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

29:48You'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 willing to go on the date and see. Yeah, right. If we're right because I realize 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. Yeah, maybe you're right. Right. Right. It is better if you're just kind of confident and not so desperate. Any fake confidence.

30:21Julie. No, you know, as a matter of fact, when people try to fake confidence, they often overstep it. Right. And, uh, Kali, 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, this perfect image to people that I wasn't, which is what he was trying to do.

31:16And so then it's like, oh, I got work to do on myself. Well, you know, one thing, one thing about this dating situation, and 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. Really, we measure openness, uh, 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 in all of those things.

32:04So can you give me really specifically exactly how a couple would show up really specifically if they were, if they had promised to last and be successful together? 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, blood of, you know, negativity, um, bragging about themselves, talking about themselves rather than being interested in the other person.

32:59Body language? Body language. What would a 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, whether this potential, this openness and potential. What's the difference in body language? Let me demonstrate it. So somebody who's overconfident, pretend he's not sitting here is just going to be doing it. So that. For people that aren't watching, laying back on... 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...

33:42Come to me, come to me, you know, it's all me. 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 relax. 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. All of those indicators. That ratio of eye to other, line -E mine, you know, predominates conversations where there's all this tension.

34:45Say that again, sir. 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, and being interested in we, and that emerges, that openness emerges in language as well. There's also a reciprocity in the sense that, let's say you and I are meaning, 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. So I'm only happy when I'm talking about myself.

35:33Right. 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. 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. But 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. How do you build confidence is really the question. You know, especially when you begin, let's say in a family or with caretakers, who are critical and contemptuous of you.

36:22And when you have that from practically the ground up, as I did, you internalize that and you believe your worthless, because you were treated as worthless. So how do you build the confidence?

36:48Right. So, you know, you know, you're going to have to be a mere mere and saying, all right, this is who I am. This is who I am. This is who I am. You know, one of us. I used to, like, almost every single woman, no matter how beautiful you are, you will always measure yourself as inferior to somebody else. Oh, okay. 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 whatever, a woman that's larger than the standard, thinner than the standard, women come in all shapes and sizes.

37:46So do men. And just seeing the reality, the reality as opposed to the Photoshop. You know, that's the thing that's so difficult about technology is that these days, you know, especially with dating apps and so on, people are photoshopping 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 or the education. It's really about the, well, here we go. It's about the heart. It's about the heart. Is this a kind person?

38:34Is this a caring person? Is this a person who exhibits compassion? Who treats people equally and so on? A dating app wouldn't work on that basis, wouldn't it? No. And most people are lying. Yeah. That's right. Is there a difference in what men and women look for in a partner as it relates to attraction when they first meet? 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.

39:18But actually, when he does 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, you're going to interact with them for five minutes and 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 social context of dating is so important. Because if it's this very tense, you know, the value of context, nothing is going to work.

40:07But if it's this relaxed, sort of interested, curious context, almost everything's going to work. 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? Well, first of all, alcohol distorts everything, drugs distort everything. There's a reason they say intoxicated toxic alcohol is toxic. So it shuts down certain parts of the brain, 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.

40:56And so, wow, she's really high time. Oh, 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 match and when, you know, you're not picking up all that stuff. So probably a coffee shop is nice. Where we met. 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. 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.

41:43And of course, then they're, you know, when they get high and they're laughing at everything and nothing. And there's no, there's no connection. There's no real connection. So the evaluative context is kind of like the antidote to love. And having a evaluative context, you know, you're trying to be your best, the other person trying to be their best. But, you know, there's no real interest in one another. When you say a value is a context, it means that we're evaluating each other. It's really, really a value. That's right. It's like an interview, basically. Yeah, it's like, it's like a job interview.

42:22Interesting. Never got to work. 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 40. And his partner is significantly younger. It's my friend that lives in America, New York. And he was telling me that because she's sort of 23, 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 that sort of 30 -age where you start.

42:56Right. And I don't know if there's any research to... 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. 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 United States. Civil rights movement. The Civil Rights Movement, you know, I got arrested. He didn't, I was a lucky, you know, in the protesting stuff.

43:41But, 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 four -year -old who wants to now settle down, create a home, create a family, and a 23 -year -old are incredibly different, developmentally. So their goals will be different. Their values will be different. If you will, if there are maturity, will be different. Their interests also may be strikingly different. There may be a real difference in valuing commitment, you know, and so on.

44:32So 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. So like a 40 -year -old and a 50 -year -old, or a 55 -year -old, would be very different than a 40 -year -old and a 23 -year -old. And good enough relationships. Should I be looking for, because of this good back to what I was saying earlier about, you know, looking for the one looking for you or Julie, or should I be looking for a relationship that is good enough and then try and build it to be a great relationship?

