Please enjoy this transcript of a special episode devoted to one deceptively simple question: How do you stay close to your partner over time through the inevitable exhaustion, misunderstanding, conflict, disappointment, and change?
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ESTHER PEREL
Esther Perel: So, this is a question from Gregoire Frifri via Facebook. “I would love to ask her how to foster marriage longevity. Any exercises, routines, or habits would be great, especially around fostering deeper emotional relationships.”
That is the first basic – appreciation. Simply saying a lot of nice things, not taking things for granted, not forgetting to say please and thank you just because it’s the person that you live with, making compliments, holding hands, kissing, stroking, sending sweet notes, buying flowers, preparing breakfast, bringing the coffee to bed – all those sweet things that people do that basically let you know that they live inside of you, that you’re thinking of them even when they’re not there.
These daily appreciations go a long way, and sometimes, it’s a real diligent effort to keep doing them. And then, I am a strong fan of letter writing. I think that when you fly away, when you’re away, sitting in a café when you just have a moment, drop a note that’s not just on the birthdays and on the anniversaries, but your own musings about you, your lives together, your dreams, where you’re going, how you met, what you remember, what you fancy – that is very much the telling of the story of the couple. There’s a lot of intimacy in there.
Touch is a major experience of intimacy. I think when you do that, humor, and things that encourage the other person in which you recognize them at their most authentic – go do this thing. This is similar to something you really like. Take a few more days. “You always wanted to take this class – go take this class.” These are ways in which you encourage the other person to be the best version of themselves, and vice versa. Be your best version of yourself with them. The things that are really basic are what makes a relationship sustain itself and be more nurturing.
Next, Alicia Kinea Eidelberger asks via Facebook, “How do you lessen arguments in your marriage?” Look: I think it’s all about the art of speaking and listening. Now, there was a sculpture a few years back by Bruce Nauman, and it was a World Peace product. He had 23-inch monitors with faces of the most diverse group of people – diverse races, ethnicities, genders, ages, all of it – and every single person – every face was saying, “I’ll talk, and you listen. You’ll talk, and I’ll listen. They’ll talk, and we listen. You’ll talk, and we listen.” And, it just showed you the robustness of this most difficult art, which is often harder than speaking, I would say. But, to some people, speaking may be the hardest thing.
In a relationship, you can often get the daily hassles in which you are grinding at each other, and in which there’s a friction going on. Don’t sweat the small things. That’s probably really important in terms of how people deal with arguments in a relationship. I would say don’t complain, ask. Behind every criticism, there’s often a wish. If you believe that your partner has done something wrong – that they didn’t pay a bill on time or anything – and you wish that they had done it right, instead of acting them to correct it, you basically tell them they can never do it well, that they’re doing this on purpose – just ask them to do it better next time.
Rather than “Would it kill you?”, something as simple as, “Do you think that next time, you could set a monthly alert so that you don’t forget?” It’s a very different tone. It’s a very different way of relating to the person. There’s no contempt in that one. We know from the research of John Gottman that contempt is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Actually, I’m going to give you the four horses because they’re really important. They are criticism, contempt, stonewalling, and defensiveness. Those four are pretty much the killers in the land of arguments and relationship decline.
Try not to talk with categoricals of always and never, all or nothing. That is probably one of the most important changes in vocabulary. Banish them. “I always have to ask you.” “You never do this.” The moment you say, “You never,” the other person is going to come up with the one time that they know and that they’ve done it, so that they can defeat your argument rather than understand that you’re asking them to do it more often, which is exactly why I say, “Ask, don’t complain.”
Add some humor. There’s nothing that’s going to defuse your arguments more than just putting some perspective into it and not taking yourself so seriously. Show empathy. At the end of the day, assume that your partner has the same interests as you – to solve the stresses in your relationship. For that to happen, it’s important that both of you understand and appreciate the other person’s point of view. Do you really think the other person wants you to purposefully be annoyed, hurt you, or let you down? Probably not.
It’s all of that shift that takes you out of relationships that are mired in bickering, chronic low-intensity warfare, or high conflict. There’s a range there. Imagine I ask you, “Has your arguing turned toxic?” Does your partner keep telling you that you can never do it right, or that they can never do it right by you, that every little conversation about who should set the table will end up in a blowout about how dysfunctional your relationship is, or that two minutes into a fight, one of you is saying you should get a divorce or break up? That’s what I’m calling a high-conflict couple.
The opposite of the argument is coming in and saying, “I want to listen to what you have to say. I want to apologize. What can I do to make this better?” Not “What can you do to make this better?” Shift it around, and you’ll have magic happening.
BRENÉ BROWN
Brené Brown: The other two hacks that I think have saved our marriage besides just showing up and using some of these things, like what’s working, what was hard is the 80/20. So everyone says marriage should be 50/50. It’s the biggest crock of bullshit I’ve ever heard. It’s never 50/50. Ever. And so what we do is we quantify where we are. So if Steve comes home and he’ll be like, “I got 20.”
