The 5:1 ratio that separates happy couples from divorced ones | John & Julie Gottman: Full Interview

I'm Julie Gottman, co-founder of the Gottman Institute and co-founder of Affective Software. And I'm John Gottman, senior scientist at Gottman Incorporated and co-founder of Affective Software. John and I work together as well as share a relationship together.

Today on Big Think, we're going to talk about how relationships fall apart, how relationships repair themselves, and how to sustain a long-lasting and loving relationship.

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Why Relationships Fall Apart

Over time, relationships end with a whimper, not a bang, for the most part. People start ignoring the relationship. A good example is the Sloan study of dual-career couples, which followed couples with young children over time. The researchers were surprised to find that on a typical evening, the partners spent less than 10% of the evening in the same room. Through that erosion, these couples wound up ignoring the relationship. Their relationships devolved into a long to-do list rather than continuing play, fun, adventure, and romance. People became more distant, and in our research we found they led parallel lives — like two railroad tracks.

When a couple comes to me and says, "We've lost something, but we don't know what," that can mean a number of things. It can mean the way they talk about problems is terribly conflicted. They used to be able to work on their problems calmly and gently and reach compromises, but now something has changed: they've moved into criticism, expressions of contempt, much more defensiveness, or even what we call getting flooded — moving into fight or flight when addressing and listening to their partner. That means they won't be able to hear what their partner is really saying. Or the opposite: they're very distant and don't talk about their problems at all — they're silent. This is what we call a devitalized relationship. It's lost its life energy and its connection.

What does distress look like when a couple walks into my office? It can look like several things. I have a long couch, so where do they sit — together, shoulder to shoulder, or at the far ends, clinging to the ends of the couch? Also, people in distress won't look at each other. They'll look at me, hoping I'll serve as a referee for who to nail — who is vastly superior and who is making all the mistakes. That's not how this therapy works. So part of what I do at the very beginning is look from one partner to the other; if one person is only looking at me, I'll look at them, then at the other, hoping to guide that partner to look at the other along with me. We're building a relationship in therapy where the two partners talk to one another as well as including me.

What drew me to studying relationships was my complete incompetence at them. My best friend Bob Levinson and I shared that incompetence, and we decided to set up a lab. One of the surprising things we discovered was that 69% of all conflicts are perpetual. By bringing couples in every two, three, or six years and finding out what they thought about, we found that 69% of the time these are perpetual problems that never go away. Most have to do with differences in personality, lifestyle, or values; couples disagree about these issues and keep coming back to them over and over again.

The masters of relationships have these perpetual problems too, but they approach them differently. They communicate an acceptance of their partner's personality and some humor about the differences, then start working on them and arrive at temporary compromises. Disaster couples deal with them differently: they spin their wheels on the problem, become more alienated, vilify one another in their minds, see the problems as the result of the other partner's defects, and withdraw from the problem as much as they can.

What turns a perpetual problem into a terrible conflict that neither person wants to talk about is typically when criticism is used to describe the problem itself. Take housework. One partner might say, "You know what? You are such a slob. What is the matter with you? You never clean anything. I can't believe what a mess this kitchen is." The operative word there was "slob" — a personality flaw being attributed to the other partner. It's very likely the other partner will respond defensively.

The partner on the receiving end of criticism typically responds defensively — "Well, you never pay the bills on time" — or dismissively: "I do too clean the kitchen. It's fine. What's your problem?" So criticism goes nowhere.

What Bob Levinson and I discovered over time was that we could accurately predict whether a relationship was heading toward disaster — whether a couple would divorce or stay together, and if they stayed together, how happily married they would be over time. We counted the seconds of positive emotion they expressed and divided that by the seconds they spent angry, disappointed, hostile, belligerent, or sad. Among the couples we called the masters of relationships — those who were happily married and stayed together — the ratio of positive to negative averaged five to one, versus about 0.8 for the disasters.

We were curious whether some negatives were far more corrosive than others, and we identified four things that were the best predictors of relationship demise:

1. Criticism — stating a problem in the relationship as a flaw in the other person's personality.
2. Defensiveness — responding to your partner by denying responsibility for anything, counter-attacking, acting like an innocent victim.
3. Contempt — an escalation of criticism that involves expressing superiority over the partner on any dimension.
4. Stonewalling — the listener not giving the usual signals of listening: no eye contact, no nodding, no brief vocalizations like "Mm-hm, uh-huh, oh, yeah." The stonewaller just shuts down, like a stonewall.

Those are the four best predictors, and contempt was the absolute best predictor of relationship demise.