45:25Because there's a lot of people that are maybe over 30 years old, over 40 years old, you are single, struggling to find someone that's great. And so they're friends or their partners or people around them are saying, just, you know, that person's good enough. That person's good enough. Just give them a chance and go on the date. Yeah, I think there's a lot to that point of view. Because when you're looking for the perfect relationship, that's good in every dimension. You're going to be disappointed. And 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.

46:14I 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. Did you have non -negotiables both of you? Was there anything on your list of things that were mandatory in finding your partner? Yeah, for me, it was one a children. So that's a non -negotiable for you? Yes. Was there anything else that was non -negotiable? A managamy. Okay, yeah. For me. Sense of humor? It 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?

47:07But I think one of the most important things is how do they make you feel about yourself? 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. 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.

47:57You have to get to know one another. But let's see. I know, I know very quickly, I think we both realized that whatever we spent time together, it's always interesting and fun. That's true. Talking over anything, really. 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. Yeah, I felt the same way about you, you know, a road trip was an opportunity. It was really, you know, a time to talk about our dreams and our hopes about the world. And what about sex and the role that plays an attraction?

48:47I asked 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, it just wasn't there. Yeah. And it was crushing for me because this person was perfect in every conceivable way. Smart, kind, fun, everything. And then the minute we moved to the next stage, it just wasn't there. I just wasn't sexually attracted to that experience too. 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.

49:27The first was they kind of helped me become a better version of myself. And however I wanted to find out, the second was this intellectual stimulation, the ability to converse and be interested in them and then 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 good relationship with someone? Yeah. You know, I think that really varies, Stephen, because there's a huge range of the importance sexuality plays in individuals. You know, some people are practically asexual.

50:07Other 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 who cares? You know, I just want to have a cup of coffee and a pastry. 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 there's a 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.

51:02And the sex falls away. 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. But it can become that way. And what happens in those scenarios? Well, you know, typically it's really interesting. Of course, in second, well, second marriages or relationships at, let's say over 40 or so. Women, especially women going through parry menopause, 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.

52:02But we're all hard wired in particular ways. 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. 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, the only way they can get touch is through sex.

53:10They can't just say, 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 more, 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.

53:52Any thoughts on that, John? I think I agree with you. It's not negotiable. You know, it's one of these intangible things that, you know, if it's not there, it's not going to work very well. In the beginning, if it's not there, that's right. I mean, it's, I think it needs to be there. Because it goes on a journey or relationships. Right. 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 be one day, maybe two of them said the same point. I think two of them said the same point, which is much of what makes sex.

54:33So, 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'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 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?

55:13And you can trust me and depend on me. But then how do I have sex with you like, like we've just met.

55:23So we call it the Coolidge effect. Have you heard of this? Calvin Coolidge was president of the United States and he and his wife were 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 hand and the farmer said, no, always a different ending. And the president said, tell that to Mrs. Coolidge. So the Coolidge effect is that it has to be novel.

56:17It has to be exciting to be erotic. 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. And for women, especially feeling safe and feeling emotionally connected, is a berequisite 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.

57:16Women 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 with 70 ,000 people in 24 countries found that the differences between people who say they have a great sex life and people say they have an awful sex life has to deal with affection and emotional connection. People have a great sex life. Say I love you every day and mean it. Kiss each other passionately for no reason at all. Cuddle, their affectionate even in public, they have romantic dates. So affection and emotional connection for most people all over the planet are connected rather than they're being this dichotomy between if you're close and if your friendship is good, sex is going to be terrible.

58:13And if you're distant and you know, it's novel, sex is going to be great. Just not true. That's right. And is there a certain amount of, because a lot of couples fall into this trap of sort of fake and power -lessen, whether it's social media or movies, where we think, okay, if we're not having sex three times a week, some things 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? No. No relationship to the two in quantity. And happiness. On quality, yes. 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.

59:08And the other one, the opposite. It's sexual. Who is more asexual and you know, could take it or leave it once sex, maybe once a month. That's not going to work. 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 that I think I found in my relationship is that my partner is always working away, that I'm working away and so when we see each other, it feels special and interesting.

59:51But 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. You know, 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. Is that because of my attachments to all maybe because you know, I wonder if that could be. Yeah, it could be. I need a lot of show to. Yeah, but you all around each other. Yeah, but you around each other most of the time. 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.

1:00:41Right. You see, so he's downstairs on maybe upstairs, something like that, or I can maybe hear him maybe not. He can hear me maybe not. You know, so.

1:00:56I think there is something wonderful about being apart and then coming together that reunion, you have to have been apart for a while is really like delicious. You know what though? This is so interesting. 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. 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, the person actually said to me, if you don't get that into a dumb skull, you'll be spending much more time with them in divorce court.

