What Actually Builds a Lasting Partnership

Posted on by helpingsoul

A Therapist’s Reflections on What the Research and Eighteen Years of Clinical Work Have Taught Me

A substantial revision of an earlier 2009 post on meeting and marriage. The original used a prescriptive timetable that real relationships rarely follow. This version draws on current research and clinical experience to describe what actually produces lasting partnership across many forms.

In 2009, I wrote a post that mapped what I thought of as the path from meeting someone to marrying them. The post laid out an eight-step timeline — meet, build friendship, set boundaries, develop respect, love revealed at nine months, marriage at one to two years. The framework reflected what I believed at the time about how the strongest relationships developed.

Sixteen years of clinical work later, I would not write that post the same way. Several things have changed.

The most important change is the recognition that relationships do not follow timetables. The couple who knew they were going to marry within three weeks of meeting can have as durable a partnership as the couple who took five years to decide. The couple who lived together for a decade before committing to marriage may have stronger fundamentals than the couple who married within months. The timing varies. The fundamentals do not.

The second change is the recognition that lasting partnership takes many forms. Marriage is one. Long-term cohabitation without legal marriage is another. Partnerships within queer relationships have their own histories and forms. Polyamorous and non-monogamous structures, when they work, work according to similar fundamentals as monogamous partnerships. The legal and cultural form of the relationship matters less than the underlying dynamics. The work of building something that lasts is recognizable across forms, even when the forms differ significantly.

This refreshed essay describes what I have come to understand about those underlying dynamics, drawing on current research and on the work I have done in my practice with couples across many configurations.

The conditions that produce lasting partnership

Several conditions, present together and developed over time, produce the kind of partnership that endures.

Friendship as foundation

This was true in the 2009 post and remains true. The strongest partnerships have a deep friendship underneath them. The capacity to enjoy each other’s ordinary company. The genuine interest in each other’s inner lives. The willingness to spend time together that is not about romance or sex but simply about being with this particular person.

John and Julie Gottman, who have studied couples in their laboratory at the University of Washington for decades, identify friendship as the foundational element of relationships that last. Their research consistently shows that couples who maintain what they call a sound relationship house — the underlying friendship and shared knowledge of each other — weather conflict and transition far better than couples whose connection is primarily passionate or primarily logistical. The friendship is not opposed to romance. It is what allows the romance to continue across decades.

Secure attachment within the relationship

Sue Johnson, who developed Emotionally Focused Therapy and has spent her career applying attachment theory to adult couples, identifies the felt sense of secure connection as the central work of lasting partnership. Each partner needs to know, in their body, that the other is reliably there — that emotional reach will be met, that need will not be dismissed, that distress can be brought to the other and will be received.

Building this kind of security is the work of years. It develops through small repeated experiences of being met. The partner who turns toward you when you reach out, even when they are tired. The partner who returns to repair after a conflict rather than letting the disconnection settle. The partner who notices when something is wrong before you have named it. These small moments accumulate into the felt sense of being securely held by the relationship itself.

For partners who arrived in the relationship with insecure attachment patterns from childhood, the work is more demanding. The nervous system that learned not to reach has to learn to reach. The nervous system that learned to defend against connection has to learn to receive it. The relationship itself, when it is functioning, becomes the corrective experience that updates the original conditioning. This is slow work. It is genuinely possible, particularly when both partners understand what they are doing.

Respect as daily practice

Respect is the felt experience of being treated as someone whose thoughts, feelings, and choices have weight. It is not the same as agreement. Two partners can disagree substantially and still treat each other with respect. They can fight hard about what matters to them and still convey, throughout the fight, that the other person remains worthy of consideration.

The Gottmans’ research identifies contempt — the felt sense of looking down on the partner, dismissing them as beneath you — as the single most reliable predictor of divorce in their studies. Contempt is the opposite of respect. When it enters a relationship and is not addressed, the relationship is on a trajectory toward dissolution that is statistically very difficult to reverse.

Maintaining respect requires daily attention. The small ways you speak about your partner when they are not in the room. The small ways you respond to them when they share something with you. The small ways you handle conflict when you are tired or activated. Respect is built or eroded in these small moments. It is rarely built or eroded in dramatic events.

The capacity for repair

All relationships experience rupture. The strongest relationships are not the ones in which rupture never occurs. They are the ones in which both partners have developed the capacity to repair after rupture has occurred.