Why contempt is the worst

Contempt is similar to criticism, but here's what it looks like: "You wouldn't even think to clean the kitchen, would you? No. You wouldn't even think of it. You're too selfish." The speaker acts morally superior, looking down their nose at their partner, delivering the words with scorn and horrible disrespect.

The other person feels it. The listener of contempt not only shrinks in self-esteem and feels terrible about themselves — which ruins the relationship — but the number of times contempt is expressed in a conflict conversation predicts how many infectious illnesses the listening partner will have in the coming four years. In other words, contempt is not only sulfuric acid for the relationship, it's sulfuric acid for the immune system: the person listening gets sick more often. So contempt is something we really want to eliminate.

When couples are stuck in these patterns

These four behaviors are what make perpetual problems so difficult. When a couple knows no alternative to criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling, the pattern makes them sick to their stomach and feel terrible every time the topic they're stuck on surfaces. Many couples simply avoid the topic altogether — but you can feel its presence in the room, like an elephant under the rug saying, "Yoo-hoo, you going to pay attention to me?" They don't want to. They're terrified of bringing it up, because they end up locked into these very destructive patterns with no idea how to get out. The feelings that follow are frequent anger, fear, and often a lot of grief: "God, we're so distant. Why…"

Couples stuck in these destructive patterns feel anger, fear, and grief at how distant they've become, wondering why they can't work on things together. They may also feel hopelessness, despair, and powerlessness, because nothing they do is working. They end up paralyzed in the face of that perpetual problem.

What quietly destroys love is the erosion of trust. Our understanding of betrayal in relationships comes largely from the unprecedented research of the social psychologist Caryl Rusbult, who helped us understand betrayal in a new way. Rusbult found that betrayal is a gradual process in which people stop cherishing what they have and start looking for what they don't have, feeling sorry for themselves over what's missing in the relationship. After an argument, people in relationships headed for betrayal think they can do better, imagining some real or imagined relationship where they would. So instead of talking to their partner about the problem and voicing their complaints, they trash their partner — Rusbult discovered they go talk to somebody else about them. They also give themselves permission to cross boundaries. As they complain, they find someone very sympathetic to their complaints, and when they cross boundaries in that self-pitying state, betrayal is a natural consequence.

Many things can break trust in a relationship, the biggest being typically an extramarital or extra-relationship affair. To the hurt individual, their entire world has blown up. You've built your world on a committed relationship, and the values you thought you shared, the dreams you thought you had together, the connection, teamwork, companionship, love, sex, and intimacy are all exploded into fragments. Betrayal can feel like shards of glass. That's why it's very difficult to rebuild trust, even after small betrayals.

Bids for connection

When cameras were rolling in the love lab, the control room noticed that when one person tried to get their partner's attention or interest, they would switch a camera over to see the partner's response. My student Jenny Driver discovered this was a critical moment. The partner either responded — which we call turning toward — didn't respond, treating it as a non-event, which we call turning away — or responded irritably ("Will you be quiet? I'm trying to read"), which we call turning against. Sometimes the original partner would come back and repeat the bid, but that happened only 22% of the time. Close to 80% of the time, when the bid was turned away from, the person who made it would crumple a little.

Looking at this over time, Jenny found that the 17 couples who divorced after six years had, six years earlier, turned toward their partner's bids an average of 33% of the time. Among couples still married, the average six years earlier was 86% turning toward. Over six years, you could fill a Russian novel with all the moments of turning toward that these master couples had done. We realized bids were really important.

A bid for connection matters so much because it says to the other person, "I trust you to respond. I believe in you as a trustworthy person." For example, you might express a bid by voicing a need: "I'm really exhausted. Would you mind doing the dishes tonight?" In asking that, you're trusting the other person to be caring and loving toward you — you perceive them as a caring, loving person. Who doesn't want to think that about themselves? Making a bid is a way of saying, "You're a good person, a worthy person, even a trustworthy and caring person. So I trust you, and I'm making this bid with you and only you in this moment."

Loneliness and the body

When one partner starts checking out of the relationship and withdrawing from conflict and from their partner, they start getting lonely, and that loneliness is very punishing physiologically. We discovered that in lonely couples, when this withdrawal takes place, the heart pumps harder at every beat, and the time it takes for the bolus of blood to travel from the heart to the ear is chronically reduced — blood flows faster at every heartbeat. Even when they're just reading a newspaper or taking a walk, if that loneliness is inside them, their heart is laboring harder. And those people tend to die younger.

