Plays Well with Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong

By Eric Barker 

This book is about what we get wrong when it comes to relationships and how we can be a bit more right. We’re gonna test those maxims we grew up with and see if they hold water, scientifically: 

❍  Can you “judge a book by its cover”? Or is that something only Sherlock Holmes can do on TV? 

❍  Is “a friend in need a friend indeed”? And what does that phrase really even mean? 

❍  Does “love conquer all”? Or are divorce rates so high for a depressingly accurate reason? 

❍  Is “no man an island”? (I have always felt that I was more of an archipelago, honestly.) 

We’ll see that the fundamental core of relationships is the stories our brains weave to create identity, agency, and community—and how those stories not only bind us together but can tear us apart if we’re not careful. 

• Relationships bring us the highest of highs and the lowest of oh-my-god-I-never-guessed-it-could-get-this-low lows. We all fear being vulnerable or embarrassed. At times we wonder if we’re  cursed or broken. We cannot stop the waves, but we can learn to surf. 
• Whether you’re already good with people or you’re a socially anxious introvert, we can all build better friendships, find love, reignite love, and get closer to others in this age of increasing emotional distance and loneliness. 

Often our problems with others start with our inaccurate perception of them. We’ve all gotten burned trying to judge people’s character. Can we learn to size up people accurately? To know what’s on their minds—scientifically? To detect lies? Read body language? 

Simply put: Can we “judge a book by its cover”? 

Active Listening

• Active listening sounds great. And it works well in scenarios like hostage negotiation or therapy where the practitioner is a third party and has some distance from the problem. But marital arguments are different; they’re about you not taking out the trash. Mirroring, labeling, and accepting all emotions when you’re being screamed at by your spouse are about as natural as telling someone not to run away or hit back when physically assaulted. John Gottman found that people just couldn’t do it in the heat of the moment. And in follow-up studies, with the few couples who actually could actively listen, it showed only short-term benefits. Couples quickly relapsed. 
• Maybe that’s why research shows that only 18–25 percent of couples report any improvements one year after marriage therapy. 
• Humans are complex. Three-dimensional chess complex. And it was naive of me to think that something so complex would have a simple skeleton key. 

Consider this: the Grant Study at Harvard Medical School has been following a group of 268 men for over eighty years. The amount of data accumulated on them could fill rooms, and the insights about what makes for a long, happy life are plentiful. Yet when George Vaillant, who led the study for much of his own life, was asked what he learned from decades of studying these men, he replied with one sentence: 

That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people. 

• It seems absurd that so much research could be reduced to a single sentence. But it rings true. We spend so much time chasing the shallow things in life. But when tragedy strikes, or late at night when your brain asks too many questions, we know it’s the relationships that matter most. Whom can I trust? Does anyone really know me? Does anyone really care? 
• If you think of your happiest moments, they will be about people. The most painful moments will too. Our relationships to others make or break our lives. 

PART 1 

CAN YOU “JUDGE A BOOK BY ITS COVER”? 

 

Impressions ParadoxTM. 

• First impressions are generally accurate. But once they’re set, they’re extremely hard to change. 
• When it comes to first impressions, it’s like we have HSAM ( “Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory”): we don’t alter our memories. We’re all but locked-in to our prior judgments. And it can dramatically affect our relationships. 
• We often think about the perils of stereotyping groups, but we also do the same thing with individuals. Someone has an “untrustworthy” face when you first meet them, so you’re less warm than usual. Because you’re distant with them, they’re distant with you. 
• This reasonable response on their part triggers your confirmation bias. (“See, I knew they weren’t a nice person!”) Now you’re both wary of each other. And that’s the most scientific explanation you’ll ever get for what it means when two people “don’t click.” 

So how do we resist confirmation bias? Three key steps: 

1. FEEL ACCOUNTABLE

• If your opinion of someone could result in them getting the death penalty, you’d slow down and be more thorough. You’d want to double-check your accuracy before the concrete sets for good and there’s no changing it. 

2. DISTANCE BEFORE DECISION 

• In Maria Konnikova’s wonderful book Mastermind she dives deep into the research of NYU psychologist Yaacov Trope, showing how getting some distance helps us be more rational and objective: “Adults who are told to take a step back and imagine a situation from a more general perspective make better judgments and evaluations, and have better self assessments and lower emotional reactivity.” These are exactly the skills we need to size up new acquaintances more accurately and resist our brain’s impulse to immediately go with our first impression. 
• Similar to Dr. Ceri Evans, Step Back- Step Up- Step In 

3. CONSIDER THE OPPOSITE 

• Since our brains tend to remember hits and forget misses, we must force ourselves to consider those misses if we want to improve. 
• Paul Nurse takes this attitude to the extreme: “If I have an idea and have observations to support it, rather than get that out there, I go around and look at it in different ways and try and destroy it. And only if it survives do I begin to talk about it.” 
• Similar to Charlie Munger, “I never allow myself to hold an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do”

Make a Good First Impression

• First, listen to that advice you’ve received so many times: make a good first impression. You now know just how important it really is. Make sure you show them the side of your personality that you want them to lock onto— because they will. 
• The other thing to remember: give people a second chance. Without the above strategies, you’re right only 70 percent of the time, max. You’re going to be wrong with at least three out of every ten people you meet. 

Challenge with Analyzing People 

• The real challenge in analyzing people often isn’t with them; it’s with us. Yes, decoding the behavior of others is difficult, but the hidden problem, the one we rarely realize and never address, is that our own brains are often working against us. 
• We think the secret to reading people is learning some special magic indicator in body language or lie detection. But the primary thing we have to contend with is our own cognitive biases. That’s what we really need to overcome . . . 
• Would you like to be able to read the minds of others? To know what those around you think and feel? Research shows even a slight edge here is quite powerful. “Accurate person perception” has a conga line of personal and interpersonal benefits. Studies show that those who possess it are happier, less shy, better with people, have closer relationships, get bigger raises, and receive better performance reviews. When we look more specifically at those who are better interpreters of body language and nonverbal communication, we see similar positive effects. 
  •  Only one problem: on average, the vast majority of us are absolutely horrible at these skills. 

• University of Chicago professor Nicholas Epley has found that when you’re dealing with strangers, you correctly detect their thoughts and feelings only 20 percent of the time. (Random chance accuracy is 5 percent.) With close friends you hit 30 percent, and married couples peak at 35 percent. 
• Ask people to rate their partner’s self-esteem, and they get it right 44 percent of the time. But they’re confident about their guesses 82 percent of the time. And the longer you’ve been together, the more your confidence goes up. Accuracy? No, that doesn’t improve. But you sure do get more confident. 
  • “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know that just ain’t so.” Paul Slovic found with horse betters that giving more data past a certain point made their betting worse- While a small amount of information increased the accuracy of predictions by about 70% (10% to 17%), the information above five percent only served to increase confidence. Accuracy flatlines at 17%, but confidence shoots to 34% when forty pieces of information became available. With higher confidence, the handicappers increased their bets without any higher accuracy — and this ultimately produced worse overall results.
• How can we be so off base? And yet so confident in our inaccuracy? The technical term is egocentric anchoring. Epley says we’re too caught in our own perspective: “Survey after survey finds that most people tend to exaggerate the extent to which others think, believe, and feel as they do.” As with profiling, we’re too trapped inside our own heads and stories. Even when we try to take the perspective of others, studies show our accuracy doesn’t improve. 

MOTIVATION

• “The science shows that when people are motivated, either intrinsically, i.e., they love it; or extrinsically, i.e., they will get a prize, they are better able to maintain consistent brain activity, and maintain readiness for the unexpected.” 
• When people are judging romantic partners, accuracy goes up. And by the same token, when a study had anxiously attached women eavesdrop on their boyfriends talking to beautiful female researchers, guess what happened? Yup, their ability to correctly predict his answers to questions increased. But when there’s no loss or gain, our brains just idle along. 
• Step #1 Be Curious: So the first step to being better at reading people is to be curious. Even better is to provide yourself with some sort of external gain or loss that motivates you. 
• Since we can’t improve our people-reading skills that much, we have to focus our efforts on making others more readable. 
  • Truth be told, if you wanted to focus on something, skip body language and laser focus on their speech. When we can see someone but not hear them, the dropoff is a whopping 54 percent. Pay less attention to whether they cross their legs and more attention to when their voice changes. 
• Our first impressions are often surprisingly accurate. Not only do people usually agree on first impressions, but they’re also impressively predictive. Just seeing someone smile for the first time was enough for viewers to make accurate predictions two-thirds of the time for nine out of ten fundamental personality traits, from extroversion to self-esteem to political preferences. 
• You’re also good at instinctively determining someone’s competence after a brief encounter. When people watch a thirty-second silent video of a teacher in class, they’re able to predict student evaluations. Watch someone for five minutes, and accuracy can go as high as 70 percent. Our ability to intuit what someone’s like from thin slices of behavior is powerful across a number of domains, providing above-chance levels of accuracy in determining if someone is smart, wealthy, altruistic, or whether they’re a psychopath. Again, these impressions aren’t rational. That means you’re actually more accurate when you think less. 

Profiling.. Does it work? 

• The UK government looked at 184 crimes that leveraged profiling and determined that the profile was helpful just 2.7 percent of the time. Maybe you’re wondering why an American author is citing British stats? Because the FBI refuses to even provide this type of data. How often does profiling work for them? They won’t say. 

 

CHP 4

Is there any way to really get the truth out of some people? 

• When told to rank a list of 555 personality traits, college students put “being a liar” dead last. Which is funny because the average college student lies in about a third of conversations. For adults, it’s one in five. Let’s not even get into online dating, where 81 percent of profiles deviate from the truth. 
• And we’re terrible at detecting lies, averaging a 54 percent success rate. Might as well flip a coin. Police aren’t any better.
• So is there any way to reliably detect lies based on real science? Actually, yes. In 2009 the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG) was formed to develop new best practices, and by 2016 they had spent more than fifteen million dollars on over one hundred research projects with top psychologists. I’ve adapted their findings for simplicity’s sake 
  • The science overwhelmingly recommended a nuanced and sophisticated method humans have never tried in the past five thousand years when attempting to detect lies: being nice. We’ll call our new system The Friendly Journalist MethodTM. 
  • Never be a “bad cop.” Be a “friendly journalist.” You have to get them to like you. To open up. To talk a lot. And to make a mistake that reveals their deception. What’s the first step? Journalists do their homework before they write a piece, and so will you. The more info you have going into a conversation about a suspected lie, the better calibrated your internal lie detector will be. And even more important, some of the most powerful techniques we’ll use later require background info, so we can’t skip this step. 
  • And then there’s the “friendly” part. The HIG report found that “bad cop” isn’t effective and “good cop” is. Everybody wants to be treated with respect. And when people are, they’re more likely to talk. Also, never accuse someone of lying. More than one study found that this reduces cooperation. Don’t accuse, be curious. 

