The Gottman Doctors: Affairs Can Actually Save Your Relationship! But If You See This, It's Time To Walk Away! | The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

When the sex falls away, it can become a serious problem.

And the largest study done on the quality of sex with 70 ,000 people in 24 countries found the differences between people who say they have a great sex life and an awful sex life has to do with it.

Really? Yeah, that's right.

Doctors John and Julie Gutman are world -renowned psychologists and researchers who have studied over 40 ,000 couples, written over 50 books, and helped millions of people find and stay in love for over 50 years.

People don't know how to have good relationships.

So, I've got so many questions.

I'll start from the top.

What are we getting wrong?

Well, first of all, most people are living under the myth that you have to be compatible with a partner, which is absolutely wrong.

And this is really interesting.

There's a t -shirt study where women smelled t -shirts that had been worn by men for at least two days and selected the ones they thought smelled the best.

And they found that they were selecting the men that wore as most divergent from them, genetically, rather than people who were like them, because we're not really turned on by her clone.

And there isn't a one.

Looking for the one is a big mistake.

What about, how do I become the most attractive version of me if I'm looking for a partner?

That's a great question.

And this is what you do.

This is a difficult question to ask, but have you ever seen cheating help a relationship?

Oh, very, very often.

Really? When there's recovery.

But can it be treated?

75 % so far in our research.

Wow. We developed a model, and here's what it involves.

First... John. Julie.

Why do you both do what you do?

I love that question.

One has to define what we do.

And there are many things that we do.

First of all, I love to write.

That's great. I've been helping people since I was eight years old, for some odd reason.

And I love, love, love connecting with people and loving them through their pain.

That's why I do what I do.

And would you class yourself as a clinical psychologist?

Is that your official title?

Yes. John, could you answer the same question, which is, why do you do what you do?

And I guess what do you do?

Well, to me, it's really an interesting puzzle.

To try to understand what makes relationships work and what makes groups work, what makes people be cooperative versus competitive, selfish, and mean.

What makes them be altruistic and empathetic.

What makes relationships become sources of longevity and health versus illness and loneliness and despair.

So for me, it's a puzzle.

And it's fun to work on a puzzle.

And what do you do?

I measure things accurately and reliably.

And then really just kind of see where the data fall out.

So it's really applying statistics and measurement and good math to try to understand processes that are going on between people.

With this really ultimate question of what makes relationships work and what makes groups work, what makes humans cooperative and magnificent at their best versus selfish, greedy, and functioning at their worst.

So it's curiosity that drives me, that's all.

And collectively, how many people do you think you've studied, researched, treated, worked with in your practice over the last however many decades?

Well, we've done research on 40 ,000 couples about to start couples therapy using questionnaires and then more intensely using physiology and objective rating of emotional behavior, about 3 ,000 couples followed over time as long as 20 years.

And how many books have you collectively written, Julie?

I think we're on 51, but I'm not sure.

I've lost it. Where I wanted to start with this conversation is really with, I guess, the subject of relationships but how we find and form them in the modern society because when you look at the stats, despite the incredible work you've done over the last couple of decades, it doesn't seem that we're better

at finding and keeping relationships than ever before, especially if you look at non -romantic relationships.

You know, loneliness and isolation are at absolute all -time highs and the technology that was invented over the last couple of decades came with a promise, which was that it was going to connect us, but it doesn't seem to have succeeded.

So I really want to start by answering this question about how people find love and form those relationships in the modern world and what the data says and what our psychology says about where we're going wrong.

I had some independent research that I found that says according to the US Census Bureau, nearly 50 % of the US population are currently single according to the 2023 survey by Pew Research.

About 33 % of men reported being single, followed by 20 % of women.

The average first marriage for men is 30 years old, for women it's about 28.

We're having less sex than ever before.

We're getting in relationships later than ever before.

Marriages still seem to break down, almost half of them.

You probably know those numbers better than me.

And almost half of people are using dating apps, but I think if you speak to anybody that uses a dating app, they feel like they're all having a bad time.

When we think about finding someone to love us or that we love, how much of our effort should be about actively going out there and putting ourselves out there, buying a new dress, whatever it is, putting ourselves out there in the market versus the internal work of building ourselves into someone that is a magnet

instead of a door -to -door salesman.

You know what I mean?

Beautiful, beautiful, yes.

I love your thought about developing ourselves internally because that's what goes wrong that makes dating apps so terrible.

Many, many people suffer from terrible insecurity, right?

They feel shame. They may have been criticized a lot as a kid or in their work.

And as a result, they hide out.

They hide, and what they present to the world, either through dating apps, this is very common, or just even meeting people at a party, is something they're not.

It's something that they believe is the ideal, but where are they getting their information?

They're getting it from TV, from Hollywood, from idealized heroes and heroines that are not real.

Also, they're living under the myth that you have to be compatible with a partner, which is absolutely wrong, as we'll talk about.

In other words, you have to have the same interests, the same values, maybe the same background, the same class you were raised in, and so on.

All of that is wrong, interestingly enough.

So when you talk about building that internal world, basically what you're saying is trust your own intuition, trust who you are.

People will come to you if you are genuinely yourself, and if you're not.

Then people may mistake you for somebody else, have an expectation of who you are, and you're inevitably going to fail that expectation, which then gives you a negative experience, because you feel like this other person is rejecting you and doesn't like you.

But the reality is, they're not rejecting you, they're rejecting this idealized portrait that you tried to present to them, which is real.

I guess a lot of people would think when they hear that, but Julie, if I show up as myself, no one's going to love me.

Yeah, that's right.

Especially on a first date.

That's right, that's right.

That's the sadness.

People don't believe, because of all that criticism in the society, that they're worthy of love.

They don't believe it.

They have to be, I don't know what, Bruce Willis or something, in order to have somebody attracted to them, have somebody really want to get to know them, which isn't true at all.

In fact, it's the opposite.

What do you think to that, John?

Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about this question of, how do we find true love?

Part of the problem, I think, is that, as you mentioned, loneliness is a very serious thing, and so many people are lonely.

Part of what they haven't done is build a friendship network that can support them.

Friends are just so important as a precondition for finding the love of your life.

The research that's been done on strangers now shows that people think that 97 % of strangers, if they talk to them, will be rejecting and will feel like they're invading their privacy.

But the data shows that just the opposite is true, that when you approach a stranger, almost 97 % of the time, they're quite delighted to be contacted and they meet an initial contact with interest, enthusiasm.

So talking to strangers turns out to be really a very important thing.

And turning a stranger into a friend, turning your social networks into places that are not alienating, places where you actually can enjoy you and company, is an important prerequisite to dating.

So I would say you need to build that friendship network first, and once you're not lonely, you're not desperate, and then you can find somebody much more easily.

I think this is a really interesting point, which is, you finish there by saying, if you're not lonely, you're not desperate.

And I was thinking as you're talking about what the most attractive version of me is to the world.

If I'm looking to find a partner, whether I'm a man or a woman, it doesn't sound like a desperate version of me is a very attractive version of me.

So on this point of attraction, we'll start with you, John, and then we'll go, because we started with Julie last time, what do we know about what makes people attracted to each other?

How do I become the most attractive version of me to the world if I'm looking for a partner?

I think everyone is really interesting and attractive, as long as they're with somebody who's curious about them.

So if you're with somebody who's really snobby and condescending and superior, nobody is at their best.

But when you're with somebody who's really interested in you, then you can really emerge.

And just about everybody is really interesting.

Their thoughts are unique and their background is interesting and their goals and their struggles are really fascinating.

So I think it's the social context that makes the difference rather than the individual.

So the problem with dating apps, I think, is that they create this very artificial situation in which everyone's being evaluated and assessed and they're swiping left all the time.

Well, that person's not quite right, not quite right, not quite right, not quite right.

The research of Eli Finkel shows that there's nothing you can measure in two individuals that will predict whether they like each other.

There's nothing you can measure.

Nothing you can measure.

In fact, you can actually ask people exactly what they're looking for in a partner and find that exact person in a large database, and it's very unlikely that they'll like that person when they meet them.

Yet if you randomly pair them with strangers, 22 % of people like each other when they first meet.

I wonder about the role that self -esteem plays in attraction.

It's kind of what we're talking about with being desperate.

Maybe they feel like a similar thing.

And I wonder if there's any data that supports this idea that self -esteem or your self -perception is this invisible force that makes you attractive or not attractive.

I've actually seen it in some of my friends, who I won't name, who started going to the gym, and just because they started working on themselves, it's almost like they grew six inches.

They just were like different people.

A lot of attraction, we think, go get the blow dry, I'll go get a better outfit, but this goes back to this point about how much of it is actually do the internal work.

What do you think? I think there's a lot to be said for that.

If you have a group of friends who really like you and you really like them, then it's easier to emerge.

And this dating situation is so artificial that people are so terrified when they meet somebody.

And instead of approaching them with curiosity about them, they're worried that they won't make a good impression and they're so self -conscious of themselves rather than being curious and interested in the other person.

And because if they're curious and interested in the other person, it doesn't matter what happens, right?

I mean, you meet somebody new and you learn about them and it's an interesting experience, and maybe they're interested in you too.

So the dating experience is just kind of fun.

It's about exploring, two people exploring one another.

And then there's no objective.

There's no real goal there.

And then it's much less artificial.

And then when you meet somebody you really click with, that's a wonderful experience.

Especially when you meet an outlier, like I met Julie.

I dated 60 women before I met Julie.

She's number 61. I had a database.

So I knew I met an outlier.

For me, she was an outlier because I just loved interacting with her.

It was just so much fun.

And she was heavy shoulders above any person I'd met before.

Do you know what's interesting though?

When people look at you two, and when they look at other relationships, they'll go, okay, John, I get it.

So you've got to make a database.

You've got to wait until you find the one.

Right. And this is often the cause of much procrastination as it relates to love.

Everyone's looking for the Julie, you know?

And there isn't a one.

You know, that's one of the other myths.

There isn't a one. And it's funny because we've seen this in our research on the opposite end of it.

And here's what I mean.

Every pairing of people, no matter how wonderful they are, no matter how much you love them, the two of you will always have perpetual problems between you.

And those are based on either lifestyle reference differences or personality differences, always.

And at some point, those conflict.

And so, you know, what we saw in our research was, you know, something like 69 % of the conflicts that couples suffer from or have are perpetual problems.

They never go away.