1:01:46Oh, wow. 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 speaking as a man. So I can't speak for all men. I can't speak for women, but speaking as a man myself and also on behalf of my friends with my own attachment style, I think that's important to add. And I struggle with naturally with conflict resolution because conflict resolution to me sounds like blame. So when my partner says we need to talk, I'm like, oh my fucking god. What have I done now? What have I done now? 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.

1:02:30I'm like, go on, tell me all the ways that I'm in, in adequate, 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. Help me because he then went on to say because if you do that, then you can get to play. Well, I think here's, here's my invention. I have a notebook in my back pocket. Oh, yeah, interesting. 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.

1:03:05You know, I mean, whatever she says, you know, I write it down and reflect it back and see if I understand what you 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, which is not easy. That's not easy. That's really the work in relationships is being non -defensive. But that's why we wrote fight right, you know, and when we gave, you know, it's all. That you, you, you, you, that blaming, that blaming. It's, you know, I feel about what's the situation, not, you know, the way you fail me. It's the situation. Julie, is it more often men or women that are saying that I feel?

1:04:04Are 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, resilience, you know, all the stuff that's autonomous. For women, vulnerability, sensitivity, empathy, expressing emotion. So, you know, there's only one emotion that men are allowed to really openly express, anger. Right? 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. And it's, I think about it, it's seen as a feminine.

1:05:08And 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? You know, I mean, so expressing vulnerable emotions, I think men are starting to catch up, you know. Don't women like strength? 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.

1:06:03It's like the opposite of connection. Yeah. But, you know, we observed eight -year -olds in playgrounds. And if you look at eight -year -old boys, they'll do runner 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 said, I never get the ball. Okay, toss the ball to Brian. Brian gets the ball and they were often running. They keep the game and play. They manage conflict quickly. Look at two girls. They're playing in groups of two or three, close to the school building, and they're talking about their feelings over and over again.

1:06:47You know, you said that I was a baby, because I had those berets. They really hurt my feelings. Yeah, well, I only wear berets when I was little and now I don't wear them. But they hurt my feelings when you said that. So 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 and play. And conflict gets in the way of that. They resolve it quickly. And socialize so differently. Is this part of the reason why it feels for many men that they are being held off all the time?

1:07:31Because it 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 will assume, is because demand things, as long as I can keep her from expressing more problems to me, then I'm happy. I feel like thinks of his responsibility as just like. Ask a man how he's feeling. And she 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 the children and there's this in the house.

1:08:07And there's this tangle of questions that really she has to address when you ask her. She's feeling there's so many things. And for a guy, it's so much easier. But John is man. 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 note pad, listening is annoying in the moment. When we zoom out, we realize that if they didn't raise these issues, if they didn't express these issues, this relationship wouldn't be so good. That's right. And we'd be in serious problems. That's right.

1:08:42They are the managers of intimacy. Yeah. We need them. Yes. We need them to say. We need to talk. Did you see Stephen's face? That was so cute. I realized it. I realized that this is serving a purpose, which is helping me. You know, and it's helping us. That's right. 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 eight hours, leave. Great evening. Great. That's right. We're both like doing our own thing.

1:09:25Hello. It's just I think men are such simple creatures most of the time. Oh, you are not. That is so not true. You know, one of the things that I've certainly seen in my work, you know, I've been doing clinical work for 50 years. And what I see is that men have exactly the same emotions. 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. Lionel Tiger, who studied men's friendships and women's friendships, said, with alcohol, men get together very physical and they talk about their feelings and enormous amount takes a little alcohol to make it happen.

1:10:14Two women said to me last night that I was speaking to on WhatsApp. People that I worked with in a different company, they were saying to me that their partner is often expressed how they're feeling by just sending songs out of the blue. Sending songs? Sending songs out of the blue. What? So I said to the woman, 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. I feel. 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.

1:10:49So he has to send her a Spotify link and say, listen, listen to this. What's the same thing, right? It's the right inability to vocalize, which is. Yep. Difficult for men. Keep working on it. I am, yeah, I'm like progressively getting better, but sometimes I have little relapses. If you, if I am very busy in my mind and then I have to have one of those, we need to talk chat. So I think you're right, there needs to be a bit of a ritual around, like, is this a good time? That's right. Yeah, well, I have your attention. You know, you're being in a different environment. Well, you can make, you know, make a date to have a talk like that.

1:11:27When 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 a right. And express your gratitude or thanks or your admiration. Then you go into, okay, so what do we need to change? What do we need to improve? And then you finish up with this beautiful question, I just love this question.