The Friendly Journalist MethodTM 

• doesn’t focus on making your lie detection skills better; it focuses on making their lie-telling skills worse. Lying well requires a surprising amount of brainpower. Truth tellers merely have to say what they remember. Liars need to know the truth. They also need to generate a plausible story. They need to make sure those don’t contradict. And this model needs to be safely updated in real time as they are asked more questions. Meanwhile, they also need to appear honest, which can require some serious acting. Finally, they must monitor the interviewer’s reactions to make sure that the interviewer is not catching on. This is hard. So we want to make it even harder. The HIG report found increasing cognitive load can boost our measly 54 percent accuracy to as high as 71 percent. 
• What it will do is create a stark contrast between how a truth teller would respond and how a liar would respond. Just like when your computer is chewing on a complex problem, a liar’s performance will slow down and get wonky. And that’s exactly the reaction we’ll be looking for as we apply the techniques. Instead of asking yourself, Is this person lying?, ask yourself, Do they have to think hard? A study by Vrij showed that merely getting police officers to focus on the second question markedly improved their lie detection skills. 

1. ASK UNANTICIPATED QUESTIONS 

• Ask an underage-looking person at a bar how old they are and you’ll hear a crisp, confident “I’m twenty-one.” But instead, what if you asked them, “What’s your date of birth?” That’s an exceedingly easy question for someone telling the truth, but a liar’s likely going to have to pause to do some math. Gotcha. The HIG report cites a study showing that airport security methods usually catch less than 5 percent of lying passengers. But when screeners used unanticipated questions, that number shot up to 66 percent. 
• Start off with expected questions. This is un-intimidating and gets you info—but more important, it gets you a baseline. Then throw them a question that’s easy for a truth teller to answer but one that a liar would not be ready for. Gauge the reaction. Did they calmly and quickly answer, or did their lag in answering suddenly increase? Yes, they could just blurt out anything, but that’s a minefield of potential contradiction in front of someone who did their homework in advance. Or they’ll just shut down, which is very suspicious. 
• Another angle is to ask for verifiable details. “So if I give your boss a call, she can confirm that you were at that meeting yesterday?” Truth tellers will be able to quickly and easily answer that. Liars will be reluctant to, and it will likely induce cognitive load. “What was Emily wearing at the meeting?” Again, easy for honest people, a nightmare for liars. It’s easily verifiable—and they know that. 

2. STRATEGIC USE OF EVIDENCE 

• Build rapport. Get them talking. And lead them to say something that contradicts the info you dug up. Ask for clarification so they commit to it. And then: “Sorry, I’m confused. You said you were with Gary yesterday. But Gary has been in France all week.” Ask yourself the magic question: Do they look like they’re thinking hard? And does their hastily assembled reply contradict anything else, digging their grave deeper? 
• You want to incrementally reveal evidence. Repeated contradictions may get them to simply confess out of embarrassment. More likely it will make their lying increasingly obvious. A 2006 study of Swedish police showed they typically detected lies 56.1 percent of the time. Those with “strategic use of evidence” training scored an 85.4 percent. 

Chapter 5

• Assuming people are usually honest is a preferable default. The good news is not only does it make us feel better, but over the long haul it’s actually the better bet. 
• One study asked people how much they trust others on a scale of one to ten. Income was highest among those who responded with the number eight. And low-trust people fared far worse than overtrusters. Their losses were the equivalent of not going to college. They missed many opportunities by not trusting. 
• In The Confidence Game Maria Konnikova points to an Oxford study showing that “people with higher levels of trust were 7 percent more likely to be in better health,” and 6 percent more likely to be “very” happy rather than “pretty” happy or “not happy at all.” (Hopefully you trust me, otherwise this book isn’t going to be of much use to you.) 

Instead of focusing on not judging a book by its cover, it would be more useful to say we would be better off putting more effort into revising the judgments we will undoubtedly make. 

PART 2 

IS “A FRIEND IN NEED A FRIEND INDEED”? 

• A 2009 study found Americans, on average, have four close relationships, two of which are friends. 
• Yale professor Nicholas Christakis notes that those stats haven’t changed much in the past few decades, and you get similar numbers when you look around the globe. And while the majority of studies show quality is more important than quantity when it comes to friends, numbers still matter. Which folks are 60 percent more likely to consider themselves “very happy”? Those who have five or more friends they can talk about their troubles with. 
• Unsurprisingly, we have the most friends when we’re young (teens average about nine), and the number generally declines as we age. Which is sad, because friends make us happier than any other relationship. Sorry, spouses. 
• Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman found that when you survey people in the moment, their happiness levels are highest while with friends. Doesn’t matter if you survey the young or old, or go anywhere around the world, pals take the title nearly every time. To be fair, research by Beverley Fair shows that we’re the absolute happiest when with both friends and spouses. 
• But even within a marriage, friendship reigns. Work by Gallup found that 70 percent of marital satisfaction is due to the couple’s friendship. Tom Rath says it’s five times as critical to a good marriage as physical intimacy. 
• Amigo impact in the office is no less significant. Less than 20 percent of people see their manager as a “close friend”—but those who do are 2.5 times more likely to enjoy their job. 
• Do you have three pals at work? Then you’re 96 percent more likely to feel happy about your life. To be clear, that result was not “happy with your job”; it was happy with life. 
• And while we would all love a raise, a 2008 Journal of Socio-Economics study found that while changes in income provide only a minor increase in happiness, more time with friends boosts your smiling to the equivalent of an extra ninety-seven thousand dollars a year. Overall, friendship variables account for about 58 percent of your happiness. 
• A 2006 study compared breast cancer patients who had ten close friends to those who had zero. Being in the first group quadrupled the women’s chance of survival—but, more surprisingly, a husband had zero impact. Same thing for men. A long term study of 736 guys showed friends reduced the likelihood of heart problems. Once again, a romantic partner didn’t. 
• However, the weakness of friendship is also the source of its immeasurable strength. Why do true friendships make us happier than spouses or children? Because they’re always a deliberate choice, never an obligation. Not supported by any institution, neither is friendship forced on us by any institution. Quite simply: you have to like your friends. Other relationships can exist independent of emotion. Someone does not cease to be your parent, boss, or spouse because you stop liking them. Friendship is more real because either person can walk away at any time. Its fragility proves its purity. 
• Aristotle, the student of the student of Socrates did have a lot to say about friends. He devoted 20 percent of his Nicomachean Ethics to the subject. Transactional relationships based on benefit weren’t real friendships to Aristotle. He was a big, big fan of close friends though. And he even had a heartwarming definition of what one was. To Aristotle, friends “are disposed toward each other as they are disposed to themselves: a friend is another self.” 
• We treat them so kindly because they’re part of us. 
• Selfishness can actually be altruism—if I believe that you are me. 
• Cicero around 50 b.c.? “For a true friend is one who is, as it were, a second self.” 
• Edith Wharton in the 1800s? “There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one’s self.” 
• Mark Vernon notes, in the New Testament it may say “love thy neighbor as thyself,” but if you check the Old Testament Levitical code, it translates as “love thy friend as thyself.” 

Self-Expansion Theory 

• Aristotle was right. And he wasn’t just a “little” right or “almost” right; not just one but over sixty-five studies support Aristotle’s idea. In psychology it’s called “self-expansion theory”—that we expand our notion of our self to include those we’re close to. A series of experiments demonstrated that the closer you are to a friend, the more the boundary between the two of you blurs. We actually confuse elements of who they are with who we are. When you’re tight with a friend, your brain actually has to work harder to distinguish the two of you. 
• The clincher was neuroscience studies that put people into an MRI and then asked them questions about friends. Of course, the areas of the brain for positive emotions lit up. You know what else was activated? The parts of the brain associated with self-processing. When women heard the names of their close friends, their gray matter responded the same way it did when they heard their own name. 
• From this work, the IOS (“inclusion of other in the self”) Scale was developed, and it was so powerful that the ranking could be used to robustly determine relationship stability. In other words, tracked over time, lower scores predicted the friendship was more likely to break up, and high scores predicted it was less likely to break up. 

Harvard professor Daniel Wegner said that empathy might “stem in part from a basic confusion between ourselves and others.” And with that, it seems like we finally have the definitions we’ve been seeking. 

❍  What is empathy? Empathy is when the line between you and another blurs, when you become confused where you end and another person begins. 

❍  What is closeness? Closeness is when your vision of your “self” scooches over and makes room for someone else to be in there too. 

❍  What is a friend? A friend is another self. A part of you. 


Believe it or not, friendship. Charles Darwin wrote a memoir and discussed the thing that affected his career more than anything else. His theory of natural selection? Nope: “I have not as yet mentioned a circumstance which influenced my whole career more than any other. This was my friendship with Professor Henslow.” Darwin’s theory didn’t have much to say about friendship, but it played as significant a part in his own life as it does in ours. 

Friends expand us. Unite us. And as far as our brains are concerned, the people we care about truly do become a part of us. 

Chapter 8

• When it comes to making friends, the closest thing we have to the magic powers of Williams syndrome seems to be the work of Dale Carnegie. Since it was first published in 1936, How to Win Friends and Influence People has sold over thirty million copies, and nearly a century later it still sells more than a quarter million copies each year.
• So what does Dale recommend? He encourages people to listen, to be interested in others, to speak to them from their point of view, to sincerely flatter others, to seek similarity, to avoid conflict, and many other things that seem obvious—but that we all routinely forget to do. 
• Does his advice line up with modern social science? Surprisingly, yes. As ASU’s Hruschka notes, the majority of Carnegie’s fundamental techniques have been validated by numerous experiments. One of his methods (which has been shown to promote the feeling of “another self”) is seeking similarity. Ever watch someone get physically hurt and you flinch sympathetically? MRI studies by neuroscientist David Eagleman show that sympathetic pain is increased when we perceive the victim as being similar to ourselves, even if the grouping is arbitrary. Social scientist Jonathan Haidt comments, “We just don’t feel as much empathy for those we see as ‘other.’” 