So, you know, when I have somebody coming into my office that says, I want to find my soulmate.

My soulmate. It's like, huh?

What's a soulmate? You know, I mean, you out of whatever in the U .S.

we have, what, 350 million people.

There's probably 500 ,000 of them that you would find wonderful and attractive.

So, looking for the one is a big mistake because inevitably they snore at night or, you know, they eat with their mouth open or, you know, something that drives you crazy.

So, okay. So, you're not looking for the perfect person.

You're not the perfect person.

And that's what I was referring to earlier as, you know, let's see each other as human beings.

There is no perfection.

We are all flawed. We all have cracks in us.

And those can be seen as beautiful too.

We don't have to be perfect to be loved.

Right? Yeah. Right.

It's interesting because that marries to something that I was reading about in your books where you talk about how often attracted to people who are very different from ourselves and just the very nature that they're different from us means that there's going to be that pretty much constant conflict.

Why is it the case that we're attracted to people that are different from ourselves?

Is that true? Yeah.

Because it doesn't seem to make sense on the surface.

You'd think, I would be attracted to someone that likes Manchester United and, you know, like my favorite food and my favorite stuff because then we'll get on like a house on fire.

But you were telling me that we're attracted to people that like other things.

The research of Klaus Wedekind is so interesting.

This t -shirt study that he did where women smelled t -shirts that had been worn by men for at least two days and selected the ones they thought smelled the best.

They actually were selecting what Wedekind found was they were selecting t -shirts of men.

Those pheromones were attractive.

The men were as most divergent from them genetically just in the genes of the immune system.

Very divergent kinds of people smelled really attractive to these women rather than people who were like them.

And actually the experiment was done.

It showed they actually liked those men better than other men they might have met.

So genetically different men.

Genetically different in terms of the immune system.

So here's this evolutionary explanation of why people are searching for somebody who's really different.

Because we're not really turned on by her clone.

We're not turned on by people who are just like us.

Julian and I are vastly different.

She's, you know, this adventurer, you know, this outdoors person.

She loves the trees and hiking, you know, up mountain trails.

I'm an endorsement.

I like sitting in my chair and reading books on mathematics and quantum mechanics and general relativity theory.

He's a consummate endorsement.

So we're very different, you know.

What's the evolutionary reason then, do you think, for why we like people that are different?

Oh, the genetic immunity.

So remember, it's all about reproduction, right?

So if you've got two very divergent sets of genetics in terms of the immune system, that child is going to have a broader genetic base as their immune system, as opposed to two identical or close to it where they'd have a very narrow genetic base for immunity.

Is there anything else that if you were advising me, if I was a single man and I was saying, okay, how do I find a partner?

What should I be doing or looking for?

Should I make a list of things that I'm looking for?

Should I be, I don't know, you said earlier about being my authentic self as much as I can be, because you don't want people to be attracted to your mask.

But should I be making a list?

Like, what should I be going for?

Is there qualities that are enduring as it relates to success in romance that everyone should be looking for?

Should I lower my expectations?

It's not about qualities.

It's about, well, I hate to say it, but it's more about behavior.

So, for example, and I have so many, particularly women, who've been divorced and now they're dating, and they ask that question.

And here are several of the things that I always tell them.

One is, does the person, male or female, ask you questions about yourself or do they broadcast?

Do they just tell you who they are?

Oh my God, my boss just gave me a promotion.

Oh my, aren't I cool or I just won this athletic competition?

No. Are they asking you questions about yourself?

And not only that, but listening to the answers, right?

And taking in the answers and, oh, that's interesting.

That's one. Another is, you know, our society is very striated, right?

So, how do they treat people who have, let's say, less social status than they do?

How do they treat the waitress who comes to their table?

Do they treat them with disdain or scorn or, you know, the steak is terrible?

Take it back. Or are they kind?

Do they treat them like human beings?

That's another thing.

Do they treat people equally?

Or do they only treat a certain group with respect and the others not?

That's number two. Number three is, are they reliable?

Do they do what they say they're going to do?

If they say they're going to call you, do they call you?

If they say, I'll pick you up at eight, are they there at eight?

So, reliability is a big deal.

And, of course, nobody can be perfectly reliable, you know, life happens.

But do they call you to let you know, oh, I ran into heavy traffic, so I'll be 20 minutes late?

So, you know, there's a consideration there of your time, of your energy, curiosity, as John pointed out, as to who you are.

And also, there are so many people who, as you have been talking about, are so terribly lonely.

Watch out for this.

Watch out for people saying, in the first date, oh, my God, you're it.

You're the answer. Oh, my God, you're fantastic.

I think I love you.

You know, that kind of rush into, let's have an intimate relationship right now.

I want to marry you and I'm going to ask you tomorrow.

No. You know, people need to take their time to get to know one another and peel away the layers slowly and carefully to build trust.

Do you think that speed to rush into a relationship is a sign of something else further upstream?

Maybe insecurity or...

You bet. Needy. And I don't like the word needy because everybody has needs.

We're pack animals.

You know, we need each other.

We depend on each other.

But somebody who can contain themselves, as you were pointing out...

With or without your energy.

That's right. Yeah.

And have done that internal work so that they're not looking to you to answer every problem they have.

You know, I would give different advice to a male who is dating.

I would say, you know, just have fun.

You know, meet people like when I was...

What a concept. ...creating my database.

You know, I met a woman who was a survivalist.

She had a .38 Magnum pistol right by her bedside.

And she spent thousands of dollars on gowns to go to opera because she loved opera.

And I remember sitting there in her house and saying, you know, God, this is really interesting.

I don't know if I like this person or I could be with this person, but she's fascinating.

You know, it's kind of fun getting to know her.

And then at a certain point, there's somebody you meet, like I met Julie, and everything feels right.

The world just kind of opens up when you talk, and your heart opens, and it's very different.

It's not just interesting.

It's really, there's potential there that you don't feel with anybody else.

Were you desperate when you met Julie, though?

I don't think I was.

Oh, I don't think I was desperate.

I've been divorced for about seven years, and I was looking to meet somebody close to my age who, you know, was an interesting person.

And I met a lot of interesting people, but she was different.

I asked this question in part because I wonder if someone's ever done a study where they take a group of people who are looking to find someone, and then they take a group of people who aren't really looking, and they see who has the most success.

And when I say looking, I mean, some people are literally looking for a husband, and they feel like they need to find one within six months, because, you know, biological clocks and goals they might have for their lives and all these kinds of things, versus a group of people that are just open to it.

And I wonder who's more attractive.

I think either one can work.

Right. Really? I don't think there has to be a magic formula.

So I think if you approach the whole situation with curiosity and wonder, you know, and just kind of see who you meet and see what happens.

But that sounds more like this group here, you know?

That's right. I agree with you.

What you're describing is that being confident in yourself and just being curious, as opposed to, I really have to find somebody.

I need to find somebody.

Very, very, very different.

I think about this in part in the context of business as well, because as an investor, you get an energy from the entrepreneur that's trying to get investment from you as to whether they need you or whether you're an option.

And it's so remarkable how much more likely you are to invest in a founder who makes you feel like an option.

And then you have these other founders.

Well, I can literally think of one example that popped to my mind from the last couple of weeks, where they were so desperate that it was almost rude.

Wow. How did that manifest?

As in the way that they sent their emails and the way that they were like demanding and how urgent they wanted to speak to you and all these kinds of things.

And how like low key expectant they were from you made me feel like their business wasn't doing well.

And I think about this in the context of relationships, whereas the founders and entrepreneurs that message me, where they're kind of more patient, they're kind of maybe a little bit busier.

The ones that have that, I keep going back to that phrase, like with or without you energy, where you're an option to them, you're much more likely to invest.

You feel like it's a privilege to invest.

And I think about this from the context of the question I just asked.

If someone's like, I need a husband now, versus someone's like, I'm open.

I'm curious. I'm willing to go on the date and see if we're right, because I realize that me saying yes to you is a huge investment.

So I need to take my time to figure out if that investment is going to be worthwhile, because I respect myself.

Yeah, maybe you're right.

Maybe it's better if you're just kind of confident and not so desperate.

Any fake confidence, Julie?

This is not the problem.

No. You know, as a matter of fact, when people try to fake confidence, they often overstep it.

Right. And, golly, I know I'll never forget this fellow in high school.

He would brag about himself without knowing that he was bragging.

He would boast and boast and boast and boast.

And I realized, oh, my God, I cannot stand this, you know, because it was so fake.

But, important thing, I realized that the extremity of my negative attitude towards him was because there was a part of me that was just like that.

That felt insecure, that wanted to present, you know, this perfect image to people that I wasn't, which is what he was trying to do.

And so then it's like, oh, I've got a little work to do on myself.

Well, you know, one thing about this dating situation that's interesting is even though there's nothing you can measure in individuals that will predict that they like each other, once they get together and start interacting, our lab can measure if that interaction has promise or not.

Really, we measure openness, the emotional connection, the fact that people are either connecting with one another, communicating with one another or not.

We measure tension versus relaxation.

We measure curiosity and interest in all of those things.

So, can you give me really specifically exactly how a couple would show up, really specifically, if they had promise to last and be successful together?

So, if you watch their videotape and they had promise, you'd find them laughing together, you know, mirroring each other, smiling, asking questions, being open, wondering about things.

And you'd have this real sense of exploration and openness and curiosity and interest in one another.

Whereas in a couple that wasn't doing very well, you'd sense this tension, sarcasm, a lot of, you know, negativity, bragging about themselves, talking about themselves rather than being interested in the other person.

Body language? Body language.

The ratio of positive to negative emotion in those couples would be much less than one, whereas it would be three to one or five to one among couples who are really getting along very, very well with this potential, this openness and potential.

What's the difference in body language?

Let me demonstrate it.

So, somebody who's overconfident, pretend he's not sitting here, is just going to be doing it.

So, for people that aren't watching, laying back your arm, you know, stretched out over the top of the chair next to you, you're leaning back, you know, which is, come to me, come to me, you know.

It's all about me, and I'm so cool.

And somebody who is really engaged is going to be more kind of leaning forward and making eye contact, being fairly relaxed, you know, not hunching their shoulders inwards, which shows they're probably depressed, they're insecure, they're hiding out.

But, you know, just relax, their shoulders are, you know, not up to their ears, they're allowing their eye gaze to look away as they think about something, and then they look right at you when they answer the question.

All of those indicators.