1:12:13How can I make you feel loved this week? And that's closure. You mentioned the word that gratitude. Yes. Why is gratitude so important, being grateful for them and expressing it? Something that you two both do to each other? I think it's indicative of a habit of mind. It's really much more important. A habit of mind where you're noticing what's going right and feeling appreciative for it. And I know I wake up every morning, lying next to Julian, 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 the people I love are right.

1:13:04And I'm with her. And I get to see my grandson. And my daughter. Life is good. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think gratitude brings you into the moment. It 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. You know, there's been studies who was at Christ 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.

1:13:55The positivity. Of the positivity, right. Whereas happy couples were seeing it all the time. It's like they're wearing different sunglasses or something. Yeah. Exactly. Different filters. And then negative habit of mind, you know, really puts you in a state of being kind of irritable and grumpy all the time. Yeah. 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 what you see. Yeah. It's gratitude puts you in a different frame of mind. See, notice actually, all the good stuff that's going on. Right. Let me draw a parallel.

1:14:36One 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 read prioritize 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 do in my practice with couples who are just racing through life together on parallel tracks, not connecting it all, is to ask them, okay, you know, if you had six months left to live, how would you want to spend it?

1:15:39Who 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 first kind of take people into a very relaxed state. So their minds are really free to imagine. And what's that doing? Is it helping to crystallize whether they should be with this person? Oh, 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 when it comes down to oftentimes.

1:16:33When you know, how would 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 in case studies. So instead of me just hyperthetical, coming with something hypothetical, I think about the challenge is my friends face and got a particular friend who's been in a relationship that many, many years, seven, eight years.

1:17:07Relationship is broken, broken down. And he naturally, because the relationship is broken down, is like jumping to repair. 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 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 as this the right one. How do you know? How do you know if this is a problem we can solve and should solve?

1:17:46Or this is just the wrong person? Therapy helps. As your friend gone to therapy? Not in therapy? Not with their partner, no. Then they don't 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.

1:18:34And so, you know, with your friend, for example, 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 pattern, it's over and over and over and over again, right? Well, it's exactly what that's your thing. But you can change those patterns once you know and practice what the alternatives are. But I think it's not in the partner. The pattern. An alternative pattern. Yes. I think when they had fun, they had an admiration system, you know, the system of affection and respect.

1:19:23Love and respect is gone and gets replaced by denigration, belittling, intent. That's a time to bail. And you've seen this in your work. Oh, yeah. This is like much of what you guys, you know, are known for is this. I mean, whenever I hear people talking about the Gotmans, they're always talking to me about the idea of contempt and the forehorsement. Right. 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. What are the forehorsement then before we talk about how we would go about changing if possible these things?

1:20:06For anyone that doesn't know how you found these forehorsement. Well, Bob Leverson 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 elulsion in a conversation? So how did you conduct this experiment? Really just observing couples talking about how their day went. How do you know the day? Wait, wait, wait. Bring them into the lab. First of all, what's the lab? The lab was a room where they sat facing one another. There were video cameras here and there that were focused on the individual and their faces and their body language.

1:20:50There was what was called a jiggleometer. How much they moved in their chairs. You know, how much the chairs moved. And so, what was happening to their heart rate? You know, as well as the light. Well, velocity, respiration. Respiration. Connectance. And all of that data that was pulled from those measures was all synchronized. You know, a hundredth of a second by a hundredth of a second. And they would talk for, let's say, 15 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 ends up being conflict.

1:21:33And then a positive topic. And then a positive topic. Or in the apartment lab, they just hung out for, you know, 12 hours before they went to sleep. And the cameras just rolled while we collected physiological data. So that we should be able to slide on them. You really spy on them, right? Except they knew there were beef. And the 12 hours you watched them just sort of chill and hang out together. That's right. How many couples have you? 130. And how many couples have been in the lab in total? 3000. 3000. And they were followed, you know, so then they'd be brought back every couple of years. Right.

1:22:10To see how the relationship changed. Right. So the procedures would be repeated every couple of years for as long as 20 years. And what did you find? So that initially that ratio of positive to negative interaction, even talking about how they're day -lit or especially during conflict for people who are in happy, stable relationship at a average five positives for every negative. Was it about the other person or about? No, just positive emotion like let's describe positives. So a positive can be nodding your head. It can be smiling. It can be asking a question. Section humor validation showing interest.

1:22:53Interest in the other person. Negative would be anger, irritability, disappointment, hurt, disgust, contempt. Shared humor was another big positive that turned out to be very important. So that ratio of positive to negative average five to one in relationships that were stable and happy. During conflict. During conflict. And point eight to one in relationships that were headed for disaster either splitting up or being together on happily. But certain negatives were much more predictive of relationship demise. And they were criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stone -wiling. So let's define what those are.