Tim Ferriss: Just in terms of energy.
Brené Brown: Just energy, investment, kindness, patience, “I’m at 20.” And I’ll be like, “I’ll cover you. I got you, brother. I’ll pull the 80.” Sometimes we come home, which we have done a lot, and my mom has been sick, and I’ll say, “I’ve got 10,” and like, Steve two days ago said, “I’m riding a solid 25.” So we know that we have to sit down at the table any time we have less than a hundred combined and figure out a plan of kindness toward each other.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I love that.
Brené Brown: Yeah, because the thing is, marriage is not something that’s 50/50. A partnership works when you can carry their 20 or they can carry your 20. And that when you both just have 20, you have a plan where you don’t hurt each other.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you’re threadbare, right?
Brené Brown: Yeah. And so what we’ll say is I’m like, “I’ve got 10,” and he’ll be like, “I got maybe 25.” We’re like, “Put all the groceries that are supposed to be great and healthy in the freezer; we’re ordering out. Get the housekeeper here an extra day, and we’re canceling anything with people that we really actually don’t like.”
Tim Ferriss: So how can we create some buffer in the system?
Brené Brown: We do that. So like, and then we’ll like a day or two later I’m like, he’ll be like, “I’m riding to 60,” I’m like, “Oh, my God, work is kicking my ass. I’m still at 20.” He’s like, “I got you, but we’re a spare of 20. So let’s ask Charlie if he wants to skip water polo practice today and let’s all turn in at 8:00.” Like, huge. The other thing I would say too, that now I’m thinking about that, is we made a determination very early there’s kid-focused families, parent-focused families, and family-focused families. We’re a family-focused family.
So that means that if you want to do water polo, Eagle Scouts, tennis, and skeet shooting, and then that comes to the family, and the family agrees what will keep the family healthy. Like we can, you know, I’ve got a book launch, I’ve got this, Steve’s got patients, he’s taking on others, you know, he’s a pediatrician, he’s doing this. So what works for our family right now is you can do two extracurriculars and I’m going to have a two-week tour, not a four-week tour, but we put the family as the system that we serve. It’s not the kids at the parents’ cost or the parents at the kids’ cost. It’s the family and it is remarkable.
Tim Ferriss: How do you weigh, if you do it all the voting system, so to speak, right? So if you all come to the table, does everyone have equal vote in the decision-making process with respect?
Brené Brown: No. This is a dictatorship! Yeah. Oh, no. Yeah. No. Like, we don’t even bullshit around that. It’s like when my kids, like if I say like, “Oh shit,” my kids are like, “Ooh, you can’t say that.” I’m like, “I say anything I want. You can’t say that. And when you’re old enough, you can do whatever you want.”
Tim Ferriss: “You get your cursing license!”
Brené Brown: Yeah, right now I can totally do that. Watch me.
BRAD FELD
Tim Ferriss: So if we’re talking about links and breaking these artificial causal links, let’s talk about another, what seems like a pattern interrupt, and that is your life dinners. Can you describe what these are?
Brad Feld: Yeah. This was another thing that came out of me and Amy’s weekend in Rhode Island. So she said to me, as we’re walking, “I want to have dinner with you once a month. Not a date night, but let’s do dinner once a month. Let’s do it on the first night of every month. And I just want a commitment for that.” And I hem and haw, “Oh, gee, I don’t know whether I’ll be in Boulder or Boston or New York or the Bay Area or whatever.” And she looked at me and she said, “Do you have a calendar, an online calendar?” Knowing full well I did, of course. And I said, “Yeah, I have an online calendar.” She says, “Does it have the ability for you to make a recurring calendar appointment?” I said, “Yeah, the online calendar lets me do that.” She says, “How about if you make an online recurring calendar appointment from 6:00 p.m. Colorado time to 10:00 p.m. Colorado time on the first day of a month and have it repeat forever?” I said, “Okay, I guess I can do that.”
So we did that. And so every month on the first day of the month, we have what we call life dinner. Now, 20 years of life dinners later, so what is that, 1,000-something life dinners, which is awesome, by the way, we have a little flexibility. There are definitely nights where we will have it on the second or the third because something’s going on. But we really commit to it. We used to go out to dinner. Now, a lot of times we just do it at home. Time of COVID, we for sure do at home. We often, not always, but often start with a gift exchange, and the gifts could be trivial little things. Once she gave me a remote control fart machine. She’s picked up a lot of jewelry and art from it over the years and books. One dinner she gave me a Range Rover. So it’s a full spectrum of little to big.
Tim Ferriss: I really hope it was the same dinner that you gave her the — oh, no, you didn’t give her the fart machine. That would have been less popular. Right.
