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.

Finding Love

Posted on by helpingsoul
A new map of the path to intimacy by Ken Page, LCSW

Four Signs That Healthy Love Is On Its Way

How to find love that can last

I’ve found that four conditions often forecast the advent of real and healthy love. Love’s arrival feels like magic; a gift of luck. Yet we can invite that luck by approaching our dating life differently. If these shifts are happening for you, be encouraged. You’re probably well on the way to finding the kind of love that can last.

You lose your taste for “attractions of deprivation”

It’s easy to become attracted to people who can almost commit; people who treat us wonderfully–and then diminish, demean or ignore us. These relationships are usually highly charged and gnawingly addictive. Like a slot machine, they keep us coming back for more. We long to get it right, to get our partner to love us. We struggle to improve ourselves. We play hard to get. We try giving more, or we practice giving less. We try to be funnier, more successful or more in-shape, so that our desired one will finally want us as much as we want them.

At a certain point, (and usually as a result of tremendous pain) we begin to lose our taste for relationships that chip away at our sense of self-worth. We find we just can’t stomach the thought of being hurt like that again. And this is a great thing. When we become less “sticky” to these kinds of attractions, a dead-end era of our dating lives is finally coming to an end. Now, we can begin the real work of intimacy–cultivating our attraction to relationships that feed and nurture us.

Kindness and availability become more important to you

As we lose our taste for attractions of deprivation, we usually experience a temporary void in our dating life. We know we don’t want the pain of past relationships, but nothing else seems as exciting. In time, (and often with guidance) we begin to seek what I call attractions of inspiration.

These attractions are based upon a (basically) consistent quality of shared kindness, generosity, and emotional availability. They often unfold slowly. They get richer as time goes on. They make us feel love, not desperation.

We can measure the very quality of our lives by the relationships of mutual inspiration we’ve cultivated.

The joy we feel in these relationships doesn’t come from conquest or momentary validation, but from an essential quality of contentment we feel with our partners. We don’t feel consistently bigger or smaller than the object of our affections. In some basic way, we feel what the twelve-step programs call “right sized.” But most of us have never been taught that these relationships have a trajectory of their own. They need to be cultivated and nourished in different ways than we might be used to. It may seem that they are not as exciting at first, but in fact, they are much more so.

There is a thrilling risk available to us in these relationships—the risk of revealing our authentic self. If we take that risk with our partners and find that we are accepted and embraced, the erotic and emotional charge of the relationship deepens and intensifies. These are the people who deserve to see the real us: our wild self, our kinky self, our unshared ideas, our tender soul.

And by the way, that’s precisely why these are the scariest relationships of all. Our fear may do anything to save us from the risk of vulnerability. It’s best strategy is to trick us into fleeing by shouting “Next! Back to the hunt!” But if we don’t flee, we may find that the fear passes, and a deeper, more passionate love shows through on the other side.

If you find that you are seeking these relationships and ignoring the thrill of your attractions of deprivation, then celebrate. You’re on the path to a relationship that can sustain a future of love.

You become willing to give up your “flight patterns”

All of us, single or coupled, flee the heat and the risks of true intimacy. All of us. Any single person who wants to find love would do well to become a student of his or her own “flight patterns.” There are so many ways to flee intimacy, even as we seek it:

Staying home and watching TV every night. Surfing the net, instead of going to places where people with shared values can be found. Wasting time on attractions of deprivation. Not being authentic. Chatting online but never taking the steps to meet. Playing it cool. Looking for hookups instead of dates. Drinking too much on our dates.

At a certain point, we really start to mean it in our search for a life-partner. We realize that time is ticking, that we are growing tired of living and sleeping alone (Please note, this isn’t true for everyone. Many of us are quite happy living solo.)

When we’re willing to let go of our flight patterns; when we find ways to meet people who share our values; and when we only have second or third dates with people who hold the promise of becoming attractions of inspiration, then things really begin to change.

You lead with your authentic self.

Leading with your authentic self may seem on the surface like an easy thing, but it’s not. We get most wounded around the places we care the most. These are the parts of us that I call “core gifts.” Because our authentic self is so vulnerable and because most of us have incurred profound wounding around our core gifts, we tend to either suppress them or create air-brushed versions of them for the world to see. But these versions of self lack the vigor, soul and magnetism of our authentic self, so we find we are less successful in attracting the very people who would accept and treasure us for who we are.