1:23:40So 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 tied your thoughtless. You didn't even call me when you were going to be late. You know thoughtless lazy, inconsiderate, selfish. Always never. Okay. So making it about that personality and that character. 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. Superiority. So give me an example of that. You're sick.

1:24:23Hey, 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. You're stewed. You're a narcissist. 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. You know, I kind of stuff sarcasm is a good example. mockery. Especially in front of people. Yeah. Right. Awful. So the person says, well, I really care how you feel. You really care how I feel. You know, a little. So that's contempt. Yeah. Stonewalling is really a mobile withdrawal.

1:25:10Don't forget defense and defensiveness. Yeah. So every defensiveness is the one we all have. So hard to get over, which is, you know, you either kind of blind like an innocent victim. You know, I did two pay the bills on time. I thought, I'm thoughtful. I'm thoughtful. Don't you remember blah blah blah? Or it's counterattack. Oh, yeah. You're self perfect. You never clean up the kitchen. You know, it's that counterattack. Do you find that insecure people are more defensive? Sure. I have this like theory that if you're self -esteem and your self -perception of yourself is fragile, then anyone poking at it at all causes such extreme pain.

1:25:53Right. That you like you live in at this state of like, I have never done anything wrong. I can't pop into anything wrong. If someone points out something you've done wrong, it's so painful if you're insecure. Right. Walking out of the house. Yeah, exactly. It's like playing with like an open wound. Yeah. It's like you're a walking burn victim. You know, the way I'm likely to screw it, but because I've been there. No, that's like is, you know, 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.

1:26:34Well, 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 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. So you defend. You defend. Oh, yeah. Well, I'm the one who does all the bill, paying. What are you doing? You know, it's defense of this. 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.

1:27:21But if that's linked to maybe, I don't know, your childhood where your father or your mother or the bullies on the playground told you that you're so forgetful, Steve or Julie, you're the most forgetful person ever and then they punched you. You could get some free, you know, 40. Yeah, can be. Can be. And 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.

1:28:05And 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 is that they feel so attacked that their heart rates are zooming up above 100 beats a minute, which just sitting here, it's a creed cortisol on adrenaline massively. And so they're shutting down. Yeah, it's a terribly, it's going into fight or flight. Although you're not facing a saber to tiger, you're facing your partner. You said that Julie that you could go into that state for minutes or even longer. Yes. 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 and 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, then breaking up shows that they don't have the tools to resolve whatever issue they keep smashing into.

1:29:03Right. But much of why I think from what I've heard, or at least the symptom of their relationship is stonewalling, but it's not minutes. One of the days it's months, I think, I think basically, I only know this because I was showing 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, they can, like, they can, nothing. It's like they're not expressing their needs. They're not saying what they feel.

1:29:42They're spiraling in their own mind and then they're just breaking up with you. 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 height 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 to this is a homosexual relationship between two men. So, you know, we talked earlier on about the woman, sometimes the instigator of expression of needs. Yeah. That's right. 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.

1:30:25And it may be that when 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 should. But 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? How come homosexual relationships with men work? And I don't know, is there any data to show that 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?

1:31:21Oh. Someone's got done the research on this subject. Well, we've, you know, we've studied gay and low -smake couples and comparing them to heterosexual couples as well. And for 12 years, generally, they're less defensive. They have a better sense of humor and they're much more gentle in the way they bring up an issue with one another. Men or women in those homosexual relationships and women together. gay men and lesbians are better than heterosexuals. And they're much less possessive and down -and -hairing as well. Much more of a sense of equality in their relationships. Well, especially, you know, pre, well, wait, pause, pre -8.

1:32:10You know, men gave each other much more autonomy to have sex outside the relationship, right? But their needs 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.

1:32:41They tend to feel very insecure around polygamy, let's say. Or polyamory. And so they really are more wanting monogamy with their partners. Am I right in thinking, John, that you're saying that homosexual relationships are better than heterosexual relationships? Yeah, they are. They're better. In general, they're better. Do you know if they last longer? I don't know that there's date on that. I don't think there are differences in how long they're last. Is that right? I don't think there's any differences. You know, there's another thing too. I mean, again, it depends on what period of history you're talking about.

1:33:26But 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 the heterosexual society, right? 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.

1:34:22And on these four horsemen, a word you didn't mention, but I wondered if it fit in there somewhere, is the word gaslighting, which has become quite popular in society. What is gaslighting? How does that show up? So, in physically violent relationships that are characterologically violent, with as a perpetrator in a victim, those kinds of domestic violence, quite often the perpetrator is communicating to the victim that everything about the 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 happens in Grubergman in that movie gaslight.

