ABSTRACT
This chapter uses a relational psychoanalytic understanding of affective exchanges to explore how affects underlie the meaning-making process in an intimate relationship. It first looks at how intimate partners acquire different affective capacities through their personal histories of primary affective exchanges, but also through social and power contexts, especially gender-related binaries that often skew the intimate dynamics.
I then propose that by paying attention to the minute details of intimate interactions, partners can sometimes deploy their different capacities to subvert these same social binaries that shape and restrict them. I use three short personal vignettes of tense or dissonant moments in my own intimate relationship, and the affective inequalities created within them, to explore and understand ways in which they were resolved. I argue that this understanding of intimate dynamics could help the couple use particular strengths of each partner as shareable resources through which they can achieve positive transformations of the relationship, including recognizing each self’s sensitivity to certain affective states and challenging their power undertones.