Repair is its own learnable skill. It involves the willingness to recognize when something has gone wrong between you. The capacity to take responsibility for your part without becoming defensive. The willingness to make a genuine acknowledgment of harm caused, however unintentional. The patience to let the other person have their own response to the repair attempt without controlling how they receive it. The follow-through that demonstrates the repair is more than words.

Stan Tatkin, who developed the psychobiological approach to couples therapy, writes extensively about repair as one of the central practices of lasting partnership. His framing — that secure functioning couples treat each other’s regulation as their joint responsibility — points to something important. The repair is not just about the specific rupture. It is about the ongoing maintenance of the relationship’s underlying safety. Each successful repair tells both partners that this relationship can hold difficulty. Each failed repair, particularly accumulated, communicates the opposite.

Differentiation alongside connection

Esther Perel has written extensively about the tension in long-term partnership between connection and otherness. The relationship needs both. Partners who completely fuse — who lose their individual identities into the relationship — often lose desire for each other over time. Partners who remain too separate, who do not actually allow themselves to be known and to know the other, miss the depth that long partnership offers.

The work is holding both. Maintaining your own friendships, interests, and inner life that are separate from the relationship. Continuing to develop as an individual across the years rather than freezing into your role within the partnership. And also doing the work of genuine intimacy, allowing yourself to be known and to know the other deeply, building the shared history that only long partnership can produce.

Differentiation is not coldness. It is the capacity to be fully present in the relationship while remaining recognizably yourself. Partners who maintain this capacity often find that their desire for each other endures across decades, because the other remains genuinely other rather than dissolving into a version of the self.

Shared sense of meaning

Lasting partnerships typically develop a shared sense of what the relationship is for beyond the immediate enjoyment of being together. This may be raising children. It may be building a business or pursuing creative work together. It may be participating in religious or spiritual community. It may be navigating significant challenges — illness, loss, large life transitions — that the partnership has helped both partners through.

The shared meaning is not always articulated. Sometimes it lives in the unspoken understanding that this relationship has been the container for the life both partners have lived. The relationship is not just a source of pleasure or companionship. It is the structure within which a life has been built. That kind of meaning, accumulated over years, produces a depth that newer relationships cannot match no matter how passionate they are.

Commitment as ongoing choice

The 2009 post talked about hundred percent commitment as the defining feature of marriage. I would say something slightly different now. Commitment in lasting partnership is not a one-time decision made at the altar or at the moment of agreement to be exclusive. It is a daily choice that gets remade across the years.

Every long-term partnership goes through periods when one or both partners genuinely consider whether they want to continue. This is not a sign of failure. It is a sign that the partnership is real and consequential. The partners who continue across these moments do so because they have made the choice to continue. The choice is not always certain. It is often made in conditions of doubt. But it is made, and remade, and remade again across the years.

This framing changes how we understand commitment. It is not the absence of doubt. It is the willingness to act in the direction of the partnership despite the doubt, and to bring whatever the doubt is about into the relationship rather than carrying it alone. The strongest partnerships have rooms in them for the difficult conversations about the partnership itself.

What I would tell a younger version of myself

If I could speak to the therapist who wrote the 2009 post, I would tell her several things.

The timeline does not matter. What matters is what happens within whatever timeline the relationship actually unfolds along.

Marriage is not the goal. The goal is a partnership that allows both people to live in a way that feels genuinely theirs, with someone who knows them and is known by them, across the long arc of a life.

Friendship matters more than passion. Passion comes and goes in long partnership. Friendship, properly tended, deepens.

Repair matters more than avoiding conflict. The couple who never fights is rarely the couple whose relationship lasts. The couple who fights and repairs is.

The work continues. There is no moment when you have arrived at a lasting partnership and can stop building it. The building is the partnership.

If you are in the early stages of a relationship

If you are in the early period of a relationship and trying to determine whether this person could be a lasting partner, here are the questions worth asking yourself. Not on a timetable. Whenever they become relevant.

Is there a genuine friendship underneath the chemistry? Do you actually enjoy this person’s company when you are not romantically engaged with them?

Can you imagine being known by this person at the depth that long partnership requires? Are they capable of receiving you, and are you capable of receiving them, beyond the surface?

How do they handle conflict and repair? Are they capable of taking responsibility for their part in difficulty? Can they offer genuine acknowledgment without becoming defensive?

