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Learning how to live love well is the work of a lifetime—staying curious about what love is, proactively growing in an understanding of what love does, and continually learning how to navigate and align ourselves with the spirit or essence of love itself—is the art, science, and spirit of love.⁠
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And this is the framework we use to guide us in all that we do here at LifeApp!⁠
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Learn more about our organization at https://www.lifeapp.ca

According to decades of research by John Gottman, 69% of conflicts in long-term relationships are what Gottman calls 'perpetual problems', which are rooted in fundamental differences.

A fight about money might actually be a clash between security and adventure. A fight about social media might be about freedom versus connection.

The goal isn't to eliminate conflict, because even the happiest couples fight. It's inevitable.

The goal is to change how we engage it—by understanding and honouring each other’s subjective reality, instead of fighting over whose version of fairness, control, or comfort should win.

In this article, I share more about how to navigate conflict so that, when handled well, it becomes the very material of intimacy:
https://www.newsletter.lifeapp.ca/p/don-t-fight-to-win-fight-to-understand

Jonathan

You’d think brushing your teeth and hitting “do not disturb” on your phone would be the prelude to blissful sleep. But every so often, it feels more like we’re queuing up another rerun of Everybody Loves Raymond.

Teresa is already in bed, lights out, covers pulled, when I slip under the sheets. After a long and busy day, I tell myself I deserve a few minutes of reading before sleep. So I reach for my phone, thumb hovering over the Kindle app. And then it begins—right on cue. Teresa sighs, rolls over, and delivers her line with the comic timing of a seasoned sitcom star: “How long are you going to be on your phone?”

She imagines she’s asking gently. I hear it as cross-examination. My inner lawyer—overpaid, under-qualified, and always on retainer—leaps to his feet: This tiny glow? Really? This is what’s unraveling your REM cycles?

And then, with all the grace of a six-year-old keeping score, I start tallying her own nocturnal crimes: four a.m. scrolling, random audio clips jolting me awake, while I lie there in monk-like silence, a martyr to fairness.

But of course, it’s not really about the glow. It’s about fairness—at least, our competing versions of it. It’s about control—who gets to call the shots when preferences collide. And it’s about comfort—whose needs should take precedence in the dark. In other words, it’s about our subjective realities: what each of us believes is reasonable, tolerable, or right.

The glow is only the spark; the fire is everything smouldering underneath. And if we don’t catch ourselves, what should be a calming bedtime ritual turns into a fight that keeps us awake longer than the book ever would.

Here’s the thing: conflict itself doesn’t destroy relationships. What does are the toxic cycles we fall into when we don’t know how to navigate them.

Read the rest of this article on our blog:
https://www.newsletter.lifeapp.ca/p/don-t-fight-to-win-fight-to-understand

Jonathan

The 3 Day is not a lecture or seminar—it’s an immersive, hands-on experience designed for deep, lasting change.

Across three transformational days, you’ll move through guided experiential processes that help you:

- Break old patterns
- Calm your nervous system
- Strengthen your relationships
- Reconnect with your purpose

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Learn more at lifeapp.ca/3day

At its core, defensiveness is a way to protect a fragile sense of self. Research shows that when our self-esteem is fragile, every mistake feels like a threat to our worth.

So instead of listening, we fight. We justify. We make excuses. We blame. We minimize. We reinterpret—anything to protect our ego from feeling small.

Brené Brown describes the opposite of a fragile self-esteem as grounded confidence—the ability to accept our imperfections without tying them to our identity or value as a person.

With grounded confidence, feedback doesn’t have to feel like an attack. It can become an opportunity to grow.

Many (and I mean many!) years ago in a fight with Teresa, I learned that the words "it goes both ways” weren’t fairness; it was defensiveness.

And defensiveness, I’ve since learned, is like bubble wrap for your ego: it makes you feel padded and protected in the moment, but it blocks all the oxygen a relationship needs to actually breathe.

Read the story and some thoughts I shared on defensiveness here:
https://www.newsletter.lifeapp.ca/p/it-goes-both-ways

Jonathan