The Gottman Doctors: Affairs Can Actually Save Your Relationship! But If You See This, It's Time To Walk Away!

After 50 years of research, the Gottmans can predict with 90% accuracy if a relationship is doomed for divorce, these are the answers to love you've been searching for Drs. John and Julie Gottman are professional relationship researchers that have published over 200 academic journal articles and 46 books. They are the co-founders of The Gottman Institute and Love Lab. In this conversation, the Gottmans and Steven discuss topics such as, how to repair from an affair, why dating apps are broken, the facts behind an awful sex life, and why to stop chasing the idea of 'the one'. Follow the Gottmans: Instagram - https://g2ul0.app.link/66wXYNo5QMb Twitter - https://g2ul0.app.link/5htmCbr5QMb The Gottman Institute - https://g2ul0.app.link/KlYOelu5QMb YouTube: You can purchase the Gottmans’ book, ‘Fight Right: How Successful Couples Turn Conflict into Connection’, here: https://amzn.to/4emRC7u Spotify: You can purchase the Gottmans’ book, ‘Fight Right: How Successful Couples Turn Conflict into Connection’, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/KosccZE5QMb Watch the episodes on Youtube - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACEpisodes My new book! 'The 33 Laws Of Business & Life' is out now - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACBook Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Get your hands on the brand new Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards here: https://appurl.io/iUUJeYn25v Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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

• 0:03Speaker 01

  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 have an awful sex life has to do with... Really?

• 0:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's right.

• 0:16Steven Bartlett?

  Doctors John and Julie Gottman are world-renowned psychologists

• 0:19Speaker 01

  and researchers who have studied over 40,000 couples

• 0:22Steven Bartlett?

  written over 50 books

• 0:23Speaker 01

  and helped millions of people find and stay in love for over 50 years.

• 0:27Speaker 00

  People don't know how to have good relationships.

• 0:30Steven Bartlett?

  So I've got so many questions. I'll start from the top. What are we getting wrong?

• 0:34Speaker 00

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

• 0:42Speaker 01

  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 were most divergent from them genetically, rather than people who were like them. Because we're not really turned on by our clone.

• 1:00Speaker 00

  And there isn't a one. Looking for the one is a big mistake.

• 1:04Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a great question.

• 1:09Speaker 00

  And this is what you do.

• 1:11Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:16Speaker 00

  Oh, very, very often.

• 1:17Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 1:18Speaker 00

  When there's recovery.

• 1:19Steven Bartlett?

  But can it be treated?

• 1:21Speaker 00

  75% so far in our research.

• 1:24Steven Bartlett?

  How?

• 1:25Speaker 00

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

• 1:36Steven Bartlett?

  John, Julie,

• 1:39Steven Bartlett?

  why do you both do what you do?

• 1:43Speaker 00

  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.

• 2:08Steven Bartlett?

  And would you class yourself as a clinical psychologist? Is that your official title?

• 2:12Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:13Steven Bartlett?

  Okay. John, could you answer the same question, which is, why do you do what you do? And I guess, what do you do?

• 2:18Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 2:54Steven Bartlett?

  And what do you do?

• 2:56Speaker 01

  I measure things accurately and reliably and, you know, 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 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.

• 3:39Steven Bartlett?

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

• 3:51Speaker 01

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

• 4:10Steven Bartlett?

  And how many books have you collectively written, Julie?

• 4:15Speaker 00

  I think we're on fifty one, but I'm not sure. I've lost count.

• 4:21Steven Bartlett?

  I am. Where I wanted to start with this conversation is 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. If you, 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

• 5:02Steven Bartlett?

  those relationships in the modern world and like 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 Euro Census Bureau, nearly fifty percent of the US population are currently single. According to the two thousand and twenty three survey by Pew Research, about thirty three percent of men reported being single, followed by twenty eight percent of women. The average first marriage for men is thirty years old, for women it's about twenty eight. We're having less sex ever before. And we're getting in relationships later than ever before. Marriages still seem to break down, almost half of them. And you probably know those numbers better than me.

• 5:44Steven Bartlett?

  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 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?

• 6:16Speaker 00

  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?

• 7:00Speaker 00

  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,

• 7:43Speaker 00

  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 isn't real.

• 8:23Steven Bartlett?

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

• 8:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's right.

• 8:32Steven Bartlett?

  Especially on a first date.

• 8:33Speaker 00

  That's right, that's right. That's, you know, 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, you know, 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.

• 9:06Steven Bartlett?

  What do you think about John?

• 9:08Speaker 01

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

• 9:15Speaker 01

  And, you know, part of the problem, I think, is that,

• 9:21Speaker 01

  as you mentioned, loneliness is a very serious thing. And so many people are lonely. And part of what they haven't done is to build a friendship network that can support them. Friends are just so important as a precondition for finding the love of your life. Because, you know, 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,

• 10:05Speaker 01

  almost 97% of the time, they're quite delighted to be contacted. And they meet an initial contact with interest, enthusiasm. And 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, that are, you know, places where you actually can enjoy you in 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.

• 10:50Steven Bartlett?

  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, 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.

• 11:07Steven Bartlett?

  It doesn't sound like a desperate version of me is a very attractive version of me.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:11Steven Bartlett?

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

• 11:26Speaker 01

  I think everyone is really interesting and attractive, as long as, you know, they're with somebody who's curious about them. So if you're with somebody who's really snobby and, you know, condescending and superior, nobody is at their best. You know, 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, their goals and their, their struggles are really fascinating. So I think it's the social context that makes the difference, rather than the individual.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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.

• 12:36Steven Bartlett?

  There's nothing you can measure?

• 12:37Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:55Speaker 01

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

• 13:02Steven Bartlett?

  I wonder about the role that self-esteem plays in attraction. It's kind of what we're talking about with like being desperate.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 13:10Steven Bartlett?

  They feel like a similar thing. And I wonder if there's any like 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. Like they just were like different people.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:34Steven Bartlett?

  So, yeah, a lot of attraction, we think like, 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 like do the internal work. What do you think?

• 13:46Speaker 01

  I think there's a lot to be said for that. Yeah. If you have a group of friends, you know, who really like you and you really like them, then it's easier to emerge. And, you know, this, this dating situation is so artificial that people are so terrified, you know, 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, you know, it doesn't matter what happens, right?

• 14:28Speaker 01

  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. You know, it's about exploring, the two people exploring one another. And then there's no objective, there's no, 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. And especially when you meet an outlier. Like, I met Julie. I dated sixty women before I met Julie. She's number sixty-one.

