Total compatibility is not a requirement for a long-lasting partnership | John & Julie Gottman

0:00 Love is a choice that you are making over and over and over again. It's easy to love somebody when they're warm and affectionate and complimentary and they're doing things for you and they pick up the kids on time. Harder to feel love when they make mistakes, when they get things wrong, when they're grumpy. When they're in a bad mood, when they come home late and they haven't told you. Nobody's perfect. So, can you love somebody who's not perfect? That's the choice you have to make. I'm Julie Gottman. And I'm John Gottman. I am a senior scientist at Gottman Incorporated.

0:44 I'm a co-founder of Affective Software. I'm the co-founder of the Gottman Institute, also the co-founder of Affective Software. and John and I work together as well as have a relationship together. Thank you for watching Big Think. If you'd like to support our work, we encourage you to join our members community. As a member, you'll receive our quarterly print magazine, a beautifully designed collection of the ideas and interviews that matter most. Bigthink is for curious people who want to take deep dives into big ideas. To support the media you want to see in the world, go to bigthink.com/membership. And now back to the interview.

1:26 How to sustain a longlasting and loving relationship? Is love enough to build a happy and lasting relationship? It's a start. It's an important start. It's very useful. It's a very wonderful thing to feel loved, to be loved, to give love. But there's a lot more required. Friendship absolutely is the foundation of lasting romantic love. Research shows that of all the couples who are dating, almost 70% of them started as friendships. They don't require that romantic spark. Romantic spark is great if it's there. Not required, not necessary. Friendship is necessary.

2:13 And we've defined what friendship means. You know, it's about building love maps. really getting to know this person, being vulnerable, having the person know you. It's about building fondness and admiration, respect and affection together. It's about really an attitude toward the relationship that it's special and that you're going to treat it as special. Those are the components of friendship that we've identified and they seem to be pretty powerful and they're enough. So, I think friendship is absolutely essential in any relationship that's going to be effective. When I've met a healthy couple, I know that they're truly strong by several little signals. One is that they laugh at each other's jokes. Two, they may be affectionate. They may just put their hand on their partner's knee or hold the other person's hand for a moment. They don't typically override the other person's opinion and humiliate them in public. They will listen to the other person when the other person is holding forth and talking about something. They are also going to say some things perhaps that are really respectful of you or complimentary to whoever else is there. That also shows a really strong relationship. And finally, love is a choice that you are making over and over and over again. Now, when I say that, I'm not talking about the very first stages of love where you know there's stars in the sky and things are twinkling and you're so excited, can't believe you're going to be seeing that person tonight. That we call limrance. And that's a little bit different. That's more falling in love. what we call falling in love, which has to do with chemicals. But choosing love over and over again looks really, really different. There's going to be days, especially when you're committed to one another, when you think, "Oh god, you know, I'm going to have to spend the whole day cleaning out the garage with my partner and they're going to complain about it all day long. Do I want to be with them? No, not really. Not today. Okay, you have a choice. You can either think about what's wrong with your partner and what they're going to do wrong during the day, or you can think, "Wow, isn't it great that they're going to help me even though they hate doing this?" Hear the choice. There's a choice in there.

5:23 So choice to love is really particularly important when our partners are not at their best. It's easy to love somebody when they're warm and affectionate and complimentary and they're doing things for you and they pick up the kids on time, etc. However, harder to feel love when they make mistakes, when they get things wrong, when they're grumpy, when they're in a bad mood, when they come home late and they haven't told you, you know, all those things. Nobody's perfect. So, can you love somebody who's not perfect? That's the choice you have to make.

6:10 The most glaring pattern that reveals that a relationship is strong is that people really are interested in one another. They're listening to one another. They're demonstrating to one another that they care, that they are fascinated by this person. And even during conflict, those patterns are there. You know, it's there's this agreement. There's this kind of like saying, "Yeah, talk to me. I want to hear what you have to say." H that's interesting. Tell me more. You know, so that surprises me. What? Help me understand that. I'm kind of confused by that, you know. Oh, that's fascinating. So, what's the history of that? How did that emerge? And you know, you see these this sense that the listener is a tourist in the landscape of the speaker's mind. You know, when we're a tourist, we're just all curiosity. We're open. You know, we're taking in the experience. And that's what the pattern is like in a relationship that's functioning well.

7:23 So some people actually underestimate how important, how foundational intimacy and affection are in a relationship. So what are we talking about when we say affection? First, affection means touch. Nonsexual touch, but touch nonetheless. It can be handholding, an arm around somebody, a big hug. Well, touch is incredibly important in a relationship. Not only that, but it's also really important in creating intimacy and creating a wonderful, passionate sexual life.

8:10 Sometimes it has sex a lot, sometimes it doesn't. Really depends on the couple. There's a huge range of sexuality that couples prefer. There's not a normal, it's got to be on Tuesdays and Thursdays. That's not part of a healthy relationship. It's what both people are comfortable with and that may involve some compromise. Safety is huge in sex, especially for women. You know, we did an experiment one time. God, it was really amazing where in a big workshop, we asked people to raise their hands. We asked first the women to raise their hands when they were in an underground garage. Would they feel scared? Everybody raised their hands. All the women raised their hands.