That ratio of eye to other, why me, mine, you know, predominates conversations where there's all this tension.

Say that again, sir.

Is where, you know, the conversation is really about just myself, I'm sort of putting myself in the center versus being interested in you, being interested in us, being interested in we, and that emerges, that openness emerges in language as well.

There's also a reciprocity in the sense that, let's say you and I are meeting, you ask me some questions about myself, I'll answer those questions, but then I'll ask you, I'll come back and ask you questions about yourself, as opposed to, go ahead, ask me more questions, and more questions, and more.

I'm only happy when I'm talking about myself.

Right. So, you know, you're going back and forth exhibiting that curiosity, as opposed to just adoring somebody being curious about you, but not reciprocating by being curious about them.

It's funny because you were talking about body language a second ago, and many people will click on episodes on YouTube or podcasts that try and teach us body language, but I think, okay, you can learn some of the things, but really, again, I think body language is a symptom of what's going on inside.

How do you build confidence is really the question.

You know, especially when you begin, let's say, in a family or with caretakers who are critical and contemptuous of you, and when you have that from practically the ground up, as I did, you internalize that, and you believe you're worthless because you were treated as worthless.

You build the confidence, right?

So, either through maybe therapy, through looking at yourself in the mirror and saying, all right, this is who I am, this is who I am, this is who I am.

You know, one of us, I used to, like almost every single woman, no matter how beautiful you are, you will always measure yourself as inferior to somebody else, always, as a woman.

I mean, you've seen already six million images of idealized women by the time you're 18.

Think about that. So, how do you build confidence in what you look like?

Go to a locker room where women are undressing and look at their real bodies and notice the variety, notice, you know, the whatever, a woman that's larger than the standard, thinner than the standard.

Women come in all shapes and sizes, so do men, and just seeing the reality, the reality as opposed to the photoshopped, you know, that's the thing that is so difficult about technology, is that these days, you know, especially with dating apps and so on, people are photoshopping their images or they're

taking an image of themselves 30 years ago, and there, here is what I am.

And I actually still have hair.

It's the reality that it's not really about the appearance.

It's not even about, you know, the IQ or whatever, the education.

It's really about, well, here we go.

It's about the heart.

Is this a kind person?

Is this a caring person?

Is this a person who exhibits compassion, who treats people equally and so on?

A dating app wouldn't work on that basis, would it?

No, and most people aren't lying on dating apps, too.

That's right. Is there a difference in what men and women look for in a partner as it relates to attraction when they first meet?

Well, you know, that's an interesting question because I remember reading this paper by Eli Finkel.

He says in the introduction, you know, generally, the dating research suggests that men are looking for physical beauty and women are looking for occupational competence and wealth.

But actually, when he did this really elaborate speed dating study, none of that actually manifested in people's preferences.

The preferences were all in terms of what it felt like to be together, and both men and women were really similar.

So when you interact with somebody, you're going to interact with them for five minutes in this speed dating situation.

What made the difference was how much fun it was to interact with them for five minutes, how enjoyable it was.

And men and women were the same.

So the social context of dating is so important because if it's this very tense, you know, evaluative context, nothing is going to work.

But if it's this relaxed, sort of interested, curious context, almost everything is going to work.

Now, a lot of dating happens these days with alcohol in a nightclub or with alcohol at maybe dinner or at a bar.

Is there a better place to conduct a first date?

And if so, why? Well, first of all, alcohol distorts everything.

Drugs distort everything.

You know, there's a reason they say intoxicated.

Toxic. Alcohol is toxic.

So it shuts down certain parts of the brain, shuts down to some degree your ability to judge, your ability to sense, your reflexes, your intuition.

All that stuff is shut down to some degree.

And so, wow, she's really hot.

I'm going to go for her.

You know, you're not picking up that, you know, she's wearing a wedding ring.

She's sitting with a man who has a matching wedding.

You know, you're not picking up all that stuff.

So probably a coffee shop is nice where we met.

Well, I think it needs to be a context that is not evaluative.

You know, I think it has to be some kind of relaxed context where you're just kind of getting to know one another and seeing what it's like to meet this person.

So it's the judgment that makes it tense and uncomfortable.

And so people need alcohol to get relaxed.

And of course, then they're, you know, when they get high and they're laughing at everything and nothing.

And there's no connection.

There's no real connection.

So the evaluative context is kind of like the antidote to love.

Having an evaluative context, you know, you're trying to be at your best.

The other person is trying to be at their best.

But, you know, there's no real interest in one another.

When you say evaluative context, it means that we're evaluating each other.

It's really, really a learning career.

It's like an interview, basically.

Yeah, it's like a job interview.

Interesting. Never going to work.

Is there a certain age where if you get together with someone, you're more likely to be successful?

I was talking to my friend about this actually this weekend because he is approaching 40 and his partner is significantly younger.

It's my friend that lives in America and New York.

And he was telling me that because she's sort of 23, he's struggling a little bit because he wants to settle down and he wants to think about kids now.

And she's still trying to figure out life.

So it made me wonder if maybe he should be aiming at people that are at least that sort of 30 age where you start.

And I don't know if there's any research to...

You know, I don't know about the research, but what I've seen clinically is that people who date others that are very, very different in age from them have a problem, typically.

Because, first of all, the social history in which they were raised is different.

So, for example, John and I, though we're not the same age, we're about nine years apart, but we both went through Vietnam.

We both went through all the assassinations in the civil rights movement.

You know, I got arrested.

He didn't. I was unlucky, you know, in the protesting stuff.

But that context, you know, understanding a period of history that you grew up in is really important and also internally in the sense that there are really phases of development that you go through as you get older.

And you're absolutely right, Stephen, in that a 40 -year -old who wants to now settle down, create a home, create a family, and a 23 -year -old are incredibly different developmentally.

So their goals will be different.

Their values will be different.

If you will, their maturity will be different.

Their interests also may be strikingly different.

There may be a real difference in valuing commitment, you know, and so on.

So I've seen relationships work with that kind of disparate age, but typically, that can happen more easily when you're older, when you've already created your identity, you've already identified what profession or line of work you want to do, whether or not you want to have kids or if you've already

had kids and so on.

So like a 40 -year -old and a 50 -year -old or 55 -year -old would be very different than a 40 -year -old and a 23 -year -old.

Good enough relationships.

Should I be looking for, because this goes back to what I was saying earlier about, you know, looking for the one, looking for your Julie, or should I be looking for a relationship that is good enough and then try and build it to be a great relationship?

Because there's a lot of people that are maybe over 30 years old, over 40 years old, who are single, struggling to find someone that's great, and so their friends or their partners or, you know, the people around them are saying, just, you know, that person's good enough.

That person's good enough.

Just, you know, give them a chance and go on the date.

Yeah, I think there's a lot to that point of view because when, you know, when you're looking for the perfect relationship that's good in every dimension, you're going to be disappointed.

And I think it makes some sense to look for what's good enough.

And so, you know, what's good enough for one person is not the same as what's good enough for another person.

I know, you know, what's good enough for me is having somebody you can really trust and really feel a sense of commitment toward.

And those two dimensions are absolutely critical.

Did you have non -negotiables, both of you?

Was there anything on your list of things that were mandatory in finding your partner?

Yeah, for me, it was wanting children.

So that's the non -negotiable for you?

Yes. Was there anything else that was non -negotiable?

Monogamy. Okay, yeah.

For me. Sense of humor was really important.

I think another thing, too, is do you get bored talking to them or not?

Or are they continually interesting to you?

But I think one of the most important things is how do they make you feel about yourself?

Not just, you know, you're attracted to them or whatever, but how do they make you feel about yourself?

If they make you feel dumb or unkind or too needy or whatever, not cool.

On the other hand, if they make you feel like the most gorgeous thing in the world and the most brilliant person in the world, etc., and you know you're not, that's not it either.

You know, so do they recognize you?

It's almost like that.

Do they recognize you in your fullness of humanity?

And, you know, that takes time, of course, you have to get to know one another.

But let's see, non -negotiable.

I know very quickly, I think we both realize that whenever we spend time together, it's always interesting and fun.

That's true. Talking over anything, really.

That's true. And everything that you said, everything that came out of your mouth was so friggin' fascinating.

I knew I would be learning from him the rest of my life.

Yeah, I felt the same way.

A road trip was an opportunity.

It was really a time to talk about our dreams and our hopes about the world.

What about sex and the role that plays in attraction?

I asked this question because I had a relationship when I used to live in New York, and I really, really liked this person.

We got on all the things you described, the road trips, everything was fun.

And then when it came to the point where we had sexual intimacy, it just wasn't there.

And it was crushing for me because this person was perfect in every conceivable way.

Smart, kind, fun, everything.

And then the minute we moved to the next stage, it just wasn't there.

I just wasn't sexually attracted to them.

And so it made me add to my list of non -negotiables a third thing at the time.

There's two things on that list.

The first was they kind of helped me become a better version of myself and however I wanted to find that.

The second was this intellectual stimulation, the ability to conversate and be interested in them and them interested in me.

And the third became not about appearance at all.

It was purely a sexual connection.

And so I just wonder what the role that sexual intimacy and sexual attraction plays in having a good relationship with someone.

You know, I think that really varies, Stephen, because there's a huge range of the important sexuality plays in individuals.

You know, some people are practically asexual.

Other people, you know, it's been a really long time if they hadn't had sex in four hours.

And everything in between.

So I think to some degree that's an individual choice as to how important is sexuality to you and having a wonderful sexual connection as opposed to, who cares, you know, I just want to have a cup of coffee and a pastry.

So every individual needs to decide that for themselves, how important it is.

And then, you know, if it is important, even of average importance, it's really important.

Yeah. But the other thing, too, that's interesting, I mean, we're talking about dating, but I've also seen relationships that have been together for a long time and the sex falls away.

But it's much more important to one person than the other and they diverged and it becomes, you know, a pretty serious problem.

It didn't start off that way, but it can become that way.

And what happens in those scenarios?

Well, you know, typically it's really interesting.

Of course, in second marriages or relationships, let's say over 40 or so, women, especially women going through perimenopause, you know, finishing with menopause, sex hormones go way down.

They go way down. And so are they still interested in having sex?

Well, they may not be so interested in it that they want to initiate sex, but we're all hardwired in particular ways.

So you touch there, you lick there, you know, you stimulate here and that wiring is going to kick in and the sexuality will kick in again and the sexual responsiveness will kick in.