Seeing The Other Person’s Point of View 

• Dale did get one wrong. The eighth principle in his book says “Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view.” 
• Nicholas Epley tested Dale’s suggestion: “Never have we found any evidence that perspective taking—putting yourself in another person’s shoes and imagining the world through his or her eyes—increased accuracy in these judgments.” Not only isn’t it effective, but it actually makes you worse at relating to them. 
• Carnegie’s book is great for the early stages of relationships, it’s excellent for transactional relationships with business contacts . . . but it’s also a wonderful playbook for con men. It’s not focused on building “another self” and developing long-term intimacy: it’s much more about tactically gaining benefit from people. 

Time & vulnerability 

• So which costly signals do we want to display (and look for) when it comes to true friends? The experts firmly agree on two, the first one being time. 
• Why is time so powerful? Because it’s scarce, and scarce = costly. Want to make someone feel special? Do something for them you simply cannot do for others. If I give you an hour of my time every day,
• There’s no getting around it: time is critical. 

Make Time Through Rituals 

• So how do we make more time for friends as an adult? The key comes down to rituals. Think about the people you do keep up with, and you’ll probably find a ritual, conscious or not, underneath it. “We talk every Sunday,” or “we exercise together.” Replicate that. It works. Find something to do together consistently. 
• Research from Notre Dame that analyzed over eight million phone calls showed touching base in some form every two weeks is a good target to shoot for. Hit that minimum frequency, and friendships are more likely to persist. 
• But making new friends can require even more time. That process can be slower than inflight internet, which is one reason we’re so bad at it as we age. How much time? Are you sitting down? Jeff Hall’s research found that it took as many as sixty hours to develop a light friendship, sometimes one hundred hours to get to full-fledged “friend” status, and two hundred or more hours to unlock the vaunted “best friend” achievement. 

Vulnerability

• Want to make good friends without dozens of hours? Arthur Aron (who developed the IOS Scale) got strangers to feel like lifelong pals in just forty-five minutes. How? Well, that leads us to our second costly signal: vulnerability. 
• It’s ironic: when we meet new people, we often try to impress them—and this can be a terrible idea. Through a series of six studies, researchers found that signaling high status doesn’t help new friendships, it hurts them. Again, might be good for sales calls or conveying leadership, but it makes finding “another self” much more difficult. 
• It’s really frickin’ scary to put yourself out there. You could be mocked or rejected, or the information could be used against you. Vulnerability gives us flashbacks to worst-case scenarios.
• We don’t want awful people to exploit our weaknesses, but the irony is that our weaknesses are where trust comes from. 
• In a paper titled “Can We Trust Trust?” Diego Gambetta wrote, “The concession of trust . . . can generate the very behavior which might logically seem to be its pre-condition.” In other words, trust creates trust. The danger of being exploited creates the value inherent in trust, giving it its power. How do you signal you’re trustworthy? By trusting someone else. And then, often, the trust in you creates the trust in them. 
• Vulnerability tells people they’re part of an exclusive club. They’re special to you. Aron found that self-disclosure directly aids in producing “another self.” And that’s how he got people to become best buds in forty-five minutes. (If you want to see the questions that Aron used to produce close friendships that quickly, I’ve posted them for you here: https://www.bakadesuyo.com/aron.) 

1. Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?
2. Would you like to be famous? In what way?
3. Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? Why?
4. What would constitute a “perfect” day for you?
5. When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?
6. If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want?
7. Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?
8. Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common.
9. For what in your life do you feel most grateful?
10. If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?
11. Take four minutes and tell your partner your life story in as much detail as possible.
12. If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?

Question Set II

13. If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future, or anything else, what would you want to know?
14. Is there something that you’ve dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven’t you done it?
15. What is the greatest accomplishment of your life?
16. What do you value most in a friendship?
17. What is your most treasured memory?
18. What is your most terrible memory?
19. If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living? Why?
20. What does friendship mean to you?
21. What roles do love and affection play in your life?
22. Alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner. Share a total of five items.
23. How close and warm is your family? Do you feel your childhood was happier than most other people’s?
24. How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?

Question Set III

25. Make three true “we” statements each. For instance, “We are both in this room feeling…”
26. Complete this sentence: “I wish I had someone with whom I could share…”
27. If you were going to become a close friend with your partner, please share what would be important for them to know.
28. Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time, saying things that you might not say to someone you’ve just met.
29. Share with your partner an embarrassing moment in your life.
30. When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?
31. Tell your partner something that you like about them [already].
32. What, if anything, is too serious to be joked about?
33. If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven’t you told them yet?
34. Your house, containing everything you own, catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be? Why?
35. Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find most disturbing? Why?
36. Share a personal problem and ask your partner’s advice on how they might handle it. Also, ask your partner to reflect back to you how you seem to be feeling about the problem you have chosen.

What’s the best way to dip your toe in the pool of vulnerability? 

• If it scares you, say it. You don’t need to go full bore just yet. Start slow and build. Stretch the bounds of the sensitive things you’re willing to admit about yourself, and, by the same token, ask more sensitive questions than you’re normally comfortable asking. And when your friend admits vulnerable things, do not recoil and scream, “you did what?!?!” Accept them. T
• hen, Daniel Hruschka says, “raise the stakes.” As long as you feel emotionally safe and you’re getting a positive reception, share more. That’s how you build “another self.” 

Not being vulnerable kills friendships. 

• That same study on the number of hours required to make a friend showed more small talk in a friendship produced a drop in closeness. 
• Oh, and not being open and vulnerable doesn’t just kill friendships: it can also kill you. University of Pennsylvania professor Robert Garfield notes that not opening up prolongs minor illnesses, increases the likelihood of a first heart attack, and doubles the chance it will be lethal. 

Chapter 10

So what have we learned?

• Empathy is when the line between you and another blurs. 
• Closeness is when your vision of your “self” makes room for someone else to be in there too. And a true friend is “another self.” A part of you. Aristotle said it first, and after procrastinating for a few millennia, science proved him right. 
• Friendship may be defined by mutual aid, but it’s not transactional. We don’t keep score with friends. 
• There is no formal institution that regulates friendship. This makes friendship fragile but pure. It’s why friends make us happier than any other relationship—they’re only there because you truly want them to be. But without a marriage certificate, a blood bond, or a contract to support it, we must be diligent in investing in and protecting our friendships to sustain them. 
• Dale Carnegie got the initial parts of meeting people right, but we must display the costly signals of time and vulnerability to forge and maintain true friendships that will last. Those with Williams syndrome show us what we must aspire to, a fearless open love that sees in others more good than danger. 
• And we will meet people who just ain’t always so nice. In fact, we already have many of them in our lives. With low-level narcissists we can use the empathy prompts of similarity, vulnerability, and community to remind them of the warmth they lack, and that they so desperately need. Daniel Kahneman’s mother knew that people are complex, and sometimes they just need an emotional nudge so that they stop trying to be special and start trying to be better. 

Roy Baumeister at Florida State University reports that studies unanimously show we judge the quality of our friendships based on “availability of support”: Are you there for me when I need you? 

• Would you lie for a friend? Let’s raise the stakes: Would you lie to the government for a friend? Researchers asked thirty thousand people from over thirty countries if they would lie under oath to protect a pal. Was the propensity to help consistent around the world, all of us bound by a single version of human nature? Heck, no. Results varied widely by country. The data were all over the place. But then they found the pattern . . . 
• Anthropologist Daniel Hruschka, who led the study, sorted the data by whether the countries were fair, whether they were stable, whether they were corrupt. Plain and simple: where life was harder, people were more likely to put themselves at risk to protect their pal. Where friends were most in need, people were friends “indeed” and “in deed.” 
• Friendship does the heavy lifting of happiness in our lives, so I’d say it deserves better. Time is critical, vulnerability is essential, but maybe something else we should remember is gratitude. Hug a friend today. We don’t celebrate our friendships enough. 

PART 3 

DOES “LOVE CONQUER ALL”? 

• Around 38 b.c. the Roman poet Virgil wrote, “omnia vincit amor,” or “love conquers all.” You can find similar wording in the Bible. 1 Corinthians 13:7 reads, “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” And we still hear versions of the maxim to this day in songs and movies and at wedding ceremonies. But is it true? 
• Does love really conquer all?  Of course not, have you seen any divorce statistics lately? roughly 40 percent of US marriages end in divorce. The proverbial seven-year-itch is more like four; divorce is most common about four years after the wedding. And that stat is true around the world. (In fact, anthroppologist Helen Fisher notes that one in ten US women have been married three or more times by the time they turn forty.) 
• That said, the details can certainly vary. In a Jacksonville, Florida, survey, 60 percent of people said their spouse was their best friend. You know how many said the same thing in Mexico City? Zero. And cultures that romantically kiss are actually in the minority: only 46 percent of the 168 studied smooch. 
• When you examine the set of all people who have ever walked down the aisle versus people who never have, the health and happiness results are very different. Simply put: marriage doesn’t make you healthy and happy; a good marriage makes you healthy and happy. And a bad marriage, even one in the past, can have very (or very very very) negative effects. 

What effects does marriage have on health? 

• Metrics for heart attacks, cancer, dementia, illness, blood pressure, or even straight-up likelihood of dying all improve. (Today’s married men enjoy an average seven-year boost in life expectancy.) 
• If you’re unhappily married, your health is likely to be notably worse than if you never got hitched at all. 
  • A bad marriage makes you 35 percent more likely to fall ill and lops four years off your life. 
  • A study of almost nine thousand people found divorced and widowed people had 20 percent more health problems (including heart disease and cancer). And most surprisingly, some of those effects never went away, even if they remarried. Folks on marriage number two had 12 percent more serious health issues than those who never split up, and divorced women were 60 percent more likely to have cardiovascular disease, even if they took another walk down the aisle. 