Brad Feld: I think the Range Rover was to make up for the fart machine, but the fart machine was years earlier. And we sit down, and if you’re a fan of software development, and you know what Agile is, we essentially do — the first half is a retrospective of the previous month, and the second half is sprint planning for the next month. So again, very deliberately not a date night. We have plenty of those. This is let’s talk, each of us, you go first, or I go first, doesn’t matter, about the last month, and what happened, and what was good, and what was bad, and what we were unhappy about, and what we wish we’d done differently, and what we regret, and what we’re really satisfied with, anything. Just retrospective.
This powerfully interesting — because we started to learn that if Amy did something that really annoyed me on the 21st of the month, in the moment, I didn’t have to react and cause us to have a three-hour personal meltdown on the 21st of the month. I could wait nine more days or 10 more days, and it could be — 11 more days. It could be part of our life dinner. And it gave us a marker for being able to resolve the conflicts that we would have with each other or express things, positive and negative, that we hadn’t said in the moment.
The forward sprint planning part of it is not go through the calendar for the next month, but talk about goals, aspirations, what we might want to do differently, what we’re feeling in the moment that’s making us uncomfortable about the future, what we’re not afraid of, what we’re worried about happening in the future, what’s causing us, in the moment, real anxiety about the future. And anybody out there has had any therapy or done meditation, literally just naming the thing oftentimes gets rid of a lot of the anxiety. Just labeling it, just calling it out, and saying it out loud.
And so these dinners, sometimes the conversation, the life dinner part of the conversation might go five or 10 minutes, and sometimes it might go three hours. And sometimes there was laughter and sometimes there were tears and sometimes there were both. And it’s just such now, 20 some odd years later, a comfortable way to reground ourselves as a couple, roughly every 30 days, in what is a very, very challenging and complicated world.
JIM DETHMER
Tim Ferriss: What are some of the candid or uncomfortable conversations that are the most important to have, if any come to mind, aside from what we’ve been discussing?
Jim Dethmer: So as you look at your close relationships, whether it be with your parents or with your siblings or children, this idea of, are we willing to be candid? Now I want to say something here, Tim, because people misunderstand this. They think that if I’m below the line, if we keep using that language, then people will say, “I don’t have a problem being candid. God, you ask anybody in my world, they’ll tell you I’m candid. I tell it like it is.” But what they’re really saying is they’re kind of living a scorched earth policy where they tell the truth all the time, but they’re rigid and righteous about being attached to their truth. So we don’t call that candor. What we call candor begins with the ability to differentiate facts from stories, facts from data, facts of what is totally unarguable. Facts are that which all reasonable people would agree to. Facts, the facts of life, stories are judgments, opinions, beliefs, interpretations that we make up about the facts. So for example, or that typical thing would be, I walk in the house, Debbie’s standing there.
Fact, a video camera would record that the corners of her mouth are turned down slightly in what one could call a frown. That’s a fact. Video camera would record it. Now my mind starts making up stories. Debbie’s upset with me. I did something wrong. She’s going to criticize me. And now I start reacting to the stories, defending, justifying, explaining, reacting to the stories, even though the stories are all made up in my mind. So candor, practicing conscious candor, first you differentiate fact from story, and then you reveal your stories, holding them lightly. So from below the line, I want to be right about my stories and prove that I’m right because my ego identification believes it can only survive if it’s right. So what that would look like is from below line, I’d say, “What are you upset about? I’m only 10 minutes late and I know I forgot the milk, but God, I was very busy.”
So now I’m revealing my story that she’s upset in a reactive modality while holding tightly to my story that A, she is upset at me and B, she shouldn’t be. That’s truth-telling. That’s not what we’re talking about at all. Candor, I differentiate fact from story, and here’s what this might look like. I walk in the house and let’s say I’m above the line and present, which I might not be. I might say something like this, “Hey, when I look over, it looks like you’re upset. I’m making up the story that you’re upset and rather than get all scared and reactive to that, first thing I do is just want to tell you I’m making up that story and I want to check it out with you. Are you upset? And by the way, when I make up the story that you’re upset, I noticed I get defensive.
Furthermore, probably what I really get scared because I don’t want you to be pissed off at me, but I’m going to reveal myself to you, Debbie, not from being right. This act of candor is an act of incredible vulnerability. I’m going to let you know me. I say all the time. I’m going to let you know what’s going on on Planet Jim. My thoughts, beliefs, interpretations, wants, desires, so you can know me. Not so that I can prove I’m right.” And by the way, this kind of candor goes hand in hand with conscious listening.