So you can work on that angle, number one, but number two, oftentimes there have been big emotional injuries that have broken trust, that have broken emotional connection.

And, okay, so two theories.

One, most men in Western culture are not, they don't accept themselves if they just want to cuddle.

That's not masculine, right?

So everybody needs touch, but for many, many men who bought into that, the only way they can get touch is through sex.

They can't just say, will you please just hold me?

Women can, because women are considered, you know, more vulnerable and softer and it's okay for them, you know, to ask to just be held, but not for men.

So, you know, sex becomes a difficult thing there too, especially with an ultra masculine man where he's just come back from war.

He wants to just be held, but he can't ask for that.

He's got to be tough and strong and sexy.

Therefore, he'll go for sex.

Any thoughts on that, John?

I think I agree with you.

It's not negotiable.

You know, it's one of these intangible things that, you know, if it's not there, it's not going to work very well.

In the beginning, if it's not there.

That's right. I mean, it's, I think it needs to be there.

Because it goes on a journey, all relationships.

It's funny because from doing this podcast and speaking to a lot of sort of sex therapists or couples therapists, this, one of them said something to be one day, or maybe two of them said the same point.

I think two or three of them said the same point, which is much of what makes sex so, you know, arousing is the spontaneity and the novelness, the newness of it, the excitement of it, all these kinds of things.

And they said to me that love is, in many respects, the opposite of that.

It's the opposite of spontaneity and love is like security and trust and dependability and it's, you know, knowing someone.

So I've spoken to a few of my friends, in fact, about this balancing act between like, I really love this person.

I know them and I'm there for them and we know everything about each other.

And then like having to fight to also create this excitement, like how do I, how do I love you like we've known each other for 10 years and you can trust me and depend on me.

But then how do I have sex with you like we've just met?

So we call it the Coolidge Effect.

Have you heard of this?

Calvin Coolidge was president of the United States and he and his wife were visiting a farm.

And as the president was led past these chickens and roosters, the farmer said, oh, this rooster has sex 17 times a day and Mrs.

Coolidge wanted me to point that out to you, Mr.

President, when she came by here because we pointed out that rooster has sex 17 times a day.

And Calvin Coolidge said, with the same hand, and the farmer said, no, always a different hand.

And the president said, tell that to Mrs.

Coolidge. So the Coolidge Effect is that it has to be novel.

It has to be exciting to be erotic, right?

And familiarity, you know, which creates security and relaxation and openness is antithetical to the novelty that creates sexual excitement.

But the truth is actually not so simple because eroticism often really results from really creating an erotic situation together and making it an erotic situation.

And for women, especially feeling safe and feeling emotionally connected is a prerequisite for feeling really attracted and feeling that this is an erotic situation, that emotional connection is necessary for many women because women have such a strange relationship to safety and fear compared to men.

The world is so much more dangerous place for women than it is for men.

Women really need that emotional safety and connection in order to feel that the situation is erotic at all.

It's important for your audience to realize that the largest study done on the quality of sex with 70 ,000 people in 24 countries found that the differences between people saying they have a great sex life and people saying they have an awful sex life has to do with affection and emotional connection.

People have a great sex life.

Say I love you every day and mean it.

Kiss each other passionately for no reason at all.

Cuddle their affectionate even in public.

They have romantic dates.

So affection and emotional connection for most people all over the planet are connected rather than there being this dichotomy between if you're close and if your friendship is good, sex is going to be terrible.

If you're distant and it's novel, sex is going to be great.

It's just not true.

And is there a certain amount of, because a lot of couples fall into this trap of sort of fake comparison, whether it's social media or movies, where we think, okay, if we're not having sex three times a week, something's wrong.

I need to raise it.

We need to argue about it.

We need to fix it. Is there any merit to the quantity resulting in, you know, happiness?

No. No relationship between quantity and happiness.

Non -volity, yes. Well, with the caveat, with the caveat that if you have two people paired together, one who is extremely sexual and, you know, really does need sex frequently and the other one, the opposite.

Asexual. Who is more asexual and, you know, could take it or leave it, want sex maybe once a month.

That's not going to work.

One of the things me and my friends have been deliberating about is the importance of what we call desire management, which is if someone is like around too much and they're there every second of every day in the house when I get home, you know, everywhere.

Does that not, to some degree, start to kill the desire a little bit?

One of the best things that I think I found in my relationship is that my partner's always working away, that I'm working away.

And so when we see each other, it feels special and interesting.

But I personally don't know that if we were both in the house seven days a week and I worked from home with her, whether the desire would be the same.

I don't know. You know, I think that, for example, John and I are around each other seven days a week.

And we have been for, you know, most of our marriage, but it doesn't matter.

Is that because of my attachment style maybe?

Because, you know, I wanted to...

Could be. Yeah. Yeah, could be, could be.

I need a lot of shower too.

But you all around each other.

Yeah. But you're around each other most of the time.

Well, we are. But, you know, in a house where there's enough space in the house to not be in visual contact with the other person all the time.

Right. You see? So he's downstairs.

I may be upstairs. Something like that.

Or I can maybe hear him, maybe not.

He can hear me, maybe not.

You know? So... I think there is something wonderful about being a part and then coming together.

That reunion, after you've been apart for a while, is really quite delicious.

You know what, though?

This is so interesting.

I am working with an individual right now.

And they're both artists.

They both travel a whole bunch all the time.

And whenever they reunite after one of them is gone, nothing.

There's nothing for about two or three days.

And then they have to get into the same rhythm again.

Someone said to me on this podcast, they said, you have to spend 90 minutes a week talking to your partner.

And if you don't, the person actually said to me, if you don't get that into your dumb skull, you'll be spending much more time with them in divorce court.

Oh, wow. I know it was a brash thing to say, but I reflected on it.

And it really helped me because I think...

I don't know. I'm speaking as a man, so I can't speak for all men.

I can't speak for women.

But speaking as a man myself and also on behalf of my friends with my own attachment style, I think that's important to add.

I struggle naturally with conflict resolution because conflict resolution to me sounds like blame.

So when my partner says, we need to talk, I'm like, oh my fucking God, what have I done now?

What have I done now?

And I sit there like a, you know, I feel like it's a kid in school being told off by their headmaster or a child being told off by their mother.

I might go and tell me all the ways that I'm inadequate.

But the framing of this idea of you're going to have to spend 90 minutes a week sitting with each other and talking regardless helped me because he then went on to say, because if you do that, then you can get to play.

Well, here's my invention.

I have a notebook in my back pocket and it's just designed for when Julie says, we need to talk.

And I take out the notebook and a pen and I say, okay, talk to me.

I'm taking notes. I want to know what's going on.

And she'll tell me I'm disappointed in you or angry.

You know, I mean, whatever she says, you know, I write it down and reflect it back and see if I understand what you're saying.

And so I think, I think it's not just 90 minutes.

It's 90 minutes when you're willing to listen non defensively.

Which is not easy. That's not easy.

That's really the work in relationships is being non defensive.

But that's why we wrote Fight Right, you know, and when we gave, you know, a talk, it's, it's really so important to not do that.

You, you, you, you.

Blaming. That blaming.

It's, you know, I feel about what, what's the situation, not, you know, the way you failed me.

It's the situation.

Julie, is it more often men or women that are saying that I feel?

Are you kidding? Men are catching up, but it's hard.

It's hard for men to do that.

Women, I mean, you go to mental health expertise and all the characteristics of a man that are considered mentally healthy, autonomy, independence, strength.

Resilience, you know, all the stuff that's autonomous for women, vulnerability, sensitivity, empathy, expressing emotion.

So, you know, there's only one emotion that men are allowed to really openly express anger.

Right? Can they express fear?

Oh my God, I'm so scared of going in there tomorrow.

Or sadness, or, you know, the more vulnerable emotions.

It's, God, think about it.

It's seen as effeminate.

And that's supposed to be bad.

Why is that bad? Because women are second class citizens.

Right? So to be allegedly like a woman and express vulnerable emotions is a bad thing because you shouldn't be like a woman.

Why not? You know, I mean, so expressing vulnerable emotions, I think men are starting to catch up, you know.

Don't women like strength?

Yes and no. They like strength.

But the problem is that they also want to be empathetic too.

They want to be, you know, nourishing to their partner.

And if their partner is always presenting this facade of strength, they can't get close to them.

It's like the opposite of inaction.

Yeah. But you know, we observed eight -year -olds in playgrounds.

And if you look at eight -year -old boys, they'll do run and chase games over a very large distance.

And if an emotional event happens, if somebody gets upset, you know, say, what's the matter?

Brian says the leader of the group said, I never get the ball.

Okay, toss the ball to Brian.

Brian gets the ball and they were off and running.

They keep the game in play, manage conflict quickly.

Look at two, look at girls.

They're playing in groups of two or three close to the school building.

And they're talking about their feelings over and over again.

You know, you said that I was a baby, you know, because I had those barrettes.

That really hurt my feelings.

Yeah, well, I, you know, I only wear barrettes when I was little and now I don't wear them.

You know, but that hurt my feelings when you said that.

So I didn't mean to hurt your feelings.

They're talking about emotions constantly.

And it's like the hopscotch or whatever game they're playing is just an excuse for talking about emotions.

For the boys, the most important thing is keeping the ball in play and conflict gets in the way of that.

They resolve it quickly and socialize so differently.

Is this part of the reason why it feels for many men that they are being held off all the time?

Because it actually what's happening is that their wife is just expressing their emotions and the man never really expresses it.

You know, that old sort of slightly problematic phrase, which is happy wife, happy life.

That's right. The reason why that phrase exists, I would assume, is because the man thinks, as long as I can keep her from expressing more problems to me, then I'm happy.

He like thinks of his responsibility as just like...

Yeah, ask a man how he's feeling.

He says, well, I'm not hungry.

I'm not horny. I'm okay.

Ask a woman how she's feeling.

She says, well, I don't know.

There's, you know, the children and there's this in the house and, you know, and there's this tangle of questions that really she has to address when you ask her how she's feeling.

There's so many things.

And for a guy, it's so much easier.

But John, as men, I think we can both agree that although, well, I'm speaking for myself here, but although in the moment, going through that conflict resolution, the 90 minutes a week, getting out your notepad, listening is annoying in the moment.

When we zoom out, we realize that if they didn't raise these issues, if they didn't express these issues, this relationship wouldn't be so good.

