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

by Eric Barker

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

Whom can I trust? Does anyone really know me? Does anyone really care? If you think of your happiest moments, they will be about people. The most painful moments will too. Our relationships to others make or break our lives.

“The Barnum effect refers to the tendency for people to accept as uncannily descriptive of themselves the same generally worded assessment as long as they believe it was written specifically for them on the basis of some ‘diagnostic’ instrument such as a horoscope or personality inventory.”

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.

Since we can’t improve our people-reading skills that much, we have to focus our efforts on making others more readable.

Truth be told, if you wanted to focus on something, skip body language and laser focus on their speech. When we can hear someone but not see them, empathic ability declines only about 4 percent. When we can see someone but not hear them, the drop-off is a whopping 54 percent. Pay less attention to whether they cross their legs and more attention to when their voice changes.

First impressions are generally accurate. But once they’re set, they’re extremely hard to change.

First, listen to that advice you’ve received so many times: make a good first impression.

The other thing to remember: give people a second chance.

The result is that your negative judgments about people will be less reliable than your positive judgments.

Never be a “bad cop.” Be a “friendly journalist.” You have to get them to like you. To open up. To talk a lot. And to make a mistake that reveals their deception. What’s

Instead of focusing on not judging a book by its cover, it would be more useful to say we would be better off putting more effort into revising the judgments we will undoubtedly make.

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

“The support for our basic prediction is consistent with the notion that, in a close relationship, other is ‘included in the self’ in the sense that cognitive representations of self and close others overlap.”

“self-expansion theory”—that we expand our notion of our self to include those we’re close to. A series of experiments demonstrated that the closer you are to a friend, the more the boundary between the two of you blurs. We actually confuse elements of who they are with who we are. When you’re tight with a friend, your brain actually has to work harder to distinguish the two of you.

“A friend who is there for you when you’re in need is definitely a friend.” Far clunkier, I know, but I promised you science, not sound bites. And that does clarify what we all want. Be there for me when I need you. The world may be selfish and competitive, but you and I do not have to be. Maybe you can or can’t help with “deeds,” but I’m not just looking for transactional gain: most of all I’m looking for “another self” to help me shoulder the burden of life.

how you start an argument is double-super-extra important.

Showing the generosity and compassion that you naturally give to a child when they’re upset is a simple way to get around many of the problems we create. We’re just less likely to think a child is motivated by conscious malice. We think they must be tired, hungry, or moody. This is, frankly, an excellent thing to do with anyone.

FOUR RS TO MAGIC Rekindle feelings through self-expansion. Remind yourself of intimacy through “love maps.” Renew your intimacy with “the Michelangelo effect.” Rewrite your shared story. Again and again.

Arthur Aron and Gary Lewandowski found that when couples do stuff that makes them feel they are learning and becoming better, it increases love. Just like boredom kills love, when we feel our partner is helping us become a better, more interesting person, we love them all the more.

Not only do “self-expansion” activities improve relationship satisfaction, but studies show that they also increase sexual desire.

Want a concrete way to get started? Go out with your spouse and pretend it’s your first date. This isn’t just some cheesy advice from Aunt Barb: it’s been tested. To fall in love again, redo the things you did falling in love the first time.

problems.” But when you take the time to get to know somebody, you can see the emotional reasons why things don’t mean to them what they might mean to you. That understanding can change “difficult problems” into “lovable quirks.” When you know they leave the lights on in the bathroom sometimes because of a childhood fear of the dark, the lazy idiot becomes a sympathetic human with acceptable foibles.

Mealtimes, bedtime, vacations, date night, partings, reunitings, scheduled snuggling appointments, and celebrations are all perfect moments for having a special, weird something that sets your love apart.

“The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work.” He didn’t feel that sculpting was creating; it was revealing. The sculpture just has to be freed from the stone around it. And psychologists found the same idea applies to improving your partner.

If we know the “negatives” of a partner but learn the meaning beneath them, we see who they really are and who they can really be. We can then encourage that ideal in a partner and help them actually become that ideal. They become the idealized self, and so the idealization can last. This is a path to a continued romantic love that defies entropy. The Michelangelo effect allows us to fall in love over and over again with same person (without amnesia).

So use more we.

belonging is the meaning of life.

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you.