9:08 The men asked the same question. two or three, maybe five, that was it. So, one of the things in a heterosexual relationship is that there has to be a sense of safety. There has to be trust. There has to be emotional connection typically for a female or a transgender female in a relationship in which there's going to be physical intimacy. There has to be emotional connection and safety too. And the reality is that no matter what the relationship is, typically that emotional intimacy along with physical intimacy creates the most connection, the most euphoria, even the most excitement, the most passion, the most love. What separates couples whose intimate and sexual lives really stay alive and vibrant in the relationship continue to exist versus couples whose sex life deteriorates. What we discovered really was that the basis was affection and respect for one another. And you know we were surprised by that. you know, couples who even 3 years after the first baby was born had really stopped having sex with one another compared to couples 3 years after the first baby was born that sex lives were back again. You know, they were they were romantic. And I was delighted when this wonderful study that was done in 24 countries with 70,000 people discovered the same thing. The basis of a great sex life. What's different about the people who say they have an awful sex life and the people who say they have a great sex life and is things like saying I love you every day and meaning it. Kissing one another passionately for no reason at all.

11:20 Cuddling, my favorite. Julie and I have a cuddle couch where we cuddle and watch English people murder each other. And we love cuddling. And cuddling came out to be really, really important. having a weekly romantic date, you know, amazing. Taking romantic vacations together, being affectionate even in public. It not a single thing on that list had to do what happened in the bedroom. It wasn't about sex techniques in the bedroom. It was about affection and shared respect and friendship continuing, nurturing that part of the relationship. And that seems to be true everywhere on the planet. What do you do when you're having a hard time being physically or emotionally intimate with your partner? I think the answer is you talk about it. You really have to say to your partner, just like Carol Rusbolt said, you're you're investing everything in this relationship. Who's the person you need to talk to about this? Your partner. You've got to say, "Hey, baby. You know, I don't feel things are the same as they used to be. I'm really feeling lonely. I'm really feeling I'm not feeling like being physically connected with you. I'm feeling really distant from you." And that really sucks cuz I want to feel close to you. I really want us to be close. I want us to be intimate. Can we talk about how to make that happen?

12:55 One of the primary things that people misunderstand about love and a loving relationship is that you can't have love unless you love yourself first. Absolutely wrong. In fact, a loving relationship can help you to love yourself more. There are so many people who wouldn't say they love themselves at times. They may like themselves or they may not. They may dislike themselves. again that comes from unhappy childhoods. It can come from unhappy childhood. But it's very rare that somebody is so healed and so enlightened that they completely love themselves. No, not really. We're all imperfect. We're all continuing to grow.

13:57 And the reality is that actually we don't really want to finish growing until we leave this earth. We're going to keep growing. So that includes growing in self-love. You don't want to wait until you're 92 years old to have a relationship, do you really? I don't think so. So have a relationship. Whether you're healed, enlightened, or not, it doesn't matter. That's one big misconception.

14:33 Another one, this one just drives me crazy. You have to be completely compatible. You have to have the same interests. you have to come maybe from a similar town or similar background. You have to be a similar race or ethnicity. You have to have had the same school experience. You have to have the same passion, same interest, same desire for adventure. No. No. And no. None of those are true. The wonderful thing about relationships or people are never completely compatible ever. So the matter the fact of the matter is that people enrich the relationship with their differences.

15:25 One loves adventure, the other one loves to read. Okay. So the reader shares with the adventurer what they've read and the relationship is enriched by that. The adventurer likewise goes on an adventure, comes back, tells the story, the experience that enriches the relationship. So you don't have to worry about compatibility necessarily. I think maybe in terms of values, one wants a child and the other doesn't, then you may have a big problem. And that may not be a relationship that can work because there's no compromise, right? You're not going to have half a child. So, in some cases, incompatibility means the relationship probably won't work, but those are far and few between. So try not to worry too much about having everything be compatible. It's not nearly as important as you think. I think after everything I've learned about relationships, people should not be cynical about finding a person who really is the love of your life. My mother used to say, "Every pot has a lid." I think it's true for relationships and I I've see people become really cynical about relationships and think what's the point you know I'll never meet anybody as so many people are doing 40% of young people in Japan have given up on relationships there are people who call themselves involuntarily celibate you know who wind up being misogynists men who give up and wind up hating women. That is so wrong. There's somebody out there for you who loves you the way you are and will accept you the way you are. Don't give up and don't turn to hatred the way many of these misogynists are doing and take it seriously. I did. I went on 60 dates before I met Julie. She was number 61. She was an outlier, a clear outlier for me.

18:00 And there's an outlier for you. You know what still surprises me about love or about loving relationships after decades of working with couples and studying couples is the incredible resilience relationships can have. I think that's the thing that just blows my mind. For example, I have treated couples where they've had 30 affairs, 40 affairs. Some of those affairs they fell in love and they're absolutely miserable, living separately, feeling horrible about the other person, and then they come in to get help, amazingly enough. And then they work and work and work and work and by golly they build a new relationship and it's beautiful and the love returns. That is the most gorgeous thing that I get to see in my office all the time. That's the big surprise. How resilient relationships are. How forgiving people can be or even not forgiving but accepting how compassionate people can be despite being destroyed, you know, by some experiences they've had in the relationship. It's not magic from me. It's resilience and the desire to grow and love that couples show. That is what surprises me and is a beautiful thing to see.

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