That's right. And we'd be in serious problems.

That's right. They're the managers of intimacy.

Yeah. We need them.

Yes. We need them to say, we need to talk.

Yeah. Did you see Steven's face?

That was so cute. I realize that this is serving a purpose, which is helping me, you know, and it's helping us.

That's right. So I sit there and I'll listen to, you know, the things that aren't right.

But you're right. My brain is just like me and my friends can sit in silence for eight hours.

I just sat right next to each other and we'll meet each other, sit in silence for eight hours, leave.

Great evening. We're both like doing our own thing, but it's just, I think men are such simple creatures most of the time.

Oh, you are not. That is so not true.

You know, one of the things that I've certainly seen in my work, you know, I've been doing clinical work for 50 years.

And what I see is that men have exactly the same emotions.

They do. They just try to bury them because it's not okay for them to express them.

So they just try to shove it down.

But open a little door, crack and up it comes.

Lionel Tiger, who studied men's friendships and women's friendships, said with alcohol, men get together, they're very physical and they talk about their feelings an enormous amount, takes a little alcohol to make it happen.

Two women said to me last night that I was speaking to on WhatsApp, people that I work with in a different company, they were saying to me that their partners often express how they're feeling by just sending songs out of the blue.

Sending songs? Sending songs out of the blue.

And I've never heard of it because one of them said it and the other woman said, oh my God, my partner does that too, which is instead of like telling me how he feels, he'll send me a song, which is basically a way.

He feels. And some of those songs are very romantic and it's like, I love you, you're the best person I've ever found, but he can't vocalize it to her.

So he has to send her a Spotify link and say, listen, this is this.

But it's the same thing, right?

It's the inability to to vocalize, which is difficult for men.

Keep working on it.

I am. Yeah, I'm like progressively getting better.

But sometimes I have little relapses if you if I am very busy in my mind and then I have to have one of those we need to talk chat.

So I think you're right.

There needs to be a bit of a ritual around like, is this a good time?

That's right. Well, I have your attention being in a different environment.

Well, you can make, you know, make a date to have a talk like that.

When we are giving couples workshops at the very end of it, we always give recommendations for ways of preserving the changes you're making in the relationship, the improvements.

And one of them is called the state of the union meeting.

Right. Where you start with five appreciations of each other, you know, things you haven't said before that you've noticed that your partner is doing right and express your gratitude or thanks or your admiration.

Then you go into, OK, so what do we need to change?

What do we need to improve?

Right. And then you finish up with this beautiful question.

I just love this question.

How can I make you feel loved this week?

And that's closure.

You mentioned the word that gratitude.

Yes. Why is gratitude so important?

Being grateful for them and expressing that it's something that you two both do to each other.

I think I think it's indicative of a habit of mind that's that's really much more important.

A habit of mind where you're noticing what's going right and feeling appreciative for it.

And I know I wake up every morning lying next to Julie and think I'm one lucky guy.

You know, I've got this wonderful woman and, you know, life is good.

I go through my checklist.

Everybody's OK. All the people I love are right.

And I'm with her and I get to see my grandson and my daughter.

Life is good. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, I think gratitude brings you into the moment, brings you into the moment, you know.

So and as John pointed out, you're not just looking for what's wrong, you know, or what your partner is doing wrong.

You're looking for what your partner is doing right.

You know, there's been studies, who was it?

Christin Robinson, I guess, who looked at unhappy couples versus happy couples and unhappy.

It wasn't that they weren't doing things for one another, but unhappy couples only saw 50 percent of what their partners were doing.

The positivity. Of the positivity.

Right. Whereas happy couples were seeing it all the time.

It's like they're wearing different sunglasses or something.

Yeah. Different filters.

And the negative habit of mind, you know, really puts you on a state of being kind of irritable and grumpy all the time.

You're noticing other people are driving badly and, you know, being careless and making mistakes all the time.

That's all you see.

Yeah. This gratitude puts you on a different frame of mind to notice actually all the good stuff that's going on.

Right. It's more accurate.

Let me draw a parallel.

One of the things that I've done in my private practice I still do is treat cancer patients and their families.

And cancer patients, of course, often are facing the possibility of death.

So one of the questions and oftentimes, I mean, the ones who deal with their diagnosis best are people who say, OK, I don't have that long to live.

I'm going to re -prioritize my life.

I'm going to really think about what's most important to me for the six months I have left.

So one of the things that I do in my practice with couples who are just racing through life together on parallel tracks, not connecting at all, is to ask them, OK, you know, if you had six months left to live, how would you want to spend it?

Who would be the most important people that you would want to draw close to?

Who would you not value as much?

How would you want to spend that six months?

And I first kind of take people into a very relaxed state so their minds are really free to imagine.

And what's that doing?

Is it helping to crystallize whether they should be with this person?

Sometimes, but it's more that, oh, my God, you know, I'm wasting my life trying to make more money.

Why am I doing that when I've got this love right here?

What's more important to me, making more money or creating more love between us?

That's what it comes down to oftentimes.

When do you know, how do you know when to quit a relationship?

How do I know if the relationship I'm in is bad, is not good?

Because relationships are incredibly tempting.

They tempt us back.

They offer comfort, which sometimes necessarily isn't healthy comfort, but they're very hard to leave.

And I actually had a conversation with one of my friends recently.

I always talk about my friends because it's the only way I know to draw on case studies.

So instead of me just hypothetical, coming with something hypothetical, I think about the challenges my friends face and got a particular friend who's been in a relationship for many, many years, seven, eight years.

Relationship is broken, broken down.

And he naturally, because the relationship is broken down, is like jumping to repair.

But I wonder if he should even repair because they've broken up six times.

They've gone through this cycle six times.

So I'm like, are they just rushing back together for the comfort of the relationship?

Or should they, you know, take a moment to say, is this even right?

But this also, the answer here applies to people that are in relationships that have those thoughts in their mind.

Is this the right one?

How do you know? How do you know if this is a problem we can solve and should solve, or this is just the wrong person?

Therapy helps. Has your friend gone to therapy?

Would therapy? Not with their partner, no.

Then they don't know.

You know, in other words, a lot of people don't know how to deal with conflict, for example.

Nobody's taking relationships one on one in high school, right?

To learn how to deal with conflict or to learn how to be more vulnerable to somebody else and be more open and so on.

So people don't know how to have good relationships.

That's part of what drives the work that John and I do.

People just don't know how to do it.

And if they did know, they could change those patterns.

And so, you know, with your friend, for example, oftentimes, you know, when people have been together for over, you know, a couple of years, they create patterns that are like dark holes.

You know, they're like black holes that have this tremendous gravitational pull.

And so they keep sinking down into the same patterns over and over and over and over again, right?

Well, that's exactly what happens.

But you can change those patterns once you know and practice what the alternatives are.

Well, I think it's not the partner, the pattern.

An alternative pattern.

Yes. I think when that fondness and admiration system, you know, the system of affection and respect, love and respect is gone and gets replaced by denigration, belittling, contempt.

That's a ton to bail.

And you've seen this in your work, right?

When you're talking about the Gottmans, they're always talking to me about the idea of contempt and the Four Horsemen.

But see, those things can change, too.

Those things can change, too.

That often is what constitutes the bad pattern.

Or there's been so much of that that now they avoid each other altogether.

And there's huge emotional distance.

What are the Four Horsemen then, before we talk about how we would go about changing, if possible, these things?

For anyone that doesn't know, how you found these Four Horsemen?

Well, Bob Levinson and I, when we were doing our research, the first thing we looked at was, what's the ratio of positive to negative elotion in a conversation?

So how did you conduct this experiment?

Really just observing couples, talking about how their day went.

Wait, wait, wait. Bring them into the lab, first of all.

What's the lab? The lab was a room where they sat facing one another.

There were video cameras here and there that were focused on each individual and their faces and their body language.

There was what was called a gigalometer, how much they moved in their chairs, you know, how much the chairs moved.

Physiological measures, what was happening to their heart rate, you know, as well.

Velocity, respiration, conductance.

And all of that data that was pulled from those measures was all synchronized, you know, a hundredth of a second by a hundredth of a second.

And they would talk for, let's say, 15 minutes about the events of the day, and then they were asked to talk about a problem they hadn't solved and to try and solve it or talk about it.

So that, you know, ends up being conflict.

And then a positive topic.

Or in the apartment lab, they just hung out for, you know, 12 hours before they went to sleep and the cameras just rolled while we collected physiological data.

So that ratio. So we really spied on them.

We spied on them, right?

Except they knew they were being spied on.

For 12 hours, you watch them just sort of chill and hang out together, couples.

That's right. How many couples?

130. And how many couples have been in the lab in total?

3 ,000. 3 ,000. Yeah.

And they were followed, you know, so then they'd be brought back every couple of years.

To see how the relationship changed.

Right. So the procedures would be repeated every couple of years for as long as 20 years.

And what did you find?

So that initially that ratio of positive to negative interaction, even talking about how their day went, or especially during conflict, for people who are in a happy, stable relationship, it averaged five positives for every negative.

Positives about the other person?

No, just positive emotion.

Let's describe positives.

So a positive can be nodding your head.

It can be smiling. It can be asking a question.

Section, humor, validation.

Showing interest. Interest in the other person.

Negative would be anger, irritability, disappointment, hurt, disgust, contempt.

Shared humor was another big positive that turned out to be very important.

So that ratio of positive to negative averaged five to one in relationships that were stable and happy.

During conflict. During conflict.

And point eight to one in relationships that were headed for disaster, either splitting up or being together unhappily.

But certain negatives were much more predictive of relationship demise, and they were criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling.

So let's define what those are.

So criticism means blaming a problem on a personality flaw of your partner.

Like, you're so lazy, you'd never think to clean up the kitchen, wouldn't you?

Or, Todd, you're thoughtless.

You didn't even call me when you were going to be late.

You know, thoughtless, lazy, inconsiderate, selfish.

Always, ever. So making it about their personality and their character.

That's right. That's a criticism.

Contempt is the worst.

That's sulfuric acid for a relationship where you're looking down your nose with disgust as well as criticism of the partner.

Superiority. So give me an example of that.

You're such a idiot.

You just never get things right.

You're just not like me.

I'm thoughtful and considerate.

You're a narcissist.

Right. Right. So there's the criticism, but it's making yourself superior to that other person.

And there's a little disgust in it.

You're a snide kind of stuff.

Sarcasm is a good example.