Happiness 

• If you’ve got a good marriage, getting hitched definitely provides a boost. A 2010 study from Australia even said previous research probably underestimated just how happy people in happy marriages are. But the flip side is even more damning than you may have guessed. 
• A study of the medical records of five thousand patients analyzed the most stressful life events people deal with. Divorce came in at #2. (Death of a spouse was number one.) Divorce even beat going to prison. 
  • Human beings are pretty resilient. With almost all bad things that happen, your happiness levels eventually return to baseline. But not with divorce. 
  • An eighteen year study of thirty thousand people showed that after a marriage goes splitsville, levels of subjective well-being rebound—but not completely. It seems divorce puts a permanent dent in your happiness. And when you look at everyone across the marital spectrum, nobody is more despondent than the unhappily married. If you’re going to be lonely, it’s better to do it alone. 

So marriage is no guarantee of health or happiness; it’s more like gambling: big wins or big losses. 

• And, extending the gambling analogy, the odds are not fifty-fifty. As New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote, “In the United States, nearly 40 percent of marriages end in divorce. Another 10 or 15 percent of couples separate and do not divorce, and another 7 percent or so stay together but are chronically unhappy.” No matter how you slice it, this is no guarantee. It’s a minority of people who are happily married and stay that way. 

Marriage wasn’t based on love.

• For the vast majority of recorded history, marriage had more to do with economics than love. This wasn’t part of some evil plan; it was due to the fact that life was really frickin’ hard. “Love marriages” were not a realistic option. The model was more like the help-me-not-die marriage. Life was often nasty, brutish, and short. You couldn’t make it on your own. Personal fulfillment took a back seat to putting food in your mouth and fighting off brigands. 
• (Read the book for an very interesting evolution of marriage and love) 

Self-Expressive Marriage 

• Northwestern professor Eli Finkel calls our modern paradigm “the self-expressive marriage.” The definition of marriage is up to you . . . which is kinda terrifying. Do you know exactly what you want? You better. 
• Marriage is no longer defined by church, government, family, or society. It’s a DIY kit. Instruction manual sold separately. Marriages of the past were definitely unfair and unequal in many ways, but the rules were clear. Today we’re confused. 
• Our expectations for marriage have gone through the roof. We still want many things marriage provided in the past, but now we think wedlock should fulfill all our dreams, bring out our best selves, and offer continuous growth. 
• We don’t just divorce because we’re unhappy but because we could be even happier. Finkel says that before, you had to justify leaving your spouse; now, you have to justify staying. And while our expectations of marriage have gone up, our ability to meet them has gone down. 
• Couples are working longer hours and spending less time together. Between 1975 and 2003 the amount of time spouses spent together on weekdays plunged by 30 percent if they didn’t have kids and 40 percent if they did. 
• And at the same time, marriage has crowded out other relationships that might reduce its burden. Research by Robin Dunbar at Oxford shows that falling in love costs you two close friends. 
• And Finkel points out that in 1975 Americans spent two hours every weekend day with friends or relatives. By 2003 that number had dropped 40 percent. Meanwhile, between 1980 and 2000 the degree to which a happy marriage predicted personal happiness almost doubled. Marriage isn’t one of your relationships, it’s the relationship. We’re experiencing the spousification of life. 

The best marriages though are better than any in the history of humanity. Period. 

• Finkel confirms it: “The best marriages today are better than the best marriages of earlier eras; indeed, they are the best marriages that the world has ever known.” 
• Divorce may put a permanent dent in your happiness and the average marriage may be pretty disappointing, but if you do this married thing right, your marriage will be happier than anybody’s at any time ever. You will rule. So it’s not doom and gloom for everyone—it’s winner takes all. And that’s why Finkel calls wedlock in our era “the all or nothing marriage.” 
• A 2011 Marist poll concluded 73 percent of Americans believe in soulmates, and a 2000 study found that 78 percent of people’s vision of love contain fairy-tale elements. But what researchers also realized was that people who believe in those things actually experience more disillusionment and angst in their marriages than those who were more grounded. Why? 
• Fairy tales are passive. And these days happy marriages take proactive work. But if you do the work, you can have one of those greatest-marriages-ever. 
• To quote Finkel, “Relative to marriages in earlier eras, marriages today require much greater dedication and nurturance, a change that has placed an ever-larger proportion of marriages at risk of stagnation and dissolution. But spouses who invest the requisite time and energy in the relationship can achieve a level of conjugal fulfillment that would have been out of reach in earlier eras.” 

Love is Both Pleasure and Pain

• “anyone who has never been in love is missing one of life’s most pleasurable experiences.” 
• But truth be told, we all know it’s a mixed bag. We’re always up and down. It’s both pleasure and pain. Agony and ecstasy. Delight and despair. Dr. Frank Tallis writes, “Love seems to provide a shuttle service that operates between only two destinations: heaven and hell.” 
• And that’s the side of love we don’t discuss quite as much: love can be awful. 
• Passion derives from the Latin word meaning “to suffer.” While Tennov’s subjects almost unanimously agreed about the pleasures of love, over 50 percent also described horrible depression and a quarter mentioned suicidal thoughts. Love can be almost too powerful a force. 

Love is Mania 

• Your mood is elevated. You barely need to sleep. Self-esteem skyrockets. Thoughts are racing. You’re talkative. Distracted. Socially and sexually you’re more active. You’re willing to take big risks, spend more money, and embarrass yourself. Does that sound like love? Well, actually I was giving you the DSM-V criteria for a diagnosis of mania. Yes, modern science basically agrees that love is a mental illness. 
• Psychiatrist Frank Tallis says if you felt all those symptoms above for a week and told a psychiatrist about it (and didn’t mention romance), you might very well walk away with a prescription for lithium. In fact, you’d only need four of those symptoms to qualify. 
• Or are you feeling sad? Lost interest in things you usually enjoy doing? No appetite? Trouble sleeping? Tired? Can’t concentrate? Yeah, that’s being lovesick. But if you have five of those six, you’d also qualify for “major depressive episode” 
• Sounds like love to me. It’s also indistinguishable from bipolar disorder. And Tallis, a psychiatrist, says love actually is often misdiagnosed by those in the mental health profession. 
• If we get really scientific, which mental disorder does love best resemble? OCD, actually. You’re obsessed. You can’t control your attention and turn it toward your responsibilities. Anthropologist Helen Fisher reports people newly in love spend up to 85 percent of their waking hours thinking about that special someone. Not only does love meet the criteria for OCD, but the neuroscience data match. Look at a brain in love or an OCD brain in an MRI, and it’s hard to tell the difference. The anterior cingulate cortex, caudate nucleus, putamen, and insula are all working overtime. Psychiatrist Donatella Marazziti took blood from people in love and people with OCD and found both had serotonin levels 40 percent lower than controls. What happens when you test the love group again, months later when the craziness of romance has died down? Serotonin levels are normal again. (Scientist drops mic.) 

Love is… addiction 

• Obsession is close, but looking at all the data, the best metaphor is addiction. 
• Research shows that the love cocktail of phenylethylamine, dopamine, norepinephrine, and oxytocin flowing through your love-addled brain provides a high similar to that of amphetamines. And MRI data support the addiction paradigm as well. 
• Juxtapose an fMRI brain scan of someone in love with someone injected with cocaine or morphine, and you see the same pattern. 
• Our old friend Arthur Aron says love is a motivation system. Just like addicts will do anything to get their drug, it’s that same system that tells us go get that special someone. 
• There’s an excellent reason for all the crazy. First (but not necessarily foremost), yeah, evolution wants us to make more humans. That’s priority number one for our genes. We procrastinate about lots of stuff, but evolution will have no trucking with that non- sense. Reproduction is job one, and it flips the logic override switch, saying, “Let me take the wheel; this stuff is important.” As famed playwright W. Somerset Maugham said, “Love is only the dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.” 

Romantic love not only overrides rationality but also signals the overriding of rationality. 

• As Donald Yates said, “People who are sensible about love are incapable of it.” Irrational loyalty is the only kind that matters. If my loyalty stops when the cost-benefit analysis for me goes south, that’s not loyalty, it’s selfishness. Loyalty is willingness to overpay. Acting crazy in love is signaling to the other person you’re no longer acting out of selfishness; in fact, you’re incapable of that: you can trust me because I’m nuts. 

The irrationality of love is, ironically, exceedingly rational. 

• And this isn’t just theory. If you lived in a culture that allowed you to easily ditch one person and replace them, would you expect the insanity of love (and its signaling power) to go up or down? Obviously, up. People would be less trusting, and the Cupid parts of your brain would know they’d need to boost the crazy to send a costly signal. And that’s what the study “Passion, Relational Mobility, and Proof of Commitment” found. In cultures where it’s easier to date and ghost, passionate signals were more intense. The crazy is vital. 

Why do we get jealous when in love?

• Because, yet again, that crazy is (within reason) a good thing. Research shows the purpose of jealousy is to protect the relationship. Eugene Mathes of Western Illinois University gave unmarried couples a jealousy test and then circled back seven years later. Three-quarters of them had broken up, while the other quarter got married. Guess which group had the higher jealousy score? Exactly. We feel crazy jealous, even when we don’t want to, because a touch of jealousy can motivate couples to maintain the relationship. 
• And then we have the most important, the most vital, and the most wonderful form of crazy that love brings: idealization. As we all know, people in love idealize their partners. It’s one of the most recognized hallmarks of love. A 1999 study showed that people in happy relationships spend five times as long talking about their sweetheart’s good qualities as bad. 
• That idealization isn’t just sweet: it also predicts the future better than a crystal ball. “Results of concurrent analyses revealed that relationship illusions predicted greater satisfaction, love, and trust, and less conflict and ambivalence in both dating and marital relationships.” Realism may be accurate, but it’s our illusions that foretell our happiness in love. And the more crazy, the better. People who idealized their partner the most felt no decline in relationship satisfaction over a study of the first three years of marriage. 
• But the benefits of crazy idealization don’t stop there. It even prevents cheating at the neuroscience level. 
  • If you show photos of good-looking people to men and women in relationships, they’ll acknowledge those folks are good-looking. At a later date, you show them the same photos, but now you say the beautiful person is attracted to them. Guess what? Now they’re less likely to say the person is beautiful. This effect has been replicated time and time again. It’s called “derogation of alternatives.” When people are in love, their brain actually dials down how attractive it sees other people who might threaten the relationship. So when the Ghosts of Hotness Past come around, idealization has your back and makes sure those cute exes aren’t as cute in the eyes of your partner. 