People always want to say, “I want a more candid relationship with my partner.” I say, “Great. Before you start revealing, start listening. Start becoming a person to whom others will reveal themselves candidly because you see them and you hear them and you get them. Then as they feel safe to reveal themselves, you’ll find that the relationship becomes more safe for you to reveal yourself.” So candor and conscious listening go hand in glove. But again, it’s a cocommitment, right? Debbie and I said we want to remove all barriers to closeness. One of the barriers to closeness is not revealing ourselves to each other. It’s so easy to hide out for fear of being rejected, for fear of being criticized, the risk. And Debbie and I had been practicing candor for decades, Tim, and there’s almost always some edge of candor where I could reveal a thought or I could reveal a judgment.
In our case, specifically about our children, because it’s our second relationship. Debbie has four boys. I have two girls. Well, sometimes I have judgments about her boys. It’s always risky to say to her, “Hey, I just want to tell you. I’ve got a judgment coming up in me about so-and-so,” because she cares about her boys and she’s irrationally involved with them just like I am with my girls. Every time I practice vulnerability in candor in my intimate relationship, there’s a modicum of fear that comes up because who knows how she’s going to react. We do have decades now of practicing, so pretty good chance that we’ll work it through. So that’s what candor is. Differentiate fact from story, hold your story likely, and reveal to the other for the sake of being known, not for proving you’re right, and practice deeply listening so the other person trusts you enough to reveal themselves. That’s a short primer on candor.
SHEILA HEEN
Sheila Heen: My guess is that you’re familiar with research by John Gottman up in Seattle?
Tim Ferriss: I have some familiarity, but please provide an overview.
Sheila Heen: An overview and just a connection to the question that you just asked. He invites married couples into his lab, and he invites them to talk about an issue that’s stressful between them, to have a difficult conversation, essentially. Hooks them up to heart monitors and videotapes and all of that. Then he says that he can watch for five minutes and predict with their different numbers based on his different studies, but 90-ish, 90, 92 percent accuracy, whether they’ll divorce within three or five years.
Part of the reason I name this is that, for me, it really says it’s not just that we have difficult conversations in our most important relationships. Those conversations are the relationship. That if we find a way to have them productively or constructively, then the relationship will thrive, whether it’s a personal or professional relationship, and/or is where we start to disengage because you just don’t get it and you won’t listen, and the relationship starts to fray.
What Gottman is listening for are what are the indicators that he’s listening for that tell him which direction it’s going to go. One of them is that as a conversation gets heated and starts to escalate, one of the spouses will often make a joke, but the purpose of the joke is that it’s an invitation to step outside this argument and to see it for what it is, to see what’s happening, which is that this is the conversation we usually have and how it usually goes. So often it’s a little bit of an inside joke, but humor — by the way, I listened to your conversation with Anne Lamott, who I absolutely adore.
Tim Ferriss: She’s a treasure.
Sheila Heen: She is a treasure. And what does she call it? Laughter is carbonated —
Tim Ferriss: Holiness.
Sheila Heen: Holiness, yeah. So laughter also in the brain just gives us a little bit of instant perspective that we suddenly see the absurdity of our own behavior in many cases. So it’s an invitation to just name what’s happening. It’s like a meta move. For instance, with my husband, who also teaches negotiation, by the way —
Tim Ferriss: I’d love it to be a fly on the wall for some of those.
Sheila Heen: Yeah, you can imagine. So we fight about how we fight. That’s the fight we usually have.
Tim Ferriss: This is like my friends’ kids. My friends are therapists, and their kids are like, “Stop therapizing me.”
Sheila Heen: Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: “Stop therapizing me.”
Sheila Heen: Exactly. So we’re like, “Yeah, you’re not listening. Oh, well, those difficult conversations, huh?” Yeah. So that’s the fight we have.
Tim Ferriss: “Stop putting your BATNA in my face!”
Sheila Heen: That’s right.
Tim Ferriss: That’s the Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement, folks. Inside joke.
Sheila Heen: Exactly. That was very nice inside baseball joke. Yeah. Waving your BATNA around in a romantic relationship is not usually a successful strategy. You know, there are a lot of people who’d find me very appealing.
One of the jokes that he and I make when we have the wherewithal to do it is like, “Why will you not just admit I am good and you are bad? That is what this is about, right? It’s about who needs to apologize, whose fault this is, et cetera.” So as things escalate, your ability to just name that underlying dynamic sometimes makes the other person laugh, and you can step out of it for a moment. Then that gives you the opportunity to say, “Look, obviously we’ve had this conversation several times. I’m not understanding why,” fill in the blank. “I’m not understanding why what I’m suggesting doesn’t make sense. Help me, genuinely, help me understand that.” Or “I’m not understanding what you’re most worried about here.” That often helps.
It needs to be a genuine ask. You can’t say like, “What are you worried about?” Because that’s really a hot question. It’s like, you shouldn’t be worried about anything. Why are you being so stupid as to be worrying about something? As long as you can step outside, see, oh, I’m not being curious right now. And I don’t have to pretend that I agree to do it. I think that’s really the key. And I don’t have to say there’s no truth, but from where I sit, I can only see some of the pieces of the puzzle. You have the other pieces of the puzzle. Putting those pieces on the table for discussion is how we figure out what we have to work with. Then at the end of the day, we still might not agree about this, but it might open up new options for how we handle it.
