So, I can imagine that the high-conflict person doesn't always appear as high-conflict. In fact, this is something that you've alluded to many times already in this conversation and certainly in your book, that sometimes these high-conflict personalities come in kind of under the radar and that can be confusing to people or they can go undetected for a long time.

Yeah, so part of it goes with the specific personalities, so high-conflict people with borderline personality traits or histrionic personality traits are often more openly dramatic and so they might really shock you, suddenly they start yelling, screaming, throwing things just because you're having an average conversation, very disproportionate, but some, and it tends to be more of the antisocial personality, some narcissistic personalities can look really reasonable on the surface.

And they've actually had a lifetime of experience at looking good, which kind of covers up all the stuff under the surface. And I think of a couple examples, so for example, and I deal sometimes with domestic violence cases, so let's say an abuser says, in court, says, "Oh, well, I was helping her because she was so upset I took her keys away and I held her down on the bed because I was afraid she would leave and get into a car crash." Well, there may be rare occasions where that's true, but that's a common story that we get from domestic abusers.

Or in court, I've seen this, where there'll be a very reasonable person kind of explaining the situation and their partner, more often a woman, is just emotional, is a mess, maybe even in tears. And people don't realize about 80% of divorces in court today, people represent themselves. And so there's these conversations and the judge is like, "Well, this guy's being really reasonable and this woman's a mess, I mean, you know, I'm going to go with what he's saying." And so a lot of stuff slips under the radar that way.

But gender-wise, it could be the reverse, and a lot of relationships people get into, people make themselves look really good and then the negative stuff comes out weeks, months, maybe a year later. So that's why we say wait a year until you decide to commit. Because nowadays, who knows, you may have someone that really is good at covering their bad behavior.

Yeah, let's hover on that one particular point, because this is perhaps one of the most important takeaways from your work. Could you just spell out this first year principle? And perhaps it's useful for us to also acknowledge that, yes, there are a great many, truly great stories about people who met one weekend, two weeks later, got married, and then we're hearing the story 50 years later when they've got grandkids and great grandkids, they thrived.

Or people met, got engaged three months later, or, you know, in some cases, got pregnant three months later, and they have this wonderful marriage and family story to tell. We hear these stories and they're really wonderful stories, right? I mean, they sort of affirm your belief in humanity when you hear those stories.

And they are powerful. But in discussing a little bit of this with you offline, you probably have witnessed more cases where people rushed and that rushing to commit or to create led to more problems than it did good. Yes. And that's many, many of the high conflict divorces that I've worked on as a lawyer and before that as a therapist and sometimes as a mediator are, in my mind, kind of the bad luck stories.

Got a decent person, usually my client, of course, but something happened, they got together too fast, and then all this stuff came out. And I really believe in today's world that it is a matter of luck. And that's why you should take a year to find out, am I, did I draw the short straw in this relationship because I got this perfect looking person, great record, all these good things.

But close relationships is where personality disorders come out, interpersonal difficulty, and the high conflict behaviors, mostly close relationships. So they might, everyone might like them at work, but when you're home alone with them, they could be really terrible, yelling, hitting, doing all of this stuff. So that's why we say wait a year.

I've had a lot of cases where people tell me we just fell in love, it was beautiful and everything was wonderful for about six months. And then when I committed to get married, all this stuff started showing up. But I got married anyway because I figured, well, time and love will heal everything.

Only it didn't. So in today's world, there's a higher risk of getting a high conflict relationship I must say. And the description you gave is what people often tell me, they say my grandparents got married a week after they met and they just celebrated their 60th anniversary, they're still in love, everything's wonderful.

Your grandparents tended to know who they were marrying. In today's world, not only don't you know, you don't have a history, but high conflict people have learned to cover up the full range of who they are. And they're not bad people, and that's something I want to emphasize. They just have a different personality.

And they may have been born this way, but they don't come with markings, you know, they don't come with the music like of Jaws, doo-doo-doo-doo. They look good and anybody I think is at risk of falling into a relationship like this. I definitely want to come back to this point that you made, that you're not demonizing these people.

Right. You're talking about how to behave with them or how to not behave with them in some cases in order to try and create the smoothest possible interactions, in some cases, no interaction. But if we could hover still a bit more on this first year idea, my understanding is that no getting engaged, or for that matter married, no conceiving children, and no moving in together in year one.