• Lovers who misremembered their histories in a positive way were less likely to split up than people with more accurate recollections. The facts don’t matter as much as the story we tell ourselves when it comes to happiness. We need the crazy. Love is blind—and should be. 

Needless to say, when idealization is not there, bad things happen. If you’re about to walk down the aisle, you better be feeling the crazy. Women who have second thoughts before they say “I do” are two and half times more likely to be divorced in four years. For men it’s more than a 50 percent increase. 

Can Love Get Better? 

• In 2012 social neuroscientist Bianca Acevedo did fMRI brain scans on couples who were married an average of over twenty years. When she showed them pictures of their spouse, some of them did show the same neural responses you see in people who were newly in love. And get this: not only can it last, it can get even better. Not only did these couples show the neural signature associated with having the hots for each other, it actually lacked the anxiety we find in new love. All the good crazy without the bad crazy. Yes, it can last… 
• But it usually doesn’t. Those couples are the exception. Most of the time romantic love drops off after a year to a year and a half. You see this in the fMRI studies, the serotonin blood tests, and survey data. The addicts become habituated to the drug, and the high wears off. Logically, it’s understandable. Everyone can’t run around like lovestruck maniacs forever. 

Love is Subject to Entropy 

• Much like the physical universe, love is also subject to entropy. Energy dies down. The frenzy regresses to the mean. Romance stories don’t discuss this part; comedians do. On the one hand, it’s good to know this. You’re not necessarily doing anything wrong. A fading of emotions is normal. But it’s still distressing. What did a study of almost 1,100 people in long-term relationships show was the biggest threat to the union? “Fading away enthusiasm.” 
• After the first four years of marriage, satisfaction drops an average of 15–20 percent. (Imagine your salary doing that.) How personally happy are most people two years after getting married? Richard Lucas at Michigan State University found that they’re about as happy as they were before getting married. Regression to the mean. Entropy. You’ve probably heard reports of studies showing cohabiting couples are more likely to divorce. One reason for this is believed to be that they burn through the period of crazy love before settling down to get married. By the time they tie the knot, entropy has already kicked in. 

Sex

• Most couples have sex roughly two or three times a week. But all around the world, the longer you’re married, the less sex you have. In fact, after the first year of marriage, sex declines by half. 
• The number one Google search related to married problems? “Sexless marriage.” Fifteen percent of married folks haven’t had sex in over six months. (And if you’re someone who is very distressed about inequality in the world, it’s worth noting that 15 percent of people are having 50 percent of the sex.) 

How do we fight the entropy and sustain the idealization? Most love stories are of little help. The trickiness of marriage begins where they end. And, as we saw, the fairy tales lead us astray here. Believing it’s supposed to be easy, magical, and passive is a big problem when you know it will take proactive work to resist entropy. 

Married love is a choice and one that will require diligent, consistent effort over time. 

Love is a verb. If you want to look good and be healthy, you have to consciously work on it. Love is no different. 

Chapter 13

• Marriage counseling was created by the Nazis. Seriously. It was a eugenics movement initiative created in 1920s Germany. And if it makes you feel any better, it doesn’t work. Only 11–18 percent of couples achieve notable improvements. As the New York Times reports, two years after therapy, a quarter of marriages that sought help are in rockier shape than ever, and after four years, 38 percent go splitsville. 
• A study by Robinson and Price showed unhappy couples don’t notice half the positivity in their marriage. Your spouse does something nice, trying to dig themselves out of the hole, but now 50 percent of the time you can’t even see it. 
• And this leads to more screaming that ends the marriage, right? Probably not. Escalating shouting matches lead to divorce only 40 percent of the time. More often than not, marriages end with a whimper, not a bang. You scream because you care. And once NSO (negative sentiment override) has seriously set in, you stop caring. 
  • *Some frustration with the book is that in the paragraph before he’s saying 38% is a massive percentage (probably because it deals with a negative) and then he says “only 40% of the time” right after that making it seem like 40% is insignificant but 38% is a massive percentage. 

The Downward Spiral of Marriage (Small things lead to big things. Prevent the damage before it gets worse) 

• How does this spiral start? It begins with a secret. You have an issue with something, but you don’t say it. 
• Maybe you think you know what they’d say. An assumption. And as we discussed in section 1, we’re terrible at reading minds, even our partner’s. As George Bernard Shaw said, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” And with time you talk less and assume more. “He’s quiet so he must be angry” or “She said no to sex so she must not love me.” 
• Unspoken assumptions start to multiply until you’re not having conversations with your partner, you’re just having them with yourself because you “know” what they would say. Sometimes we don’t ask for clarification or say something because “he/she should know.” But here on Planet Earth people can’t hear what you don’t say. The emotional landfill grows. You collect compound interest of marital doom. 

You have to communicate. It’s a cliché, but it’s true. 

• Communication is so vital that shyness is actually correlated with lower marital satisfaction. Meanwhile, the average dual career couple spends under two hours a week in discussion. You gotta talk. 
• Yeah, that means you’re gonna fight more. But guess what? Fighting doesn’t end marriages; avoiding conflict does. 
  • A study of newlyweds showed that, early on, couples who rarely fought were initially more satisfied with their marriages. But those same couples turned out to be on their way to divorce when researchers checked back in after three years. 
  • And a 1994 paper showed after thirty-five years it was actually the passionate bickering couples who were the only ones to still have a happy marriage. Oddly enough, a lower threshold for negativity is good for a marriage. 

• Something bothers you, you’re more likely to bring it up, and then it’s more likely to get dealt with. 
• Top relationship researcher John Gottman says: “If they don’t or can’t or won’t argue, that’s a major red flag. If you’re in a ‘committed’ relationship and you haven’t yet had a big argument, please do that as soon as possible.” 
• Sixty-nine percent of ongoing problems never get resolved. No, I’m not saying that to depress you. The point is that it’s not what you talk about, it’s how you talk about it. Everybody thinks the issue is clarity, but studies show that most couples (if they do talk) are actually pretty clear. And it’s not about problem solving because more than two-thirds of the time it’s not going to get solved. As Gottman notes, it’s the affect with which you don’t solve the problem that matters. 
• It’s about regulation, not resolution, of the conflict. War is inevitable, but you have to obey Geneva Convention rules. Maya Angelou once said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” And she’s right. Survey couples about their most recent disagreements and 25 percent of the time they can’t even remember what the argument was about—but they remember how they felt. And that’s what affects your marriage. 
• When you ask divorced people what they would change about their previous marriage, the numero uno answer is “communication style.” 

Communication Style in Marriages 

• Marital communication skills guided by Gottman’s work. 
• His research allows him to predict which couples will be divorced three years later with 94 percent accuracy, a number nobody else even comes close to. 
• What Gottman realized is that the amount of negativity in a marriage doesn’t predict divorce, it’s the type of negativity. 
• Gottman found, unhappy couples all make the same four mistakes. And if we learn them, we can avoid them. 

He calls these problems the Four Horsemen, and they predict divorce 83.3 percent of the time. 

1. CRITICISM

• Complaining is actually healthy for a marriage. It’s criticism that’s the deadly problem.
• Complaining is when I say you did not take the trash out. Criticism is when I say you did not take the trash out because you’re a horrible person. The first is about an event, the second is about your fundamental personality. We can fix events. Attacking someone’s personality does not tend to go very well. 
• Complaints often begin with “I” and criticisms often begin with “you.” If a sentence starts with “you always” and doesn’t end with “make me so happy,” it’s probably a criticism.
• So turn your criticisms into complaints. Address the event, not the person. Or better yet, see your complaints as “goals” to be reached or problems to be solved. Criticism is something women do a lot more than men, but don’t worry, we’ll get to the problems the guys usually cause soon enough. 

 

2. STONEWALLING 

• And here we have the thing men do in arguments that powerfully predicts divorce. Stonewalling is when you shut down or tune out in response to issues your partner brings up. 
• Yes, there are many times in life when you just don’t want to miss a good chance to shut up, but stonewalling conveys “you or your concerns are not important enough for me to deal with.” 
• It doesn’t reduce conflict: in most cases it dials it up. 
• For many men, Gottman has found the issue actually operates at the physiological level. When guys’ adrenaline levels soar, they just don’t return to baseline as quickly as women’s do. The solution is to take long breaks. If the argument gets too heated, ask to return to the discussion in twenty minutes when fight-or-flight hormones have dropped back down. 

 

3. DEFENSIVENESS 

• Gottman defines defensiveness as anything that conveys, “No, the problem isn’t me, it’s you.” This, by its very nature, escalates conflict. 
• Denying responsibility, making excuses, repeating yourself, or using the dreaded “Yes, but . . .” are all examples of defensiveness. 
• Don’t counterattack or dodge. Listen, acknowledge your partner’s issues (no matter how ridiculous they might seem to you), and wait your turn to prevent escalation. 

 

4. CONTEMPT 

• Contempt is the single biggest predictor of divorce that Gottman found. 
• Contempt is anything that implies your partner is inferior to you. Calling them names, ridiculing or putting them down are all examples. (Yes, eye-rolling is one of the worst things you can do in a marriage, and that’s backed by data.) 
• Contempt is almost never seen in happy marriages. Gottman refers to it as “sulfuric acid for love.” 

So if you forget everything else, remember this: how you start an argument is double-super-extra important. Just by listening to the first three minutes of an argument, Gottman could predict the result 96 percent of the time. Plain and simple: if it starts harsh, it’s going to end harsh. And harsh startup not only predicted the outcome of the conversation, it predicted divorce. If you know you’re raising an issue with your partner that might lead to a fight, take a deep breath first. Complain, don’t criticize. Describe it neutrally. Start positive. You may be right, but you don’t need to make this harder than necessary by starting it as an attack. 

What’s an overall perspective to keep in mind that encapsulates much of this?

we create a lot of problems because we expect our partner to always be a competent, emotionally stable “adult.” They’re not. I’m not. And you’re not. As humorist Kin Hubbard once said, “Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men.” Showing the generosity and compassion that you naturally give to a child when they’re upset is a simple way to get around many of the problems we create. We’re just less likely to think a child is motivated by conscious malice. We think they must be tired, hungry, or moody. This is, frankly, an excellent thing to do with anyone. 

