Golden rule and the platinum rule.

• Golden rule: "treat them how you want to be treated"
  • easy
  • does not protect from "typical-minding": where you forget that they work differently from you
• Platinum rule: "treat them how they want to be treated"
  • hard

Better to model them as they are, not put yourself in their shoes. Trust less in instinctive empathy, more intellectual: "what do I know about how this person prefers to deal with this kind of situation…?"

I figure it's a reason why psychopaths can manipulate people so well – they always operate by the platinum rule, as they never had the option of "put yourself in their shoes" in the first place.

The golden rule only works between people who think very alike, and the more dissimilar you are, the more important to upgrade to the platinum rule.

If scheduling a fight seems a little bit absurd, just imagine the results of letting the tension build for several days because you haven’t made time to argue.

It is usually helpful to schedule a time to fight and make an agreement to do so; it does not promote constructive hostilities if we waylay our partner in the bathroom or on the way out the door to work. We need to schedule discussions at a time when we can give them our full attention.

Scheduling fights has the added advantage that you can prepare for them, organize your thoughts, and know you have a time when this particular issue will be dealt with. If you feel bad about the grocery bills on Tuesday, and you know you have a date to fight about it on Thursday, it’s pretty easy to put your stuff aside until then. Most people don’t put their stuff aside very well when it seems that their issues will never get dealt with.

—Book: The Ethical Slut

These small things may never change, so you shouldn't approach it with an "okay, I'll endure it" mindset. Better if you learn to view these things thru a different lens, such that they genuinely don't bother you anymore.

Or else – let them know. Or what do you think, does it sound like a good idea to keep enduring without ever saying? It'll explode later during some big conflict and they'll be like "why didn't you tell me earlier?"

Note that it doesn't need to be perfectly fixed or perfectly accepted. It's okay if your partner does little things that bother you, and you do little things that bother them, so long as the other knows it's a bother. Knowledge disarms it.

A tenet of NVC. I guess it's a version of the epistemic habit of avoiding premature generalization.

Instead of "careless husband", just observe that "he left toothpaste in the sink" and nothing more. By not attributing to fundamental traits (Fundamental attribution error), we leave ourselves room to understand their behavior.