Falling in love with someone is the easy part. How to sustain love long-term? How to rekindle passion and romance? How to enrich a relationship? These are the questions that psychologists and relationship experts try to answer using scientific research and studies.
Good relationships don’t happen overnight. They take commitment, forgiveness, kindness and effort. All of this is needed to develop our Relationship Intelligence.
What is Relationship Intelligence?
Relationship Intelligence is a set of behaviours and a mindset that help enrich relationships.
Why is Relationship Intelligence (RI) important?
RI contributes to happy relationships and hence, enrich our health and vitality.[1]
Let’s look at the opposite: a lack of RI has strong consequences in our life: we may stay feeling unfulfilled and unhappy either being in a single-ship or a dysfunctional relationship.
What can we do to be more intelligent in relationships?
There are many things you can do to help yourself and steer the course of your life in a better direction. Here are some of the recommended steps:
1. Avoid the below evil-4:
Photo by Nicholas Gercken
Criticism – Criticism is a slow burner of separation if done consistently. Complaints are fine. Criticism is worse than complaints — it seems to attack the person, not their behaviour: “He didn’t take out the garbage not because he forgot, but because he’s a bad person.”
Contempt – it’s a ‘kiss of death’ for relationships. Contempt is number one factor [2] that tears relationships apart. “…name-calling, eye-rolling, sneering, mockery, and hostile humour.”
Defensiveness – This strategy seems to protect one partner but in fact, it reduces the connectivity between partners and by not taking responsibility for what has been happening, it adds negativity to being passive-aggressive. It’s a mild but deadly escalation to separation.
Stonewalling – Disengaging. Being silent. This strategy seems to be helping to deflate the conflict, but actually, this doesn’t just remove the person from the conflict, it ends up removing them, emotionally, from the relationship.
2. Dial-up for your Kindness.
Research shows that kindness is one of the best remedies for healing relationships.
How do you learn to be kind?
Apparently, it depends on how you relate to your partner’s good news.
According to a psychological researcher Shelly Gable, couples respond to each other’s good news in four different ways that they called: passive destructive, active destructive, passive constructive, and active constructive.
Let’s say that one partner had recently received the excellent news that he got an invitation for a job interview.
If his partner responded in a passive destructive manner, she would ignore the event. For example, she might say something like: “You wouldn’t believe the great news I got yesterday! I received this amazing proposal!”
If his partner responded in a passive constructive way, she would acknowledge the good news, but in a half-hearted, understated way. A typical passive constructive response is saying “That’s great, babe” as she texts her friend on her phone.
In the third kind of response, active destructive, the partner would diminish the good news her partner just got: “Are you sure you can handle all the change? And what about our other projects? How are we going to handle them all with your new adventure?”
Finally, there’s active constructive responding. If his partner responded in this way, she stopped what she was doing and engaged wholeheartedly with him: “That’s great! Congratulations! When did you find out? Did they call you? When will you have it?”
Among the four response styles, active constructive responding is the kindest. While the other response styles are joy-killers, active constructive responding allows the partner to savour her joy and gives the couple an opportunity to bond over the good news.
Active constructive responding is critical for healthy relationships. In the 2006 study, Gable and her colleagues followed up with the couples two months later to see if they were still together. The psychologists found that the only difference between the couples who were together and those who broke up was active constructive responding. Those who showed genuine interest in their partner’s joys were more likely to be together. In an earlier study, Gable found that active constructive responding was also associated with higher relationship quality and more intimacy between partners.
3. Make regular and meaningful connections
Photo by Christiana Rivers
When we spend time together and share our thoughts and feelings with each other, we enhance intimacy, or ‘into-me-see’. We allow another person to see what’s inside us. Ask open questions like:
- What is your best and worse childhood memory?
- What are your biggest needs, how can I help fulfil them?
- When did you feel most loved by me and why?
- How can we make our sex life better?
- What kind of surprises do you like?
Getting to know your partner a little bit better in every interaction you have. Don’t take them for granted, cherish the connection.
Interestingly, there is so much to learn for heterosexual couples from bi-sexual ones, in the way of communication mastery.
