightfully cold and crystal clear. I look up at the mountain. Vaguely toy with the idea of taking the bus up again today. Ski alone, iPhone music for company. Clear. Beautiful. But that’s just dumb.
• My right hip has a dull ache from skiing yesterday.
• Megan’s in Paris. Megan’s in Paris. That’s a warm, wonderful, happy thought.
• The line in the song “Mothers don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys: “Cowboys like clear mountain mornings.”
• Not just clear, but also cold. The cold increases the clarity. Walking to Nancy P’s for coffee, I could see Mt. Bachelor in the distance. The cold increases the clarity.

So what was special about 1979?

Hong Kong Was the Least of It

Business International transferred me to Hong Kong, finally, after more than a year of me first dropping hints, then asking.

I spent most of February and March of that year in Hong Kong, testing out a job in Hong Kong with Business International. I stayed in a hotel on the Kowloon side, ran along Hong Kong bay in the early mornings (hot, but not as hot as it was later), then went to the Business International offices in b grade office space on the Hong Kong side. Every day.

They invited me out at night, some. They invited me to sail on their junk (yes, really) to an island in the bay, about 90 minutes each way. I bought a used Honda Civic and agreed to take over the apartment of the guy who was leaving.

I have no pictures, but vivid memories. No, I didn’t go, after all. It’s a long story.

We moved from Mexico to the United States.

I started at Stanford business school. We moved into a 3-bedroom townhouse at 100C Escondido Village, on campus. I started working with Creative Strategies International. Life was good.We drove our beige Rambler American station wagon from Cuernavaca, where we stayed the last few days in Mexico, to Stanford. It was packed to the gills. We shipped what we could via “air freight.” The picture here is of a stop in San Diego along the way.

The Car Filled with Smoke

The car filled with smoke on the first day, when we were barely driving up the hill from Cuernavaca towards Mexico City. La Manini (we were going to drop her off at her home in Mexico City on the way north) said she smelled something burning and we ignored her. Then the smoke filled the car.

We dropped off la Manini and continued north, with the car backfiring and exploding frequently all the way to Guadalajara, about 8 hours away. We found a hotel and a taller. It turns out that the car had been tuned wrong — in preparation for the trip — by a local mechanic. Nothing serious.

The Throat, The Jellyfish, the Desert

Sabrina had a throat and a temperature a lot of the way. We had to stop for antibiotics in Culiacan.

Mom got stung by a jellyfish in Mazatlan. Excruciating pain. She had to lay in the dark in a room with all the curtains closed, even the sleeping ones, because she couldn’t stand the light.

The temperature in Hermosillo was 45 degrees centigrade. Do the math. We’d waited to stay at the Bahia San Carlos in Hermosillo for years, since it had been way too expensive for us the first times through Guaymas. We couldn’t stay out doors, it was too hot, and the room was dark and hostile.

We crossed an immense desert between Caborca and San Luis without seeing another vehicle, or maybe only two or three, in 100 miles. We had to go west south of the border instead of crossing into Nogales because of visa processing. When we got to San Luis, dark of night, finally out of the desert, we filled with gas and the car wouldn’t start. We hung at a dismal dark restaurant by the highway while the mechanic in the gas station tried to fix it. The place looked so bad that Mom wouldn’t let any of you eat anything except corn flakes and milk/ We waited, wondering what we would do if they couldn’t fix it. They fixed it.

It was near midnight when we got to the Holiday Inn in Mexicali. Hooray, civilization. Try to imagine how we looked at midnight after driving from Hermosillo, having the car go dead, at midnight.

Interesting, somewhat chilling note: in the middle of the desert afternoon, hours away from San Luis, we stopped for everybody to pee. It was weird, there was no shelter, just open desert, so you could see for miles, but there were no other vehicles so privacy didn’t matter. The desert must have been 115 degrees hot. There was no shade. I decided, just for I don’t know exactly what reason, to leave the motor running during the five-minute stop. Just in case. The next time it was turned off, which was in San Luis, it didn’t start. Think about that.

Crossing the Border

Next day, bone exhausted from Mexico and hungry to cross the border, where things seemed bright and clean and in working order, and cooler, and not covered with a fine grit dust sand, we were turned back. They couldn’t process the residence visa in Mexicali on a Saturday. We had to drive west again, south of the border, through another desert, to Tijuana.

The visa process was hard, demeaning, long lines, abrasive, too many people, including Mom and me and three blonde children. It took hours. There was no preferential treatment for gringo faces and little blond children. They found us all extremely annoying.

Finally we crossed into San Diego. I was enormously relieved to be back on the side of the border in which, if the car broke down, I could get motels, and help from parents, and so forth.

This is a picture of the next day, after a night in the Holiday Inn in San Diego:

The happiness you see on the faces was real. It was a different world. We had grown very tired of Mexico and very happy –despite all the uncertainty — with moving to the United States. We had planned to spend another night in San Diego and see the San Diego zoo, but we couldn’t resist, we drove to Disneyland. We took a motel room in the annex section of the Disneyland Hotel. We had made it. This was such a good time. Anticipation of happiness. And no, it wasn’t like “and then everything bad happened.” In fact, things stayed good for a long time.

What Happened to Hong Kong?

What happened to Hong Kong? It turns out that in January of 1979 I spent three weeks with my parents to get a nose job. They had to ream me out because the allergies had caused nasal polyps that meant I never breathed through my nose. This was the second time in my life, the first in 1965 when I was 17.

While I was there, I took advantage to interview for a job with Wells Fargo bank, which was then headquartered in San Francisco. Dennis Nathan, who had been in charge of Wells Fargo in Mexico, had become a friend and recommended me. When I interviewed, they told me I was an unlikely candidate because I didn’t have an MBA degree.

Great Moments

One morning when I was up very early doing pushups in the sunny spot on the living room rug, Dad walked out in his bathrobe, with his coffee cup full, and tossed me the business section of the San Francisco Chronicle. The headline said Stanford MBAs were getting huge salaries. Dad said I should get the MBA, why not, and I said don’t be silly, I have a wife and three kids. He said what the heck, go over there, talk to them, see what they say. Applying doesn’t mean you have to go.

This was one of my dad’s great moments. Advice gently given, no pressure, just a suggestion, no resentment if it wasn’t followed. And in this case, it was followed. I went, I talked, I applied. It wasn’t trivial. I had to take the GRE exams, do essays, get transcripts from Notre Dame and University of Oregon, the whole deal. I completed my application just before I left for Hong Kong.

When I returned from Hong Kong Stanford has sent a telegram. I had been accepted. that year they took one of every 25 applicants. I hadn’t really taken it seriously, but suddenly it was real.

Two months struggling with the decision. Mom said: “Tim, don’t worry, it’s both of us. We’ll take the risk together. If it turns out wrong, we’ll deal with that together. You hate your job now. It’s time to take a risk.” Or something like that. She was always in favor of education. I would never have quit the job and gone back to school without that kind of attitude. This was one of the great moments in our history.