• 15:06Steven Bartlett?

  As you like to call it.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  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 head and shoulders above any person I'd met before.

• 15:24Steven Bartlett?

  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 till the... You find the one."

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:34Steven Bartlett?

  And this is often the cause of much procrastination, as it relates to love. Everyone's looking for the Julie, you know?

• 15:40Speaker 00

  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 preference 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 sixty-nine

• 16:20Speaker 00

  percent 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, there... You, out of, out of whatever, in the US, we have, what, three hundred fifty million people? There's probably...

• 16:49Speaker 00

  Five hundred thousand of them that you would find wonderful and attractive. Right? 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.

• 17:31Speaker 00

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

• 17:38Speaker 00

  Right?

• 17:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. Right?

• 17:41Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 17:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:59Steven Bartlett?

  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're telling me that we're attracted to people that like other things?

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, the research of Klaus Wedekin 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 Wedekin 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.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 19:02Steven Bartlett?

  So genetically different men?

• 19:04Speaker 01

  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 our clone. We're not turned on by people who are just like us. Julie 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 indoorsman. I like sitting in my chair and reading books on mathematics and quantum mechanics and general relativity theory.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  He's a consummate indoorsman.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  So we're very different, you know, but.

• 19:45Steven Bartlett?

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

• 19:50Speaker 00

  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.

• 20:23Steven Bartlett?

  Is there anything else? 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?

• 20:55Speaker 00

  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, you know, aren't I cool? Or I just won this athletic competition. No. Are they asking you questions about yourself?

• 21:38Speaker 00

  And not only that, but listening to the answers, right? And taking in the answers. And, oh, that's interesting. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. 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?

• 22:23Speaker 00

  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 gonna do? If they say they're gonna 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.

• 23:08Speaker 00

  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.

• 23:50Speaker 00

  You know, they, people need to take their time to get to know one another and peel away the layers slowly and carefully to build trust.

• 24:02Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think that speed to rush into a relationship is a sign of something else, further, like further upstream, maybe insecurity or?

• 24:10Speaker 00

  Sure. You bet. Needy there. 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.

• 24:28Steven Bartlett?

  With or without you energy.

• 24:29Speaker 00

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

• 24:38Speaker 01

  You know, I would give a different advice to, to a male who's, who's dating. I would say, you know, just have fun. You know, meet people, like when I was

• 24:49Speaker 00

  What a concept.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  Creating my database, you know, I, I met a woman who was a survivalist. She had a .38 Magnum pistol right by her, 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. You know, I, 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.

• 25:35Speaker 01

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

• 25:40Steven Bartlett?

  Were you desperate when you met Julie, though?

• 25:43Speaker 01

  I don't think I was. Oh, I don't think I was desperate. I'd been divorced for about seven years and I was looking to meet somebody my, you know, close to my age, who, you know, was an interesting person. And I met a lot of interesting people, but she was different.

• 26:00Steven Bartlett?

  I ask 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 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.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  I think either one can work.

• 26:34Steven Bartlett?

  Right.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  You know, I don't think there has to be a magic formula. So I think, 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.

• 26:48Steven Bartlett?

  But that sounds more like this group here. You know?

• 26:52Speaker 00

  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.

• 27:09Steven Bartlett?

  Good. 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 I think because, 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.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 27:46Speaker 00

  Wow. How did that manifest?

• 27:48Steven Bartlett?

  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. Whereas, 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, you know, they're kind of maybe a little bit busier. The ones that have that like, 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

• 28:33Steven Bartlett?

  willing to go on the date and see.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 28:35Steven Bartlett?

  If we're right, because I realized 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.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe you're right.

• 28:47Speaker 00

  Right.

• 28:48Speaker 01

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

• 28:53Steven Bartlett?

  Can you fake confidence, Julie?

• 28:55Speaker 00

  Uh-uh.

• 28:56Steven Bartlett?

  This is the problem.

• 28:57Speaker 00

  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,

• 29:42Speaker 00

  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 lot of work to do on myself.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  Well, you know, one thing, 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.

• 30:14Steven Bartlett?

  How?

• 30:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:35Speaker 00

  I guess.

• 30:35Speaker 01

  And all of those things, yeah.

• 30:37Steven Bartlett?

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

• 30:47Speaker 01

  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 negativity, bragging about themselves, talking about themselves rather than being interested in the other person.

• 31:32Steven Bartlett?

  Body language?

• 31:33Speaker 01

  Body language.

• 31:34Steven Bartlett?

  What would it?

• 31:34Speaker 01

  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, where there's this potential, this openness and potential.

• 31:51Steven Bartlett?

  What's the difference in body language?

• 31:53Speaker 00

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

• 32:01Steven Bartlett?

  So

• 32:01Speaker 00

  That.

• 32:02Steven Bartlett?

  For people that aren't watching, laying back on.

• 32:05Speaker 00

  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

• 32:15Steven Bartlett?

  I'm too good for this.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  Come to me, come to me, you know.

• 32:18Steven Bartlett?

  It's all me.

• 32:19Speaker 00

  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, not hunching their shoulders inwards, which shows they're probably depressed, they're insecure, they're hiding out. But, you know, just relaxed, 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 and they answer the question.

• 33:04Steven Bartlett?

  He did.

• 33:04Speaker 00

  All of those indicators.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  That ratio of I to other, I mean, mine, you know, predominates conversations where there's all this tension.

• 33:18Steven Bartlett?

  Say that again, sir.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 33:38Speaker 00

  There's also a reciprocity in the sense that, um, 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.

• 34:03Speaker 00

  So.

• 34:04Speaker 01

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

• 34:06Speaker 00

  Right, 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.

• 34:24Steven Bartlett?

  I am, 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.

• 34:35Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:36Steven Bartlett?

  But I, 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.

• 34:42Speaker 00

  How do you build confidence is really the question. You know, especially when you begin, uh, let's say in a family or with caretakers who are critical and contemptuous of you.

• 34:55Steven Bartlett?

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:56Speaker 00

  And when you have that from practically the ground up, as I did, uh, you internalize that and you believe you're worthless because you were treated as worthless. So how do 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, I, I used to, like, almost every single woman, no matter how beautiful

• 35:37Speaker 00

  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, 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...

• 36:23Speaker 00

  Just seeing the reality, the reality as opposed to the photo shot. 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 photo shopping 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, it's about the heart. It's about the heart. Is this a kind person?

• 37:07Speaker 00

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

• 37:15Steven Bartlett?

