Whenever I get upset with my partner, I always come back to Victoria Rader’s strategy – and remember rather fondly that regardless of what happens – this person is my ass.

If you’re not familiar with the Ass Principle, it’s basically a mental reset tool that enables you to validate, resituate, forgive & love all in 30 seconds. When there’s a behavior or a pattern that is frustrating to you, do the below

1. Validation – in your mind. Look at the person that you love and say, “What an ass.”
2. Ownership – Say to yourself, “But he/she is my ass”. Own up to your relationship with them.
3. Forgiveness – Say to yourself, “I choose to forgive them”. You neither excuse the behavior, nor punish it.
4. Love – Time to say, “I choose to love them.”

After coping with my momentary meltdown and re-finding my zen it’s time to fortify the Relationship Love Vitamin by practicing Relationship Repair. All relationships encounter rough patches, and sometimes these conflicts feel all-consuming. They create distance in your relationship and dissonance in what you want versus the reality that you’re living. Relationship Repairing is about not taking our ability to resolve disagreements with our partner for granted, but being intentional in building back the trust that was broken when the conflict arose. 

Sometimes Relationship Repair looks like sitting across the table with your partner and asking them how they define a certain concepts like “responsibility” or “caring.” This is vital especially because it often feels like you already know how they define a concept, or that you share a common understanding – but when it comes down to the specifics, as individuals we tend to have nuances in how we show up — and this is when things tend to get spicy. 

My partner and I took this opportunity to have a conversation about how we define sympathy, empathy, and compassion. And as we discussed we realized that while we overlapped about 80% on how these terms and our behaviors, we had some major differences that led to misunderstandings in the heat of the moment.

Check out this amazing infographic by Susan David to inspire your conversation. I love how she broke down Sympathy, Empathy, and Compassion into action verbs like Distant, Shared & Connected/Action Oriented. My partner and I had a lengthy conversation on how Compassion shows up in our relationships and the role of “helping” each other when we are suffering.

Will this one conversation solve our problems? No. But it does provide a foundation for the next time one of us is suffering and we feel like the other person is not being compassionate towards our pain – we have a higher level of common ground that we can build from instead of starting at ground zero.