DR. SUE JOHNSON
Tim Ferriss: Could you walk us through what a hold me tight conversation is?
Dr. Sue Johnson: A hold me tight conversation, very briefly, is a bonding conversation. The tricky part is that, as adults, some of us have never seen this conversation. So it’s a dance that is foreign to us. We’ve never had it with our own parents. We’ve never had it with siblings. We’ve never had it with previous lovers. And we get married, or we get committed to a partner, and it’s reasonable that we don’t know how to go there because many of us, it’s just not a drama that we’ve ever seen enacted.
A hold me tight conversation is where one person is able to open up and reach for the other person and share vulnerabilities; talk about their needs and fears in a way that pulls the other person close. It helps the other person reach back and respond.
Tim Ferriss: Could you give any examples of phrasing, or questions —
Dr. Sue Johnson: Sure.
Tim Ferriss: — or guidelines you provide?
Dr. Sue Johnson: Of course.
Tim Ferriss: I know I would love to know, and I suspect others would too.
Dr. Sue Johnson: Well, when you don’t trust, you don’t feel safe, and you’ve never seen a hold me tight conversation, the way it usually goes just naturally as human beings, I catch myself doing this with my husband, if I’m upset about something, like he’s been going to bed very early, and that means that we don’t have our snuggle time, we don’t have our little chat time, okay, and it doesn’t seem to bother him at all. It doesn’t seem to bother him this isn’t happening. So this will go on for a couple of weeks. And even though I’m doing this work, there’s a certain point where I start to get self-protective and I start to blame him in my head. And I say, “He’s always too busy. He’s got his lists. He’s got lists, and he’s a man and he’s got lists. And all he cares about is his list of tasks. And he’s just into problem-solving. And he doesn’t think about me at all.”
And this dialogue would go in my head. So I turn to him and I say, “You’re going to bed very early these days.” Listen to my voice. It’s the emotional music. He says, “No, I’m not,” because he hears the threat in my tone, I say, “Yes, you are. And you’ve been going to bed for weeks. And I guess it doesn’t matter to you that we’re not having those close moments.” And listen to me, I’m on the attack and we are acutely sensitive as human beings to signs of rejection, or abandonment by the people we love, acutely sensitive. That’s how we’re wired. So he hears that he’s blown it. He hears it that I’m rejecting him. I’m telling him he’s done something wrong. So he says, “I don’t want to talk about this right now.” I say, “Oh, let me guess, you have to go to bed because you’re so tired.” Right. So we’re off. Right? Okay.
That is the typical demand-withdraw, demand-defend dialogue that you’ll see in a distressed couple. And it’s totally predictable. You can also have it with your kids. I can remember a glorious argument I had in Starbucks with my adolescent son that was just a perfect example of the way distressed couples talk to each other. So I’m blaming and pointing fingers and he’s rolling his eyeballs and basically telling me what a dreadful mother I am. So you can have it with anyone, but with partners it’s very predictable, and it has everyone feeling completely threatened and unsafe and unable to dance together. If you shift that into a hold me tight conversation, the way it would go is that I would be more able to tune into my own needs, more aware of my own needs, accepting of my own needs. And I would realize, oh, I’m really missing those conversations with John. We’ve been married for 32 years. We’re both very strong people, so it’s been quite an adventure.
So, I think, oh, I’m missing those relationships with John and maybe he doesn’t miss them. And oh, that makes me feel really somehow anxious and uncomfortable if he doesn’t miss them, because the big question in love relationships is, are you there for me? Do I matter to you? Can I count on you? Maybe those conversations don’t matter to him, but they really matter to me. So I am aware, on a different level, of me and I’m specifying, that scares me a bit that maybe these conversations don’t matter to him. I can tune into my own emotions. And then I take the risk and reach for him and say to him, “I’m open.” I say to him, “You know what? We haven’t been having our usual talks late at night and somehow, it doesn’t look like you miss them. And somehow that makes me feel really uncomfortable. It almost feels like I’m not sure that that closeness matters to you.”
And so I could get angry about it, but actually what’s happening is it scares me a bit because I need those conversations. Now I’ve talked about my fears and my needs. I can only do that if I have some model that it’s okay to do that, that doesn’t mean I’m a wimp, or mentally ill, or weak, or pathetic. From my point of view, it’s strength to do that. And that’s what we teach: I need strength to do that. And that’s what securely attached people can do. They can reach from a position of vulnerability. So I say that to him, and that pulls him; he says, “Oh, you’re right. Yeah. Yeah. I do want those conversations. I’ve just been so exhausted and I’ve been doing this and I haven’t wanted to tell you how stressed out I am.”