1:35:10She's married to this guy who can try to convince her that she's mentally ill, that her whole sense of reality is wrong. So, it does things like change the order of the pictures, and, you know, in the home, steal jewelry that he's given her, that he says comes from his mother and grandmother, he steals it, and then he says, you know, where is it? You lost it? You're so forgetful. And he's constantly sort of making you feel like she's going crazy. They never was a painting. They're, what are you talking about? He was never a painting there, and she knows, and he's actually removed it, or he's changed the order of the pictures.

1:36:02He'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. 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 gaslight. So, people, for example, who have a conflict, and they have totally different points of view about what happened during the conflict. Two of her members are better, you know. And one will say, well, you said this. No, I did. And I never said that. That they're calling gaslighting.

1:36:46And it's not. That is not gaslighting. So, it's being misused in the culture all the time. Because people always have two points of view about different perceptions in any situation. 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.

1:37:32So, people are calling that gaslighting. And it isn't. That's not what gaslighting is. At what point does it become gaslighting? Is that when you're intentionally trying to make the other person crazy? Believe that they're crazy so they don't trust themselves. And these vial of relationships, you know, the man will slap the woman across the face. And says, God damn it, you just hit me. I never hit you or never touch you. Yeah, I spoke to a domestic violence victim once who told me that her partner, when after, like, love bombing her, to immediately, like, you know, throwing all this affection onto her and, you know, very, very quickly, he would then start hiding her stuff.

1:38:12So, he'd put her car keys in the fridge. And he'd be like, I didn't. Why did you put your car keys in the fridge? Gas gaslighting. Yeah, that's gaslight. Perfect description. Because then she thinks she's going crazy. So, he goes, well, I'm going to have to take your car keys. Often. And then she can't. She's lost that car. That's right. Often done in the service of extreme jealousy. Yeah. And socially isolating the victim. Yeah. We've treated domestic violence a lot. And, uh, 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.

1:38:49And at the end of the day, if those marks didn't line up, he'd be here up. Even if she just went to the grocery store, it didn't matter. Who did you fuck today? Right. Where'd you go? Nowhere. Oh, yeah. Right. You liar. You roar. You. 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. Blah blah blah. But it not true. Yeah. Not true. You know, first of all, it doesn't happen all. It's not. Secondly, uh, oftentimes the victim usually, you know, in a hetero, it's a, it's a woman. Um, has her confidence beaten down.

1:39:39So 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 think you could survive out there. Nobody else is going to want you. And she starts to believe it. It starts to believe it. Um, and she also has a dream that he's going to change. Yeah. 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 going to get to some of the control. Is he a narcissist or is it possible that someone who isn't a narcissist can a format behavior or is the way the narcissist another word that's just throwing around too much.

1:40:27Very good. A plus. Yeah. It's another word. You know, everybody is narcissistic. 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 going to get it? And so on. I've got to 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. The person has no conscience whatsoever. They can hurt you.

1:41:21They 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 everybody around them is a reflection of who they are themselves. And so they only see people, other people in two dimensions. How'd you go about, you said you spoke to couples and women who have been through domestic abuse and, you know, how do you go about helping them? Okay. There's two types of domestic violence. John mentioned characterological domestic violence.

1:42:19That's when there's a clear perpetrator, clear victim. Nothing the victim can do will change the 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. Easy said, then done right? It is. That is correct. It is very, very hard. It has to be secretive. It, you know, she's got a 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. And in that kind, both people tend to be violent, both.

1:43:13The 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, 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 a hundred beats a minute. You go into fight or flight. 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 person is saying, because it's like your frontal cortex, your prefrontal cortex is offline.

1:44:17So both people typically are getting flooded during conflict. So those people we can really, really help. So we've done a randomized clinical trial treating those people. And even a year and a half after treatment is ended when they 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 controller. Q1 is often when businesses start implementing new systems and processes in hopes of creating efficiencies for the year ahead. And over the course of my career, I've learnt just how crucial having the right systems in places, one which has helped me across many of my investments is NetSuite.

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1:45:38That's NetSuite .com slash Bartlett. Is this part of the reason why you're in the UK at the moment? You talked about you. It's trauma. Oh, it's trauma. It's trauma. At Oxford, yeah, we're talking about trauma. And also affairs. You're talking about affairs. You're talking about treating affairs. Right. That's right. So I've never heard the phrase treating affairs as if it's a, you know, a condition, per se. But you're, if it has been an affair or some form of infidelity, can it be treated? 75 % so far in our research. You're right. And when you say affair, what are you throwing in that bucket in terms of the definition of an affair?

