Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

by John M. Gottman

We forget about seeking understanding, and we give a 20-minute diatribe on why we’re right and they’re wrong. We get defensive, we criticize, we show contempt, and we turn away at the very moment we should be turning toward each other.

We discovered in our research that taking responsibility—even for a small part of the problem in communication—presents the opportunity for great repair. It’s highly effective.

There’s usually a story underneath every strong emotion.

Don’t make your partner the bad guy. There is no winner in a healthy conflict; there is only understanding and resolution or acceptance.

Don’t criticize or judge your partner, or believe that their viewpoint is wrong and yours is right. Both of your perspectives are valid.

To begin your relationship or marriage saying we’re going to have sex every single day is a setup

for failure. Life shows up, and nothing is a greater measure of just how life is showing up than your sexuality.

Couples who have a great sex life: Say “I love you” to their partners every day, and mean it Buy one another surprise romantic gifts Compliment their partner often Have romantic vacations Give one another back rubs

Kiss one another passionately for no reason at all (85 percent who love sex also kiss passionately) Show affection publicly (hold hands, caress, kiss) Cuddle with one another every day (only 6 percent of the non-cuddlers had a great sex life) Have a romantic date once a week that may include dressing up, dinner out, massage, and lovemaking Make sex a priority and talk to one another about sex comfortably Are open to a variety of sexual activities Turn toward bids for emotional connection

Often it can seem easier to be naked physically rather than naked emotionally, but if you want to create a relationship or marriage that goes the distance, you’re going to have to bare it all.

Frequency: In our research of couples’ sex lives, we found that ideally men want sex four to five times a week, and women one to two times.

Sexual desire for women is a barometer for how the rest of her world is going. If she’s not rested, or happy, or healthy, or feeling supported and loved, she’s not going to feel like having sex.

It’s especially hard for men to hear “no,” because research shows that being wanted sexually is essential to a man’s sense of his masculinity. There’s even been a study showing that men would prefer to get fired from their job rather than have their partner not want them sexually.

Checking in on your partner’s interior world will help your sex life flourish.

Lips are our body’s most exposed erogenous zone and are associated with a disproportionately large part of the brain. The brain literally lights up with a good kiss, and kissing activates 5 out of 12 cranial nerves.

The Science of Kissing, cites a ten-year German study that found that men who kissed their wives before leaving for work lived five years longer and earned 20 percent more than men who “left without a peck goodbye.”

You can’t just think positive things about your partner, you need to verbalize them to your partner.

successful relationships have a 20 to 1 ratio of positive to negative in all their everyday interactions in the apartment lab.

kissing passionately for no reason at all is one universal key to a great sex life.

The top sex and passion killers in a relationship are: ~ Lack of physical affection, flirting, intimate connection apart from sex ~ Vital to-do things left undone ~ Emotional distance and intense conflict ~ Lack of safety, either emotional or physical ~ Exhaustion and stress ~ Feeling unappreciated

financial arguments were the single best predictor of divorce. The other four issues that couples get into conflict over the most? Sex, in-laws, alcohol or drug use, and parenting.

Couples need to avoid the dichotomy of characterizing one another in terms of the two most common stereotypes: the Spender and the Saver.

Money buys pleasure, and it also buys security.

John and Julie go on a honeymoon every year. It is a ritual they have created to celebrate and honor their union—a way to show that their relationship is still important enough to merit time away from careers, family, friends, and obligations as it was when they first got married.

research shows that if you’re happy in your marriage you’re more likely to be happier in your job. The reverse is also true, job satisfaction can predict marital satisfaction, but researchers found this link to be weaker.

In fact, another Pew Research study in 2007 showed that after faithfulness and a good sex life, sharing household chores was listed as the most important element of a successful marriage.

If you hired someone to do the work of maintaining a household, especially if you have children, the cost would be approximately $90,000 a year.

If you enter into a long-term relationship or marriage thinking that you and your partner will always leave work at 5 p.m. every day, ready to go out, or cook dinner, or hit the gym, or take a class together, or have a deep discussion—you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. Sometimes work demands will feel like there’s been a hostile takeover of your free time and your relationship, and you need to make sure your relationship is solid enough to handle these times. While Rachel was in her medical residency, she and Doug had very little time together. The hours were long and brutal, she was sleep-deprived, and it seemed as if they never saw each other except for their weekly date night. Doug supported Rachel’s work dream of becoming a physician, but not being able to connect and spend time together had driven a wedge between them. They were both feeling dissatisfied and started arguing more during the brief time they saw each other. While they kept up with scheduling a date night, during it they both felt frustrated and alone. “I remember one date night in particular, because we never made it out of the parking lot of the apartment complex we were living in,” remembered Rachel. “We just sat in the car, side by side, and I just felt exhausted, numb, and kind of lost. I was working so hard, for us, but somehow in the middle of my grueling residency, we had lost that us. All that was left

In our research with heterosexual couples, we’ve found that there can be profound differences between men and women when it comes to money. Women don’t typically save money, and more than 58 percent of women born between 1946 and 1964 (baby boomers) have saved less than $10,000 in retirement accounts.