So then it becomes reciprocal. I say, “Oh, I didn’t know that you were so stressed out about this decision we’ve made and that it’s taking up all your energy and you’re worried about it.” So then we start to have an open, responsive, engaged conversation where we can share vulnerabilities, comfort each other, and you’re literally better at tuning in to each other. And I think that’s because when I feel safe, I can tune into you. When I think about the people I can dance with in tango really well, it’s the people I feel emotionally safe with. And I know that there’s no mistakes, because mistakes don’t matter, we’re just playing. Then I relax. I’m in my body. I tune into their cues and we move together naturally. So, that’s what happens. And it’s a hold me tight conversation.
And it cascades. Each time you have this conversation, your nervous system goes, “Ah, this is comfort. This is home. This is safety. This is what I need.” And you see your partner as a resource. You see your partner as somebody who can provide this safety, comfort, caring, reassurance, social support, if you want to use a psychological formal term for it. You see your partner as this person and your partner connects, and you know how to do this dance. This dance is innately rewarding. It creates joy in people.
You don’t have to persuade people to keep doing it, like going to the gym, or meditation, or their communication skills. People will do this. Once they know how to do it, they’ll keep doing it. And that’s why I think we get good follow-up results, because once you start having these conversations and it’s very moving sometimes to see people’s response, like people will start to cry and say things like, when they discover these hold me tight conversations, people will say, I’m thinking of one man who said, “I never knew that you could talk to somebody like this. I never knew that you could ask for these things and that she wants me to be vulnerable to her. I never knew that. I never saw that growing up. I didn’t know people did that.”
And then he wept and he turned to the therapist and said, “I’ve been alone all my life, haven’t I?” And that — what attachment science tells us is that emotional isolation is toxic for human beings. We found out that in the pandemic, but we still don’t get it. I wish we would get it on a different level. It’s toxic for human beings. It’s not who we are. And when people start to have these hold me tight conversations, all kinds of amazing things happen. They don’t just understand how relationships can be and how you can shape relationships, don’t have to just have them happen to you, you can shape love, they understand something very deep about themselves. Couples grow each other. In safe relationships, couples grow each other. I watch severely traumatized people learn to trust another human being by having these hold me tight conversations with their partner, and it changes everything. Because they have a secure place in life for the first time. They feel seen, they feel accepted, they feel held.
And once you feel seen, accepted, and held, there’s a natural human growth process that happens. Attachment science is all about development of the personality. There’s a natural growth process. So we tune into that natural process in the hold me tight conversation. And those conversations predict over study, after study, after study, after study, those conversations predict success in EFT, they predict more secure bonding, they predict better sex, more sexual satisfaction in couples, they predict any measure of good, positive functioning you can imagine. Those bonding conversations predict all the good results we get in EFT and they predict results at follow up.
TERRY REAL
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, I imagine that’ll give you a lot of payoff over a lot of miles. What is, another term that I’d never heard before, being exposed to your work, normal marital hatred?
Terry Real: I got this from Ed Tronick, infant observational researcher. Ed, along with Berry Brazelton, was the first generation — you know, since Freud, what we said about child development all came from listening to adults. We didn’t watch any kids. And he was one of the first people to actually plunk a video camera in front of mothers and infants and then fathers and infants and actually look at what happens. And when he came up with, I borrowed and it’s central to RLT, which is the essential rhythm of all relationships is harmony, disharmony, and repair. Closeness, disruption, and a return to closeness. That’s where the skills come in, how to move from disruption to repair.
Our culture doesn’t teach it. Our culture doesn’t even acknowledge that this rhythm, a good relationship is all harmony. Just like a good body is pure or a good body is like a 20-year-old body. A good sex life is like what you had when you were two weeks into the relationship. No, all harmony is bullshit. Bullshit.
One of the things I like about you, Tim, is you tell the truth. You know what? You go to a cocktail party and you go, “Oh, there’s Harry and Shirley. They’re in their 80s. They still have sex, they love each other.” Makes me — one of these days I’d let you go to a cocktail party in here, “There’s Harry and Shirley. They actually split up for a year. He fell in love with another woman. He couldn’t take it because she was such a drunk. But then she got into AA and got sober and the two of them are really doing reasonably well. Aren’t they cute?” Just once, I’d like to hear that.
So we don’t deal with reality. The father of couple’s therapy back in the ’50s said, “The day you turn to the person who’s next to you,” it was assumed it was your marriage, “and you say, ‘This is a mistake. I’ve been had. This is not the person I fell in love with.’ That,” said Framo, “is the first day of your real marriage.”