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

• 37:17Speaker 00

  No, and most people are lying on dating apps too. Yeah, that's right.

• 37:23Steven Bartlett?

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

• 37:32Speaker 01

  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 for, you're going to interact with them for five minutes

• 38:15Speaker 01

  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, the social context of dating is so important because if it's this very tense kind of, you know, evaluative context, nothing is going to work. But if it's this relaxed, sort of interested, curious context, almost everything's going to work.

• 38:48Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 39:00Speaker 00

  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. It 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. Time 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.

• 39:43Speaker 00

  So probably a coffee shop is nice where we met.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. 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.

• 40:02Speaker 00

  I know.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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 a evaluative context, you know, you're trying to be at your best. The other person's trying to be their best. But, you know, there's no real interest in one another.

• 40:45Steven Bartlett?

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

• 40:50Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 40:50Steven Bartlett?

  It's like an interview, basically.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like a job interview.

• 40:55Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  Never gonna work.

• 40:58Steven Bartlett?

  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 forty and his partner is significantly younger. It's my friend that lives in America, in New York, and he was telling me that because she's sort of twenty-three, 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 at that sort of thirty age where you start. Right. And I don't know if there's any research to...

• 41:32Speaker 00

  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, they're, the social history in which they were raised is different, right? 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 US.

• 42:06Steven Bartlett?

  Civil rights movement.

• 42:07Speaker 00

  The civil rights movement, you know, I got arrested, he didn't, I was unlucky, you know, and the protesting stuff, but, 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 forty-year-old who wants to now settle down, create a home, create a family, and a twenty-three-year-old are incredibly different developmentally. So their goals will be different, their values will be different.

• 42:51Speaker 00

  If you will, their maturity will be different.

• 42:56Speaker 00

  Their interests also may be strikingly different. There may be a real difference in valuing commitment, you know, and so on.

• 43:06Speaker 00

  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.

• 43:31Speaker 00

  So like a forty year old and a fifty year old, or fifty five year old, would be very different than a forty year old and a twenty three year old.

• 43:40Steven Bartlett?

  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 thirty years old, over forty 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.

• 44:14Steven Bartlett?

  That person's good enough. Just, you know, give them a chance and go on the date and...

• 44:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, 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, 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.

• 44:59Steven Bartlett?

  Is that, did you have non-negotiables, both of you? I, was there anything on your list of things that were mandatory in finding your partner?

• 45:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, for me, it was wanting children.

• 45:12Steven Bartlett?

  So that's a non-negotiable for you?

• 45:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:15Steven Bartlett?

  Was there anything else? That was non-negotiable.

• 45:19Speaker 01

  A monogamy.

• 45:20Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, yeah.

• 45:21Speaker 01

  For me.

• 45:22Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 45:24Speaker 00

  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?

• 45:41Speaker 00

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

• 45:48Speaker 00

  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.

• 46:20Speaker 00

  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.

• 46:36Speaker 00

  But let's see. Non-negotiables.

• 46:39Speaker 01

  I know very quickly, I think we both realized that whatever we spent time together, it's always interesting and fun.

• 46:51Speaker 00

  That's true.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Talking over anything is really.

• 46:53Speaker 00

  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.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I felt the same way about you. You know, and a road trip was an opportunity. It was really, you know, a time to talk about our dreams and our hopes about the world.

• 47:15Speaker 00

  Changes.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:17Steven Bartlett?

  What about sex and the role that plays in attraction? I ask 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.

• 47:36Steven Bartlett?

  It just wasn't there.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:38Steven Bartlett?

  And it was, it was crushing for me because this person was perfect in every conceivable way. Smart, kind, fun, everything. I just, and then the minute we moved to the, the next stage, it just wasn't there. I just wasn't sexually attracted to them.

• 47:54Speaker 01

  I had that experience too.

• 47:55Steven Bartlett?

  And so it made me add to my list of non-negotiables. A third thing, at the time, there was 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. Because, and so I just wonder what the role that sexual intimacy and sexual attraction plays in having a, a good relationship with someone.

• 48:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. 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. So, 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, eh, who cares? You know, I just want to have a cup of coffee and a pastry.

• 49:09Speaker 00

  You know, it, so every individual needs to decide that for themselves, how important it is. And then, you know, if it, 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.

• 49:40Speaker 00

  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.

• 49:53Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm.

• 49:53Speaker 00

  But it can become that way.

• 49:56Steven Bartlett?

  And what happens in those scenarios?

• 49:58Speaker 00

  Well, you know, typically, it's really interesting. Of course, in second, well, second marriages or relationships at, let's say, over forty 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.

• 50:42Speaker 00

  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.

• 51:17Speaker 00

  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,

• 51:40Speaker 00

  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.

• 52:25Steven Bartlett?

  Any thoughts on that, John?

• 52:26Speaker 01

  I, I, I think I agree with you. It's, it's not negotiable. You know, it's, it's one of these intangible things that, you know, if it's not there, it's not going to work very well.

• 52:40Speaker 00

  In the beginning, if it's not there.

• 52:42Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 52:43Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 52:44Speaker 01

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

• 52:48Steven Bartlett?

  Because it goes on a journey, all relationships.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 52:51Steven Bartlett?

  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 me 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, 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

• 53:36Steven Bartlett?

  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, like we've just met?

• 53:55Speaker 01

  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 was 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 hen?

• 54:38Speaker 01

  And the farmer said, no, always a different hen. 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.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  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

• 56:05Speaker 01

  with 70,000 people in 24 countries found that the differences between people who say they have a great sex life and people who say they have an awful sex life has to do with affection and emotional connection. The people who have a great sex life say I love you every day and mean it, kiss each other passionately for no reason at all, cuddle, they're 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.

• 56:46Speaker 01

  And if you're distant and, you know, and it's novel, sex is going to be great. It's just not true.

• 56:56Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 56:57Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 57:17Speaker 01

  No, no relationship between quantity and happiness. The quality, yes.

• 57:24Speaker 00

  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.

• 57:44Speaker 01

  Asexual.

• 57:45Speaker 00

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

• 57:51Speaker 01

  That's not going to work.

• 57:52Speaker 00

  That's not going to work.

• 57:54Steven Bartlett?

  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 I think I found in my relationship is that my partner's always working away, then 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.

• 58:36Speaker 00

  You know, I, 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.

• 58:47Steven Bartlett?

  Is that because of my attachment style, maybe? Because, because, you know, I wondered if...

• 58:52Speaker 01

  Could be.

• 58:53Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 58:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, could be, could be.

• 58:55Speaker 01

  I need a lot of solitude.