1:46:24Is that a text? There is that. It could be an emotional affair as well as a thought here. A physical affair. A physical affair. Yeah, it's usually so it can be emotionally, you know, falling in love with somebody else without physical consummation or physical consummation with somebody that you fall in in love with or just having sex outside the relationship, not an emotional connection, but just having sex when the agreement is monogamy. So you always, almost always involves deception. Right. Always. It always does. Yeah. That's, that's a big part of it is the deception and broken trust. You know, it, what affairs do is they turn, you know, the hurt partners world upside down.

1:47:20Everything they believed about the partner is wrong. Everything that they thought they shared in terms of values is wrong.

1:47:33So, you know, you can trust the 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. It's like I didn't know this person. Yeah. I didn't know this. Yeah. Who are you? 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. Purpose. 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.

1:48:23It shatters. And how many people, how many couples cheat in any of those definitions that you've described? Well, we don't really know, you know, but, you know, probably around 30 % of all couples is, you think it's a conservative estimate conservative? Really? I've heard 15 % of men and women. And the thing that's interesting is that the 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 things. The milkman and the farmer when they were watching.

1:49:22The male man, 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 potential people out there. And so, you know, it's interesting. I was thinking through all the implications of what would happen in a woman's life when she went out to work. And one of the other things is she would become more independent in every sense of work. Yeah, exactly. That's right. She doesn't have to stay in the marriage. She can support herself financially.

1:50:04So how do you treat an affair? So we developed a model based on our research called the tone attune attach, a, a, a, mom. And here's what inner 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 the kind of sex they had. And here's why. I mean, it's, it's an important thing. Almost every person who suffered through an affair has PTSD from it.

1:50:58Post -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 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, yes, 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 a terrible.

1:52:02So a tone, 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 have 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 speedings without defensiveness. Just listen. 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.

1:53:00To 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 her, 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. A tune 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.

1:53:52Once 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. 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.

1:54:44Especially if the woman is the one who's been betrayed. 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 the affair partner. So you know, it can be both. It's, I mean, I've got so many questions that so the first phase was the atonement, achievement and then attachments. 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? A thousand. Because is it true that at some point you've got to kind of move on? You have to know what you're apologizing for.

1:55:27Well, that's important. But here's why. And, 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. Right. 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 months later after you leave therapy, the man is late home from work and doesn't call. Well, guess what happens? Who? She goes into full -blown PTSD, reenactment, basically, where it's gotten triggered again.

1:56:24And oh my god, he's doing it again. 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? Interesting. I guess that's the cost of cheating. Is the person who really has never been the same again. That's a high cost. That's a very high cost. That's right. Yeah. I wrote in security 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 links to the second thing I was writing down, which is this whole question of why did you cheat on me? And it must be for a lot of people difficult to answer that question.

1:57:08Because if it's and also I was thinking, some people don't even know. So they might try and hazard a guess and do even more harm. Right. Well, I think it's because you gave him some way. 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, that's right. You know, is that a useful question to even ask in that setting? 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.

1:57:55So 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, 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. 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 worst way. So we had to keep proving to himself that he was heterosexual, heterosexual, heterosexual, over and over and over again.

1:58:54And 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. Well, it just goes to show how complex it can be. That's right. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, no, it's a compliment, not, not forgiveness. The difference there. Because when, when carapace emphasized forgiveness in this affair situation, they would blame the betrayed partner for not forgiving. It's acceptance importance. Acceptance of what? The situation you find yourself in. No, no, that's bad. Because you're accepting something that's hurtful, that's terribly hurtful.

1:59:49The 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 situation is, but basically someone's broken up with him. Oh, and so it's this constant rumination of maybe if I do this, I can change it or maybe if I go almost like thinking back in time to see if he could time travel and fix all his mistakes. 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.

2:00:21And then we'll work from here. Oh, oh, oh, that's, yeah, that's a whole different meaning of acceptance. Yeah. I didn't mean accept the fact that they cheered on you. Right. That's how I interpreted it at first. But yes, acceptance, 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. And, you know, if the partner may, you know, tiny little teeny, weenie spark left, 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.

2:01:12But as John was pointing out, sometimes the person is only feeling the ashes of the past relationship. There are no embers left. This is a difficult question to ask, but have you ever seen cheating? Help a relationship? Oh, every time. Really? When there's recovery. Right. 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 going to, 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.

2:02:11So it can create more intimacy, different kind of trust, of course. But more intimacy and more connection. The trail is always, yeah, implied prior, conflict of 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. 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.

2:02:54I'm going to 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? I think that relationships can be great sources of longevity, health, great context for raising children. And so they can, they can have this wonderful magic, is health giving, longevity giving. It just requires certain conditions to be met. And those are the principles that make relationships work. Is there a particular piece of research that you're most fond of? I mean, it's difficult.