Mockery. Especially in front of people.

Awful. So the person says, well, I really care how you feel.

You really care how I feel.

So that's contempt.

Stonewalling is really emotional withdrawal.

Don't forget defensiveness.

So defensiveness is the one we all have.

It's so hard to get over, which is you either kind of whine like an innocent victim.

I did too pay the bills on time.

What do you mean? I am thoughtful.

Don't you remember blah, blah, blah?

Or it's counter attack.

Oh, yeah. You're so perfect.

You never clean up the kitchen.

It's that counter attack.

Do you find that insecure people are more defensive?

Sure. I have this theory that if your self -esteem and your self -perception of yourself is fragile, then anyone poking at it at all causes such extreme pain that you live in this state of like, I have never done anything wrong.

I can't do anything wrong.

And if someone points out something you've done wrong, it's so painful if you're insecure.

Walking at anything else.

Yeah, exactly. It's like playing with like an open wound.

Yeah. It's like you're a walking burn victim.

Yeah. You know, the way I like to describe it, because I've been there.

I know what that's like, is, you know, the earth.

If you take a picture of the earth, then the earth has this very thin crust on it.

And then you go down some layers, and in the center is this boiling hot lava, you know, that burns you to death.

Well, somebody says to you, why didn't you pay the bills on time?

And the earth opens up.

You fall through that crack and straight down into that hot lava of self -loathing.

That is agony. And you feel like you're getting burned to death.

So you can't allow yourself to step into that crack and say, oh, God, you're right.

I didn't. So you defend.

You defend. Oh, yeah.

Well, I'm the one who does all the bill paying.

What are you doing?

You know, it's defensiveness.

Well, in that case, it sounds like that's fundamentally linked to some kind of trauma, because paying the you didn't pay the bills to the average person would be, yeah, I know.

Sorry, my bad. But that's linked to maybe, I don't know, your childhood where your father or your mother or the bullies on the playground told you that you always you're so forgetful.

Steve or Julie, you're the most forgetful person ever.

And then they punched you.

You could get to, you know, 40.

Yeah, can be can be.

And then stonewalling.

This was one that was so fascinating because you could have, you know, a pair of people sitting just like this looking perfectly normal.

But you notice that one is completely shutting down, not showing anything on their face, in their body, maybe looking away or just glazed, you know, looking and not saying a word.

And that's not for seconds.

It's for minutes. And what's actually going on?

Because these guys, you know, John and his colleagues measured physiology, is that they feel so attacked that their heart rates are zooming up above 100 beats a minute, which just sitting here.

It's creating cortisol and adrenaline massively.

And so they're shutting down.

Yeah, it's a terribly it's going into fight or flight, only you're not facing a saber tooth tiger.

You're facing your partner.

You said there, Julie, that you could go into that state for minutes or even longer.

Yes. But as you were saying that I was thinking about my friend's relationship, which kind of started this conversation and whether they should get back together or not.

You were totally right when you said there's clearly a pattern because the fact that they're getting back together, then breaking up, then getting back together, then breaking up, then breaking up, shows that they don't have the tools to resolve whatever issue they keep smashing into.

Right. But much of why I think from what I've heard, or at least the symptom of their relationship, is stonewalling, but it's not minutes.

One of them, it's months, I think.

I think basically, I only know this because I was sharing some text messages and I looked at the text messages and I was like, oh my God, there's like, whenever you talk about something that might be a little bit challenging or whatever, or you even ask, how do you think the relationship's going?

The other partner is like vacant, like vacant, nothing.

It's like they're not expressing their needs, they're not saying what they feel, they're spiraling in their own mind, and then they're just breaking up with you.

I don't know whether that's stonewalling, but it's also what you were saying about lacking the tools.

That was at the heart of the relationship, is one partner spirals independently and then without you even knowing it, you thought everything was okay, breaks up with you.

To give more context, well, this is a homosexual relationship between two men, so we talked earlier on about the women, sometimes the instigator of expression of needs, it's just occurring.

Oh, that's so sad. It sounds like both of them have terrible difficulty making themselves vulnerable to the other and saying what they feel.

It may be that if they tried that early on in the relationship, the other one said something very negative to them back that felt punishing in terms of expressing their emotion.

They made a choice, oh, God, I can't make myself vulnerable, I'm going to get hurt if I do that, so they shut down.

To this point about men not being very good at expressing their feelings, with that in mind and with the knowledge that expression of feelings are good for building connection, how come homosexual relationships with men work?

Is there any data to show that they last less longer than a relationship where a woman is stereotypically more likely to talk about the challenges and the issues and bridge the connection?

Someone's got to have done the research on this subject.

Well, we've studied gay and lesbian couples and compared them to heterosexual couples as well.

For 12 years. Generally, they're less defensive, they have a better sense of humor, and they're much more gentle in the way they bring up an issue with one another.

Men or women in those homosexual relationships?

Men and women together.

Gay men and lesbians are better than heterosexuals, and they're much less possessive and domineering as well, much more of a sense of equality in their relationships.

Well, especially, you know, pre -well, weight pause, pre -AIDS, you know, men gave each other much more autonomy to have sex outside the relationship, right?

But then AIDS kicked in, and a lot of that shut down.

Now it's opening up again.

So they're giving themselves sexual freedom as long as there isn't a lot of emotional connection and falling in love with the third party.

Women don't do that nearly as much.

They tend to feel very insecure around polygamy, let's say, or polyamory, and so they really are more wanting monogamy with their partners.

So am I right in thinking, John, that you're saying that homosexual relationships are better than heterosexual relationships?

They are. They are better in general.

They're better. Do you know if they last longer?

I don't know that there's data on that.

I don't think there are differences in how long they last.

Is that right? I don't think there's any differences.

You know, there's another thing, too.

I mean, again, it depends on what period of history you're talking about.

But because being homosexual has been so stigmatized in the past, you know, and there's so much prejudice against homosexuality, there's, first of all, there's more of a sense of community amongst gay men and gay women.

You know, they've connected with one another, not just as couples, but as community in order to survive the kind of prejudice they endure out in the heterosexual society, right?

And it's been shown, actually, the research has shown this, that when the community really supports the relationship, the relationship does better.

So if you've got a community around you that's a consistent community that's really supporting the relationship, that's really going to help you sustain that relationship.

And on these four horsemen, a word you didn't mention, but I wondered if it fit in there somewhere is the word gaslighting, which has become quite popular in society.

What is gaslighting?

How does that show up?

So in physically violent relationships that are characterologically violent, whether it's a perpetrator and a victim, those kinds of domestic violence, quite often the perpetrator is communicating to the victim that everything about the reality is wrong.

They never raised their hand against this person, you know, it's just all imagined.

They're basically doing what happened to Ingrid Bergman in that movie Gaslight, where she's married to this guy who tries to convince her that she's mentally ill, that her whole sense of reality is wrong.

So he does things like change the order of the pictures in the home, steal jewelry that he's given her that he says comes from his mother and grandmother.

He steals it and then he says, you know, where is it, you know, you lost it, you're so forgetful.

And he's constantly sort of making her feel like she's going crazy.

There never was a painting there.

What are you talking about?

There was never a painting there.

And you know, and he's actually removed it, or he's changed the order of the pictures.

He's trying to make her think she's crazy.

And even her sense of reality needs him to determine what's real and what's not real.

And that's where Gaslight comes from.

Let me mention something, because that word, you're right, it's really being bandied about commonly, and people have got it wrong, speaking of Gaslight.

So people, for example, who have a conflict, and they have totally different points of view about what happened during the conflict, two remembers it better, you know.

And one will say, well, you said this.

No, I didn't. I never said that.

That they're calling Gaslighting.

And it's not. That is not Gaslighting.

So it's being misused in the culture all the time, because people always have two points of view about different perceptions in any situation.

That's right. They have, you know, everybody has their own individual filters, and so they're going to hear some things, not hear other things, and distort things, and so on.

Memory isn't perfect.

And so they're always going to have two points of view.

And people can get locked into struggles over, no, this is the absolute reality of what happened.

No, it isn't. This is.

And there is no absolute reality.

It's all about perception.

So people are calling that Gaslighting.

And that's not a right.

It isn't. That's not what Gaslighting is.

At what point does it become Gaslighting?

Is that when you're intentionally trying to make the other person crazy, believe that they're crazy, so they don't trust themselves.

And these violent relationships that, you know, the man will slap the woman across the face and says, God damn it, you just hit me.

I never hit you. I never touched you.

Yeah, I spoke to a domestic violence victim once who told me that her partner went after like love bombing her to immediately like, you know, throwing all this affection onto her.

And, you know, very, very quickly, he would then start like hiding her stuff.

So he put her car keys in the fridge and he'd be like, I didn't.

Why did you put your car keys?

That's gaslighting.

Yeah, that's gaslighting.

Perfect description.

She thinks she's going crazy.

So he goes, well, I'm going to have to take your car keys often.

And then she can't she's lost her car.

Often done in the service of extreme jealousy and and socially isolating the victim.

Yeah, we've treated domestic violence a lot.

And I'll never forget this one guy who would put a mark on the tire and a mark on the driveway that matched up, that lined up.

And at the end of the day, if those marks didn't line up, he'd beat her up.

Even if she just went to the grocery store, it didn't matter.

Who did you fuck today?

Right. Where'd you go?

Nowhere. Oh, yeah. Right.

You liar. You roar.

You. This is the typical and naive question people ask when they hear a story like that.

Their head goes, I would never stay with someone that did that to me.

Blah, blah, blah. But it's not true.

Yeah, not true. You know, first of all, it doesn't happen all.

Secondly, oftentimes the victim, usually, you know, in a hetero, it's a woman, has her confidence beaten down.

So it's not just physical.

It's also mental abuse.

God, you're an idiot.

Man, are you stupid?

And she starts doubting her own judgment, her own intuition.

Plus, you know, I don't think you could survive out there.

Nobody else is going to want you.

And she starts to believe it, starts to believe it.

And she also has a dream that he's going to change because he's so remorseful of what he did to her.

He promises he'll never happen again and he loves her and he's going to get this under control.

Is he a narcissist or is it possible that someone who isn't a narcissist can perform that behavior or is the word narcissist another word that's just thrown around too much?

Very good. A plus. It's another word.

You know, everybody is narcissistic, Stephen.

Everybody is. You know, narcissism basically comes from the instinct for self -preservation.