Are their values and life goals genuinely compatible with yours, or are you assuming compatibility that has not actually been tested?

Do you feel respected by them in the small daily moments, and do you respect them similarly? Is there any contempt in either direction that has begun to enter the interaction?

Are there patterns from their family of origin or yours that you can see playing out in the relationship, and is there room to work with those patterns together?

Do you both have the capacity to maintain your individual lives within the partnership, or is one or both of you losing yourselves into the relationship?

These questions take time to answer honestly. The relationships that last typically allow the time for these questions to surface and be addressed. The relationships that move too quickly past these questions often arrive at the larger commitment with answers that have not been earned.

If you are in an established partnership

If you are in an established partnership and reading this article, the questions are different. The work is not whether to commit. The work is how to sustain what you have built.

The same elements apply. The friendship needs continued tending. The attachment security needs daily renewal. The respect needs to be protected from the small erosions that accumulate over years. The repair after conflict needs to remain a practice rather than something that has become rare. The differentiation needs to be preserved so that you do not lose yourself into the relationship. The shared meaning needs to be allowed to evolve as the lives you are living evolve. The commitment needs to be remade rather than assumed.

Couples therapy can be useful at many points in lasting partnership — not only when the relationship is in crisis. Working with a clinician who understands attachment, who can hold both partners’ nervous systems at once, who can address the somatic dimensions of long partnership rather than only the verbal ones, often produces real growth in relationships that are already functioning. The work is not about fixing what is broken. It is about deepening what is already real.

A closing thought

Lasting partnership is one of the most demanding things a human being can attempt. It is also one of the most rewarding. The partnership that endures across decades does not endure because it was easy or because both partners are uniquely well-suited to each other. It endures because both partners have done the daily work of building and rebuilding it across the years.

If you are in a relationship that is working, honor it. Tend to it. Notice what makes it real, and continue investing in what makes it real. The relationship is not a destination you arrive at. It is the daily practice of choosing to remain in it, to develop with it, to be changed by it across the years.

And if you are searching for a lasting partnership and have not yet found one, the search is real and worth doing. The conditions that produce lasting partnership are recognizable. With enough self-knowledge and enough willingness to do the work, the conditions can be met. The path is rarely linear. The destination, when it is reached, is worth the journey.

Further reading: John Gottman and Julie Gottman, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work and What Makes Love Last. Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight. Stan Tatkin, Wired for Love. Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity. For clinical work with couples in California or Florida, visit thecourageousself.com.

April Wright, MA, LMFT is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California and Florida specializing in EMDR, sex therapy, and couples counseling. She trained in sex and couples therapy at AACAST at UCLA. She blogs about attachment, healing, and the courageous arts of becoming oneself at courageous-arts.com and sees clients at thecourageousself.com.

Service and Gratitude as Lifelong Practice

Posted on by helpingsoul

Why Giving Back to Others and Acknowledging What You Have Received Are Foundational to Sustained Growth — In Recovery and Beyond

A substantial revision of an earlier 2014 post on the twelfth step of Alcoholics Anonymous. The principles are sound. The framing has been broadened to address recovery and growth in their many forms.

The twelfth step of Alcoholics Anonymous, in its original wording, reads: Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

When I first wrote about this step in 2014, I was attending Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings as part of my own work. I was trying to understand my father, who has been in recovery for many decades, and trying to understand the legacy of growing up around his alcoholism. The twelve-step framework gave me one lens for thinking about the principles of sustained recovery — practical principles that have remained meaningful to me, even as my clinical work has expanded into other territories of healing.

What I have come to recognize, in the years since, is that the principles in this final step are not unique to recovery from alcohol. They name something true about how sustained growth actually works, for anyone doing meaningful inner work. The specific frame of AA is one expression of these principles. The principles themselves apply much more broadly. They apply to anyone in recovery from any addiction. They apply to anyone doing trauma recovery. They apply to anyone working through grief. They apply to anyone trying to live a more conscious life than they were trained to live.

This article is a broadening. The twelve-step community will recognize the source material. Anyone outside of that community can engage the same principles in their own context. Both readings are valid.

Recovery as continuing rather than completed

The original twelfth step recognizes that the work does not end when the immediate crisis is over. The recovering alcoholic who has stopped drinking has not finished. The work continues for the rest of their life. Maintaining the change is a daily practice rather than a destination.