So here’s what I want to say about disharmony. You ready? It hurts. It’s dark. You can really, really feel like, “What the hell did I get myself into? This is such a disappointment. And guess what? Your partner’s probably feeling that about you, too. So I talk about normal marital hatred. When you’re in that dark phase, you hate your partner. That’s okay. Don’t kill yourself or her. That’s okay. I’ll teach you how to get through it, but it’s part of the deal for many of them. And here’s what I like to say, I’ve been going around the world talking about normal marital hatred for, oh, my God, what? 30 years. This is true. Not one person has ever come backstage and said, “Terry, what do you mean by that?” It’s okay, kids. Don’t sweat it. You can get through it. It’s normal. Relax.
Tim Ferriss: What are some of the first steps or tools that you would recommend to someone listening who agrees with what you’re saying, but has had no models for repair, has never learned how to use any type of approach for repair? And this is something that your help, well, your direct help, and then also your books have really helped me with because I did not grow up in a household with repair, right? It was basically, one person screams, then the other person goes to fix, which they don’t really want to do, but it’s their attempt to basically quell the disaster and fury, and that’s it. Then everybody’s kind of upset, and it never gets addressed. That was the model growing up. So what do you suggest to people who want to start with repair?
Terry Real: Of course, I’m tempted to say, “So are you a screamer or a fixer?” But I won’t. Leave that alone.
Tim Ferriss: I’m a fixer. I’m not a screamer.
Terry Real: Oh, wow. Okay. Lucky for your partner, but —
Tim Ferriss: Well, yeah.
Terry Real: The problem is the resentment that builds up.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly. Yep.
Terry Real: Yeah. Okay. So, repair. First of all, I like to say I have a number of bitter pills to swallow, but if you swallow them, things will be a lot better in your life. And here’s one of them. Repair is a one-way street. Everybody gets that wrong. It’s not a dialogue. It’s not, well, these are your issues with me. Well, these are my issues with you. No. You have your turn, but not then. Take turns. So if you have a disgruntled partner, you are at their service — that’s the first thing to master. I like to say, Tim, you’re at the customer service window. Somebody comes to the customer service window and says, “My microwave doesn’t work.” They don’t want to hear you say, “Well, my toaster doesn’t work.” They don’t want your excuses. Fix the goddamn microwave. Tend to your partner and bring them back into repair with you, then hours later or maybe, or the next, then they might have some interest in what you’re — but tend to them. Put yourself aside and tend to them.
What does that look like? Two things. First, do I get it? Listen. Don’t argue. Don’t rebut. Listen. Empty the well. “I’m sorry you feel bad.” That’s beautiful. Compassion. “I’m sorry you feel bad. I love you. I don’t want you to feel bad. Help me understand. What feels bad? What’s it like for you?” Okay, and then you reflect, “This is what I hear you say. Did I get it?” Yeah, good enough. Good. Two, “Is there something I could say or do right now that would be helpful? What would you like?” Who says that? And then if anything short of jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge, give it to them. Be generous. So those are the basics. I could be more specific, but —
DIANA CHAPMAN
Tim Ferriss: I would like to, if you’re open to it, shift a little bit to relationships. And I want to ask you specifically about your partnership with Matt. So here’s one of your superpowers, as listed from Mr. Jim. “Creating and sustaining a wonderful, intimate partnership with Matt, her husband and lover, since they were teenagers. Have her talk about the risks she and they were willing to take to keep the relationship alive and vital, growing, and intimate.” If you are game to talk about that, I would be very interested to hear more.
Diana Chapman: Yeah. Well, it’s a challenge. It’s both a great gift to be with a partner since you were young and get to grow up together. There’s a lot of shared memories and shared friends, and there’s a sweetness that it started out with you get to keep. And there’s also a great challenge of the fact that we are different people who evolve and change. And so several times, at least three key times in our relationship, we’ve been willing to let it all go, and we’ve basically killed it off. Just said, “The relationship as it was is done. Now let’s just check and see, is there a relationship? What is the relationship that wants to happen moving forward? Maybe it’s just friends, co-parents. Maybe it’s lovers, staying married. What is it?” And so we have a lot of courage, both of us, to be willing to let go of what’s not working and trust that the right form of the relationship will reveal itself. And it just so happens that it continues to be us married.
And we play around often. Sometimes we’ll get up in the morning and I’ll say something like, “Hey, you want to be married today?” And he’ll say, “Oh, well, what would that mean? What kind of a husband do I need to be?” And we’ll giggle and play around with, “Well, how about this and this?” And then we choose.
And we are always choosing over and over again, and we always are willing, kind of to the point of using the work with Byron Katie of, I’m willing to open to the possibility that not being married is just as okay as being married.
And what that has created is an incredibly vital, creative, ever evolving, passionate marriage, in which we’re freed up to keep exploring new ways of being together.
And I am really proud of my relationship. I think it’s one of the greatest things I’ve ever done, is the marriage that I have. We get a lot of feedback that it’s an inspiring marriage to a lot of people who look to it. And I do think it comes with the courage to say no.