You know, you're thinking about, OK, me, what do I need?

What do I need? How am I going to get it?

And so on. I've got to really, you know, think about taking care of myself sometimes.

I mean, they call that a narcissist.

But the way it really is meant is shorthand for a narcissistic personality disorder, which is extreme narcissism, where there is no empathy whatsoever.

The person has no conscience whatsoever.

They can hurt you. They can do everything that damages you.

And they take absolutely no responsibility for it and blame you for it.

Blame the victim. So somebody who, you know, says, I didn't fail.

You made me fail. This is what you did that set me up, you know, blah, blah, blah.

So every everybody around them is a reflection of who they are themselves.

And so they only see people, other people in two dimensions.

How do you go about you said you spoke to couples and women who had been through domestic abuse.

And, you know, how do you go about helping them?

OK, there's two types of domestic violence.

John mentioned characterological domestic violence.

That's when there's a clear perpetrator, clear victim.

Nothing the victim can do will change violence.

There's major injury.

So what has to happen there is the victim has got to get out of the relationship because she could be killed.

Easier said than done.

Right. It is. That is correct.

It is very, very hard.

It has to be secretive.

It, you know, she's got a plan, especially if there are kids and so on.

But there's also that's only 20 percent of the domestic violence out there.

Only 20 percent, 80 percent of the domestic violence is what we call situational domestic violence.

And in that kind, both people tend to be violent, both.

The violence is not a seriously injuring of the other person.

It's a slap, it's a push, it's a holding, you know, holding them from moving, you know, that kind of thing.

Pushing them down, breaking things, breaking things, throwing things at them and so on.

And that results from moving into that flooded state we described earlier, where you're in conflict, your heart rate is jumping up over 100 beats a minute.

You go into fight or flight.

And when you do that, you lose access to your ability to problem solve, your ability to listen, actually, to really take in what the other person is saying.

You hear attack, attack, attack, no matter what the person is saying.

Because it's like your frontal cortex, your prefrontal cortex is offline.

So both people typically are getting flooded during conflict.

So those people we can really, really help.

So we've done a randomized clinical trial treating those people.

And even a year and a half after treatment has ended, when they discuss a conflict on videotape in their home and we measure physiology, physiology stays low.

So the therapy is really effective compared to a control group.

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Is this part of the reason why you're in the UK at the moment?

You talked about your trauma.

Oh, it's trauma. It's trauma at Oxford.

Yeah, we're talking about trauma.

And also affairs, you're talking about treating affairs.

Right. That's right.

So I've never really heard the phrase treating affairs as if it's a condition per se, but if there has been an affair or some form of infidelity, can it be treated?

75 % so far in our research.

True rate. And when you say affair, what are you throwing in that bucket in terms of the definition of an affair?

Is that a text or is that?

It can be an emotional affair as well as a physical affair.

A physical affair. A physical affair.

Yeah, usually. So it can be emotionally, you know, falling in love with somebody else without physical consummation or physical consummation with somebody that you've fallen in love with.

Or just having sex outside the relationship, not an emotional connection, but just having sex when the agreement is monogamy.

So it almost always involves deception.

Right. Always. It always does.

Yeah, that's that's a big part of it is the deception and broken trust.

You know, it what affairs do is they turn, you know, the hurt partners world upside down.

Everything they believed about the partner is wrong.

Everything that they thought they shared in terms of values is wrong.

So, you know, you can trust what the person says.

No, you can't because they weren't staying at work late.

They were going to so -and -so's apartment.

It's like, I didn't know this person.

Yeah, I didn't know this.

Yeah, who are you? Who are you?

And, you know, relationships are really oftentimes, you know, especially committed ones are the foundation for our whole life.

You know, we build everything around that oftentimes.

Our sense of family, even our sense of work sometimes, what work we choose, how we live our lives.

Purpose and meaning that we give our lives together.

And when there's betrayal like that and the person that you thought your partner was isn't, then that whole thing cracks and falls to the ground.

It shatters. And how many people, how many couples cheat in any of those definitions that you've described?

Well, we don't really know, you know.

But, you know, probably around 30 percent of all couples is the conservative estimate.

Conservative, really?

I've heard 15 percent of men and women.

And the thing that's interesting is that the the stance for women having affairs has pretty much caught up to men now.

But here's why. When before the 70s and women's the women's liberation movement, women were stuck at home.

They weren't out in the world working.

They didn't have access to the milkman and the plumber.

And the mailman. So, you know, they were stuck at home having coffee around their kitchen table with their neighbor woman, you know, whoever.

But once they entered the workforce, then they had access to a whole field of potential people out there.

And so, you know, it's interesting.

Julia, I was I was thinking through all the implications of what would happen in a woman's life when she she went out to work.

And one of the other things is she would become more independent in every sense.

Yeah, exactly. That's right.

She doesn't have to stay in the marriage.

She can support herself financially.

So how do you treat an affair?

So we developed a model based on our research called the Tone Attune Attach, A -A -A model.

And here's what in a nutshell, here's what it involves.

Again, it has to be done in therapy.

You really can't do this stuff at home.

It's it's too intense.

First, the person who did the betraying needs to respond totally transparently to every question the hurt partner asks them.

However, the hurt partner shouldn't probably ask about the kind of sex they had.

And here's why. I mean, it's it's an important thing.

Almost every person who suffered through an affair has PTSD from a post -traumatic stress disorder.

And part of post -traumatic stress disorder is having these images or flashbacks, if you will, come into your mind unbidden.

You don't want them there, but they come in anyway.

And traumatic memory is different than regular memory.

Regular memory, you have a few little fragments, something said and so on.

Traumatic memory, everything comes up at one time.

The images, the smells, the sounds, the adrenaline, cortisol and so on.

So when a woman asks questions about sex and then gets the answers, guess what?

You know, so her images now are like flooding her mind with the kind of sex they had, you know, the partner and the affair partner that plagued her to an even greater degree.

And it's horrible. So a tone, answering the questions and then saying, I'm sorry, a thousand times and really meaning it, really, really meaning it.

I've had many, both men and women who've cheated on their partners or had affairs who end up crying during that phase.

Even the strongest of men will cry when they realize how hurt the woman is or the man.

The other thing that they, that the betraying partner needs to do is to listen to the other partner's feelings without defensiveness, just listen.

But in the therapy, you know, a lot of times what happens is that the therapist has to help shape the hurt partner's expression of emotion to take it out of criticism and out of contempt into, I feel destroyed.

I feel like my, you know, my world has fallen apart.

I feel so empty, so abandoned, so rejected.

So she has to describe, or he has to describe their own feelings, not how bad the partner was, which is typically what happens at home.

So that's the atonement phase.

A tune, and this has to come after atonement, not as the first thing.

They start looking at the actual marriage or relationship itself and what was wrong with it.

And a lot of times what you see are couples who at first might have had terrible conflict.

It was so bad, they started avoiding conflict.

Once they avoided conflict, they got more and mostly distant.

And the person who did the betraying got lonely, got lonely.

So oftentimes the affairs are not about just getting more sex.

They're about loneliness and beginning to talk to somebody else about how unhappy they are.

And then the third phase is attachment.

So it's like reattaching to your partner.

That second phase is really rebuilding trust.

And the third phase is recommitting to the relationship.

And in many, this is not always true.

I've seen the opposite.

But in many cases, the sexual relationship doesn't resume until phase three, especially if the woman is the one who's been betrayed.

But there are some where the woman will kind of throw herself at the man sexually to compete with the affair partner and be better than the affair partner.

So, you know, it can be both.

It's I mean, I've got so many questions that so the first phase was the atonement, attunement and then attachment.

So many questions at different phases in that.

I mean, so many of them.

I'll start from the top, which is how many times do you apologize?

A thousand. Because is it true that at some point you've you've got to kind of move on?

You know, you have to know what you're apologizing for.

Well, that that's important.

But here's why. And, you know, probably some of your audience, especially therapists may disagree with this, but I've treated it for 50 years.

PTSD doesn't disappear.

It doesn't disappear.

It can get episodes of getting triggered can be much less frequent over time or maybe not as intense, but it never disappears.

So, for example, you may apologize a lot during the therapy.

Things get better, better, better, better, better.

And then, you know, a couple of months later after you leave therapy, the man is late home from work and doesn't call.

Well, guess what happens?

She goes into full blown PTSD reenactment, basically, where it's gotten triggered again.

And oh, my God, he's doing it again.

You see, that's why you can't stop apologizing and just put it behind you.

You don't put PTSD behind you, you see.

Interesting. I guess that's the cost of cheating, is the person who really is never be the same again.

That's a high cost.

That's a very high cost.

That's right. I wrote insecurity, as you were talking, as a note.

And I think what I meant when I wrote that is being cheated on must create a huge amount of like lasting insecurity.

And it kind of links to the second thing I was writing down, which is this whole question of like, why did you cheat on me?

And it must be for a lot of people difficult to answer that question, because if it's and also I was thinking some people don't even know they don't actually.

So they might try and hazard a guess and do even more harm.

Right. Well, I think it's because you gain some weight or I think, well, you, I think you, you smell or, you know what I mean?

When actually it's something much deeper.

So like, that's right.

You know, is that a useful question to even ask in that setting?

It is. But again, in the setting of therapy, in the setting of therapy, you need the safety, hopefully with a good therapist, you need the safety that the therapist provides.

Where, you know, why did she cheat?

Well, because you're an asshole, you know, no, that's not going to work, you know.

So I once treated a couple where he had had 57 affairs and they'd only been, they had three children under the age of 10 and he'd had 57 affairs and three of them.

He actually fell in love with.

OK, so, you know, you can, you can easily say, oh, because the guy has a sexual addiction or blah, blah, blah.

No, not true. The real reason was that he had been raped as a kid and he feared, oh my God, maybe I'm a latent homosexual, which in his culture was the worst in the world.

You know, in the worst way.

So he had to keep proving to himself that he was heterosexual, heterosexual, heterosexual, over and over and over again.

And as soon as he, you know, we put that together because he just completely blocked it out for the most part, boom, the affair stopped.

Well, it just goes to show how complex it can be.

That's right. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, and it's atonement, not forgiveness, the difference there.

Because when when therapists emphasize forgiveness in this affair situation, they would blame the betrayed partner for not forgiving.

Is acceptance important?

Acceptance of what?

The situation you find yourself in.

No, no, that's bad.

