Glossary terms beginning with W
The plain-language glossary behind The Architecture of Intimacy — a field guide to 369 green flags of healthy relationships.
Terms beginning with W
- wait-list control wait-list
- A comparison group that receives the same program only after a waiting period, letting researchers compare people who got the help now with people still waiting for it.
- walls and windows
- A clinical image of how affairs form: a wall of secrecy rises between partners while a window of closeness opens toward an outside person.
- we-ness couple identity · first-person plural pronoun use · first-person-plural language · we language · we talk · we-ness versus separateness · we-talk
- A couple's habit of describing their shared life in 'we' terms rather than as two separate individuals — read in Gottman's coding as a sign of partnership and unity.
- weaponized honesty
- A counterfeit of honesty: announcing unflattering truths as a license to be unkind, then hiding behind "I'm just being honest" — candor serving the speaker's ego.
- weaponized incompetence
- Doing a task badly or claiming you cannot, so a partner takes it over and stops asking - feigned or exaggerated inability that keeps the work defaulting to the other person.
- weight stigma internalized weight stigma · weight criticism
- Negative judgment, stereotyping, or criticism a person faces because of their body weight or size — here, especially when it comes from inside the romantic relationship.
- WEIRD (samples) WEIRD · WEIRD samples
- An acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic — describing research samples whose findings may not generalize to other cultures or populations.
- widowhood effect
- The observed rise in a surviving spouse's own risk of death after losing their partner, with the excess risk highest in the months right after the loss.
- willingness to sacrifice
- The readiness to set aside your own immediate interests for a partner or the relationship — the orientation to give, as distinct from actually performing a sacrifice.
- window of tolerance
- The range of emotional arousal in which a person can stay calm and functional, rather than becoming overwhelmed or shutting down.
- wise feedback
- Critical feedback paired with an explicit statement of high standards and genuine confidence that the person can meet them.
- within-person (level) within-couple · within-person
- A pattern tracked inside the same individual over time — whether a person's own ups and downs in one thing predict later shifts in another, not comparisons between different people.
- working alliance therapeutic alliance
- The quality of the trusting, collaborative bond between a therapist and client, treated in research as a key channel through which therapy produces good outcomes.
- working memory
- The short-term mental workspace that holds and juggles the information you need right now — such as the steps of a task — while you carry it out.