Loneliness itself predicted early death. That's what we discovered in Bob's longitudinal 20-year study of couples: when we tried to recontact participants we thought had dropped out, what had actually happened was that one of the partners had died. The faster blood flow we observed was predictive of that early death.

Is there a point of no return where a relationship can no longer be healed? Frankly, we don't know. Helen Fisher taught us that you can stay in love forever—there's no shelf life for love. Before her research, people believed being in love lasts about two years and then fades, that nobody can sustain it. Not true. There may not be any point of no return. We've even seen couples divorce, hate the divorce, get back together, and rebuild the relationship.

But we do believe that when the relationship becomes a source of abuse, when it's no longer on the side of both people, when people become enemies—when love is no longer a dying ember we can fan into a roaring fire, when the fondness and admiration system dies—the relationship is better off dead, and people are better off separated.

Many couples believe they've reached the end of the road, that there's no turning back and it's time to leave. The problem is thinking that too early—when you're exhausted by conflict, or feel so distant from your partner that the spark from the beginning seems missing. People who believe they've reached the end of the rope are often wrong, because they haven't learned alternative ways of speaking with one another, reconnecting, and perhaps rebuilding trust.

Probably every couple that comes into my office—even the most distressed ones—includes someone who believes that's it, they're at the end of the road. I hold the hope for them, because the fact that they've come into my office at all suggests there's a tiny ember still remaining of the love, of the hope that the relationship can grow into something much healthier and more rewarding.

However, there are couples who have truly reached the end of the road, and I like to think that results from too little, too late. A couple may come in where 25 years have passed since they became really unhappy—living on parallel tracks, like railroad tracks with no connection, for years and years. By the time they finally come in, all those embers have turned to ash, and there's no love left no matter how things change. In that case, it may be over.

But so many times, it actually isn't. Buried under the ash can be just a little spark of hope. That's what I work on with the couple: blowing on that little ember, giving the partners brand new ways of connecting that they hadn't been aware of before. Then things begin to build very slowly, like blades of grass—fragile, delicate, but rebuilding nonetheless.

Many people believe a healthy relationship should be completely conflict-free, and that any conflict means something is seriously wrong. In reality, conflict is completely normal and healthy in a relationship.

Think about it: you live in your own body, with your own skin, head, heart, and way of thinking, while your partner lives in a totally different one. Are those always in sync? No. Our research found that conflict can actually be a way of understanding one another—especially when it concerns important topics like parenting, what kind of vacation or adventure to have, how to relate to in-laws, how to celebrate holidays, or even how to say good night and good morning to each other. Couples experience many such differences.

Conflict happens in our own marriage too. John and I can get into a fight where one of us is being critical and the other defensive—and we have the chance to say, "You call yourself a marriage therapist?" We're not perfect either. A healthy relationship isn't perfect, but it is capable of repair, and that is one of the big differences between a healthy relationship and an unhealthy one.

When we studied 130 newlyweds just a couple of months after their wedding, we found that some couples really were building trust, and they were testing the relationship to see whether that trust existed. What we mean by trust comes from using game theory—the mathematics of game theory—to understand the relationship. The answer is very simple: trust means that

Trust means each partner is thinking for two — not just maximizing their own benefit in the relationship, but maximizing the sum of their own and their partner's benefit. When you start caring as much about what's good for your partner as what's good for you, you build trust, and that's the basis of our trust metric.

Many of us have moments when we betray our partner's trust in some small way — hurting their feelings, disappointing them. In relationships that work, people stop and repair those things. They notice the loss of trust or the slipping sense of commitment, talk about it, repair it, and recommit to one another in a way that is meaningful for both.

When a betrayal is discovered, there's a specific way couples need to recover from it, whether it's big or small. The stages are:

1. Atonement. The person who lied, deceived, or betrayed doesn't get defensive or blame the other person. They take full responsibility and empathize with the other person's pain — sometimes anguish or despair — caused by the betrayal. They also ask for forgiveness, or at least express remorse for having committed the betrayal.
2. Building "marriage number two." This means working on the relationship itself. Marriage number one may have burned to the ground, but marriage number two can be rebuilt by learning new ways of talking to each other and building rituals or traditions that create connection and transparency. If they're late coming home from work, they call, say they're late, and explain why — instead of leaving a cloud of doubt with the partner at home.
3. Attaching again. Attaching means recommitting to the relationship. If trust was broken, commitment was broken too, so recommitment is the final step in recovering from betrayal.

