How Do I Make Lasting Relationships?
Relationships are foundational to the human experience. We spend our lives developing and navigating relationships, but it is often the plight of people to want better relationships.
Making worthwhile relationships is a difficult process that requires effort from everyone involved. They are complex physical, emotional, and perceptive experiences. A successful relationship requires mutual respect, honesty, and commitment when times get hard. There are also required body chemicals.
When I say "I've studied relationships" I don't mean that I've read a couple books. I mean that relationships are an area specialty in which I have gathered, analyzed, published, and presented data. It's not a hobby, it's my research field.
With that in mind though, what I say here is expressly opinion. As any good scientist should say, we know very few actual facts. What we do is use induction to gather data and then form the best guess possible. That is exactly what this post is. The best guess I can come up with.
In more explicit terms, the views and sentiments expressed here are only my own. They are not intended to be seen as anything more than that. They are not definitive facts. They are just theories, hypotheses, conclusions, and statistics. Those a fact do not make.
To the heart of this post, we're going to talk about how relationships form, how to have a good one, relationship cycles, and how to make one last.
How Relationships Form
I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this. There's a lot to go into here and I want to get to other topics. I'll cover it more in-depth in a later post.
There are several theories about the formation of relationships, however, they (mostly) follow the same general pattern. You meet, you learn about each other, you get attracted, you learn more about each other, your commitment increases, and then you do something called crystallizing. Think of that as what comes after a DTR. For better or for worse...
Either one of both people will move through this course in a relationship. It doesn't really matter if you are on different pages so long as both partners eventually arrive at crystallizing. Either partner may drop out at any time, and reaching crystalization does not mean that the relationship is permanently set.
Crystalizing just means that something tangible has come out of the process. Whether it's a break-up or engagement doesn't matter too much. You also go back and repeat the steps for as long as the relationship lasts. The first time through the cycle generally takes 3 months to a year.
An important part of this process is something called the Matching Hypothesis. That's a link to the Wikipedia page. It's a good start for understanding it, though it doesn't give any counter-information to it, so take it with a grain of salt.
Basically, the matching hypothesis is the idea that humans pair up with people who are about their equals. It starts out with being equals in their looks, then moves into being equal in intelligence, emotional ability, and social ability.
This is all being evaluated as the couple moves through those stages and this plays a large role in what happens in the crystalization stage.
As a side note, there is an older study that I couldn't get a link to that confirms that couples who aren't similar in their attractiveness rating have a vastly higher chance of failing. What this means is that both partners need to think that they are about as attractive as the other. It doesn't matter if they actually are, it just matters that they think they are.
Much like Aristophanes stated in the Symposium, we are truly most powerful when we find our other half. (Paraphrased from Plato's Symposium.) More on that Dialogue in the future.
Having a Good One And How to Make it Last
I've decided to combine those two into one heading because they really go hand in hand. We'll still go in order though.
Having a Good Relationship
For a topic such as this, there is endless advice and all of it can be applicable. What really matters when it comes to relationship advice is completely dependent on what kind of relationship you want to have and what kind of personalities are involved.
There are a few basic statistics that are almost universally applicable. Say thank you, serve your partner without holding a grudge, don't belittle them, be gracious, include them in your decisions, and don't treat them like they're your slave. We'll give examples of all of these in order.
Saying thank you is much more important than most people seem to realize. To illustrate this point I'll point you to a book by author Daniel Coyle titled The Culture Code. It's an award-winning analysis of what makes groups function well. In his research for this book, Daniel discovered that one of the most important actions necessary for a group to function well is an excessive amount of "thank yous" flying around.
Serving your partner is ancient wisdom. It floats around a majority of religious texts and the heart of many stories told to you by happy old people that have been in long-term relationships. The idea is that you have to go out of your way to make their life easier whether or not that act will be reciprocated.
Don't belittle them seems fairly self-explanatory. In reality it is, but in practice it can be a little more nuanced because everyone is going to experience their emotions with different triggers. So it requires you to not only know ahead of time what could hurt your partner's feelings, but to be able to actively read a dynamic situation where your partner's emotions are constantly changing.
Being gracious is going to be exactly the same as not belittling them. It's easy in theory but harder in practice. You need to know how your partner will interpret your gracious attitudes and what will they need in order to feel that you are gracious.
Including them in your decisions, again, is going to be up to individual couple needs. Some partners may want to be included in nearly every decision, and some partners may only want to be included in the decisions that have big ramifications. It's up to you to know what your individual needs are going to be.
Lastly, we have don't treat your partner like they are your slave. No one wants to be your slave. You can get up and get that glass of water, you can do the dishes, you can do the laundry. This doesn't mean that your partner wouldn't love to help you sometimes, but the point is that it shouldn't be the norm.
Again though, in the end this is up to you and your partner.
Making it Last
There's really not too much more to add for this section. What is worth adding is that a good relationship requires humility in both partners. Both of you need to be willing to work for what you want to have. That means you will have to change.
Despite the current wisdom of social media, you are not entitled to stay the way you are and have people like you. Concessions need to be made. You both need to be engaged in making what changes need to be made in order to make the couple work.
If you both want it to be successful, you both have to change.
There are a couple interesting points worth noting here about the physicality of lasting relationships. The first is a semi-recent study that points out that the hormone vasopressin needs to interact with oxytocin in order to have lasting relationships. The more vasopressin there is, the more likely you are to have a lasting relationship.
However, you should not go around messing with hormones. As Sarah Hill Ph.D. points out in her book This is your brain on birth control, every hormone you put into your body is going to have large side effects. There is actually very little information on how hormones affect your body.
That's not my opinion, there is actually very very little information on the matter. What is my opinion is that hormones shouldn't be messed with. That is simply an opinion though. Nothing more. Do not take my word in this matter as medical fact.
Relationship Cycles
This is going to be very brief. Andrew Cherlin in his research found that relationships follow a three-five year cycle. Failure rates peak between three and five years after a child is brought into a relationship, and from there follow that cycle fairly closely from that point on.
It is also established that couple that conceive a child within one year of getting together are more likely to fail at any point, and especially more likely to fail after the child is old enough to take care of itself.
Conclusion
There's a lot of information here, and a lot of my own conclusions. So please, ask questions if you have them or want clarification :)
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