The secret to lasting love | Eli J Finkel

0:02You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hume. Navigating romantic relationships amidst life's big decisions can be brutal. It's easy to find yourself in a bind. Do I choose me or do I choose love? Maybe you've heard a friend vent about this. Maybe you've felt it. Most likely, you've seen it play out in a rom-com. We see this assumption in the movie La La Land. Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone have a sparkling connection. And yet, the relationship fails. That's Eli Finkel, a psychologist and relationship expert who has spent decades studying what makes partnerships successful.

0:47Emma has this exciting opportunity overseas, and Ryan says, you've got to give this everything you've got. It's your dream. But he tells her, I got to follow my own plan. Stay here. This logic, as irrefutable as they find it, is flawed. In his talk, Eli explains that investing in relationships doesn't mean divesting from yourself. In fact, he says this isn't the only popular dating myth we subscribe to. It's pretty easy to think of genuine compatibility as sharing hobbies, loving the same bands, watching the same shows. But he also claims that genuine compatibility is so much more. It feels like we should be especially compatible with people who are more similar to us.

1:29We aren't. What actually matters is something smaller and more profound. And that small, profound thing may surprise you. At first, it seems trivial. But Eli says it's a secret ingredient to long-lasting, true-to-self relationships. We'll hear more right after a short break.

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4:29And now, our TED Talk of the day. Imagine you just died You need to get your spouse a message that could save their life Here's the problem The only person who can hear you is Whoopi Goldberg? Yes, it's true This is the plot of the movie Ghost Patrick Swayze is trying to communicate with Demi Moore through a psychic But imagine that's you What could you say in just a few urgent seconds that would convince your spouse it's really you? Patrick's first attempt fails. Tell her I love her. Too obvious. Too generic. But then he knows it's just one word. Ditto. Because ditto was their secret code for I love you.

5:24Something that only made sense inside the private world the two of them had built together. I think of that private world as a relationship's love motif. Just as a leitmotif is a recurring musical theme that identifies a character, a love motif is a recurring set of shared experiences and meanings that uniquely define a relationship. Your love motif includes the words that would pass your own version of the ditto test, but also your weird in-jokes, your distinctive moral code. It turns out love motifs matter a lot. I'm a psychological scientist who studied love for nearly 30 years. I wrote a book, The All-Or-Nothing Marriage, to explain how the best relationships work.

6:19I co-host a podcast that analyzes romantic movies from the perspective of relationship science. It's called love factually. But it was only recently that I discovered just how important love motifs are. In fact, they matter more today than ever before because a love motif isn't just something you do. It helps to define who you are. These days, around much of the world, we feel increasingly responsible, obligated to be true to ourself. And in almost any long-term relationship, you'll have moments where it feels like that pursuit of authenticity is at odds with your relationship commitment. How should we think about those moments?

7:10In the past, couples who got divorced felt ashamed for getting divorced. These days, it's increasingly the opposite. We feel shame for staying if it makes us feel like we're not authentic. But there's an assumption lurking here that in those moments, we struggle to be true to ourself and true to our relationship at the same time. We see this assumption in the movie La La Land. Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone have a sparkling connection, and yet the relationship fails. Not because there's no love, not because they don't understand or support each other, but because in those me versus us moments, the relationship never gets a voice.

8:00Emma has this exciting opportunity overseas, and Ryan says, you've got to give this everything you've got. It's your dream. But he tells her, I've got to follow my own plan. stay here. This logic, as irrefutable as they find it, is flawed. That's not how authenticity actually works. Before we unpack that, I'd like to call your attention to something kind of amazing that we often overlook. At the end of a dinner party with other couples, most of us feel lucky that the person we go home with is our own partner.

8:43Where does that sense of compatibility come from? We're told it comes from finding the right person. The idea is that we possess a constellation of attributes, our personality, our habits, our preferences, and we need to find somebody whose attributes fit with our own. It's as if we're a gear, and we need to keep shopping until we find a gear that's the right shape and size for us, one that will minimize friction as we rotate through life together. We can even find one on our phone. My Love Factually co-host, Paul Eastwick and I, have spent decades studying this issue across tens of thousands of couples.

9:24Here's the surprise. Compatibility is not something that you find. In some of our studies, including at speed dating events that I emceed, we asked singles to tell us about the attributes they were seeking. Things like physical attractiveness or sense of humor or kindness. And then we introduced them to a bunch of potential partners who varied on those attributes. Some of them were hotter or funnier or kinder than others. You'd expect that those people who told us they cared a lot about how, say, physically attractive a partner was, would be more attracted to hotter partners than people who said they didn't care as much.