• 58:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:58Steven Bartlett?

  But you are around each other.

• 59:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:01Steven Bartlett?

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

• 59:03Speaker 00

  Well, we are, but, 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.

• 59:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:15Speaker 00

  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.

• 59:30Speaker 01

  I think there is something wonderful about being apart and then coming together, that reunion after you've been apart for a while is really quite delicious.

• 59:40Speaker 00

  You know what, though? This is so interesting. I, 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.

• 1:00:07Steven Bartlett?

  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, and 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.

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 1:00:20Steven Bartlett?

  I know it was a, 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, I'm speaking as a man, so I can't speak for all men, I can't speak for women, but speaking for, 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 with, naturally with conflict resolution, because conflict resolution to me sounds like blame. So if my, when my partner says, we need to talk, I'm like, oh my fucking God, what have I done now?

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:00:55Steven Bartlett?

  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, like the headmaster or the child being told off by their mother. I'm like, go on, 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, he then went on to say, because if you do that, then you can get to play.

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  Well, I think here's, here's my invention. I have a notebook in my back pocket.

• 1:01:22Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, yeah, interesting.

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:01:56Steven Bartlett?

  Which is not easy.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  That's not easy. That's really the work in relationships is being non defensive.

• 1:02:04Speaker 00

  But that's why we wrote Fight Right, you know, and when we gave, you know, a talk. It's, it's really.

• 1:02:14Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:02:32Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:02:37Speaker 00

  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. Strength. Resilience. Resilience, you know, all the stuff that's autonomous. For women, vulnerability, sensitivity. Empathy. Empathy, expressing emotion. So, you know, there's only one emotion that men are allowed to really openly express? Anger. Right?

• 1:03:23Speaker 00

  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?

• 1:04:05Speaker 00

  You know, I mean, so expressing vulnerable emotions, I think men are starting to catch up.

• 1:04:12Steven Bartlett?

  Don't women like strength?

• 1:04:15Speaker 00

  Yes and no. They like strength, but the problem is, 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.

• 1:04:36Steven Bartlett?

  It's like the opposite of connection.

• 1:04:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  But, you know, we observed eight-year-olds in playgrounds. And if you, 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. He says, "I never get the ball." "Okay, toss the ball to Brian." Brian gets the ball and they're 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

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  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, I only wore barrettes when, when I was little and now I don't wear them, you know. But that hurt my feelings when you said that. So I, 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. They're socialized so differently.

• 1:05:59Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, ask a man how he's feeling and 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, 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.

• 1:06:51Steven Bartlett?

  But John, as men, I think we can both agree that although, well, I'm speaking to 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 realise that if they didn't raise these issues, if they didn't express these issues, this relationship wouldn't be so good.

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:07:13Steven Bartlett?

  And we'd be in serious problems.

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

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

• 1:07:17Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  We need them.

• 1:07:20Steven Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 1:07:21Speaker 01

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

• 1:07:26Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:27Speaker 00

  Did you see Stephen's face? That was so cute, he went, oh my god.

• 1:07:31Steven Bartlett?

  No, but it's true. I realise it. I realise that this is serving a purpose, which is helping me.

• 1:07:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:36Steven Bartlett?

  You know, and it's helping us.

• 1:07:37Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:07:38Steven Bartlett?

  So I sit there and I'll listen to, you know, the things that, 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, sat right next to each other and we'll meet each other, sit in silence for hours, leave. Great evening.

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  Great evening, yes.

• 1:07:54Speaker 00

  That's right, yeah.

• 1:07:55Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:08:01Speaker 00

  Oh, you are not. That is so not true. You know, one of the things that I've certainly seen in my, my work, you know, I've been doing clinical work for 50 years and what I see is that men have exactly the same emotion. 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.

• 1:08:31Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:08:47Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 1:09:01Speaker 00

  Sending songs?

• 1:09:02Steven Bartlett?

  Sending songs out of the blue. And I'd never heard of it. Cause 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.

• 1:09:14Speaker 01

  Describes it.

• 1:09:15Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, he feels, yeah. 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 instead, they can't, he can't vocalize it to her. So he has to send her a Spotify link and say, listen, listen to this.

• 1:09:28Steven Bartlett?

  But it's the same thing, right? It's the inability to vocalize, which is hmm.

• 1:09:33Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:09:34Steven Bartlett?

  Difficult for men.

• 1:09:35Speaker 00

  Keep working on it.

• 1:09:36Steven Bartlett?

  I am, yeah. I'm like progressively getting better, but sometimes I have little relapses. If you, if I, I'm very busy in my mind and then I have to have one of those, we need to talk chats. So I think you're right, there needs to be a bit of a ritual around like, is this a good time?

• 1:09:53Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:09:53Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. Will I have your attention? Or you know, even being in a different environment.

• 1:09:57Speaker 00

  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, okay.

• 1:10:36Speaker 00

  So what do we need to change? What do we need to improve?

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:10:40Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:10:55Steven Bartlett?

  You mentioned the word there gratitude.

• 1:10:59Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:11:00Steven Bartlett?

  Why is gratitude so important? Being grateful for them and expressing it. Something that you do both do to each other.

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  I think I, 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 appreciated for it. And I, I know I wake up every morning lying next to Julian 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 okay. All, all the people I love are all right. And I'm with her and I get to see my grandson. And my daughter. Life is good.

• 1:11:47Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:12:08Speaker 00

  You know, there's been studies, who was it? Christy 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% of what their partners were doing.

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  The positivity.

• 1:12:29Speaker 00

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

• 1:12:35Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:12:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:37Steven Bartlett?

  Like a different filter.

• 1:12:38Speaker 00

  Exactly, different filters.

• 1:12:39Speaker 01

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

• 1:12:47Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:48Speaker 01

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

• 1:12:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:58Speaker 01

  As gratitude puts you in a different frame of mind, so you notice, actually, all the good stuff that's going on.

• 1:13:05Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:13:06Speaker 01

  It's more accurate.

• 1:13:07Speaker 00

  Let me draw, 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, okay, I don't have that long to live. I'm going to reprioritize 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

• 1:13:49Speaker 00

  do in my practice with couples, who are just racing through life together on parallel tracks, not connecting at all, is to ask them, okay, 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, I first kind of take people into a very relaxed state so their minds are really free to imagine.

• 1:14:35Steven Bartlett?

  And what's, what's that doing? Is it helping to crystallize whether they should be with this person?

• 1:14:40Speaker 00

  Uh, 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.

• 1:15:05Steven Bartlett?

  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 I've 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.