Atonement can be difficult if the hurt partner expresses their pain through criticism, contempt, or labeling — attacking the other person ("You did this to me. You are bad.") rather than describing their own feelings. That's very different from saying, "I felt devastated. I felt so hurt when I found out about the lie. I felt like sinking to the floor. I felt awful."

Repair: what separates masters from disasters

Repair is probably the most important thing that discriminates the masters of relationship from the disasters — they actually go and fix things. Interestingly, couples whose relationships are in trouble also make repair attempts, but the partner doesn't perceive them as repair. They're perceived as manipulation or more hostility, not as "let's make things better together." That perception is what matters.

It took us about seven years to study repair attempts, done by two of my students. They found that the most powerful repair of all is when a person takes responsibility for even a part of the problem. It's even more powerful in heterosexual relationships when a woman does it — for a man, it's very powerful when a woman says, "Hey, this isn't all your fault. I have a role in our miscommunications, and I want to admit that role. I messed up in the fight we had, or the evening that didn't go well."

When repair attempts go well, they're first recognized as an attempt to repair rather than more hostility or conflict — and second, they take the relationship to a new level.

When a repair works, there's a new understanding of one another. We've tried to structure that in our therapy by creating this aftermath-of-regrettable-incident form, where people go through five different steps that capitalizes on repair going really deep in understanding one another and what went wrong in the miscommunication.

What that often requires is being vulnerable. What does being vulnerable actually mean? It means, in a manner of speaking, unzipping yourself and exposing your feelings, your emotions, your heart. That can be terrifying for some people—some really don't want to do that, it's really scary. In fact, some people may not even know what they're feeling.

Take a man, for example, who was taught that it was not okay to express any emotion whatsoever except anger. He couldn't express sadness, guilt, shame, grief, or fear, so it may be hard for him to access those feelings.

How does a person get to those feelings? You can do it through your body. For example, if you're talking to your partner, pay attention to where there's tension in your body. Tightness in your jaw can be frustration, anger, or maybe fear that's keeping your mouth shut so you don't say anything that really offends the other person. Tightness in your chest means you're breathing very shallowly—that's typically the feeling of fear, especially when your shoulders are rounded like this. A feeling like being kicked in the gut can be the same thing: being blown away, shocked, surprised, or also afraid. Anger, you feel it maybe in your arms.

Anger shows up in the body — in your shoulders, your fists. You can translate what's going on in your body, which is much easier to connect with, and then figure out what feeling lies beneath it and dare to name it.

I'm often asked what the single best piece of advice is for people starting to work on their relationships. My answer is that great relationships seem to have a motto. They operate under a basic rule: when you're upset, baby, the world stops and I listen. I keep a little notebook in my back pocket that I take out whenever Julie says the four terrible words, "We need to talk." I pull it out slowly, get my pen out slowly to calm myself down, open it to a clean page, and say, "I'm listening. Talk to me."

The goal of conflict is mutual understanding — it has a purpose. If you realize that the purpose is mutual understanding, not persuasion, not convincing your partner that you're right and they're wrong, but finding a way to be right together, then things can work out really well. That's my big invention. People need to realize that when their partner is upset, it's the most important thing in the world: stop what you're doing, pay attention, listen, take it seriously, communicate respect and affection.

When partners really need to make a repair, what brings them back together? It's listening — deep listening to the other person. You might think that if you apologize, everything is fine and it's all done, but it isn't. What needs to happen is really listening to the other person's perspective on what happened, putting yourself in their shoes so you can genuinely understand the reasons why they acted or spoke the way they did.

Many of us think that to build a relationship you have to broadcast — say who you are, what you think, what you feel, what you believe, describing yourself all the time. Those things are important too, but the greatest gift for creating a long-lasting, loving relationship is the desire to listen and understand. That is key: the gift of listening you give the other person, and hopefully they give you, so that both people reach a much deeper understanding of one another in the process of repair.

Softened startup is something we discovered by examining the active listening recommended so strongly by Bernard Guerney in the 1950s. His idea was that if you listened well, you could use a formula: "Dear partner, when you do X, it makes me feel Y." But research on that active listening found it was completely ineffective. The Munich Marital Study found it was the worst intervention they tried — the least effective, with the most return to poor communication.

What Julie and I decided was that the problem was the "you." "When you do something, it makes me feel this way" still points the finger at the other person. So what if we pointed the finger at ourselves? Looking at the masters, that's exactly what they were doing — a softened startup. They said, "Here's how I feel about the situation we've confronted — not about you, but about a situation. And here's what I need — not what I don't need, but my positive need." We realized they were giving their partner a way to shine for them, making it easier to hear their unhappiness and what they needed. What matters most in love and long-term relationships is maintaining affection and respect, and fixing it when that goes wrong.