Tim Ferriss: You mentioned at least — I think you said three times that you’ve had this type of conversation. I would like to zoom in on the first conversation. Were you both already prepared and trained to initiate that type of conversation? Did one side initiate the, “Hey, let’s decide if we want to remain as is, or if we want to take one of these other forms?”
I’m just wondering for people who are listening, who have never had one of these conversations — maybe they’ve been at the breaking point, but they’ve never had this conversation.
Diana Chapman: I initiated it. It wasn’t Matt’s idea. I said, “Hey, this isn’t working for me, the way we’re in a relationship. And there’s a different kind of a man I want to be with than how you are. And I want another possibility.”
And so I didn’t know how to do all this. I was just toddling around, trying to figure this out. And I said, “I don’t want to do it this way anymore.” And so I thought that might mean that we needed to be separated and that we needed to end the marriage.
And I was willing to. We actually got some support from counselors about telling our kids that we were going to divorce. Because that’s the only direction it seemed like we were going to go.
And then I had this great advice from a friend who said, “Okay, Diana, I love you both. If you think divorce is what needs to happen, that’s great. But I hear you complaining that there’s a certain man you want him to be that he’s not.” And she said, “Who is the woman you would need to be to call forward that man?”
And my stomach dropped, and I though “I don’t know about that. What?” And I realized, “Oh, I would need to be a different woman.” So we said, “Let’s kill off this old marriage and let’s see if we can create a new one. And I’m going to keep asking myself, who do I need to be to call forward the man I want to be with?”
And about six months later, I was with the man I wanted to be with. And I remember saying to him, “You really changed.” And he said, “No, you really changed.” And the truth is we both really changed.
But I was really grateful for that first conversation of being willing to let it go, and then getting the feedback of, “Hey, if you’re the creator of who’s showing up over there, who do you need to be?”
And for many months I felt like I was going to throw up 24/7, learning to be a much more vulnerable, needy woman, who called forward the man who could protect and lead, in a way that I hadn’t been willing to be in the past.
Tim Ferriss: Thank you for sharing all this, by the way. Very courageous and vulnerable. And how did you figure out who you needed to be? Who that woman was, to call forth the version of your husband or the man who you wanted to be with?
Did you have help? Was it obvious once you sat with it, in terms of the changes that needed to be made on your side or the things you needed to cultivate or drop? How did you arrive at the answers?
Diana Chapman: At first I didn’t know. I just knew I was really scared when I asked the question. And so I knew that my fear — I believe that fear, when we’re present, is an intelligence that says, “Something needs to get learned. Something needs to get learned.”
So when I had that fear, I thought, “Oh, wow, something needs to get learned. I don’t know something here.” And so that was my first clue that her question was powerful, is the fear that arose in me. And then I just kept asking the fear, “What needs to be learned?”
I just kept being really broad in that curiosity. I got into a state of wonder. “I wonder who I would need to be to call forward the man I most want to be with.” I just kept asking that. “I wonder.”
And I let it be okay that I didn’t have to know, because I didn’t know. I’d been with him for a long time and I didn’t know. So I had to be willing to listen and learn from something greater than my own experience so far.
And so it was in that level of curiosity that I just found my way. And it was just baby steps. A little bit here, a little bit there, and we’ve had several versions of that often. Or not often, but the three versions were all some version of me — something needs to get learned for the next evolution here of this relationship.
Tim Ferriss: Do you have recommended resources or practices that couples can seek out or embrace so that they are better prepared, if they get to these decision points? Or just overall in with respect to nurturing a healthy co-created relationship? Are there any books, any particular practices that you would highlight for folks?
Diana Chapman: Well, Matt and I studied with Gay and Katie Hendricks for years at the Hendricks Institute. They did a lot of relationship work. They still do a bit of it. But I learned so many tools there on how to get off the Drama Triangle.
I learned about personas and about how I get caught in these personas that then unconsciously require the persona of my partner to show up in a certain way, that then I complain about. And I learned about how to unwind those or shift them when I wanted to.
I learned about the importance of feeling my feelings. I learned about really questioning my stories. I learned about polarity and how important it is to honor polarity that shows up in couples, and making sure that I honored both sides of the polarity equally.
For example, a lot of couples argue about money. And almost always there’s one that we call the gas and one who’s the brake, and somebody who’s more free-flowing with money, and somebody who’s more controlling about money. And can we honor these polarities and can we see the value in both of them?
Because usually I was the one who wanted to spend the money and my husband wanted to hold onto the money. And we would get into a battle about, “You’re keeping me from having joy in my life because you’re so stingy about money.” And he’d say, “You’re going to make us all broke because you’re just so unconscious about spending it.”
And so honoring that those two sides of the polarity are actually allies that are here to create just the right balance to take care of ourselves and have fun. And so those are all different skill sets. There’s so many different tools.
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