• 1:15:49Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 1:16:22Speaker 00

  Therapy helps. Has your friend gone to therapy? Good therapy?

• 1:16:27Steven Bartlett?

  Not with their partner, no.

• 1:16:29Speaker 00

  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 101 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,

• 1:17:11Speaker 00

  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 in the same patterns over and over and over and over again. Right?

• 1:17:32Steven Bartlett?

  Well, this is exactly what happens.

• 1:17:34Speaker 00

  That's your friend. But you can change those patterns once you know and practice what the alternatives are.

• 1:17:45Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:17:45Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's, I think it's one-

• 1:17:47Speaker 00

  Not the partner, the pattern.

• 1:17:49Steven Bartlett?

  An alternative pattern.

• 1:17:50Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:17:51Speaker 01

  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 of bail.

• 1:18:06Steven Bartlett?

  And you've seen this in your work.

• 1:18:07Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:18:08Steven Bartlett?

  This is like much of what you guys, you know, are known for is this. And whenever I hear people talking about the Gottmans, they're always talking to me about the idea of contempt and the four horsemen.

• 1:18:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:18:18Steven Bartlett?

  For anyone that doesn't know.

• 1:18:18Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:18:35Steven Bartlett?

  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, and how you found these four horsemen.

• 1:18:44Speaker 01

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

• 1:18:55Steven Bartlett?

  So how did you conduct this experiment?

• 1:18:57Speaker 01

  Really just observing couples talking about how their day went.

• 1:19:01Steven Bartlett?

  How did you observe them?

• 1:19:02Speaker 00

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

• 1:19:06Steven Bartlett?

  What's the lab?

• 1:19:07Speaker 00

  Uh, the lab was a room where they sat facing one another. There were video cameras here and there that were focused on-

• 1:19:20Speaker 00

  Each individual and their faces and their body language. There was what was called a gigolometer, 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.

• 1:19:35Speaker 01

  Blood velocity, respiration.

• 1:19:37Speaker 00

  Respiration.

• 1:19:38Speaker 01

  Conductance.

• 1:19:39Speaker 00

  And all of that, all of that data that was pulled from those measures was all synchronized, you know, hundredth of a second by hundredth of a second. And they would talk for, let's say, fifteen 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.

• 1:20:06Speaker 01

  Then a positive topic.

• 1:20:08Speaker 00

  And then a positive topic.

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

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

• 1:20:20Steven Bartlett?

  So you really spied on them.

• 1:20:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:22Steven Bartlett?

  You really spied.

• 1:20:23Speaker 01

  We spied on them, right.

• 1:20:24Speaker 00

  Except they knew they were being spied on.

• 1:20:26Steven Bartlett?

  For twelve hours, you watched them just sort of chill and hang out together, couples.

• 1:20:29Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:20:30Steven Bartlett?

  How many couples have you?

• 1:20:31Speaker 01

  Hundred and thirty.

• 1:20:32Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:20:34Speaker 00

  Three thousand.

• 1:20:35Steven Bartlett?

  Three thousand.

• 1:20:36Speaker 00

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

• 1:20:44Speaker 01

  How their relationship changed.

• 1:20:46Speaker 00

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

• 1:20:52Steven Bartlett?

  And what did you find?

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

  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 happy, stable relationship, it averaged five positives for every negative.

• 1:21:10Steven Bartlett?

  Positives about the other person or about what?

• 1:21:12Speaker 01

  No, just positive emotion, like.

• 1:21:14Speaker 00

  Let's describe positives. So a positive can be nodding your head, it can be smiling, it can be asking a question.

• 1:21:23Speaker 01

  Affection, humor, validation.

• 1:21:25Speaker 00

  Showing interest.

• 1:21:26Speaker 01

  Interest in the other person. Negative would be anger, irritability, disappointment, hurt, disgust, contempt.

• 1:21:36Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:21:48Speaker 00

  During conflict.

• 1:21:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:22:11Speaker 00

  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, "God, you're thoughtless. You didn't even call me when you were gonna be late." You know, thoughtless, lazy, inconsiderate.

• 1:22:32Speaker 01

  Always, never.

• 1:22:33Steven Bartlett?

  Okay. So making it about their personality and their character.

• 1:22:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, 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.

• 1:22:52Speaker 01

  Superiority.

• 1:22:53Steven Bartlett?

  So give me an example of that.

• 1:22:55Speaker 01

  "You're such an idiot." You know, "You just never get things right." You know, "It's just, you're just not like me." You know, "I'm thoughtful and considerate." You're just, you're just...

• 1:23:08Speaker 00

  You're stupid.

• 1:23:08Speaker 01

  You're a narcissist.

• 1:23:10Speaker 00

  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, inner snide kind of stuff.

• 1:23:23Speaker 01

  Sarcasm is a good example.

• 1:23:24Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:23:26Speaker 01

  Mockery.

• 1:23:27Steven Bartlett?

  Especially in front of people.

• 1:23:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 1:23:30Speaker 00

  Awful.

• 1:23:31Speaker 01

  So the person says, "Well, I really care how you feel." "You really care how I feel." You know?

• 1:23:39Speaker 00

  So that's contempt. Yeah. Stonewalling is really emotional withdrawal. Don't forget defense. And defensiveness. Yeah, so every, defensiveness is the one we all have. Yeah. It's so hard to get over, which is, you know, you either kind of whine like an innocent victim, you know, "I did too pay the bills on time. What do you mean?" I'm thoughtful, I'm thoughtful. "I am thoughtful. Don't you remember blah, blah, blah?" Or it's counterattack. "Oh, yeah?" You're so perfect, huh? You never clean up the kitchen. You know, it's that counterattack.

• 1:24:13Steven Bartlett?

  Do you find that insecure people are more defensive?

• 1:24:16Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:24:16Steven Bartlett?

  I have this like 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.

• 1:24:26Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:24:26Steven Bartlett?

  That you like, you live in a, this state of like, "I have never done anything wrong. I can't possibly do anything wrong." And if someone points out something you've done wrong.

• 1:24:32Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:24:33Steven Bartlett?

  It's so painful if you're insecure.

• 1:24:36Speaker 00

  Right, walking on it.

• 1:24:37Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:24:40Speaker 00

  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, the earth, if you take a picture of the earth, and 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

• 1:25:18Speaker 00

  down into that hot lava of self-loathing, that is agony, absolute, 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."

• 1:25:38Steven Bartlett?

  So you defend.

• 1:25:39Speaker 00

  You defend. Oh, yeah. Well, I'm the one who does all the bill paying. What are you doing? You know, it's defensiveness.