• Studies have shown that while negatives hurt, it’s actually the loss of the positive that speeds marriages to the grave. 
• More specifically, Gottman realized that the most important thing is a 5:1 ratio of positive to negative. This is why the raw amount of negative doesn’t matter. As long as you have enough good times to offset it, a relationship can thrive. 
• Couples headed for divorce typically have a ratio of 0.8 positives for every negative. 
• But you don’t want to have too little negative either. If you hit 13 positives to every negative, you’re probably not communicating enough. Gotta talk, gotta fight. It’s a balance. (What’s fascinating is this applies to all relationships. Friendships need an 8:1 positive to negative ratio. And with your mother-in-law the number is actually 1,000:1.) 

Chapter 14

PSO: positive sentiment override. That’s the fancy term for the magic, the idealization, the not- exactly-true but oh-so-wonderful story. 

FOUR Rs TO MAGIC 

❍  Rekindle feelings through self-expansion. 

❍  Remind yourself of intimacy through “love maps.” 

❍  Renew your intimacy with “the Michelangelo effect.” 

❍  Rewrite your shared story. Again and again. 

Love is a verb, so let’s start verbing: 

 

1. REKINDLE 

•  In a 2002 study, Karney and Frye found that overall relationship satisfaction has more to do with recent feelings. Unsurprising, but just how important are those recent emotions? Eight times as important. 
• But how? You don’t just “choose” to feel warm and fuzzy about your partner. Here’s where the concept of self-expansion comes in. Because of entropy, you’re either growing together or drifting apart. The most commonly cited reason for divorce isn’t fighting or affairs; 80 percent of couples said it was losing closeness. 
• We often talk about feeling like we’re growing, learning, and expanding ourselves as a result of love, but it turns out this is actually one of the creators of love. 
• Arthur Aron and Gary Lewandowski found that when couples do stuff that makes them feel they are learning and becoming better, it increases love. Just like boredom kills love, when we feel our partner is helping us become a better, more interesting person, we love them all the more. 
• Doing things together that are stimulating and challenging stretches our self-concept wider and provides a buzz. 
• The angle of attack is simple: never stop dating. You did all kinds of cool stuff together when you first fell in love. You probably saw that as a result, not the cause of romance, but it’s both. “Quality time” together won’t do diddly if you’re merely making more time to be bored together. The research is clear here: you need to do exciting things. 
• Researchers did a ten-week study comparing couples who engaged in “pleasant” activities versus those who pursued “exciting” activities. Pleasant lost. Couples who went out to dinner or a movie didn’t get nearly the marital satisfaction boost that those who danced, skied, or went to concerts did. We need interaction, challenges, movement, and fun. 

Psychologist Elaine Hatfield said it best: “Adrenaline makes the heart grow fonder.” 

• But how does this increase love? It’s due to the criminally underrated concept of emotional contagion. When we feel excited, we associate it with what’s around us, even if that thing is not directly responsible. When we feel partner = fun, we enjoy their presence more. And that lets us be somewhat lazy by letting environments do the work for us. Go to a concert. Get on a roller coaster. 
• In fact, any strong emotion can increase love. People often reference Stockholm syndrome, the phenomenon of hostages coming to sympathize with their captors. It’s real. And what many people forget is that after the actual 1973 event in Stock-holm, two of the hostages actually got engaged to the criminals. This is why some people stay in toxic relationships. Though they may not realize it, to them, the drama and fighting are preferable to another night watching TV. 
• Not only do “self-expansion” activities improve relationship satisfaction, but studies show that they also increase sexual desire. Couples who did exciting stuff were 12 percent more likely to have sex that weekend than those who did typical stuff. And speaking of sex: have it. Only 58 percent of women and 46 percent of men are happy with the current amount of sex they’re getting. Denise Donnelly of Georgia State reports that sex less than once a month is a harbinger of misery and separation. And a low-sex relationship isn’t just a result of unhappiness, it’s also a cause. 
• Want a concrete way to get started? Go out with your spouse and pretend it’s your first date. To fall in love again, redo the things you did falling in love the first time. 

 

2. REMIND

• Okay, I cheated. This is not really “reminding.” I needed an R word. What we’re really doing here is going deeper and learning more about your partner to build intimacy. 
• A 2001 study found couples who really open up to each other are nearly two thirds more likely to say they have a happy union. Our buddy Casanova once said, “Love is three-quarters curiosity.” And Gottman’s research backs him up. The happiest couples understand a lot about their partners. He calls this deep knowledge a “love map.” 
  • Knowing how they like their coffee, the little worries that bother them, what their biggest hopes and dreams are. This info not only increases intimacy but also reduces conflict by what Gottman calls “preemptive repair.” We all have con- cerns and sensitivities, rational or not, and when you’re aware of those, you can avoid them before they become an issue. 
  • Knowing how they like their coffee is good, but the real value here is in understanding the personal, idiosyncratic meanings they have of things. 
    • What does love mean to them? Marriage? Happiness? Dig for their unique perspective on things like what “being fulfilled” entails. When you know that your partner sees the completion of household chores as an important expression of caring, then it’s not a mystery why they’re getting upset—and you can do something about it.

• Dan Wile once wrote, “Choosing a partner is choosing a set of problems.” But when you take the time to get to know somebody, you can see the emotional reasons why things don’t mean to them what they might mean to you. That understanding can change “difficult problems” into “lovable quirks.” When you know they leave the lights on in the bathroom sometimes because of a childhood fear of the dark, the lazy idiot becomes a sympathetic human with acceptable foibles. 
• Gottman says that understanding people’s idiosyncratic meanings is how you overcome those perpetual problems—the intractable 69 percent. What does gridlock on an issue mean? It means this is tied to something important to them. Values. The same thing causing you all that grief can be a door to a deep insight into your partner. If you know what something really means to them, maybe you can find something that honors both of your visions of life. 
• Like Gottman said, dealing with those perpetual problems is about regulation, not resolution. And that works a lot better when you’re honestly able to tell them “I don’t agree, but I see why you feel that way.” 
• Talking about dreams and values is crucial. You’re on a journey together, so it’s kinda important that you both wanna head in the same direction, eh? 
  • What’s their ideal life? 
  • Their ideal self? 
  • These are big questions, but if you start answering them, the smaller stuff starts falling into place and that crazy person you live with can start to make sense. All couples argue about money. Why? Because money is all about values. It’s a quantification of what’s important to you. Get closer to an understanding of their values, and the money problem magically gets easier to deal with. 
• You don’t want to just “get along.” God, how low a standard is that? Do all the above right and you get on the path to shared meaning. That’s the first step toward the good side of “the Tolstoy principle”: your unique culture of two. Folie à deux. To have your own secret language. An emotional shorthand. Silly stuff infused with rich personal meaning. Those inside jokes, things you say that are crazy to everyone else but mean so much to the two of you. Building your own little religion. This is when couples truly can’t bear to be apart, because they have a shared identity, a shared story, because the other person is inextricably a part of their future progress, future goals, and how they will become their ideal self. 
• And that unique culture should be supported by unique rituals. 
  • True of the best teams/organizations as well. 
• A good concrete one to start with? At the end of the workday when you reunite, you each take a turn sharing the good news of the day. And both of you support and celebrate what the other says. Repeated studies have shown this can boost happiness and relationship satisfaction. UCSB professor Shelly Gable has found that how couples celebrate can actually be more important than how you fight. Again, like Gottman said, in many cases, if you increase the positive, the negative doesn’t matter quite as much. 

3. RENEW

• Okay, so you know your partner better. It’s a natural response to want to change them a bit. No, this is not good, at least not the way it’s usually done. A study of 160 people found that this usually doesn’t work and decreases marital satisfaction. Why? Because you’re not objective. You’re saying you know better than they do who they should be. There’s always a bit of selfishness in there. The enormous irony here is that you have to accept someone fully before they can change. As John Gottman notes, our instinct for autonomy is wired deep, so, ironically, people change only when they feel they don’t have to. 
• There’s a healthy (and effective) way to help your partner move in the direction of positive change. But it starts with who they want to be, not who you want them to be. You have to help them become their own ideal self. That’s one reason why the love maps process above is so important, for you to ask and know, rather than guess, what this ideal self is. 
• Michelangelo. Speaking about his artistic process, he once said, “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work.” He didn’t feel that sculpting was creating; it was revealing. The sculpture just has to be freed from the stone around it. And psychologists found the same idea applies to improving your partner. 
• Just as in romantic love we’re able to see our “real” partner but discount the negatives and idealize them, we can benefit from that here. With the knowledge of the current block of marble and what it has the potential to be, we can better see how the idealized version parallels it. 
• So how do we actually do this? The best way to help them improve was by encouraging instead of shaming. Same applies here. In accepting them as they are, you can still focus on and encourage those aspects aligned with their ideal self, who they most want to be. 
• See the “idealized” sculpture in their realistic marble and encourage that. Nurture the ideal them through support and affirmation. This is a more proactive effort to “bring out the best in someone.” And, given it originated with their own goals, it meets far less resistance. You’re not encouraging them to become what you want them to be, you’re encouraging them to be more them. Speak to their best self, encourage their ideal self, and treat them like they already are that person. 
• In a 1996 study, researchers Sandra Murray, John Holmes, and Dale Griffin found that, much like children, adults often come to perceive themselves the way we perceive them. This is why supporting the ideal works and shaming them as bad fails. The delusion of love is necessary because it is a North Star. The lie becomes the truth. 
• It’s idealization all over again, but the deliberate “enlightenment era” version. If we know the “negatives” of a partner but learn the meaning beneath them, we see who they really are and who they can really be. We can then encourage that ideal in a partner and help them actually become that ideal. They become the idealized self, and so the idealization can last. This is a path to a continued romantic love that defies entropy. The Michelangelo effect allows us to fall in love over and over again with same person (without amnesia). Somerset Maugham wrote, “We are not the same persons this year as last, nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.” 

4. REWRITE 

In the end, love is a shared story. 

