The Seven-Day Love Prescription

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JSG: Yep, yep. We all do Brené. This is absolutely the norm out there in our culture, so declaring a date night is creating sacred time for the two of you to grow… ABR: Do you remember the podcast that… I don’t know if you did it or we did it together, but you were talking about, like, the 50/50 split, the 20/80 split and stuff. How do you go through the last three years when neither one of y’all… ABR: I also really loved in the podcast, they were saying, like, with your kids, I wrote this part down. It was like,” I love you so much. I want to know everything about every minute, the history of what’s changed you. Like, you’ve gone off, and now you’re a new person, and I want to know everything that happened, what changed you, how that went down.” Because I think that about my daughter right now who’s taking social work classes for the first time. And I’m like, “She’s going to get so fired up, just like we all did in social work class and want to make all these changes,” and it’s so hard for me not to want to have every single conversation about her classes, like, “What did you learn? What’s firing you up? Where do you want to protest? Do you need a ride?” So I love that part about that…

BB: We talk about that story all the time, because every now and then we’ll do something, I’m like, “Oh, shit! I bought you a barrette.” He’s like, “I bought you a chain for your watch.” JG: And it’s really interesting how they see things so differently, and so as we get older, it takes more of an effort to really do things like talk to strangers and find out who they are. But then when we do that, we create a little community, and that community of caring really makes a huge difference in our own well-being and our own health.And here’s what they found. Love isn’t that mysterious after all. It’s not just a feeling but an action. Love is a practice that anyone can get better at, starting right now. The astute guidance is straightforward without being obvious, and the authors excel at distilling sharp lessons from client stories. Couples should consider making this enlightening guide required reading.”

JSG: So, the more we can see what our partners are doing right and turning towards us and to say thank you, the more turning towards will increase in the relationship. We'd found a major point of intervention. If we could help couples understand the importance of these little moments that might seem like nothing, just slipping by under the radar, we could really help people turn things around. How people reacted to their partner's bids for connection was in fact the biggest predictor of happiness and relationship stability. These fleeting little moments, it turned out, spelled the difference between happiness and unhappiness, between lasting love and divorce. JSG: Yeah, that’s exactly what we were trying to create. So thank you so much for that summary. We too, realize that it takes baby steps to change your relationship. You can’t go tell people to be more loving, be more kind, be more compassionate, just go ahead and do it with your partner. What does that mean? What does it look like? So, I personally have the kind of brain where I’ve got to have everything be very concrete, otherwise I can’t visualize it, I can’t know how to move my body, how to transform my language, what direction to take with my partner, unless those concrete steps are in place. And so that’s really what we wanted to create, something that is doable rather than abstract and maybe even obsolete at this point. JSG: John and I, for example, almost every day, ask each other one simple question, “What’s on your mind and heart today?” Most of the time…It was nine months into the COVID-19 pandemic, and like everything, the retreat was on Zoom. Not being in the same physical space with our participants, we had to work especially hard to observe their emotional states and body language. But even through the slightly grainy, brightly pixelated Zoom window, we could see Alison and Jeremy's disconnect. They sat side by side so that we could see them both through our screen, but they could have been in their own separate Zoom squares, sitting in different rooms, miles apart. By turning against: They responded irritably or angrily to actively shut down their partner's attempt to connect. JG: So… Yeah, I see that tendency in myself too, Brené, where, I don’t want to bother. Why should I turn towards Julie’s bids? I’ve done enough, I want to read, I want to play the flute, I want to play the banjo, [laughter] and I stay in my own little world. Why should I look at my daughter’s garden? I want to read this novel and really this guy’s a good writer, I want to finish that Michael Connelly novel because I love Michael Connelly so much. But then I miss something, which is a real golden opportunity, and I keep myself isolated, I live more in a vacuum in my own mind, and that’s not good for me. What's a bid for connection? Well, it can look like a casual remark. It can be as simple as one person sitting down next to the other one. It can be as subtle as a sigh. It's an invitation to connect. And how we respond to these tiny bids for connection can actually make or break a relationship! This was one of our first and most foundational discoveries in the Love Lab.

JG: In the moment, turning toward in those small moments, turns out to have a big impact on conflict itself, because couples who increase their turning toward wind up having more of a sense of humor about themselves when they’re disagreeing with one another, when they’re in conflict.JSG: And false and phony, “I don’t want to do this. This doesn’t feel like me.” Well, like you may be not working in the relationship, like you is something you’re wanting to change.