Jamal and Luciana’s ability to compromise and use humor as they discuss how many children they might have is a good indicator that this is not likely to be a big source of conflict for them.

Statistics show that for a child born in the United States in 2015, it costs an average of $233,610 to raise that child through age 17.

but the kind of falling in love that happens the first time you hold your newborn baby is like being hit with a meteor.

“If you focus all of your emotional passion on your children and you neglect the relationship that brought that family into existence . . . eventually, things can go really, really wrong. I have not been a perfect mother, but giving my children a sense of security in their parents’ relationship is something that I feel really proud of,” she says. Waldman knows what many of us who have older children know. Eventually, if everything goes according to plan, those children will leave the house. And when it’s just the two of you once again, your relationship is going to be lacking if you haven’t

maintained your intimacy or your connection.

Sociologist Ernest Burgess was one of the first people to study married couples. In the 1930s he wanted to develop a scientific measure to predict the success rate of marriages. In his longitudinal study of married couples, he found that beginning with newlyweds, and as you went further along the married life spectrum, marital satisfaction was a U-shaped curve. Marital satisfaction began plummeting after the wedding and then took a big downward dive when the first child arrived—taking bigger nosedives with every subsequent child. If the couple didn’t divorce while at the bottom, then marital satisfaction began increasing when the youngest child left home. This wasn’t just true for the early part of the twentieth century. This is the norm.

John Gottman’s own longitudinal newlywed study found that for those couples who have a child within an average of four years after getting married, 67 percent have a precipitous drop in marital happiness in the first three years of the baby’s life. Measuring videos of conflict, with observers blind to whether or not the couple had children, the couples with children showed an increase in hostility and conflict. But a third of all couples who became parents didn’t have a drop in relationship happiness, so John chose to look closely at both sets of couples three months after the wedding. Was there some difference he could see prior to the baby being born that could predict which group the couple would be in post-baby? What John found out in his longitudinal study of heterosexual couples was that the men who were more respectful to their wives, and more accepting of their wife’s influence or opinions, were more likely not to have a drop in marital satisfaction after children are born.

The second most important thing is for the two of you to maintain intimacy and connection. You need to make your relationship a priority. If you don’t, you will fall to the bottom of the curve and not get out for 18 years, if you don’t divorce first. To maintain intimacy you need to talk to each other about your stresses, make time to connect (date nights!), and avoid defensiveness, criticism, contempt, and shutting down or withdrawing from each other.

The decision to have children or not can be a deal breaker. Be very honest and open about your wishes to have children and how many you envision. Don’t enter into a marriage thinking you can convince your spouse to have children or not have children later on.

What does your ideal family look like? Just us? Us and friends and relatives? If you want children, how many children would you like to have?

What do you think you will love about being parents together?

1 How are we going to create a sense of family?

Who do you consider our closest family (this can be friends or relatives)? What do you want to do to deepen our relationship with our family or closest friends?

couples who play together, stay together.

Shared fun, shared activities, and shared laughter all contribute to a stronger, happier, and healthier relationship.

“Play refreshes a long-term adult-adult relationship; some of the hallmarks of its refreshing, oxygenating action are: humor, the enjoyment of novelty, the capacity to share a lighthearted sense of the world’s ironies, and the enjoyment of mutual storytelling.

We seek new experiences, new understanding, and new meaning. And we seek the reward and pleasure that comes from these new experiences

“I had to face the fact that this woman, the love of my life, is very different from me. She is an athlete, an explorer, and a true adventurer. Adventure for me is studying quantum mechanics and differential equations from the safety of my chair. Julie was a downhill skiing racer in college—going fifty miles an hour downhill. My God, why would anyone want to do that? But she wanted to partially climb Everest, and she’s my girl, so I had to understand what it meant to her and support her.

They have learned to verbally share their disparate interests, while sharing together the play and fun that works for both of them.

Adventure doesn’t have to happen on far-off mountaintops or at the risk of life and limb. At its core, it’s simply seeking what is new and different.

One indication that adventure is lacking is when one or both of you are seeking substitutions for the dopamine response and end up feeding the need for play and adventure (dopamine) with sugar, chocolate, junk food and, for some, alcohol, prescription drugs, and other mind-altering substances, whether legal or illegal.