• John Gottman could predict divorce with 94 percent accuracy? Know how he does it? It’s simple: he asks the couple to tell their story. That, and that alone, is his crystal ball to the future of any romance. 
• So what’s your story? Every relationship has one. 
• The stories we have about our relationships are usually intuitive and unconscious.Some people have a “business” story where they’re all about making sure things in the relationship run smoothly. Others do have a “fairy tale” story of wanting to save or be saved. And there are those who have a “home” story where everything is centered on building a lovely environment. There are an infinite number of stories. None guarantee happiness, but Sternberg found some make it pretty hard. (I recommend avoiding a “war” story.) 
• And people can repeat their problematic stories, which is why some friends of yours might complain, “Why do I always attract jerks?” They’re casting an actor for the “role” in their story, and decent people might not fit the part. Sternberg’s research has shown that we end up with people who have similar ideas about what the story of a relationship will be. And if they don’t, we’re far more likely to be dissatisfied with the partnership. 
• First, you need to know what your “ideal” relationship story is so that you can align with it, tweak it, or change it. It can be a great way to diagnose what’s wrong with a relationship, but that’s hard to do if you don’t know what your story is. If you secretly love “drama” but won’t admit it to yourself, you can say you’re seeking a “fairy tale” but keep ending up in a “war” story, saying “Jeez, why does this keep happening to me?” Often people have confusion between the story they’re seeking and the story they think they “should” have. 
• Our stories are influenced by upbringing and experiences, and the environment we live in. Stories are now far less culturally scripted than in the past, which is a good thing if you craft one deliberately, but if you’re not as proactive about this, it can end up more hellish than being on a group text. 
• Look at your past behavior to find your “ideal” story, the one you’ve been unconsciously seeking. What kinds of people did you get involved with? Reject? How has that changed? Ask friends for insight because you’re probably not going to be objective. And then you want to think about what your “actual” story currently is with your partner. Has an “adventure” story become a “running a small business” story since the kids arrived? 
• Talk to your partner and find out their “ideal” and “actual” story. Again, this is why you discussed dreams and values with them and tried to understand their ideal self. Failing to get on the same page about this is why when talking to couples who split, you often hear a Rashomon of two tales that sound completely different. Sternberg’s research found that couples with similar stories are more satisfied. 
• A critical element is understanding the issue of roles and power in the shared story. Today many couples have a knee jerk desire to say they’re equals, but that may not reflect their true ideal. Do you feel uncomfortable when you’re leading or uncomfortable when not leading? Roles can be asymmetric, and that’s okay. One can be the race car driver and the other the mechanic. 
• Remember, there’s no “right” answer, just something both of you are comfortable with that’s in line with your needs. Yes, this is the choose-your-own-adventure marriage. Objectivity and facts aren’t central here: it’s the framing, the perspective, and the mutual buy-in. There is no objective truth here, just two subjective truths. 

And that lines up with what Gottman has found about story: the facts don’t matter. It’s all about the spin. 

• Getting his 94 percent prediction accuracy didn’t come from what the couple said but how they presented it. 
• The single most important thing? The theme of “glorifying the struggle.” That means everything. A story of problems that has a positive spin (“We had troubles but we overcame them”) bodes well, but a story of good things with disappointment (“We’re doing fine, I guess; this isn’t what I wanted but whatever”) means problems. 
• The goal here is to create what journalist Daniel Jones calls “retroactive destiny.” The story isn’t the events: it’s the lens you see them through. 
• NSO is a negative rewriting of the story. PSO is the positive version. The facts didn’t change, the lens did. And the story is forever being rewritten, tweaked here and there 
• Why are kids such a challenge to happy marriages? You just added a whole new primary character and didn’t update your story. Without a conscious rewriting of the storyline, you shouldn’t be surprised that a “whirlwind romance” became a “sitcom.” 

 

PART 4 

IS “NO MAN AN ISLAND”? 

• In 1920, 1 percent of the US population lived alone. Now one in seven adult Americans do, meaning more than a quarter of US households are just one person. 
• The percentage of solo households has gone up in every census since 1940, when the question was first asked. And America is not alone in its alone-ness; it’s not even in first place. The UK, Germany, France, Australia, and Canada have rates even higher. Scandinavian nations have solo living numbers approaching 45 percent. And the rest of the world is following. Between 1996 and 2006, the number of people living alone increased by a third, globally. 
• But unlike solitary confinement, we’ve been deliberately choosing this. Before World War II, it wasn’t all that economically feasible. As we’ve gotten richer, understandably, we wanted more freedom and control.  We love autonomy, but some suggest this is what’s making us lonely. 
• The research has shown that loneliness is the emotional equivalent of a physical assault. The elevation in stress hormones is comparable to what you would experience by someone beating you up. 
• Loneliness sends your brain into perpetual high-alert mode. In the lab, lonely people notice risks twice as fast as non lonely people, 150 milliseconds versus 300 milliseconds. 
• Repeated studies have shown that what the happiest people have in common is good relationships, hands down. An economics study titled “Putting a Price Tag on Friends, Relatives, and Neighbours” put the happiness value of a better social life at an additional $131,232 per year. Meanwhile, loneliness leads to depression far more often than depression leads to loneliness. 
• Johann Hari notes that a shift from the fiftieth percentile of loneliness to the sixty-fifth percentile doesn’t increase your chance of depression a little—it boosts it by a factor of eight. 
• But it’s not just happiness at stake here. Loneliness is so bad for your health, I’m surprised insurance companies don’t mandate you put this book down and go see friends. Studies connect it with an increased rate of heart disease, stroke, dementia, and pretty much every other awful thing you can think of. 
• A UC Berkeley study of nine thousand people found good relationships add another decade to your life span, and a 2003 review of the research said this: “Positive social relationships are second only to genetics in predicting health and longevity in humans.” 
• What predicts whether you’ll be alive one year after a heart attack? Pretty much two things: how many friends you have and whether you smoke. 

 

Loneliness vs Solitude 

• What if I told you that before the 1800s, loneliness didn’t exist. Not that it was uncommon: it did not exist. Okay, I’m exaggerating. But not by much. Fay Bound Alberti, a historian at the University of York, says, “Loneliness is a relatively modern phenomenon, both as a word, and perhaps more controversially, as an experience.” 
• Before 1800, you can barely find the word in a book. And when you do, it’s used to mean “being alone” without any negative connotation. 
• So how the heck was loneliness not an issue until a couple of centuries ago? Well, we did feel something while alone, but usually it wasn’t bad. You know the word: solitude. That word did appear before the 1800s, and it was almost always a good thing. 
• Solitude is what you mean when you say “I need time to myself” or to “get away from it all.” We need alone time to recharge and reflect. And we rightfully associate solitude with creative breakthroughs. Isaac Newton discovered the law of gravity when he was isolated in Woolsthorpe during 1665. Albert Einstein swore by daily nature walks. Pablo Picasso said, “Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.” Ludwig von Beethoven, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and countless others did their best work while alone and wouldn’t have it any other way. 
• Historically, people generally had a good balance of socializing and alone time in their lives. Your house usually had a dozen people running around, so you got your face-to-face time, but you also did plenty of roaming outdoors, so you got your solitude. 
• Loneliness doesn’t care if you’re actually alone. Loneliness is a subjective feeling. It’s not necessarily about physical isolation. We’ve all felt it: lonely in a crowd. 
• 2003 study by Cacioppo showed, on average, lonely people actually spend as much time with others as non lonely people do. So living alone is not the real culprit here. It’s a symptom, not a cause. While a lack of face-to-face contact can certainly create problems, it’s a red herring in terms of big-picture loneliness. Cacioppo writes: “The amount of time spent with others and the frequency of interaction did not add much to the prediction of loneliness. What did predict loneliness was, again, an issue of quality: the individuals’ ratings of the meaningfulness, or the meaninglessness, of their encounters with other people.” Loneliness isn’t about being alone: it’s about not having a feeling of meaningful connection. 

Individualism

• Before, the default was to see yourself as part of a community. You are a child of god. A member of Clan Barker. Warrior in the Tribe of Los Angeles, California. But the focus shifted to the individual as the primary unit. The very positive upside of that is you are free, like our hermit Chris Knight. 
• But what your brain hears is you are also now, fundamentally, alone. And that’s why you can be lonely in a crowd. We think a lot about the great things we gained from this story shift but have trouble pinning down what we lost. There’s just a vague feeling of unease and an ever-present hum of anxiety. It’s awesome to feel in control and free, not bound by social obligations, but your brain knows that also means others are also free and not obligated to look out for you. And millions of years of evolution taught our physiology that that means one thing. Help is not coming. You’re on your own. 
• we’ve dramatically expanded it with our hyperindividualism. But our physiology can’t keep up. Biological wiring that is millions of years old still needs meaningful connection, which is why this new story affects our health and happiness so drastically. Loneliness is less a personal affliction than a cultural pathology. 
• Sebastian Junger writes, “Numerous cross-cultural studies have shown that modern society—despite its nearly miraculous advances in medicine, science, and technology—is afflicted with some of the highest rates of depression, schizophrenia, poor health, anxiety, and chronic loneliness in human history. As affluence and urbanization rise in a society, rates of depression and suicide tend to go up rather than down.” 

 

Chapter 17

Status vs Likeability 

• Being lonely sucks. Meanwhile, being popular is good. Like really good. Being popular as a kid made a huge difference in people’s lives decades later—and in some very surprising ways. 
• Research by Mitch Prinstein, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at UNC Chapel Hill, shows popular kids do better in school and go on to have stronger marriages and better relationships, and make more money as adults. They’re happier and they live longer. Popularity was more predictive of these positive results than IQ, family background, or psychological issues. 
• And what about the unpopular? You guessed it: a greater risk of illness, depression, substance abuse, and suicide. 
• Now before I trigger a class war between the jocks and the nerds, it’s important to note something else: there are two kinds of popularity. The first is status. Status is about power and influence. Think of the cool kids in high school. And you can achieve status by some very unsavory means like bullying. “Proactive aggression” doesn’t make you well liked, but, sadly, it does increase status. 
• Like it or not, we all naturally have some desire for status. We would all like to be more successful in achieving what psychologists call “extrinsic goals”: power, influence, and control. This is wired deep. The reward centers of our brains light up in fMRI studies when we just think about high-status people. And those reward centers glow even brighter when we think people see us as high status. And it makes sense. Status gives us that control over the world that we crave so much. 
• The problem with status is that it isn’t fulfilling over the long term. 
• Joe Allen at the University of Virginia followed the “cool kids” for a decade after middle school and found that they had more substance abuse problems, lousy relationships, and criminal behavior. And this effect has been replicated around the world. Focusing on status, power, and “extrinsic goals” didn’t lead to good things. 
• This isn’t just true for thirteen-year-olds. What’s it like to have ultimate status? To be famous? The academic research confirms another maxim: it really is lonely at the top. 
• One study titled “Being a Celebrity: A Phenomenology of Fame” showed that while most of us want to be famous to be more loved, ironically, being famous leads to more loneliness. Celebrities have to put up walls to deal with the flood of attention. Other people always wanting something from you makes it difficult to trust anyone. Friends become envious. And so being loved by everyone often ends up producing what the authors call “emotional isolation.” And that has similar effects to what we saw with the middle school cool kids. Celebrities have nearly twice the rate of alcohol problems that the average person does and more than a quadrupling of the suicide rate. 
• Why does a focus on status and extrinsic goals so often lead to problems? Because it’s usually a trade-off. Only 35 percent of high-status people are also very “likable.” When we devote our time to acquiring power and control, what we’re not doing is focusing on “intrinsic” goals like love and connection. And maintaining status can require behaviors that are downright antithetical to good relationships, like bullying. Being liked often means ceding power. 