10:10You'd be wrong. The attributes that we think we're looking for cease to matter once we meet a live flesh-and-blood partner. Same thing with similarity. It feels like we should be especially compatible with people who are more similar to us. We aren't. What actually matters is something smaller and more profound. A phrase gets repeated. A joke sticks. A ritual forms. And a private world takes shape. Two people across countless tiny interactions building something that never existed before. That's compatibility. not finding the right person, building your private world together. I'll give you an example from my own relationship.

11:08It dates back to our earliest months together. Our ditto was belly full of wine. That's a line from a Beatles song called Her Majesty, which includes that couplet, I want to tell her that I love her a lot, but I got to get a belly full of wine. Whenever I wanted to tell Allison that I loved her or was grateful for her, belly full of wine, delivered. And as couples repeat and riff on these tiny moments, they cease to be random moments. They become a love motif. They become who we are. That's pretty cool, because it offers a happy answer to that question from earlier about whether we can be true to ourself and true to our relationship.

11:59And once our relationship becomes part of our identity, being true to it stops feeling like self-denial. It starts feeling like authenticity, which is why we need to find our love motif and why once we've found it, we need to nurture and protect it. If our partner starts pulling away from our private world, it's not just disappointing, it's devastating. Because what we're losing, what's being rejected, isn't just an overture, it's an identity. Maybe you've seen the movie 500 Days of Summer. In one scene, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel are play-acting domestic life at Ikea. She jokingly says the kitchen sink is broken.

12:49He says, well, that's okay because, and he runs over to the next display, that's why we bought a home with two kitchens. They race over to the IKEA bedding department and they have sort of a romantic moment until they discover that they're being watched. It's playful. It's romantic. It's theirs. But later, when Joseph reaches out for that ritual on a subsequent shopping trip, she won't meet him there. What breaks your heart for him isn't just the rejection. It's the loss of a private world that no longer exists. And now we can see what went wrong with Emma and Ryan in La La Land. They realized too late that loyalty to their private world, to their playful banter, to their dancing, wouldn't have been a betrayal of authenticity.

13:43It would have been an expression of it. They have that final haunting glance in the jazz club, and we see the Parisian life they might have lived. The apartment, the child, the ordinary Tuesdays. Theirs wasn't a failure of love. It was a failure to protect the world. And a beautiful relationship became a wistful memory. In one study, we asked couples to tell us about their own love motif. They told us about their October-long horror movie calendar. They told us about the special song they sing to their baby daughter every Shabbat. And this one is my favorite. They told us about surfing on a shrimp sandwich.

14:32My colleague Lydia Emery and I kept tabs on these couples every day for weeks. We're still finalizing the article, but the results are clear. Couples who leaned more strongly into their love motif were happier. And in fact, those who leaned more strongly into their love motif on a given day were happier than on days when they didn't lean as much into it. Turns out it's not just about date nights. It's about savoring your private world together. Allison left me this post-it note a decade ago. The reason I can show it to you today is that it still lives in my cabinet where I see it all the time.

15:13The post-it note on the screen Eli is referring to reads, Belly full of wine. Have a great day teaching. I've moved offices since then. This post-it note moved with me. That's the thing about a love motif. To the outside world, looks trivial. From the inside, it's sacred. We're often told that relationships lose something over time. The novelty, the excitement, the passion. It's true. Some of that stuff goes. But something deeper grows. That shared history, that private world that means nothing to anyone else and everything to you. That world matters. So how do we build it? We've already seen the three moves.

16:03First, find it. Pay attention to those moments when something uniquely us is starting to emerge. Next, feed it. Revisit those moments. Nurture them into rituals, into inside jokes. And finally, fight for it. Against distraction. Against drift. Against the delusion that that tiny stuff can't really matter. That's how those shared symbols, something as small as a post-it note, become protectors of your private realm. Someday, one of you will be gone, and the other will be left holding a hundred tiny symbols that mean nothing to anyone else and everything to you. Please, while there's still time, build your love motif so when it matters most, one word will be enough.

17:05Thank you.

17:13That was Eli Finkel speaking at TED 2026. If you're curious about TED's curation, visit ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is a podcast from TED. This episode was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Taubner, and Tansika Sungmarnivong. Additional support from Daniela Ballarezzo, Christopher Faze-Bogan, Valentina Bohanini, Ban Ban Chang, Brian Green, and Lainey Lott. Learn more at podcasts.ted.com. I am Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feet.

17:55Thanks for listening.

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