Glossary terms beginning with F
The plain-language glossary behind The Architecture of Intimacy — a field guide to 369 green flags of healthy relationships.
Terms beginning with F
- Facebook intrusion
- Social media crowding into someone's daily life in an almost compulsive, addiction-like way, so heavy use spills over and strains the romantic relationship.
- faith faith (in trust) · faith (trust component) · faith (trust sense)
- In trust research, confidence that a partner will be there in an uncertain future you cannot yet test — the deepest layer of trust, reaching beyond current evidence.
- familism familistic
- A cultural value placing the family's closeness, needs, and obligations near the center of life, so that caring for relatives is a core duty.
- family accommodation accommodation · accommodation creep
- Changing your own behavior to help a loved one avoid or reduce anxiety-driven distress, such as answering every worry or reshaping routines around their fear.
- family of origin families of origin · family-of-origin
- The family a person grew up in — the parents, home, and household rules that shaped their earliest model of what families do and how love is expressed.
- family ritual family rituals · family routines and rituals
- A repeated family event carrying symbolic meaning and continuity across time — like a holiday or ceremony — unlike a routine, which is a practical, repeated task.
- Family Stress Model FSM
- A model in which economic hardship creates felt economic pressure, which raises emotional distress, which fuels conflict and erodes warmth between partners.
- fawn response fawning
- A survival pattern of appeasing others to head off conflict or threat — keeping the peace by giving up your own needs, often learned early.
- felt acceptance
- Your own sense that your partner accepts you as you are — believing you are accepted, which can differ from how accepting your partner truly is.
- felt safety
- The body's own sense that a partner is safe to be near, a bodily, largely automatic judgment rather than a conscious, reasoned conclusion.
- felt security felt relational security · felt sense of a secure bond · felt sense of security · felt state of security · relational durability · sense of felt security · sense of security
- The settled background sense that a partner is reliably there for you, so your nervous system no longer has to keep asking whether they are.
- felt understanding feeling understood · perceived understanding
- The sense that another person has accurately grasped what matters about you — your view, your feelings, the meaning under your words — and received it with care rather than judgment.
- fictive kinship
- Relationships treated as family though not based on blood or marriage — such as honorary aunts, uncles, or godparents — recognized as kin within a culture or community.
- filial piety filial obligation
- A cultural value, strong in many East Asian traditions, that treats respect, devotion, and care for aging parents as a central duty of adult children.
- financial autonomy
- The everyday freedom each partner has to make ordinary personal spending decisions without seeking permission, paired with mutual respect for each other's economic independence.
- financial compatibility
- The broader question of whether two people's values and habits around money fit together — distinct from reliability, which asks only whether agreements are kept.
- financial contingency of self-worth
- Basing your self-esteem on financial success, so that feeling good about yourself rises and falls with how well you seem to be doing with money.
- financial enmeshment enmeshment
- A money arrangement with no individual space, where every dollar is jointly decided and neither partner keeps any financial identity of their own.
- financial infidelity financial concealment · financial deception
- Deliberately doing something with money you expect your partner would object to, and then hiding it — where the concealment, not the spending itself, is what makes it a betrayal.
- Financial Infidelity Scale FI-Scale
- A validated questionnaire that measures how prone a person is to financial infidelity — doing something a partner would disapprove of and then hiding it.
- financial intimacy
- A shared, felt sense that money is something a couple faces together, side by side, rather than something each person handles alone and dreads talking about.
- financial snooping
- Secretly checking a partner's bank accounts, statements, or spending without their knowledge — monitoring finances covertly rather than through open, mutual visibility.
- financial transparency
- Being honest, early and ongoing, about the money facts of a shared life — what you earn, owe, own, and how you actually spend.
- financial-infidelity asymmetry asymmetry · secrecy asymmetry
- The gap between two partners in how prone each is to hide money — one much more secretive than the other, rather than both being equally open.
- find, remind, and bind binding function · find remind and bind · find-remind-and-bind · find-remind-and-bind theory · find-remind-bind · find-remind-bind cycle · find-remind-bind theory
- A theory of gratitude's role in relationships: a partner's kind act helps you find a good partner, reminds you of the relationship's value, and binds the two of you closer.
- fit statistic
- A number showing how well a model matches the data it was built from — not a prediction that has been tested on new, unseen cases.
- fixed mindset fixed belief
- The belief that an ability is innate and static — you either have it or you do not — so effort and practice cannot meaningfully change it.
- fixed pie
- The mistaken assumption that the other person's wants mirror your own, so anything that helps them must cost you — which hides possible trades that would help both.
- flooding DPA · diffuse physiological arousal · emotional flooding · flooded · physiological flooding · physiologically flooded
- A mid-conflict state where stress arousal overwhelms the body — heart rate climbs and stress hormones surge — leaving a person too disorganized to listen, empathize, or solve problems.
- fondness and admiration culture of fondness and admiration · fondness and admiration system
- In Gottman's model, a couple's habit of feeling warm affection for each other's character and respect for each other's good qualities — a buffer against contempt.
- food selectivity selective eating
- Eating only a narrow, restricted range of accepted foods and refusing many others — studied in research as selective or picky eating that limits dietary variety.
- forgiveness genuine forgiveness
- An internal change in the person who was hurt — letting go of resentment and the urge for revenge — separate from deciding whether to trust or reconcile.
- Four Horsemen Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse · the Four Horsemen
- A set of four corrosive conflict behaviors — criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling — that relationship researchers treat as warning signs of relationship breakdown.
- FRIES
- Planned Parenthood's shorthand for core consent principles the chapter draws on: agreement that is freely given, reversible at any moment, and specific to each activity.
- fusion emotional fusion
- When two partners' emotions blur into one, so neither can feel calm unless the other is calm too — the opposite of staying separately grounded while connected.