Are those the critical... Except for the last one, is it's really, don't commit like getting married within the first year. Sometimes moving in together is a good way to find out what it's like up close with this person. Yeah, you learn a lot by living with somebody. That's right.

That's right. And personality disorders, part of the definition is interpersonal dysfunction. And that's close, that's close relationships. So if you haven't had that close relationship, you don't see what happens when you leave your socks out or the caps off the toothpaste and some little thing is some huge storm.

Or when somebody is sleep-deprived. I always say you learn a lot about somebody after a bad night's sleep, you end them, right? Right. But the key is patterns of behavior. So one thing I want to say is everybody gets angry sometimes, that's fine. Everybody yells sometimes. Everybody criticizes sometimes.

But if they have a pattern, like their life pattern of relationship is to yell and scream and criticize and all that, whoa, this pattern is probably going to keep going. And as I mentioned earlier, I believe, with personality disorders, it's a narrower pattern of behavior. So it's more pattern-driven in several different settings.

Family, maybe at work when it's close, maybe in the community when it's close. So these are recognizable patterns, as recognizable as alcoholism and addiction, once people learn. So that's the key. Give yourself some time, see if this stuff comes to the surface. I think you're raising a really interesting point, which is that although nowadays we have more information about people available to us by way of the internet and social media, you made the comparison with our grandparents' era.

I'm 49 years old, so my grandparents... Actually my grandparents knew each other from the time they were like in the eighth grade. They eloped when they turned 18, boom, went and got married, I think to the dismay of one side or the other side of parents, but then were married more than 50 years.

And grandkids, obviously, I'm one of them, et cetera. And so you have these stories and we love these kinds of stories, but as you point out, they knew each other very, very well and had for a long time. Nowadays, one can "do their research", go online and look for things, but would you argue that that's not complete information?

Right. I think it can be helpful. I tell people, "Google your partner and find out if there's some history there that may impact you." Definitely. But don't believe that's sufficient. What I say, what you really want to talk to is relatives and friends of this person, and what you really want to do is see them in action with their relatives and friends.

Relatives and friends. Yes, because that's close relationships. That's the key. This is all about close relationships. And that's what catches people by surprise. They say, "This person looks good at work." Some people have worked together for 10 years and maybe they were in other relationships and they both got divorced, commiserated with each other, and they get together.

And it's like, "We've known each other for 10 years, you know, we're going to have a great relationship." And they find out this is like a stranger almost, because it's a close relationship now. And that's the difference. How people behave in a close relationship often triggers like personality disorder stuff.

Fear of abandonment, fear of looking inferior, fear of being dominated, fear of not getting enough attention. The personality disorders seem to have excessive fears in these areas. Is it fair to say that if somebody has a lot of stable friendships over, you know, long periods of time, that that's a good indication that they can maintain close relationships?

But it seems to me you'd also want to know, like, what is a close friend to that person? Do they actually spend time with them, you know, and likewise with coworkers? Because some work environments that I've been in are necessarily very non-personal. You don't share much, right? Whereas other environments, like I know the partners of everyone I work with now at the podcast, that wasn't true for my academic colleagues.

I knew some of my academic colleagues' families, I would have dinner with them, et cetera, but some of them less so. So context matters a lot. Yes. Right. And I'd say, you mentioned the word stability, and that's really a key. So if they have close friends they've had for 10, 20, 30 years, that's a really good sign.

Bad signs are, "I don't want you talking to my family, they're evil people, they'll say terrible things about me, you can't trust them, they'll end up, they'll turn on you, they'll hate you," all this stuff. "You can't even ever talk to my, I can't even let you know who my family is and what their emails and phone numbers are." Oh goodness.

That's a warning sign. Yeah. Definite warning sign. Because everyone has conflict with family members at some level, but you would hope that one would feel comfortable allowing you to interact with their family. Yeah. And if your family's really difficult, introduce your partner to your family and let them see, "This is a difficult family and this is why I had to distance from them," because a lot of people, to be healthy, do have to get some more distance.

But it's the secretiveness, it's the, just secrets in general are not a good thing for relationships. That's the biggest piece that's missing in a way, compared to 50 years ago when people knew. It was hard to have family secrets 50 years ago. Well, even though people may be all over the internet, you might really know their secrets.

And that's what you need to find out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)