• 1:25:46Steven Bartlett?

  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, you know, I know, sorry, my bad. But if that's linked to maybe, I don't know, your childhood where your, 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, forty.

• 1:26:08Speaker 00

  Can be. 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,

• 1:26:50Speaker 00

  is that they feel so attacked that their heart rates are zooming up above a hundred beats a minute, which just sitting here.

• 1:26:59Speaker 01

  It's secreting cortisol and adrenaline massively, and so they're shutting down.

• 1:27:05Speaker 00

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

• 1:27:14Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:27:19Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:27:19Steven Bartlett?

  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're, they don't have the tools to resolve whatever issue they keep smashing into.

• 1:27:36Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:27:37Steven Bartlett?

  Um, but much of why I think, from what I've heard.

• 1:27:45Steven Bartlett?

  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 shown 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.

• 1:28:19Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:28:20Steven Bartlett?

  You know, it's kind of, 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 as well, this is a homosexual relationship.

• 1:28:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:28:37Steven Bartlett?

  Between two men.

• 1:28:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:28:39Steven Bartlett?

  So, you know, we talked earlier on about the woman, the woman's sometimes the instigator of expression of needs.

• 1:28:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:28:44Steven Bartlett?

  It's just, you know.

• 1:28:45Speaker 00

  Oh, that's so sad, you know, so it sounds like both of them have terrible difficulty making themselves vulnerable to the other. And saying what they feel. And it may be that when the, 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. And so 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.

• 1:29:26Steven Bartlett?

  At this point about men not being very good at expressing their feelings, do we, you know, with that in mind and with the knowledge that expression of feelings are good for building connection.

• 1:29:38Steven Bartlett?

  How come homosexual relationships with men work? And I don't know, is there any data to show that they they last less longer than a relationship where a woman is stereotypically more likely to, you know, talk about the challenges and the issues and bridge the connection?

• 1:29:54Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:29:55Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:29:57Speaker 01

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

• 1:30:04Speaker 00

  For 12 years.

• 1:30:05Speaker 01

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

• 1:30:18Steven Bartlett?

  Men or women in those homosexual relationships?

• 1:30:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:30:36Speaker 00

  Well, especially, you know, pre, well.

• 1:30:39Steven Bartlett?

  So do we?

• 1:30:40Speaker 00

  Wait, 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're, they tend to feel very insecure around polygamy, let's say, or polyamory.

• 1:31:24Speaker 00

  And so they really are more wanting monogamy with their partners.

• 1:31:30Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:31:38Speaker 01

  They are. They are better in general. They're better.

• 1:31:42Steven Bartlett?

  Do you know if they last longer?

• 1:31:44Speaker 01

  I don't know that there's data on that. I don't think there are differences in how long they last.

• 1:31:49Speaker 00

  Is that right?

• 1:31:50Speaker 01

  I don't think there's any differences.

• 1:31:53Speaker 00

  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 a heterosexual society, right?

• 1:32:32Speaker 00

  So, 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.

• 1:32:56Steven Bartlett?

  And on these four horsemen, a word you didn't mention, but I wondered if it'd fit in there somewhere, is the word "gaslighting," which has become quite popular in society. What is gaslighting? How does that show up?

• 1:33:07Speaker 01

  So, in physically violent relationships, that are characterologically violent, where there's a perpetrator and a victim, those kinds of domestic violence, quite often, the perpetrator is communicating to the victim that everything about their reality is wrong. They never raised their hand against this person, you know, it's just all imagined. They're basically doing, you know, 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,

• 1:33:51Speaker 01

  that her whole sense of reality is wrong. So he does things like change the order of the pictures, and, you know, in the home.

• 1:34:05Speaker 01

  Steal jewelry that he's given her that, you know, 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 she 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.

• 1:34:46Speaker 00

  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 gaslighting. 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.

• 1:35:21Speaker 01

  That's not gaslighting.

• 1:35:22Speaker 00

  That is not gaslighting. So it's being misused in the culture all the time.

• 1:35:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:35:28Speaker 00

  Because people always have two points of view about.

• 1:35:32Speaker 01

  Different perceptions in any situation.

• 1:35:35Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:36:08Speaker 01

  And that's not a.

• 1:36:09Speaker 00

  And it isn't. That's not what gaslighting is.

• 1:36:12Steven Bartlett?

  At what point does it become gaslighting? Is that when you're intentionally trying to?

• 1:36:16Speaker 00

  Make the other person crazy.

• 1:36:17Steven Bartlett?

  Okay. Believe that they're crazy, so they don't trust themselves.

• 1:36:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:36:31Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I spoke to a domestic violence victim once who told me that her partner, when after like love bombing her, so 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'd put her car keys in the fridge.

• 1:36:46Speaker 00

  Ah.

• 1:36:47Steven Bartlett?

  And he'd be like, I didn't, why did you put your car keys in the fridge?

• 1:36:50Speaker 00

  That's gaslighting.

• 1:36:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's gaslighting.

• 1:36:52Speaker 00

  Perfect description.

• 1:36:53Steven Bartlett?

  So then she thinks she's going crazy. So he goes, well, I'm gonna have to take your car keys.

• 1:36:57Speaker 01

  Often.

• 1:36:57Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:36:59Speaker 01

  That's right, often done in the service of extreme jealousy.

• 1:37:02Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:03Speaker 01

  And socially isolating the victim.

• 1:37:06Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:06Speaker 00

  We've treated domestic violence a lot. And God, I'll never forget this, one guy who had 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.

• 1:37:32Speaker 01

  Who did you fuck today?

• 1:37:34Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:37:35Speaker 01

  Where'd you go? Nowhere. Oh, yeah, right, you liar, you whore, you.

• 1:37:44Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 1:37:53Speaker 00

  Blah, blah, blah.

• 1:37:55Steven Bartlett?

  But it.

• 1:37:55Speaker 00

  Not true.

• 1:37:56Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:56Speaker 00

  Not true. You know, first of all, it doesn't happen all the time. Secondly, oftentimes the victim usually, you know, in a hetero, it's a, 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 gonna want you.

• 1:38:32Speaker 00

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

• 1:38:36Speaker 01

  And she also has a dream that he's gonna change.

• 1:38:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:38:40Speaker 01

  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 gonna get this under control.

• 1:38:50Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 1:39:00Speaker 00

  Very good. A plus.

• 1:39:03Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:39:04Speaker 00

  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, you're thinking about, okay, me, what do I need? What do I need? How am I gonna get it? And so on. I've gotta 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.