The same is true for recovery from any meaningful pattern. The person who has done significant work on attachment trauma does not finish that work. The patterns may quiet. The reactivity may soften. New responses become available. And the underlying conditioning, formed across childhood, continues to surface periodically in ways that require continued attention. The work becomes a practice rather than an event.

This is honest. It is also, in some ways, freeing. The pressure to complete the work — to arrive at some final state of healing where the past no longer affects you — is a pressure that produces shame when the work continues to be needed years later. Recognizing that this is how sustained recovery actually works removes the pressure. You are not failing because the work continues. The work continues because that is what the work is.

Service as the natural extension of recovery

When someone has done significant work and arrived at greater stability, the question of what to do with what they have learned becomes meaningful. The original twelfth step answers this question directly: carry the message. Help others who are still in the early stages of the work you have completed.

In the AA context, this means becoming a sponsor, attending meetings to support newcomers, sharing your experience and strength and hope. The frame is specific. But the underlying principle is broader. The person who has done significant work has something genuine to offer others. The offering is part of what sustains the person’s own continued recovery.

This is not theoretical. There is research support for the observation that helping others produces durable benefits for the helper, sometimes more than the helped. The act of using your experience in service to someone else integrates the experience in a way that solitary processing does not. Telling your story to someone who needs to hear it makes the story more real, more integrated, more useful. The service is its own form of practice.

This applies regardless of the specific recovery context. The adult who has worked through their own attachment wounds becomes valuable to other adults doing similar work. The person who has navigated significant grief has something to offer others facing loss. The person who has come out the other side of any meaningful struggle carries knowledge that, shared appropriately, helps the people behind them on the path.

The service does not have to be formal. It can be the conversation with a friend who is struggling, where you share what you learned in your own version of that struggle. It can be the listening you offer when someone needs to be heard. It can be the patience you extend to someone earlier on a path you have walked. The service is whatever you do with what you have learned, in genuine response to what someone else needs.

Gratitude as the practice that sustains everything else

The other principle named in the twelfth step is gratitude. The recovering alcoholic, having received help, is asked to recognize what they have been given. This recognition produces a particular kind of stability. The person who can acknowledge what they have received does not have to carry the alone-against-the-world stance that often precedes addiction and other forms of struggle.

Gratitude, properly understood, is not a positive-thinking practice or a forced sunny disposition. It is the honest recognition of what is true. You are alive. Someone helped you. The conditions for your current state, whatever it is, include the contributions of many people, many circumstances, many fortunate alignments alongside the difficult ones. Acknowledging this is not optimism. It is accuracy.

There is also research on this. The work of Robert Emmons at UC Davis, who has been studying gratitude for several decades, has shown that consistent gratitude practice produces measurable changes in well-being, sleep, relational satisfaction, and physiological stress markers. Gratitude works in the body, not only in the mind. The system that regularly acknowledges what it has received functions better than the system that does not.

The practice does not require elaborate ritual. A short list at the end of the day. A specific acknowledgment to someone who helped you, given to them directly. A pause before a meal to recognize what is on the plate and who contributed to its arrival there. The simple acts, repeated, accumulate.

On the AA framework specifically

For readers who are themselves in AA or another twelve-step program, the original principles continue to apply. Sponsor someone if you are ready. Attend meetings consistently. Practice the steps as the lifelong path they are designed to be. The community offers something significant — the shared experience of others who have walked the same road, the regular practice of the meetings themselves, the structure that gives the principles their ongoing power.

For readers who are not in a twelve-step program but who are doing other forms of recovery or growth work, the same principles apply with appropriate translation. Find your equivalent of the meeting — the therapy group, the somatic class, the community of others doing similar work. Find your equivalent of the sponsor relationship — the mentor, the trusted friend further along the path, the therapist who has accompanied you. Find your equivalent of service — the role you can play in supporting others in their own work. The forms differ. The functions are the same.

I would also acknowledge, having written about this in other recent posts, that the language of the older twelve-step literature can sometimes feel harsh by current standards. The framing of alcoholism as disease, of the person in recovery as defective, of the surrendering of will to a higher power as the only path to sobriety — all of this works for many people and lands as shaming for others. Current trauma-informed understanding offers more compassionate framings of the same underlying work, recognizing the early conditions that often precede addiction and treating the addictive behavior as an intelligent if costly survival adaptation rather than as a disease to be cured.

