All Posts Tagged With: "compromise"

Lance and I talk a lot about compromise – what it means to adapt your own interactions to cater to someone else’s love style, for example, or being supportive of your partner’s desire for a dog even though you hate them.  Here’s another example of Honey and Jake: Compromise in Action.

Jake hates household chores.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, right?  Is there anyone out there who likes household chores?  I can think of one friend, but only one. Continued

I thought that Lance’s recent post on How to Qualify a Relationship was excellent, and his description if himself as a “bursty” worker being one of the things that makes the quality time love style very difficult for him was a worthy insight.  So worthy that it got me thinking about my own work style.

You see, where for Lance,

My brain gets really tired each day, way before my body or my emotional center runs out of energy. WAY before. I have a finite amount of this mind energy, and that energy runs out after 3-4 hours. After that, I’m basically a zombie mentally. Once I’m in this low energy state, I have to recharge, and I do that by napping, reading, watching TV, or otherwise fucking around in private.

I do not experience these types of creative energy spikes with any regularity.  Sure, if I have a really long day at work or am under stress about something specific, then I might get emotionally/intellectually tired.  But for the most part, I wake up fairly early and chug along at a steady pace all day (Lance would say it’s the Virgo in me). Continued

After over 3.5 years, Jake and I still have an awesome sex life.  We don’t do it every day, but then again, we were long-distance so much of the first two years that was never the norm for us in any case.  I’d say that we average 3 times a week usually, with the odd week off due to one of us traveling, getting sick, or having a period (okay, only one of us has ever needed a week off for that, and fortunately, it doesn’t appear that I’ve ever dedicated an entire blog posting to one!).

Still, when you’ve been together for awhile, things do get a bit routine if you aren’t taking steps to avoid it.  Sometimes, though, you don’t even need to take the steps – it just resurges on its own.

In the past two weeks, Jake and I have had sex so many times I’ve lost count.  When my alarm clock goes off in the morning…when he gets home at night…several times a day on the weekend…let me just say that it’s AWESOME. Continued

The second of the two presentations at the professional development conference I attended last week (you can read about the first one, “recession-proofing your personal relationships,” here) was on negotiating.  Now, the conference was sponsored by a woman’s professional organization, so that’s what the focus (and most of the supporting anecdotes) was on, but I think there’s value in it regardless of your gender.

“Hard” versus “Soft” Negotiating

This is one of the core principles of the well-known book Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher and William Ury.  Essentially, hard negotiation (often called competitive negotiation) is about using whatever means necessary to get whatever it is that you want.  Soft negotiation (often called integrative or cooperative negotiation) is about maximizing both parties’ returns – even if it means giving up something that you really want.  Continued

On Wednesday I got to go to yet another training…this one was actually an all-day professional development conference for staff at our institution.  Two of the presentations (e-mail in the workplace and locavore/plant-based eating) were disappointing, not because I’m not interested in the topics but because the speakers were terrible.

However, the “Recession-Proofing Your Personal Relationships” and the “Women Don’t Negotiate, But They Should” presentations were pretty rockin’.  So, here I am, passing all my rockin’ new knowledge on to you!  This entry is inspired by the value I got out of the “Recession-Proofing” presentation, and I’ll do one on negotiations next week. Continued

On Friday, I went to a training on emotional intelligence, and I have to say that it was really interesting.  I’d taken a quiz on emotional intelligence prior to this (check out http://www.queendom.com/) and scored not nearly as well as I would have thought, although firmly within the bell curve. One of the results of the training was to make a contract with ourselves (we were given contracts and the trainer is going to follow up with us to hear about the results) and try to do one thing differently for a month to improve our emotional intelligence.  I got a lot of value out of the session, so I thought I’d try and pass some of it on.

Regarding the monthly contract, I chose to allow my emotions to influence my decisions, which I anticipate will be pretty interesting.  Sometimes I get really frustrated or angry and then my emotions make my decisions for me (which is different, I think, from letting your emotions influence your decisions), and the rest of the time I pretty much disregard my emotions completely.  I’m looking forward to the idea of taking a balanced approach. Continued