The Untold Truth Behind Successful Long-Term Relationships

You’ve found your perfect partner! You’re settling into a lifelong relationship with them. Congratulations, you did it. It might feel like a missing piece to that puzzle of your beautiful life.

But now, how do you keep them?

Because believe it or not, getting your dream person is scratching the service of what’s about to come. It’s merely the beginning of a much more complex and fulfilling journey of intimate personal growth and mutual development.

When you find your dream person, it’s not the end goal, but the starting point for a journey that will require a continuous concentrated effort, communication, and copious amounts of compromise to build a lasting and fulfilling relationship.

The real work begins after the initial attraction and courtship phase, where you start to discover and navigate each other’s unique qualities, vulnerabilities, and preferences. In doing so, you learn more about yourself and your own limits, and you develop skills such as patience, empathy, and active listening that will serve you not only in your relationship but also in other aspects of your life. Yes, it’s this important.

But it isn’t all roses:

Here are some scary statistics for you, One in two marriages in the USA ends in divorce, with the rest of the world not being far behind.

One in two marriages. Let that sink in.

Is there predictability to this? Is there a science or equation where perhaps we can avoid this and be on the good side of 50%?

“A great marriage is not when the ‘perfect couple’ comes together. It is when an imperfect couple learns to enjoy their differences.” — Dave Meurer

Psychologist John Gottman did exactly that. He took the time to observe thousands of couples having their conversations recorded. He recorded everything he possibly could; what was said in the conversation, he recorded their skin conductivity, he recorded their facial expressions, their heart rates, their blood pressure, basically everything! Bravo, John, you have far more patience than I ever could.

Gottman found that one of the most important predictors of whether or not a couple was going to get divorced was how positive or negative each partner was being in the conversation.

You expected a more esoteric answer, right? But it’s that simple!

Couples with very low risk scored much more positive points on the Gottman scale. But bad relationships and marriages, which are more likely to get divorced or break up, found themselves getting into a whirlwind of very audible negativity.

Now just by using these very simple ideas, Gottman and his group were able to predict whether a given couple was going to get divorced with 90% accuracy, but it wasn’t until he teamed up with mathematician James Murray, that they really started to understand what causes these negativity, tornados, and how they occur.

But don’t freak out because understanding the root cause of these negative interactions, as Gottman did, can help couples work together to prevent them and foster positive interactions instead.

By prioritizing positive interactions and being mindful of the impact of negative ones, you can build and maintain a strong, healthy, and long-lasting relationship.

The results that they found, I think, are just incredibly simplistic and very interesting to realize.

It’s like a chemistry experiment where you mix two different chemicals together. The resulting reaction depends on the nature of each chemical, how much you mix, and the conditions in which they are mixed. Similarly, the equations predict how the conversation will progress based on the emotional states of each partner and the overall context of the relationship. Just like the chemistry experiment, small changes in the conditions can lead to vastly different outcomes.

To me, the most critical thing in this equation is the influence people have on one another, particularly the negativity threshold.

The negativity threshold

Now the negativity threshold you can think of is how annoying the husband can be before the wife starts to get really vexed and vice versa.

The best couples and the most successful couples are the ones with a shallow negativity threshold. These are the couples that don’t let anything go unnoticed and allow each other some room to vent and open up some real conversations.

This is great because it means there’s no resentment from either party, as minor and slight annoyances can always be discussed and mediated.

The couples continually trying to repair their relationship and have a much more positive outlook on their relationship are the ones who are very happy!

This simple fact alone can be the difference between people ending it all vs. fighting for everything!

But beware as couples that don’t let things go and couples that let trivial things end up being a really big deal. They never stand the test of time.

Now look, this is very much an oversimplification of a myriad of nuances I’m sure every couple has and goes through. But this is a tool, a simple option that allows one to unearth some things that might very well save their relationship.

It’s so fascinating to know that there really is mathematical evidence to say that you should never let the sun go down on your anger. That statement has been around for decades for a reason!

So remember, when it comes to what makes or breaks your relationship, be positive in word, in deed, and in countenance. Don’t let feelings of negativity fester, and always communicate.

Cheers,

t.h.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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