• 1:39:48Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:40:29Speaker 00

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

• 1:40:35Steven Bartlett?

  How'd you go about? You said you spoke to couples and women who've been through domestic abuse. And, you know, how do you go about helping them?

• 1:40:45Speaker 00

  Okay, 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.

• 1:40:58Speaker 00

  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 to plan it, especially if there are kids and so on. But there's also, that's only 20% of the domestic violence out there. Only 20%. 80% of the domestic violence is what we call situational domestic violence.

• 1:41:39Speaker 00

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

• 1:42:24Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:42:51Speaker 00

  So both people typically are getting flooded during conflicts. So those people, we can really, really help.

• 1:42:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:43:18Steven Bartlett?

  Is this part of the reason why you're in the UK at the moment? You talked about your-

• 1:43:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, the trauma.

• 1:43:24Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, it's trauma?

• 1:43:24Speaker 00

  It's trauma. At Oxford, yeah, we're talking about trauma.

• 1:43:28Steven Bartlett?

  And also affairs?

• 1:43:30Speaker 01

  Affairs.

• 1:43:31Steven Bartlett?

  Talking about affairs, you're talking about treating affairs?

• 1:43:33Speaker 00

  Right. That's right.

• 1:43:35Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:43:49Speaker 00

  Seventy-five percent so far in our research. Sure rate.

• 1:43:56Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 1:44:02Speaker 01

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

• 1:44:05Speaker 00

  A physical affair.

• 1:44:07Steven Bartlett?

  A physical affair sex?

• 1:44:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, it usually, so it can be emotionally, you know, falling in love with somebody else without physical consummation or

• 1:44:20Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:44:36Speaker 01

  So it almost always involves deception.

• 1:44:39Speaker 00

  Right, always. It always does. Yeah, that's a big part of it, is the deception and broken trust. You know, what affairs do is they turn, you know, the hurt partner's world upside down. Everything they believed about the partner is wrong. Everything that they thought they shared in terms of values is wrong.

• 1:45:10Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:45:20Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:45:21Speaker 01

  I didn't know this. Yeah, who are you?

• 1:45:23Speaker 00

  That's right. 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.

• 1:45:43Speaker 01

  Purpose.

• 1:45:44Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:46:02Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:46:10Speaker 01

  Well, we don't really know. You know, but, you know, probably around 30% of all couples is...

• 1:46:19Speaker 00

  You think it's that high?

• 1:46:20Speaker 01

  The conservative estimate.

• 1:46:21Speaker 00

  Conservative, really? I've heard 15% of men and women. And the thing that's interesting is that the stats 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 other...

• 1:46:53Speaker 01

  The milkman and the plumber was all...

• 1:46:58Speaker 00

  And the mailman, maybe. You know, they, so, you know, they were stuck at home, having coffee around their, you know, kitchen table with their neighbor woman, you know, whoever. But once they entered the workforce, then they had access to a whole field of our potential people out there. And so, you know...

• 1:47:21Steven Bartlett?

  It's interesting, as you say that, 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, the other things is she would become more independent in every sense of the word.

• 1:47:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. That's right. She doesn't have to stay in the marriage. She can support herself financially.

• 1:47:40Steven Bartlett?

  So how do you treat an affair?

• 1:47:43Speaker 00

  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

• 1:48:24Speaker 00

  the kind of sex they had. And here's why. I mean, it's, it's an important thing. Almost every person who's suffered through an affair has PTSD from it, 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

• 1:49:06Speaker 00

  images, the smells, the, 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 plague her to an even greater degree. And it's horrible. So, a tone.

• 1:49:42Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:50:23Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:51:04Speaker 00

  Atonement, 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 emotionally distant. And the person who did the betraying got lonely, got lonely. So... Oftentimes, the affairs are not about just getting more sex.

• 1:51:43Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:52:24Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:52:40Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 1:52:54Speaker 00

  A thousand.

• 1:52:56Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:53:00Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:53:01Speaker 01

  You have to know what you're apologizing for.

• 1:53:04Speaker 00

  Well, 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.

• 1:53:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:53:23Speaker 00

  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? Boom, she goes into full-blown PTSD reenactment, basically, where it's gotten triggered again. And, oh my God, he's doing it again.

• 1:54:03Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:54:14Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting.

• 1:54:16Steven Bartlett?

  I guess that's the cost of cheating, is the first one. Yeah, it really is. Never be the same again. It's a high cost. It's a very high cost.

• 1:54:23Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:54:24Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. 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 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. No. They don't actually, so they might try and hazard a guess and do even more harm.

• 1:54:52Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:54:52Steven Bartlett?

  Well, I think it's because you gained 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.

• 1:55:02Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:55:03Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:55:07Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:55:52Speaker 00

  Okay, so, you know, you can, you can easily say, oh, because the guy has a sexual addiction or blah, blah, blah. No, not true.

• 1:56:04Speaker 00

  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, 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.

• 1:56:42Steven Bartlett?

  Wow.

• 1:56:45Steven Bartlett?

  It just goes to show how complex it can be.

• 1:56:47Speaker 00

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

• 1:56:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's a torment, not forgiveness. There's a big difference there. Because when therapists emphasized forgiveness in this affair situation, they would blame the betrayed partner for not forgiving.

• 1:57:08Steven Bartlett?

  Is acceptance important?

• 1:57:10Speaker 00

  Acceptance of what?

• 1:57:12Steven Bartlett?

  The situation you find yourself in.

• 1:57:14Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:57:15Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:57:15Speaker 00

  That's bad.

• 1:57:18Speaker 00

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

• 1:57:26Steven Bartlett?

  The reason I asked 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.

• 1:57:37Speaker 00

  What's the situation?

• 1:57:38Steven Bartlett?

  Situation is he's basically, someone's broken up with him.

• 1:57:41Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 1:57:41Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:57:58Speaker 00

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

• 1:58:04Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:58:06Speaker 00

  Right, that's, 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. Okay, I really have made all these mistakes.

• 1:58:29Speaker 00

  And, you know, if, if the partner, maybe, maybe, you know, tiny little teeny weeny spark left, um, 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.

• 1:58:59Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:59:06Speaker 00

  Oh, every time.

• 1:59:07Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 1:59:08Speaker 00

  When there's recovery. 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 gonna, 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.

• 1:59:47Speaker 00

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

• 1:59:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:00:07Steven Bartlett?

  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? I'm gonna ask you first, John, from a research perspective, is there any particular research which you'd consider to be your favorite research that was most pivotal for the way you think that you haven't mentioned yet?

• 2:00:42Speaker 01

  I think that relationships.

