Cultivating a baseline sense of ease with a prospective spouse

one of the most important senses to cultivate with your (prospective) spouse is the sense of ease. the sense that there's nothing wrong, right now if you don't have at LEAST as much of that with them as you have on your own, don't get married

Matthew Dub @5matthewdub · Apr 30, 2024

Our autonomic nervous systems require an "all-clear" signal to return to homeostasis. For social mammals, this signal comes from the tribe/family. But when the tribe/family are the source of the trauma… and they pass it on to the next generation…

[long tweet — read the rest on Twitter]

quoting @ElodesNL: not explaining this rn but i'm becoming increasingly convinced that trauma isn't about what happened but about the context around what happened it's not even that something happened but rather that the people around you didn't help integrate it into the rest of your life

May 1, 2024

Matthew notes that getting to ease can sometimes require freaking out for a bit that's why part of having a sense of ease means having a sense of whether your partners' weird sounds are a problem to be dealt with or the shaking off of an old problem

Matthew Dub @5matthewdub · Sep 2, 2022

Mammals are only safe in the herd. The zebra returns, touches its kin. It may shake, quiver, roll, vocalize. Discharging all that pent-up ANS energy. More touching, more shaking, until the close contact with the herd allows the restoration of a safe and social state: State 0.

but also you want a sense of baseline ease/safety that's there in the background—what you return to at minimum you want to feel this most nights, falling asleep together. whatever difficulties & stresses they can wait until tomorrow, when we're rested. we've got this.

but that's the minimum. the more of this ease you have, the more every interaction is smoother and you can have a calibrated sense of how problematic things are, that lets you collectively put attention where it's needed

this interpersonal ease is what allows trusting your partner when they go "ugh" and you say "you okay?" and they say "yeah" and you both know they ARE ok—that they'd ask for your help if they needed it so you can relax and return to what you were doing

if you don't have that calibration, then those tiny little moments can't get discharged. she makes a weird sound—and it actually wasn't about you at all!—but you can't get to ground with her and trust that things are good (let alone after an actual substantial conflict)