What matters most in loving long-term relationships—at least this is what our research shows—is the ability to repair. Anyone in a relationship is going to make a mistake, no matter how strong the relationship is. If repair attempts are not made, and mistakes or hurtful feelings are swept under the carpet, they tend to add up and fester until there's more emotional distance, because no repair was created for whatever was hurtful.

So it's very important to always at least try to make repairs when each of you is being human, imperfect, making mistakes—thinking, "Oh God, why did I say that?"—and going back to your partner to really repair the disconnect that's occurred. That's what it takes to have a sustained long relationship.

Is love enough to build a happy and lasting relationship? It's a start — an important and very useful start. It's a wonderful thing to feel loved, to be loved, and to give love. But there's a lot more required.

Friendship is the foundation of lasting romantic love. Research shows that of all couples who are dating, almost 70% started as friendships. You don't require that romantic spark — it's great if it's there, but it's not required or necessary. Friendship is necessary.

We've defined what friendship means: building love maps, really getting to know this person, being vulnerable and letting the person know you. It's about building fondness and admiration, respect and affection together. It's about an attitude toward the relationship that it's special, and that you're going to treat it as special. Those are the components of friendship we've identified, and they seem to be pretty powerful — they're enough. Friendship is absolutely essential in any relationship that's going to be effective.

Signals of a strong couple

When I've met a healthy couple, I know they're truly strong by several little signals:

1. They laugh at each other's jokes.
2. They may be affectionate — putting a hand on their partner's knee or holding the other person's hand for a moment.
3. They don't typically override the other person's opinion and humiliate them in public.
4. They listen when the other person is holding forth and talking about something.
5. They say things that are respectful of or complimentary to their partner in front of whoever else is there — that also shows a really strong relationship.

And finally, love is a choice that you are making over and over and over again. When I say that, I'm not talking about the very first stages of love, where there are stars in the sky and you're so excited you can't believe you're going to see that person tonight. We call that limerence — that's a little bit different. That's more what we call falling in love, which has to do with chemicals.

Choosing love over and over again looks really different. There are going to be days, especially when you're committed to one another, when you think, "Oh God, I'm going to have to spend the whole day cleaning out the garage with my partner, and they're going to complain about it all day long. Do I want to be with them? No, not really. Not today." Okay — you have a choice. You can either think about what's wrong with your partner and what they're going to do wrong during the day, or you can think, "Wow, isn't it great that they're going to help me even though they hate doing this?" Hear the choice? There's a choice in there.

The choice to love is particularly important when our partners are not at their best. It's easy to love somebody when they're warm and affectionate and complimentary, when they're doing things for you and pick up the kids on time. However, it's harder to feel love when they make mistakes, get things wrong, are grumpy or in a bad mood, or come home late without telling you. Nobody's perfect — so can you love somebody who's not perfect? That's the choice you have to make.

Interest even during conflict

The most glaring pattern that reveals a relationship is strong is that people really are interested in one another. They're listening to one another, demonstrating that they care — that they are fascinated by this person. Even during conflict, those patterns are there. There's this agreement, this kind of saying, "Yeah, talk to me. I want to hear what you have to say. Hmm, that's interesting. Tell me more." Or, "That surprises me. Help me understand that — I'm kind of confused by that." Or, "Oh, that's fascinating. What's the history of that? How did that emerge?" And you see this…

In these conversations, the listener is a tourist in the landscape of the speaker's mind — full of curiosity, open, taking in the experience. That's what the pattern looks like in a relationship that's functioning well.

Affection means non-sexual touch

Some people underestimate how foundational intimacy and affection are in a relationship. When we say affection, we mean touch — non-sexual touch, but touch nonetheless: hand-holding, an arm around somebody, a big hug. Touch is incredibly important in a relationship, and it's also really important in creating intimacy and a wonderful, passionate sexual life.

How much sex a couple has varies enormously. There's a huge range of sexuality that couples prefer — there's no "normal" where it has to be on Tuesdays and Thursdays. What matters is what both people are comfortable with, and that may involve some compromise.

Safety is huge, especially for women

In one workshop experiment, we asked people to raise their hands if they would feel scared in an underground garage. All the women raised their hands; among the men, only two, three, maybe five did. That's why in a heterosexual relationship there has to be a sense of safety, trust, and emotional connection. Typically, for a female or a transgender female, physical intimacy requires emotional connection and safety. And no matter what the relationship is, emotional intimacy combined with physical intimacy creates the most connection, the most euphoria, excitement, passion, and love.