• 2:00:46Speaker 01

  Can be great sources of longevity, health,

• 2:00:52Speaker 01

  great context for raising children. And so they can, they can have this wonderful magic.

• 2:01:01Speaker 01

  It's health giving, longevity giving. And it just requires certain conditions to be met. And those are the principles that make relationships work.

• 2:01:12Steven Bartlett?

  Is there a particular piece of research that

• 2:01:17Steven Bartlett?

  you're most fond of? I know that's difficult.

• 2:01:19Speaker 00

  That he's done or somebody else has done?

• 2:01:22Steven Bartlett?

  Both.

• 2:01:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I think this whole field of social epidemiology is, 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.

• 2:01:51Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 2:02:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:02:03Steven Bartlett?

  What, what are bids for connection?

• 2:02:06Speaker 01

  Well, in this, in this apartment lab that Julie and I built,

• 2:02:11Speaker 01

  there were three cameras.

• 2:02:14Speaker 01

  And at the time, it was only possible to technologically merge two of them in a split screen. So the people in the, 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 this, you had this, you know, sort of.

• 2:02:56Speaker 01

  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 look 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 look back six years later, they had turned toward their partner's bids 86% of the time. So this huge difference, 33% versus 86%.

• 2:03:37Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 2:03:45Speaker 00

  It's not physical, mind you.

• 2:03:48Speaker 01

  Well, could be.

• 2:03:49Speaker 00

  No. What I'm trying to say is that a lot of people interpret turning toward as, oh, you turn your body towards your partner. No, it's not. It's responding to your partner's desire for interest or attention.

• 2:04:06Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 2:04:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:04:07Steven Bartlett?

  And then turning away is me not responding.

• 2:04:10Speaker 01

  Not responding.

• 2:04:11Steven Bartlett?

  Then turning against would be?

• 2:04:12Speaker 01

  An irritable kind of response.

• 2:04:14Speaker 00

  Stop interrupting me, I'm working.

• 2:04:16Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 2:04:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:04:18Steven Bartlett?

  So 86% of the couples that stayed together were those that turned toward, i.e. they acknowledged the bid for connection.

• 2:04:26Speaker 01

  The couples who stayed married had turned toward bids an 86% of the time. So when their partner tried to get their attention, probability of them turning toward was 0.86.

• 2:04:40Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 2:04:40Speaker 01

  86% of the time. It turns toward. The other thing that was interesting was that... People who turn 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.

• 2:05:14Steven Bartlett?

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

• 2:05:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can. Just increase awareness.

• 2:05:19Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 2:05:30Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 2:05:31Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 2:05:41Steven Bartlett?

  Just turning mid-email, hi, what's up, what's, you know, and it helps.

• 2:05:47Speaker 00

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

• 2:05:53Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:53Speaker 00

  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?

• 2:06:06Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:07Speaker 00

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

• 2:06:14Speaker 01

  That's a nice way of saying it.

• 2:06:15Speaker 00

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

• 2:06:20Steven Bartlett?

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

• 2:06:23Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 2:06:24Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 2:06:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:06:33Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 2:06:40Speaker 00

  That's not gonna work.

• 2:06:41Steven Bartlett?

  It doesn't do it.

• 2:06:42Speaker 00

  That's not gonna work.

• 2:06:44Steven Bartlett?

  Or even worse is just that, one sec.

• 2:06:45Speaker 00

  Good try, but no, C minus.

• 2:06:50Steven Bartlett?

  If people want to learn more about all the work that you do, how do they go about finding you?

• 2:06:58Speaker 00

  Well, a couple of things. They can go to Gottman.com, G-O-T-T-M-A-N dot com, internet site. There's a whole bunch of stuff there, or they can go to our books.

• 2:07:14Speaker 00

  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.

• 2:07:31Speaker 01

  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 in 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.

• 2:07:56Steven Bartlett?

  We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next. We're going to start with Julie. Tell us about a paranormal experience you've had.

• 2:08:04Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 2:08:08Speaker 00

  These always, 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.

• 2:08:53Speaker 00

  And I was sitting, tiny little being, in its hands. And it lifted me up off the ground.

• 2:09:03Speaker 00

  And...

• 2:09:07Speaker 00

  I heard many truthful things about reality that form my very foundation.

• 2:09:20Steven Bartlett?

  Can you give me one?

• 2:09:23Speaker 00

  Everybody suffers, everybody. And so, 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, it's not a sense of duality. Suffering is part of the perfection of our existence.

• 2:10:08Steven Bartlett?

  It really does change your perspective on yourself and others when you, when you hear that, that point about suffering being unavoidable, because then at least you can, you don't treat yourself as such a victim to

• 2:10:19Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 2:10:20Steven Bartlett?

  suffering. You realize that it's part of, it's fundamentally attached to all the things that I love as well, you know?

• 2:10:24Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 2:10:25Steven Bartlett?

  What about you, John? Have you ever had a paranormal experience?

• 2:10:30Speaker 01

  Um.

• 2:10:31Steven Bartlett?

  When the numbers just came together perfectly and?

• 2:10:35Speaker 01

  I don't know if this is a paranormal experience, but I, um, I was once driving through the University of Washington Arboretum and I was really, really sick. And, um, and I was, 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 canceled 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

• 2:11:16Speaker 01

  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, oh, well, maybe this is real. By the time I got through the arboretum, all my cold symptoms were gone. And it was important for me to be there for that client. And I was healthy

• 2:12:00Speaker 01

  enough to actually have a session with her. So that constitutes a paranormal experience, but it's pretty weird. She was okay.

• 2:12:13Steven Bartlett?

  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 Colombia and

• 2:12:58Steven Bartlett?

  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 do. And thank you for being here again.

• 2:13:12Speaker 01

  Thank you, Stephen.

• 2:13:13Speaker 00

  And thank you very much for being, again, the best interviewer we've had in 30 years.

• 2:13:25Steven Bartlett?

  Isn't this cool? Every single conversation I have here on the Diary of a CEO, at the very end of it, you'll know, I ask the guest to leave a question in the Diary of a CEO. And what we've done is we've turned every single question written in the Diary of a CEO into these Conversation Cards that you can play at home. So you've got every guest we've ever had, their question, and on the back of it, if you scan that QR code, you get to watch the person who answered that question. We're finally revealing all of the questions and the people that answered the question. The brand new version two updated Conversation Cards are out right now at theconversationcards.com.

• 2:14:10Steven Bartlett?

  They've sold out twice instantaneously. So if you are interested in getting hold of some limited edition Conversation Cards, I really, really recommend acting quickly.