PhronesisWe argue that chronic relationship fault-finding — the habitual attentional pattern in which one partner registers the other primarily through the lens of what they are doing wrong, failing to do, or doing inadequately — constitutes a wrong attractor W_FF in the dynamical landscape of intimate relationships. The healthy ground state S^0 is calibrated appreciative attention: an attentional architecture that registers both deviation and compliance, calibrated to their actual frequencies, and capable of genuine acknowledgment of the ordinary good.
We identify three interlocking mechanisms that stabilize W_FF: negativity-selective attention, the righteousness bypass, and contempt escalation. We show that fault-finding is not primarily about the faults being found but about an endogenous attentional apparatus that will find new targets regardless of the partner's actual behavior. A formal dynamical model formalizes the criticism-loop as a self-reinforcing attractor with a contempt-threshold basin.
We distinguish this framework carefully from Gottman's general criticism research, which identifies criticism as a relational failure without modeling it as an attractor with identifiable basin dynamics. Return paths to S^0 are identified. Nine propositions structure the argument.