Plays Well with Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong

by Eric Barker

Neuroscience research by Matthew Lieberman at UCLA has validated that labeling dampens powerful emotions. It also builds rapport by showing someone you’re on their wavelength.

“Nephew?” Mirroring. Another pillar of active listening. In the form of a question, repeat the last thing they said. Keep ’em talking. And all the while you’re getting more information and building rapport.

Active listening sounds great. And it works well in scenarios like hostage negotiation or therapy where the practitioner is a third party and has some distance from the problem. But marital arguments are different;

That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.

But when tragedy strikes, or late at night when your brain asks too many questions, we know it’s the relationships that matter most.

“Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.”

People turn to crystal balls and tarot cards not for hard answers but for a story that gives them a feeling of control over their lives. Phony

humans are prone to seeing meaning where there is none.

“Survey after survey finds that most people tend to exaggerate the extent to which others think, believe, and feel as they do.”

So the first step to being better at reading people is to be curious. Even better is to provide yourself with some sort of external gain or loss that motivates you.

We forget the bad and remember the good. This helps us to heal and to put things behind us.

Unsurprisingly, we have the most friends when we’re young (teens average about nine), and the number generally declines as we age. Which is sad, because friends make us happier than any other relationship.

Amigo impact in the office is no less significant. Less than 20 percent of people see their manager as a “close friend”—but those who do are 2.5 times more likely to enjoy their job.

Do you have three pals at work? Then you’re 96 percent more likely to feel happy about your life.

To be clear, that result was not “happy with your job”; it w...

Why do true friendships make us happier than spouses or children? Because they’re always a deliberate choice, never an obligation.

Quite simply: you have to like your friends. Other relationships can exist independent of emotion. Someone does not cease to be your parent, boss, or spouse because you stop liking them. Friendship is more real because either person can walk away at any time. Its fragility proves its purity.

“are disposed toward each other as they are disposed to themselves: a friend is another self.”

Pretty nice, huh? We treat them so kindly because they’re part of us.

“self-expansion theory”—that

A series of experiments demonstrated that the closer you are to a friend, the more the boundary between the two of you blurs.

What is empathy? Empathy is when the line between you and another blurs, when you become confused where you end and another person begins.

What is closeness? Closeness is when your vision of your “self” scooches over and makes room for someone else to be in there too. What is a friend? A friend is another self. A part of you.

Williams syndrome is a genetic disorder. Perhaps the most endearing of disorders. What is fascinating is that while people with this condition are disabled, they are also superhumanly abled when it comes to kindness, empathy, and socializing.

So what does Dale recommend? He encourages people to listen, to be interested in others, to speak to them from their point of view, to sincerely flatter others, to seek similarity, to avoid conflict, and many other things that seem obvious—but

As we discussed, friendship beats other relationships in terms of happiness, but what is it specifically that works that magic? Melikşah Demιr of Northern Arizona University says it’s companionship—merely spending time together.

we’re often more likely to tell very personal details to strangers than close friends.

How do you signal you’re trustworthy? By trusting someone else. And then, often, the trust in you creates the trust in them.

The Scary Rule™: If it scares you, say it. You don’t need to go full bore just yet. Don’t confess to any murders at Christmas dinner.

not being vulnerable kills friendships.

Make the time, vulnerably share your thoughts, and raise the stakes. If all goes well, they do the same. This gets us away from transactional relationships.

over time. But does that really make frenemies

surprisingly well into our Aristotelian paradigm. Narcissists

zero empathy; it’s more like their empathy muscle

When it comes to sex, love, and marriage, everything is complicated and nothing is obvious, simple, or easy.

But that’s committing an error called “survivor bias.”

If you want to determine if getting married makes you happier, you need to include separated, divorced, and widowed people in with the currently married,

marriage doesn’t make you healthy and happy; a good marriage makes you healthy and happy. And a bad marriage, even one in the past, can have very (or very very very) negative effects.

If you’re unhappily married, your health is likely to be notably worse than if you never got hitched at all.

But not with divorce. An eighteen-year study of thirty thousand people showed that after a marriage goes splitsville, levels of subjective well-being rebound—but not completely. It seems divorce puts a permanent dent in your happiness.

“In the United States, nearly 40 percent of marriages end in divorce. Another 10 or 15 percent of couples separate and do not divorce, and another 7 percent or so stay together but are chronically unhappy.” No matter how you slice it, this is no guarantee. It’s a minority of people who are happily married and stay that way.

Just like your career today might be more about paying the bills and have little to do with what you’re passionate about, back then who you married was about paying the bills and had little to do with who you were passionate about. Marriage was a lot more like workmates than soulmates.

“The bonds of wedlock are so heavy that it takes two to carry them, sometimes three.”

“anyone who has never been in love is missing one of life’s most pleasurable experiences.”

Dr. Frank Tallis writes, “Love seems to provide a shuttle service that operates between only two destinations: heaven and hell.”

Passion derives from the Latin word meaning “to suffer.”

Yes, modern science basically agrees that love is a mental illness.

Oddly, though, we don’t take love seriously as a malady and generally see it as something not only benign but widely recommended and endorsed.

Anthropologist Helen Fisher reports people newly in love spend up to 85 percent of their waking hours thinking about that special someone. Not only does love meet the criteria for OCD, but the neuroscience data match.

If my loyalty stops when the cost-benefit analysis for me goes south, that’s not loyalty, it’s selfishness. Loyalty is willingness to overpay. Acting crazy in love is signaling to the other person you’re no longer acting out of selfishness; in fact, you’re incapable of that: you can trust me because I’m nuts.