‘Love Maps’ Are a Game Changer When You Have an Anxious Attachment Style
How to develop maps of your partner’s inner world to ease your anxiety.
Recently, I came across the concept of ‘Love Maps’ as given by Dr. John Mordecai Gottman, an American psychologist who has written the popular book, “The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work.”
Gottman describes Love Maps as “that part of your brain where you store all the relevant information about your partner’s life.” In simpler words, it refers to asking and remembering all the important aspects, both small and big of your partner’s life journey.
Having Love Maps mean that you are aware of your partner’s dreams, quirks, pet peeves, and formative events and the same is true for them.
Love Maps are considered the very base of the Sound Relationship House. Before you move onto the higher levels of creating shared meaning and learning to turn towards each other, there is a need for a solid foundation in the form of Love Maps to hold the relationship firmly.
Dr. Gottman writes in The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work “if you don’t start off with a deep knowledge of each other, it’s easy for your marriage to lose its way when your lives shift so suddenly and dramatically.”
