The Love Prescription: Seven Days to More Intimacy, Connection, and Joy

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JSG: Yes, that totally makes sense. Our connection that’s built through turning towards and really responding to each other builds this feeling of, “We exist on the same planet.” [laughter] We’re still together here facing a world that is less than perfect by a long shot. Here we are as a team, “I’m not alone.” And I know for a fact, and our research as well as that of others, has shown that the best stress reliever in the whole wide world isn’t solving somebody else’s problem, giving them suggestions for what to do. It’s simply listening, showing interest, and showing empathy, which helps the person who’s stressed feel less alone. And feeling less alone is what drops the stress. Because there’s nothing worse than feeling alone in the face of stress. JG: I want to say a word about being in love, being in love. And Helen Fisher who studies people in love has found that there is no shelf life to being in love. If you do these things, you stay in love with one another forever. I’m just as much in love with Julie as I was when we first met because we make this special.

JSG: Right, loneliness and negative feelings are much more powerful actually than positive feelings in their impact on us, right. So we have this resentment building inside of us, and then it’s time to talk about how we should parent our two-year-old, what’s the best way? Well, I’ve got so much resentment about my partner turning away from me that I don’t want to listen to them. I would feel like they haven’t listened to me, so why should I listen to them? So you start responding with hostility, with criticism, anger through the side door of yourself. JG: Yeah. We need a cookbook and that has the recipes in it, and tells you just how to do it, and that’s what we try to do, is create a cookbook. I love to cook, and I’m learning how to bake bread now and how to make better sauces, and how to use the clay cooker better, and so I really like cookbooks and… Well, we need a relationship cookbook too, and that’s what we wrote. JG: Yeah. I keep thinking of the Sloan Center study at UCLA that my colleague, Tom Bradbury, was involved with where they put microphones and cameras in couples’ homes, dual career couples with young children, and they spent less than 10% of an evening in the same room, and they talked to each other an average of 35 minutes a week. That’s all. And all of the conversation was about the to-do list. BB: Yes. Beautiful. I think one of the things that my friends and I often talk about is like the who wants to go first in terms of saying… [laughter] In terms of saying, “I really like you. I know we could keep doing this for another 30 years, but I think we could have more.” You know?JSG: And his leather hat. Oh my God, there it was. Yep, my vision of perfection. There he is. He still wears the same hat.

BB: Do you know what I mean? Like, your inner map is not a reflection of dry cleaning, groceries, and what time does the game start, and are you bringing the camera to the game or am I bringing it to the game, and how’s graduate school going for this. There’s no way you piece that shit together and come up with an inner map. JSG: Yeah, the other thing too, about turning towards is if you’ve made a bid for connection in some way, and your partner responds to it in a affirming way to say, “Thank you, I notice that you’re doing something for me.” That is incredible, that is really important.BB: You know what I thought of when I was reading about this? It’s so… It just made me so… I don’t know, it took my breath away a little bit, is I thought about Mary Oliver’s “What are you going to do with this one wild and precious life?” A lot unfortunately works against 'Prescription for Love'. Am another person who intensely disliked Donovan's character, as someone who is disabled seeing nurses being disrespected that much and that distastefully left a bad aftertaste in my mouth. Have been around some lovely, caring sympathetic nurses and hearing people personally respected treated in that way annoys me. The rest of the characters, while dependably acted, are not well fleshed out enough to allow one to care for them, and much of me was frustrated at Murray's decision making in the latter stages and too naive. Not an awful lot of chemistry between her and Donovan either. Successful long-term relationships are created through small words, small gestures, and small acts. Every Monday and Wednesday morning, we’ll talk you through research-based tips to help improve your relationships in five minutes or less. BB:“We’re going to tell you to first go out and…” Well, you use an analogy of, “Make a mud pit and have some fun,” because you talk about a really uptight couple that was assigned to have a mud fight, which I loved. Wow, this is like… I as someone who works in leadership and organizational development, I know this like I know my name. It’s like, “Stop catching people doing things wrong and start catching people doing things right.” Because it’s so much better to compound those great behaviors by catching people doing things right, even when you’re using their strength to turn around another behavior.

JG: Yeah. How do you get people to laugh at themselves when they’re fighting? Because that reduces physiological arousal. Well, the way to do it is really simple, it’s really those small moments where you turn toward one another, and if you increase the turning toward which just requires some awareness, then automatically you get this wonderful gift of a sense of humor about yourself when you’re disagreeing. So, you can laugh together, and that reduces physiological arousal, and makes people more logical and rational when they’re disagreeing rather than raising their voice to be more persuasive.Just don’t expect to solve all of your relationship problems. A good amount of conflict is perpetual… meaning there are some things that you and your partner will rehash over and over again without progress. Maybe you Think you can’t make relationship changes in a week? Drs. John and Julie Gottman say, yes, actually, you can—and they have 40 years of breakthrough research on marital stability and divorce prediction to prove it. . . . This book feels so hopeful because it’s direct, it’s really honest, and it’s so actionable.”