2:03:44He's done or somebody else has done. He's both. Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I think the so -field of social epidemiology is, which is 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 a relationship to start making the difference and really make the difference in raising kids. 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.

2:04:25Right. What are bids for connection? Well, in this apartment lab that Julian and I built, there were three cameras. And at the time, it was only possible to technologically merge two of them in a split screen. So the people 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.

2:05:13And so this, you had this sort of 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 turned out that six years later, the couples who eventually divorced, when they looked 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 looked back six years later, they had turned to a partner's bids 86 % of the time. So this huge difference, 33 % versus 86%.

2:06:00You mentioned three responses to a bid for connection. So my partner comes up to me, she goes, babe, look at this. You mentioned they turn toward them, which is me turning towards my partner and saying, what is it? It's not physical. Okay. Mind you? So it could be. No. What I'm trying to say is that a lot of people interpret turning toward it. So you turn your body towards the partner. No, it's not. It's just, it's responding to your partner's desire for interest or attention. Okay. Yeah. And then turning away is not responding. Then turning against would be a durable kind of response. Stop interrupting me.

2:06:39I'm working. Okay. Yeah. So 86 % of the couples that stayed together were those that turned toward either acknowledged the bid for connection. Now 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. Okay. 86 % on me. It turns out the other thing that was interesting was that people who turned 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.

2:07:32That was a really amazing finding of one of my graduates. You can teach people to turn toward acknowledge those bids. Yeah, you can't just increase awareness. I've struggled with that in my relationships. I've not been very good at turning towards. When my partner makes bid for connection, I've not been greater. I often saw it as like an interruption or you knew I was busy or like you. But from doing this podcast, in fact, and speaking to lots of great people like you guys, I've in those moments, I guess, Steve. Fulfill up talk. Just turning, maybe you know, hi, what's that? What's that? You know, and get them in the helps.

2:08:10Let me give you a suggestion, you know, because all of us have times when we can't turn towards, right? 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? Yeah, you see? So you're putting a bookmark in there that says, I want to talk to you, but I got this competing. That's a nice way of saying it. All that I have to finish. And but then we'll talk. My partner says to me, it's how you say it. Oh, you know, so I've just got to be like actually turn my body language.

2:08:52So I'm acknowledging the person not like saying it while without missing a keystroke, 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, it's not going to work. It's just a one second. Good try. I know. Just seeing miners. If people want to learn more about all the work that you do, how do they go about finding you? Well, a couple of things. They can go to gotman .com, g -o -t -t -m -a -n .com, internet site. There's a whole bunch of stuff there, or they can go to our books. And the last one, especially if you're dealing with conflict, the last one is called fight right.

2:09:43But we also have one that is eight dates, essential conversations for a lifetime of love. And that's a great one too. And there's also a website we've created called Gotman Connect, where people can actually go on, take questionnaires and evaluate the strengths and challenges in their own relationship, and the privacy of their homes, and then access 37 video modules that Julian are created for improving how you deal with conflict, how you improve intimacy, sexual connection, and so on. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves, leaves a question for the next. Let's start with Julian.

2:10:25Tell us about a paranormal experience you've had. Okay. These always say, 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. And I was sitting tiny little being in its hands, and it lifted me up off the ground. And I heard many truthful things about reality that formed my very foundation.

2:11:43Can you give me one? 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 not a sense of duality. Suffering is part of the perfection of our existence. It really does change your perspective yourself and others when you hear that point about suffering, being unavoidable. Because then at least you can, you don't treat yourself as such a victim to suffering. You realize that it's part of it's fundamentally attached to all the things that I love as well.

2:12:48What about you, John? Have you ever had a paranormal experience? When the numbers just came together perfectly. I don't know if that's a paranormal experience, but I was once driving through the University of Washington, our burrito. And I was really, really sick. And 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 to see you, but I care about you.

2:13:42And as I was driving through the Arboretum, I was, 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. I just, because of Julie's experiences, I kind of said, oh, well, maybe this is real. And all. And by the time I got to the Arboretum, all my cold sickness was gone. And it was important for me to be there for that client. And I was healthy enough to actually have a session with her so that I don't think constitutes a charitable experience.

2:14:32But it's pretty weird. She was okay. Yeah. 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 Gottmins. I think it's both your wisdom, your knowledge, but also the pair of you together formed 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.

2:15:05And 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 had, I've gone to conferences in Columbia and I've had people talk about your work on the forehorsement and contempt and all these kinds of things and your 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.

2:15:34So thank you for all that you do and thank you for being here again. Thank you Stephen. And thank you very much for being the again, the best interviewer we've had in 30 years.

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