Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

by John M. Gottman

And when conflict comes, as it inevitably does when we weave two lives together, it’s our commitment to being curious rather than correct that allows us to turn toward instead of away from one another in the moments of disagreement.

A true love story isn’t a fairy tale. It takes vulnerability and effort.

it isn’t a coin toss. It’s not chance. It’s choice.

Successful long-term relationships are created through small words, small gestures, and small acts.

Perfection is not the price of love. Practice is. We practice how to express our love and how to receive our partner’s love. Love is an action even more than a feeling. It requires intention and attention, a practice we call attunement.

Open-ended questions lead to conversations that will make you fall in love, or help you decide to make a long-term commitment, or keep you in love with the person you have chosen to spend your life with.

Decades of research show that the great relationships—the masters—are built on respect, empathy, and a profound understanding of each other.

Staying in love takes a level of vulnerability that isn’t always comfortable.

For newly committed couples, we want to emphasize that conflict will happen in any relationship, but if you avoid conflict now, you’re guaranteed to have a lot more conflict later.

John discovered that one set of variables determined whether a marriage would succeed or fail: Were the couples being positive or negative during the interview? There was very little gray area. Either they emphasized their good times together and minimized the bad times, or they emphasized their bad times together and minimized the good times. Either they emphasized their partner’s positive traits and minimized their partner’s more annoying characteristics, or they emphasized their partner’s negative traits and minimized their partner’s more positive characteristics.

They emphasize their commitment to the relationship versus questioning whether they should really be with this partner.

The positive switch is all about how couples positively interpret their negative events and their partner’s character, and whether in their minds on an everyday basis they maximize the positive and minimize the negative (in their partner and in their relationship).

We miscommunicate, and when we do we need to make repairs. Expecting no communication snafus in a relationship is like expecting a hole-in-one every time you hit a golf ball. Happy relationships aren’t relationships where there is no fighting. They are relationships where repairs are made after regrettable incidents happen—and where a couple connects with each other day to day.

Happy couples are not so very different from unhappy couples; they are simply able to make repairs to their relationship easier and faster so they can get back to the joy of being together.

Happy marriages or long-term relationships can significantly reduce depression, anxiety disorders, addictions, and antisocial behavior, and reduce incidents of suicide.

Showing appreciation and affection for your partner regularly, talking together at the end of each day, giving each other a kiss hello and goodbye—these are all elements of a happy and healthy relationship. Your relationship is built out of these small and simple moments together each day; you should embrace them. But we also are asking you to set aside time once a week to have a planned date night—or date afternoon or morning.

The plain and simple truth is—date nights make relationships.

a date is a preplanned time where the two of you leave your work life and your work-in-the-home life, and spend a set amount of time focusing on each other, and really talking and listening to each other.

Date nights should be sacred times to honor your relationship. Think of them as such, schedule them in your calendars for as much time as possible—even if it’s just for an hour, suit up and show up, no matter what.

At times, both John and Julie, and Doug and Rachel, would trade childcare with other couples, so both couples could enjoy date nights.

Children are incredibly resilient, and by showing your commitment to your relationship with your partner, you’re nurturing your children by ensuring that they will be raised by parents in a healthy and stable relationship. Children feed off of the love in a marriage. Remember they are constantly modeling you, and you want them to see how you sustain a loving marriage.

Find the moments of humor. Find the joy, even when it feels difficult.

Now talk about WHY you have these feelings. This might include a description of the events that led to the feeling, a story from your childhood, an observation, or an insight or revelation that you’ve had. Anything that draws a connection between the feeling and what you think caused the feeling.

Listening is the all-important other half. It requires a special kind of listening. It’s where we listen to understand, without judgment or defensiveness, or the desire to rebut.

It is an accepting form of listening. Listening is an action; you have to commit to it. And you can’t do that if you don’t get out of your own head. If you stay inside yourself, the voice you hear will be your own, and not your loved one’s.

Don’t be critical and don’t give advice unless your partner asks for it.

In every conversation with our partner we want to communicate respect, understanding, and empathy.

Remember the goal in these conversations isn’t to prove that you’re right in your beliefs or that your partner is wrong. The goal is to understand the similarities and differences that you have and to create empathy for why you each see the world the way that you do.

Try to understand what makes your partner tick, and work to accept the way your partner is,

without listening, intimate conversation is impossible.

Leah explained that for her, trust is about feeling safe and about how attentive

Ben is.

and now her reaction makes sense to me.”

commitment is a choice we make every single day, over and over again.

when people, especially people who are unhappy in their relationships, start confiding in another person about their relationship, they are opening up a window to this outside person.

Choosing commitment means accepting your partner exactly as he or she is, despite their flaws. It means never threatening to leave, even if at times you might want to. It also means caring about your partner’s pain as much as—if not more than—your own.

True commitment is choosing each other over and over again,

There is one step that cascades toward all betrayals. It often happens when things aren’t going well in the relationship. That step is making negative comparisons of our partner with other real or imagined alternative relationship partners. We call these “Negative Comps.” Rather than nurturing gratitude for what we have with our partner,

When we fall in love we are often on our very best behavior. We lead with the healthiest side of ourselves. But as relationships progress, each person gets more real, more transparent, and therefore more vulnerable. None of us has it all together, and none of us is without our idiosyncrasies or insecurities no matter how together we may appear. And here’s where the real magic comes in—the more honest we are, the more we can discover that our partner really loves us for who we are, and not the idealized version of us that shows up when we first begin to date.

Commitment is actually built on thinking and then communicating to one’s partner that he or she is precious, and not replaceable.

We think and communicate that no one out there—real or imagined—can compare with our partner.

On the other hand, betrayal is nurtured by communicating to one’s partner that he or she is lacking certain qualities we simply cannot do without, and therefore is highly replaceable.

“We never argue. We never fight. We’re each other’s best friend, and I can’t think of a single thing we’ve ever fought over,” said Marie. They gained insight into conflict on this date. This state of marital peacefulness that passes for “bliss” that Marie describes is actually just the quietness that results from avoiding conflict.

Marie hadn’t realized it, but she had internalized the idea that all conflict was to be avoided and if there ever was a fight, it meant the relationship was over.

Mutual understanding: This is the healthiest and most productive goal of all conflict.

Here’s another headline: Our research has shown that most relational conflict is not resolvable. Each relationship comes with a set of problems because each person is unique and different from others, and some set of problems is going to be there no matter who the other partner might be. Time and time again we hear of couples divorcing because of their problems, and then remarrying only

to find they have similar or new problems in the new relationship.

You can’t “solve” your personality or preferred lifestyle differences, nor should you try. Recognizing a perpetual problem for what it is leads to accepting and valuing how each of you is different.

Marie started vilifying Wesley in her head, and his going to sleep with the television on became a symbol of his extreme selfishness in all areas. If you find that the two of you get more and more polarized, more extreme, and more uncompromising, you’re gridlocked. Eventually this will lead to emotional distance between the two of you, and this is the real relationship killer—not anger, or arguments, or conflict in general—but the distance you let it create between you.

When your partner expresses anger, instead of acting defensive and attacking back, try asking yourself, or even asking your partner, what does he or she need, what is the unmet desire or hope that hasn’t yet been met. Through any argument, if you can communicate that you love and accept your partner, even if you deeply disagree with them, your relationship and marriage can not only survive but also thrive.