4. Be clear on your partner’s love style.
Terry Hatkoff, a California State University sociologist, has created a love scale that identifies six distinct types of love found in our closest relationships.
- Romantic: Based on passion and sexual attraction
- Best Friends: Fondness and deep affection
- Logical: Practical feelings based on shared values, financial goals, religion etc.
- Playful: Feelings evoked by flirtation or feeling challenged
- Possessive: Jealousy and obsession
- Unselfish: Nurturing, kindness, and sacrifice
Researchers have found that the love we feel in our most committed relationships is typically a combination of two or three different forms of love. But often, two people in the same relationship can have very different versions of how they define love. Dr Hatkoff gives the example of a man and woman having dinner. The waiter flirts with the woman, but the husband doesn’t seem to notice and talks about changing the oil in her car. The wife is upset her husband isn’t jealous. The husband feels his extra work isn’t appreciated.
What does this have to do with love? The man and woman each define love differently. For him, love is practical and is best shown by supportive gestures like car maintenance. For her, love is possessive, and a jealous response by her husband makes her feel valued.
Understanding what makes your partner feel loved can help you navigate conflict and put romance back into your relationship. You and your partner can take the Love Style quiz from Dr Hatkoff and find out how each of you defines love. If you learn your partner tends toward jealousy, make sure you notice when someone is flirting with him or her. If your partner is practical in love, notice the many small ways he or she shows love by taking care of everyday needs.
5. Have more sex.
Photo by Becca Tapert
Evolutionary, we were meant to have sex to procreate and having a regular sex life boosts our health and enhances relationships. Check my article on the Benefits of Love-Making.
Even though most people keep their sex lives private, we do know quite a bit about people’s sex habits. The data come from a variety of sources, including the General Social Survey, which collects information on behaviour in the United States, and the International Social Survey Programme, a similar study that collects international data, and additional studies from people who study sex like the famous Kinsey Institute. A recent trend is that sexual frequency is declining among millennials, likely because they are less likely than earlier generations to have steady partners.
Based on that research, here’s some of what we know about sex:
- The average adult has sex 54 times a year.
- The average sexual encounter lasts about 30 minutes.
- About 5 percent of people have sex at least three times a week.
- People in their 20s have sex more than 80 times per year.
- People in their 40s have sex about 60 times a year.
- Sex drops to 20 times per year by age 65.
- After the age of 25, sexual frequency declines 2 percent annually.
- After controlling for age and time period, those born in the 1930s had sex the most often; people born in the 1990s (millennials) had sex the least often.
- About 20 percent of people, most of them widows, have been celibate for at least a year.
- The typical married person has sex an average of 51 times a year.
- “Very Happy” couples have sex, on average, 74 times a year.
- Married people under 30 have sex about 112 times a year; single people under 30 have sex about 69 times a year.
- Married people in their 40s have sex 69 times a year; single people in their 40s have sex 50 times a year.
- Active people have more sex.
- People who drink alcohol have 20 percent more sex than teetotalers.
- On average, extra education is associated with about a week’s worth of less sex each year.
EARLY AND OFTEN
One of the best ways to make sure your sex life stays robust in a long relationship is to have a lot of sex early in the relationship. A University of Georgia study of more than 90,000 women in 19 countries in Asia, Africa and the Americas found that the longer a couple is married, the less often they have sex, but that the decline appears to be relative to how much sex they were having when they first coupled. Here’s a look at the frequency of married sex comparing the first year of marriage with the 10th year of marriage.
Why does sex decline in marriage? It’s a combination of factors — sometimes it’s a health issue, the presence of children, boredom or unhappiness in the relationship. But a major factor is age. One study found [3] sexual frequency declines 3.2 percent a year after the age of 25. The good news is that what married couples lack in quantity they make up for in quality. Data from the National Health and Social Life Survey found that married couples have more fulfilling sex than single people.[i]
[1] Gottman, John M., and Nan Silver. (1999). “Inside the Seattle love lab: The truth about happy marriages,” in The Seven Principles for Making Marriages Work (Chapter One, 1-24). New York: Three Rivers Press (Random House, Inc.).
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/happily-ever-after/372573/
[3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10508-017-0953-1