Both framings can be held. Twelve-step community remains genuinely valuable for many people, even when the language sometimes lands hard. Trauma-informed framings offer additional language that some people find more accurate to their experience. The work itself, in both frames, is similar. The principles of service and gratitude apply to both.

Reflection questions

If you are doing recovery work in any form, the following questions may be useful for your own reflection.

Who has helped you in your work, and how have you acknowledged their contribution?

What have you learned that someone else might benefit from hearing?

Is there someone earlier on a path you have walked, with whom you could share what you know?

What does gratitude look like as a daily practice in your specific life?

How do you handle conflict differently now than you did before your recovery work began? What helped you develop the new capacity?

What is your relationship with the community that has supported your work, and how do you contribute to it?

When you imagine yourself five or ten years from now, what kind of presence do you want to be for others walking similar paths?

These questions are not a test. They are openings for reflection. The answers may come quickly or may take weeks to surface. Sit with them as feels right.

A closing thought

The principles in this final step, whether you encounter them in AA or in some other framework, are pointing at something true. The work of sustained growth is lifelong. The service to others is part of how the work sustains itself. The gratitude for what you have received is the foundation that keeps the rest of the practice from drifting into ego or fatigue.

Most of us were not taught these principles directly. We learned them through our own struggles, through the help of others who walked alongside us, through the slow accumulation of experience that comes from doing the work over years. Naming them clearly is part of what makes them transmissible — what allows them to be passed forward to the people who come after us on similar paths.

Whatever path you are walking, the principles apply. Continue the work. Help others where you can. Acknowledge what you have received. These three practices, held together, become the architecture of a life that does not need to escape from itself. The escape, eventually, becomes unnecessary. The life is the one you actually want to live.

Further reading: Alcoholics Anonymous and the broader twelve-step literature. Adult Children of Alcoholics. Robert Emmons, Thanks: How Practicing Gratitude Can Make You Happier. For the broader work on compassionate framings of recovery, see related posts on this blog including The Art of Detachment with Love.

April Wright, MA, LMFT is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California and Florida. She blogs about attachment, healing, and the courageous arts of becoming oneself at courageous-arts.com and sees clients at thecourageousself.com.

Beliefs, Values and Good Intentions

Posted on by helpingsoul

With few exceptions, all of us have beliefs, values, and a relatively similar sense of what’s right and what’s wrong. They are what make us different from other living things on the planet…they are what make us human.

But while having principles may be natural for us, actually practicing them isn’t. Acting according to these beliefs, values, and good intentions…doing what’s right “walking the talk” is one of the biggest challenges each of us face every day. It’s true for just about every aspect of our lives – from family and faith, to sports and politics, to our jobs and our communities.

Unquestionably, talking about beliefs is easy – there’s not much effort or pain involved at all. Behaving those values, however, is quite another story.

Discussing good citizenship is a lot easier than going out in an election-day rainstorm to vote. Stating the importance of honesty is just plain easier than overcoming the temptation to keep the change the store clerk overpays us. Touting good service is one thing, staying late to make sure a customer is taken care of is quite another. And, waxing eloquent about how parents should be actively involved in their children’s education is a piece of cake compared to turning off our most favorite TV program so we can check our children’s homework.

Here are two facts “you can take to the bank:”

  1. We all have moments when our behaviors are out of sync with the beliefs we hold deep down inside, and
  2. The vast majority of those out-of-sync behaviors are Unintentional.

Think about it. How many times have you jumped out of bed in the morning and declared, “My mission in life today is to NOT walk my talk. I’m not gonna rest until I’m out of sync somehow, some way!”? We’ll go way out on a limb and guess that your answer is NEVER! It just doesn’t happen that way.

Are there some misguided, hypocritical people out there who knowingly – even intentionally – do wrong? Unfortunately, yes. They’re the ones who make the headlines. The good news, however, is that they’re also the extreme exceptions. The rest of us tend to approach each new day loaded with noble goals and good intentions.

But too often, we get bombarded with demands, crises, pressures, changes, issues, and unexpected situations that make merely “holding our own” sometimes the best that we can hope for. As a result, it can become way too easy to fly through our lives on automatic pilot – without really thinking about what we do and whether or not we’re actually behaving our beliefs.