Because you're accepting something that's hurtful, that's terribly hurtful.

The reason I ask that particular question is because I was thinking about my friend who's going through this breakup and much of the agony that I see himself in is because he's like refusing to accept the situation, it seems.

And all the resistance situation is he's basically someone's broken up with him.

And so it's this constant rumination of maybe if I do this, I can change it or maybe if I go almost like thinking back in time to see if he could time travel and fix all his mistakes.

And I was saying to him, and this might be bad advice, but I was saying to him, like, I think the first thing is we have to accept that this is the situation you find yourself in and then we'll work from here.

Oh, oh, oh, that's yeah, that's a whole different meaning of acceptance.

Yeah. I don't mean accept the fact that they cheated on you.

Right. That's how I interpreted it at first.

But yes, acceptance, you know, I would call that grounding in the reality of what you have right now.

And then, you know, really grounding in it.

OK, I really have made all these mistakes.

And, you know, if if the partner maybe, maybe, you know, tiny little teeny, weeny spark left, I call it an ember that in therapy it can be blown on, you know, to bring back the fire and the passion and the relationship array.

But as John was pointing out, sometimes the person is only feeling the ashes of the past relationship.

There are no embers left.

This is a difficult question to ask.

But have you ever seen cheating help a relationship?

Oh, every time. Really?

When there's recovery.

Well, every time, not every time, but very, very often, very often when they get help, when they get help, if they don't get help, it's not going to, you know, it's worse.

But when they get help, the help can help them change all the patterns in the relationship and help them learn who the other person really is, what their needs really are.

How they want you to turn up in the relationship that they had no idea of before.

So it can create more intimacy, different kind of trust, of course, but more intimacy and more connection.

Betrayal is always implied prior conflict avoidance.

Instead of talking to your partner about what's wrong, you talk to somebody else about what's wrong with you, with the partner.

What are some of the, so you're telling me that 74 % of the time affairs can be treated, 75 % of the time affairs can be treated, roughly.

What are some of the revelations or realizations that you've had over the all the years of your work about the nature of humans and relationships and love and dating and all these things that always stick front of mind for you?

That was most pivotal for the way you think that you haven't mentioned yet.

I think that relationships can be great sources of longevity, health, great context for raising children.

And so they can have this wonderful magic that is health giving, longevity giving.

And it just requires certain conditions to be met.

And those are the principles that make relationships work.

Is there a particular piece of research that you're most fond of?

That he's done or somebody else has done?

Both. Yeah, I mean, I think this whole field of social epidemiology, which has emerged in the last 50 years, really shows that relationships are life giving and longevity giving, given today's level of medical treatment of chronic illness.

It's really relationships that make the difference and really make the difference in raising kids.

And the last thing I want to talk to you about is this idea of bids for connection, because it's a very popular topic and there's lots of people online and on TikTok discussing the importance of bids for connection.

What are bids for connection?

Well, in this apartment lab that Julie and I built, there were three cameras and at the time it was only possible to technologically merge two of them in a split screen.

So the people in the control room had to use the cameras in a particular way so that they had a split screen.

And they very quickly saw that quite often one person was trying to get the other person's attention or interest.

And so they would focus on that person who was saying, oh, look at that beautiful boat going by.

And then they focused the other camera on the partner and see the response.

And so you had this sort of two -step interaction, one attempting to get the partner's attention, making a bid for connection, and the other person either responding or not responding or responding irritably, turning toward or turning away or turning against.

And it turns out that six years later, the couples who eventually divorced, when they looked back six years earlier, they had turned toward these bids an average of 33 % of the time.

Whereas the couples who were still married, they looked back six years later, they had turned toward their partner's bids 86 % of the time.

So there's a huge difference, 33 % versus 86%.

You mentioned three responses to a bid for connection.

So my partner comes up to me, she goes, babe, look at this.

You mentioned they turned toward them, which is me turning towards my partner and saying, what is it, babe?

It's not physical, mind you.

Could be. No. What I'm trying to say is that a lot of people interpret turning toward it as, oh, you turn your body toward your partner.

No, it's not. It's responding to your partner's desire for interest or attention.

Okay. And then turning away is me not responding, then turning against would be an irritable kind of response.

Stop interrupting me.

I'm working. Okay. So 86 % of the couples that stayed together were those that turned toward, i .e.

they acknowledged the bid for connection.

No, the couples who stayed married had turned toward bids an 86 % of the time.

So when their partners tried to get their attention, the probability of them turning toward was 0 .86%, 86 % of the time they turned toward.

The other thing that was interesting was that people who turned toward a lot tended to have a sense of humor together during conflict, which reduced physiological arousal.

So how do you get people to laugh together when they're disagreeing?

And it turns out that if you increase turning toward, people spontaneously develop more of a sense of humor about themselves during conflict.

That was a really amazing finding of one of my graduate students, Dennis Driver.

You can teach people to turn toward, acknowledge those bids.

Yeah, you can, you know, just increase awareness.

I've struggled with that in my relationships.

I've not been very good at turning towards, i .e.

when my partner makes a bid for connection, I've not been great at...

I often saw it as like an interruption, or you knew I was busy, or like you...

But from doing this podcast, in fact, and speaking to lots of great people like you guys, I've...

In those moments, I go, Steve, fuck the laptop.

Just turn and maybe email, hi, what's up, what's up, you know, and it helps.

Let me give you a suggestion, you know, because all of us have times when we can't turn towards, right?

Because we've got a deadline, or we've got something.

But what you can do is say, honey, I would really love to listen to you right now, but I've got to finish this project.

After I do another hour of work, can we then talk, you see?

So you're putting a bookmark in there that says, I want to talk to you, but I've got this competing...

That's a nice way of saying it.

...goal that I have to finish, but then we'll talk.

My partner says to me, it's how you say it.

You know, so I've just got to be like, actually turn my body language.

So I'm acknowledging the person not like saying it while without missing a keystroke.

Yeah. Turn my body and say it in a way that's loving.

Not just one second, I'm just working on something.

It's not, it just, you know...

That's not going to work.

It doesn't do it. That's not going to work.

Even worse is just at one second.

Good try, everything else.

C minus. If people want to learn more about all the work that you do, how do they go about finding you?

Well, a couple of things.

They can go to Gottman .com.

G -O -T -T -M -A -N .com. Internet site.

There's a whole bunch of stuff there.

Or they can go to our books.

And the last one, especially if you're dealing with conflict, the last one is called Fight Right.

But we also have one that is eight dates, essential conversations for a lifetime of love.

And that's a great one, too.

And there's also a website we created called Gottman Connect, where people can actually go and take questionnaires and evaluate the strengths and challenges in their own relationship and the privacy of their homes.

And then access, 37 video modules that Julie and I created for improving how you deal with conflict, how you improve intimacy, sexual connection, and so on.

We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves the question for the next.

Let's start with Julie.

Tell us about a paranormal experience you've had.

Okay. I have visions now and then.

And they always happen when I'm driving, for some odd reason.

So I was driving across the Mojave Desert, and I felt a very strong urge to pull over.

Okay, I always listen to those.

Pulled over, walked into the desert to whatever felt like the right place, sat down, started to meditate, and felt myself inside a huge golden mountain that was just glowing.

And it took the form of a huge golden Buddha, and I was sitting, a tiny little being, in its hands, and it lifted me up off the ground.

And I heard many truthful things about reality that form my very foundation.

Can you give me one?

Everybody suffers. Everybody.

And nobody suffers more than anybody else.

Everybody has their own suffering, and everybody has their own path to move through that suffering and to heal.

And people do heal.

But life is full of suffering.

That's normal. It's not a sense of duality.

Suffering is part of the perfection of our existence.

It really does change your perspective on yourself and others when you hear that point about suffering, being unavoidable, because then at least you don't treat yourself as such a victim to suffering.

You realize that it's part of, it's fundamentally attached to all the things that I love as well.

That's right. What about you, John?

Have you ever had a paranormal experience?

When the numbers just came together perfectly?

I don't know if this is a paranormal experience, but I tell them, I was once driving through the University of Washington Arboretum, and I was really, really sick.

And I was driving toward my office because I had a client who was suicidal, and I hadn't been able to reach her to cancel the appointment.

And I'd cancel all the other appointments, but as sick as I was, I just didn't think I could just not show up.

So I had to show up and at least say, I'm really too sick physically to see you, but I care about you.

And as I was driving through the Arboretum, I had a fever and I was sneezing and coughing.

I felt the presence of my parents in the car, both no longer living.

I felt my mother on this cheek and my father on this cheek.

And it was really very sweet.

Because of Julie's experiences, I kind of said, well, maybe this is real.

By the time I got to the Arboretum, all my cold symptoms were gone.

And it was important for me to be there for that client.

And I was healthy enough to actually have a session with her.

I don't know if that constitutes a paranormal experience, but it's pretty weird.

She was okay. Thank you so much.

I've continued to learn so much from your wonderful, lovely work.

And our last conversation was such a smash hit with my audience.

Everywhere I went, people would stop me and say, oh my God, I love that episode with the Gottmans.

I think it's both your wisdom, your knowledge, but also the pair of you together form such a diverse set of perspectives, which is useful in sort of taking on some of these problems that we've discussed today, which is really nice because you do have very different perspectives and you come at things

differently. And I think that helps complete the whole picture.

And thank you more broadly for the work that you've done on relationships and love over the last couple of decades, because people cite it everywhere I go, not just in the context of love, but they cite it in the context of business.

I've used your work on stage when I did a tour of Australia recently.

I've gone to conferences in Columbia and I've heard people talk about your work on the Four Horsemen and contempt and all these kinds of things and your love lab, as they call it.

So you're doing incredibly important work.

That really targets the most important thing, which is keeping humans together.

So thank you for all that you're doing.

Thank you for being here again.

Thank you, Stephen.

And thank you very much for being, again, the best interviewer we've had in 30 years.

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We're finally revealing all of the questions and the people that answered the question.

The brand new version 2 updated conversation cards are out right now at theconversationcards .com.

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[The Science of Lasting Love: Insights from Drs. John and Julie Gottman]-[The Gottman Doctors: Affairs Can Actually Save Your Relationship! But If You See This, It's Time To Walk Away!]

📋 Summary

The Myth of Compatibility and Finding "The One"

The Internal Work of Attraction

Conflict and the Four Horsemen

Treating Betrayal and Infidelity

The Role of Affection and Intimacy

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript