Green Cape or Red Cape?

“Green 3” by firemedic58 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 

I’d like to think that in my relationship I use both the red and green cape, balancing the promoting of good things and getting rid of the bad. However, I think looking back on it, as my relationship has progress I’ve started gaining more anxiety about different things and I’ve been overthinking a lot and I tend to at times make sure if there is anything wrong we talk about it or I bring it up. This has its downsides, more often because I think I’m the only one doing this, and it makes me think that maybe I’m more insecure than my partner. I love him, and he makes me feel like a better person, but I never thought that I would be insecure at times and it often makes me feel that there is something wrong with me, not wanting myself to be content in my relationship. It’s unfortunate because I feel like all I really want in life is a mutually benefitting relationship, but I feel like I don’t want myself to be happy for some reason, which prompts me to bring up something that I think needs resolving, and that is usually met with confusion from partner, making it difficult to communicate at times. But, I’ve realized this a while ago, and since I’ve been getting better at letting things sit, and not asking as often if what I did was wrong or if this is something I should be doing that I’m not. I think it just stems from an instinctual need for me to be reassured, but I don’t want it to bleed into something that makes my partner unhappy.

Tonight I gave my boyfriend a call and I tried to use a more green cape method which I do engage in often, I stopped the call to thank him for being so good to me, as he always is, and understanding. I could tell he appreciated that. It made me feel better knowing that he knew that I was genuinely thankful to him, which I am. I think that in the future I’m going to have us take more personality tests together, and the strength test. I think that if we knew each others strengths and values, for sure we could both come together and talk about our results. I don’t think we necessarily need to change anything about how we interact right away, I think it would just be good to know about each other going forward. For example, we took our love languages test recently and compared results and it helped me understand that he is the kind of person that values acts of service, and my results showed that I valued words of reassurance(big surprise,) but I think I didn’t even truly know this was something I needed until I took the test.

I thought it was interesting how we talked about equity and how relationshiips need equity, “love and liking is only possible when there are relatively large amounts of equity; goods, information, love, money, services, status, attractiveness.”

2020 What is Positive Psychology? What is Happiness? [PowerPoint presentation]. Retrieved from Moodle.