Most of the useful ones are fairly symmetrical. Things like taking care of health and appearance for yourself but also more effort than you would otherwise on the margin because you care about your partner’s experience. Taking note of things that seem specific to your partner/make them happy and noticing opportunities to do them. Noticing that the way your partner expresses care is probably the way they also wish they could receive it, and symmetrically noticing that the ways you keep expressing care for your partner are ways you secretly want care and doing the counterintuitively difficult emotional work of learning to ask for it instead of resenting their lack of mind-reading.
Creating space in which your partner can be vulnerable to expose their real preference (e.g. sexual preferences). Both men and women have a pretty hard time with this (especially any gender-narrative dystonic preferences) and often have had some pretty hurtful rejections in the past from other unthinking young people.
Then there are things that people present as if they are relationship obligations and try to avoid the emotional maturity of having them be explicitly discussed requests instead of tacitly held/resented demands. Such as coddling their coping mechanisms while not being allowed to acknowledge that you are paying costs to accommodate them (or you doing this to them).
Men often wind up in the valley of bad emotional sensitivity where they think that going into these sorts of things will make them unattractive/feminine (see: gender-narrative dystonic), mostly because they haven’t had solid models of masculine emotional space-holding from their fathers and older male peers, modern age siloing isolates people from a lot of feedback from older people at every stage of life. They don’t have a context in which to train the first awkward 100 hours of these skills. I think this is often why people report things like circling being very helpful.
Most of the useful ones are fairly symmetrical. Things like taking care of health and appearance for yourself but also more effort than you would otherwise on the margin because you care about your partner’s experience. Taking note of things that seem specific to your partner/make them happy and noticing opportunities to do them. Noticing that the way your partner expresses care is probably the way they also wish they could receive it, and symmetrically noticing that the ways you keep expressing care for your partner are ways you secretly want care and doing the counterintuitively difficult emotional work of learning to ask for it instead of resenting their lack of mind-reading.
Creating space in which your partner can be vulnerable to expose their real preference (e.g. sexual preferences). Both men and women have a pretty hard time with this (especially any gender-narrative dystonic preferences) and often have had some pretty hurtful rejections in the past from other unthinking young people.
Then there are things that people present as if they are relationship obligations and try to avoid the emotional maturity of having them be explicitly discussed requests instead of tacitly held/resented demands. Such as coddling their coping mechanisms while not being allowed to acknowledge that you are paying costs to accommodate them (or you doing this to them).
Men often wind up in the valley of bad emotional sensitivity where they think that going into these sorts of things will make them unattractive/feminine (see: gender-narrative dystonic), mostly because they haven’t had solid models of masculine emotional space-holding from their fathers and older male peers, modern age siloing isolates people from a lot of feedback from older people at every stage of life. They don’t have a context in which to train the first awkward 100 hours of these skills. I think this is often why people report things like circling being very helpful.