I’ve found that the key does not lie in simply accepting our authentic self, in all its humanity. The key lies in treasuring it, in all its timidity, imperfection and excess. We have the right to honor our core gifts, and to only choose people who can do the same.

When we do that in a non-defensive way, our world begins to change. That’s when we somehow find ourselves dating people who accept us for who we are; people who are kind, generous of spirit and available. I can’t explain why this happens, but I’ve see it occur so many times that I’ve come to accept it as a happy truth in the frequently treacherous world of dating.

Instead of helping us embrace our core gifts, the singles world teaches us to dishonor them—in ourselves and in the people we date. Like those ugly fun-house mirrors, the prevailing singles culture flashes distorted, haunting images at us–images of our own flaws and inadequacies and of the inadequacies of the people we date. The solution is not to find our self-esteem within the walls of that hall of mirrors. It is to get out, and to find a better path.

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.

Social Goggles

Posted on by helpingsoul

Society looks through the lens of social goggles; seeing the world as rules are laid out for them. Wandering through a life set by laws, being ‘good citizens’ they wonder why they are unhappy. If you look at the world realistically, consider that the rules are not natural human nature.

Little girls are preprogrammed starting at a young age to stay away from boys and they are bad. An example from my childhood was when I was four a boy similar in age and I was curious. We had never seen each others ‘parts’, slithered to the back corner of my bedroom closet behind the hanging clothes and slipped our pants down to discover the difference. It was purely innocent but soon my Mother discovered us hiding in the closet and yelled at the young boy to get out of the house. She embarrassed and shamed me in front of this blameless boy as he ran home.

Once he left, my Mom stood me in front of her in the living room as she sat on the couch and scolded and told me how wrong it was to pull down my panties in front of a boy. I would be thought of as a “slut” or “whore” and “We don’t want the neighborhood to think of you in that way.”

I remembered feeling horrified and so shameful for what I did. I was confused. I didn’t hurt anyone. How could it be so wrong just to look? I was just a curious little girl.

Perhaps my Mom was jealous, insecure or even selfish because she didn’t want the possibility for guys to like me and she would have to fend off men as I grew older. I know she didn’t want to take away my innocence that parent’s value yet envy so much. They live vicariously through the purity of their children hoping they will see hope ahead even if it is to children’s detriment.

Soon little girls and boys learn to think on their own and rebel from their parents. It is difficult as they explore and find out for themselves what the opposite sex is all about.

Rebellion though may not lead to learning and growing to come into your own. It takes many years to discover who you are. The more you interact and meet people, you learn about yourself and what you like in others but there is still conflict from our preprogramming.

Women are pressured to get married and feel inadequate if they aren’t. When they do get married, there is over a 50% chance you will get a divorce. Why is this? Do we marry and then give up as if we got our price and the competition is over so I don’t need to try anymore. Or do we marry too early, not knowing the person well enough or perhaps even ourselves? I don’t know the exact answer. All I know is that marriage is a value most women posses. Men don’t have the same pressure as females but it is there.

I foresee the solution is to seek outside the rules. Learn who you are first. Become aware of what you like, don’t like and be confident in all that you are. Find a purpose, live out your dreams, desires and fantasies and love will come naturally.

It’s better to live life in your personal set of values than remaining conflicted and angry resulting in a psychological state from unconscious opposition between simultaneous but incompatible desires, needs, drives, or impulses.

If parents just allowed their children to naturally explore the world on their own anger, envy, and rebellion is avoided. Children are innocent; it is a wonderful thing. Don’t take it away from them because you are ashamed of your acts of rebellion and resentment.

If children were loved, supported, and free to roam naturally, bitterness is prevented. Rules are needed for fundamental moral values and etiquette and punishing for demeaning or hurtful behavior and acting out. The best rule is to treat others as you would like to be treated; with mutual respect.

The golden rule is that a person attempting to live by this rule treats all people, not just members of his or her in-group with consideration. The golden rule, with roots in a wide range of world cultures, is well suited to be a standard to which different cultures could appeal in resolving conflicts even in our own head.