If you live with someone other than an identical twin, you differ in genetics, metabolism, family histories, and life experiences, with likely different core vulnerabilities and coping habits. Your brains are bound to make different autopilot judgments and assumptions. You’ll employ different radar screens to notice and emphasize different tasks and preferences in your common environment. You will have different set points of what feels right. It’s not surprising that you need to make frequent behavior requests of each other. The ways you seek behavior change can enhance love or diminish it, facilitate emotional growth or impede it.

The most common approach is persuasion—get your partner to do something through reasoning, seduction, cajoling, coaxing, or pleading. It can work in the short run, but its effectiveness deteriorates with predictability. When partners see it coming, attempts to persuade result in standoffs:

Here we go again; you're right, I'm wrong.

Manipulation usually includes a certain amount of deceit or, at best, hidden agendas. It undermines the honesty, openness, and trust necessary for the long-term health of intimate relationships. Manipulated partners can feel like the love they gave was really stolen.

Manipulation is prevalent in relationships that suffer power imbalance. When one party controls the couple's resources and key decisions, manipulation is inevitable.

Manipulation is one of those things we detest in others, while oblivious to how often we do it ourselves. Partners manipulate each other primarily through blame, which evokes guilt and shame. The most common phrase........

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