What separates thriving couples from struggling ones

What we discovered was that the basis was affection and respect for one another — and we were surprised by that. Comparing couples who, three years after their first baby was born, had stopped having sex with couples whose sex lives had come back and were romantic again, the difference came down to that foundation. I was delighted when a wonderful study of 70,000 people in 24 countries found the same thing. The people who report a great sex life differ from those who report an awful one in things like:

• Saying "I love you" every day and meaning it.
• Kissing one another passionately for no reason at all.
• Cuddling — my favorite. Julie and I have a cuddle couch where we cuddle and watch English people murder each other, and cuddling turned out to be really important.
• Having a weekly romantic date.
• Taking romantic vacations together.
• Being affectionate even in public.

Not a single thing on that list had to do with what happened in the bedroom. It wasn't about sex techniques; it was about affection, shared respect, and friendship continuing — nurturing that part of the relationship. And that seems to be true everywhere on the planet.

If intimacy is hard right now

When you're having a hard time being physically or emotionally intimate with your partner, the answer is to talk about it. As Carol Rusbult said, you're investing everything in this relationship — so the person you need to talk to is your partner. You've got to say, "Hey, baby, you know..."

You have to tell your partner: "I don't feel things are the same as they used to be. I'm feeling lonely. I'm not feeling physically connected with you. I'm feeling really distant from you, and that really sucks, because I want to feel close to you. I really want us to be close. I want us to be intimate. Can we talk about how to make that happen?"

Myth 1: You must love yourself first

One of the primary things people misunderstand about love is that you can't have love unless you love yourself first. Absolutely wrong. In fact, a loving relationship can help you love yourself more.

Many people wouldn't say they love themselves—at times they may like themselves, or they may dislike themselves, often because of an unhappy childhood. But it's very rare that somebody is so healed and so enlightened that they completely love themselves. We're all imperfect and still growing, and we don't really want to finish growing until we leave this Earth. That includes growing in self-love. You don't want to wait until you're 92 years old to have a relationship, do you? So have a relationship whether you're healed, enlightened, or not—it doesn't matter.

Myth 2: You must be completely compatible

This one just drives me crazy: the idea that you have to be completely compatible—same interests, maybe a similar town or background, similar race or ethnicity, the same school experience, same passions, same desire for adventure. No, no, and no. None of those are true. People are never completely compatible, ever.

The fact of the matter is that people enrich the relationship with their differences. One loves adventure, the other loves to read: the reader shares what they've read, and the adventurer goes out, comes back, and tells the story. Both enrich the relationship. So you don't have to worry about compatibility, necessarily.

The exception is values. If one wants a child and the other doesn't, you may have a big problem, and that may not be a relationship that can work—because there's no compromise. You're not going to have half a child.

In some cases, incompatibility means the relationship probably won't work. But those cases are far and few between, so try not to worry too much about everything being compatible. It's not nearly as important as you think.

After everything I've learned about relationships, people should not be cynical about finding a person who really is the love of your life. My mother used to say, "Every pot has a lid," and I think it's true for relationships. I've seen people become really cynical and think, "What's the point? I'll never meet anybody." As so many people are doing: 40% of young people in Japan have given up on relationships. There are people who call themselves involuntarily celibate who wind up being misogynists—men who give up and wind up hating women. That is so wrong.

There's somebody out there for you who loves you the way you are and will accept you the way you are. Don't give up, and don't turn to hatred the way many of these misogynists are doing. And take it seriously. I did: I went on 60 dates before I met Julie. She was number 61. She was an outlier, a clear outlier for me—and there's an outlier for you.

What still surprises me about love, after decades of working with and studying couples, is the incredible resilience relationships can have. That's the thing that blows my mind. For example, I have treated couples who've had 30 or 40 affairs—some of which they fell in love in—and they were absolutely miserable living separately, feeling horrible about the other person. Then, amazingly enough, they come in to get help. They work and work and work, and by golly they build a new relationship, and it's beautiful and the love returns. That is the most gorgeous thing I get to see in my office all the time.

That's the big surprise: how resilient relationships are, how forgiving people can be—or even not forgiving but accepting—and how compassionate people can be despite being destroyed by some of their experiences in the relationship. It's not magic for me. It's resilience and the desire to grow and love that couples show. That is what surprises me, and it's a beautiful thing to see.

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