Being Likeable (Intrinsic Goals) 

• And that leads us to the other type of popularity: being likable. A focus on intrinsic goals. Likable people may not have the same sway that high-status folks do, but they’re the ones we trust and feel warm around. They’re cooperative and kind. And this type of popularity does lead to happiness. 
• Edward Deci, a professor at the University of Rochester, summarizes the research: “Even though our culture puts a strong emphasis on attaining wealth and fame, pursuing these goals does not contribute to having a satisfying life. The things that make your life happy are growing as an individual, having loving relationships, and contributing to your community.” 
• Those stats I mentioned about all the benefits of popularity? Those come from the likable-popular, not the status-popular. A multi decade study of over ten thousand kids in Sweden showed that more often it was likability that led to long term happiness and success. 
• Our desire for individualistic control gave us a lot of power, like status does. But it also bred disconnection and isn’t as fulfilling as being likable and having a community of people who love you. So we’re dealing with the status versus likable death match at the societal level. Guess what? Likability and intrinsic goals aren’t winning. 
• Today’s young people want to be famous more than anything else. A 2007 Pew Research study of young Americans found “their generation’s top goals are fortune and fame.” We can see it in the media. Between 1983 and 2005 there were no TV shows about kids becoming famous. After 2006, nearly 50 percent of shows on the Disney Channel are about that subject. 
• In our individualistic culture today, status is on its way to becoming synonymous with self-worth, and as Prinstein points out, this isn’t a great recipe for happiness. It is, however, a great recipe for narcissism. A 2010 study of over fourteen thousand college students noted a 40 percent decline in empathy over the past few decades, while a separate study (“Egos Inflating over Time”) found scores on the Narcissism Personality Index increased by almost 50 percent between 1990 and 2006 among a similar cohort. In the twenty-first century, narcissism has been increasing as quickly as obesity. 
• When we feel connected to others, control is less important because we feel help is there. But when we’re lonely, our brain scans for threats twice as fast. We need control over the environment to feel safe. And that desperate need for control in an ever more individualistic world is affecting our relationships. Not only how we handle them but the kind we choose and the form they take. We want ones where we have control. We don’t want social relationships; now we want what psychologists call parasocial relationships. 

Pseudo Relationships

• The concept was created in 1956 to describe the pseudo relationships people would develop with television characters. Re- searchers Cohen and Metzger wrote that “television represents the perfect guest—one who comes and leaves at our whim.” Relationships on our terms. Laughs and warmth without all the grief of dealing with other people who have their own needs. They don’t let you down, they don’t ask to borrow money, and you can turn them off when you’ve had enough. MIT professor Sherry Turkle says that they “offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.” 
• And it’s shocking how powerful these parasocial relationships can be. In 2007 there was a television writers’ strike, and a lot of shows temporarily stopped releasing new episodes. What was the emotional effect on viewers who had developed strong parasocial bonds with their favorite fictional characters? A 2011 study put it bluntly: it was like a breakup. 
• And just like time spent trying to acquire status steals time away from being likable, guess where the time for TV comes from? Exactly: from time spent with real people. But TV isn’t as fulfilling as social time. Heavy TV viewers are less happy and have higher anxiety. 
• Harvard professor Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone is the best dystopian science fiction novel you’ll ever read—except that it’s not fiction. He meticulously details the decline of American community involvement over the final quarter of the twentieth century. Between 1985 and 1994 there was a 45 percent drop in involvement in community organizations. No time for bowling leagues and Boy Scouts anymore. The time spent on family dinner dropped by 43 percent. Inviting friends over dropped by 35 percent. Putnam writes, “Virtually all forms of family togetherness became less common over the last quarter of the twentieth century.” And the primary culprit he identified? Television. 

 

Those studies where the loss of TV characters was like a breakup? 

• Well, guess what happens when you put people in an MRI and play the sounds and vibrations of a smartphone? No, it doesn’t show all those awful signs of addiction. It’s not a brain screaming with drug-addled craving—it’s love. You react to your smartphone as if it’s a family member or a significant other. 
• Norman Nie of Stanford says, “For every personal e-mail message sent or received there is almost a 1-minute drop in the amount of time spent with family. With a mean of 13 personal emails sent and received, that amounts to about 13 minutes less of family time a day, or about 1.5 hours a week.” 
• Chocolate cake is not evil, but if 50 percent of your meals were chocolate cake, um, that’s not a good idea. Use tech to arrange live meetings and it’s an unadulterated good. But when it replaces face-to-face, we’re not getting more connected, we’re growing further apart. And we now spend more time on digital devices than we do sleeping. 
• And all this time focused on screens has created a flywheel effect for our problem with status and extrinsic values. People’s focus on fame, money, and achievement grew significantly between 1967 and 1997, but it positively exploded after 1997. What happened in 1997? The rise of the internet. And just like Putnam noted the decline in community attributable to television, Jake Halpern says those trends have only increased with the rise of digital technologies. Between 1980 and 2005, the number of times that Americans invited friends over to their house declined by half. Club participation dropped by two-thirds in the three decades after 1975. And we are experiencing severe picnic deprivation. Yeah, picnics are down 60 percent over the same period. 
• Famed biologist E. O. Wilson once said, “People must belong to a tribe.” But where are many finding their tribes these days? Video games. Which ones are preferred by people suffering from internet addiction? Psychotherapist Hilarie Cash told Johann Hari: “The highly popular games are the multiplayer games, where you get to be part of a guild—which is a team—and you get to earn your status in that guild . . . It’s tribalism at its core.” But online communities and live ones are not interchangeable. When Paula Klemm and Thomas Hardie studied online cancer support groups, they found 92 percent of participants were depressed. How many people in live groups were? Zero. 
• They report: “Traditional cancer support groups can help people cope with their cancer, but the efficacy of Internet cancer support groups . . . remains to be proven.” It’s exceedingly easy to replace face-to-face contact with online interaction, but it doesn’t build the same connections. Psychologist Thomas Pollet found that “spending more time on IM or [social networking sites] did not increase the emotional closeness of relationships.” 
• As we shift more of our time and energy to less fulfilling digital connections, we degrade our ability to connect with others. Remember that 40 percent reduction in empathy among the young? What was it due to? Edward O’Brien, who was part of the research team, said, “The ease of having ‘friends’ online might make people more likely to just tune out when they don’t feel like responding to others’ problems, a behavior that could carry over offline . . . Add in the hypercompetitive atmosphere and inflated expectations of success, borne of celebrity ‘reality shows,’ and you have a social environment that works against slowing down and listening to someone who needs a bit of sympathy.” 
• You’re probably thinking we’re all broken forever and the only thing any of us will be able to connect with at this point is a phone charger. Nope. Turkle points to another study of youth: “In only five days in a sleepaway camp without their phones, empathy levels come back up. How does this happen? The campers talk to each other.” 
• *Have heard of Matt Walker talking about their sleep cycles resetting as well when going to nature. 
• We end up in a place where we have neither community nor solitude, always connected but never fulfilled. Technology and social media aren’t evil, but when they replace real community, we have a problem because we don’t get the meaningful bonds we need. We don’t truly feel “in it together” or “a part of something.” We have too much control and autonomy to have any kind of collective identity. 

Chapter 18

• So what happens in a world so focused on status and the extrinsic and so little on care and the intrinsic? We become depressed. Happiness levels have declined in the Western world over the past fifty years and the incidence of major depression is up, despite our enormous material success. In 2011 the National Center for Health Statistics announced that nearly a quarter of middle-aged women in the US are currently on antidepressants. 
• But today we get the causes of depression all wrong. We’re quick to think it’s due to a chemical imbalance or some other endogenous reason. That’s definitely part of it but far from the biggest cause. Psychologists George Brown and Tirril Harris did a series of studies showing that 20 percent of women who did not experience depression had major problems in their lives. For women who did become depressed, the number was 68 percent. Yeah, I know, the only surprise about that stat is nothing. Life problems make you sad. But here’s the twist: it wasn’t just the amount of bad stuff that led to depression; it was the ratio of problems to stabilizers in your life—how much support you received from those around you. Big problems and no support? The chance of depression hit 75 percent. 
• Johann Hari covered the results of the research in his book Lost Connections: “[Depression] wasn’t just a problem caused by the brain going wrong. It was caused by life going wrong.” And these effects have been replicated around the world. 
• A 2012 study on depression concluded, “General and specific characteristics of modernization correlate with higher risk.” Another study, “Depression and Modernization: A Cross-Cultural Study of Women,” found that rural Nigerian women, who materially have it the worst, were the least likely to be depressed, while US women in cities were the most likely to be. The Western world is richer than ever but more depressed than ever. Since problems in life are inevitable, it’s clearly an issue of support. We’re not getting it the way we’re living. 
• So what did we do about it? Oh, we gave them a placebo. Yes, I’m talking about antidepressants like Prozac. A 2014 paper concluded: “Analyses of the published data and the unpublished data that were hidden by drug companies reveals that most (if not all) of the benefits are due to the placebo effect.” And another study, titled “Listening to Prozac but Hearing Placebo,” looked at over 2,300 subjects and found “approximately one quarter of the drug response is due to the administration of an active medication, one half is a placebo effect, and the remaining quarter is due to other nonspecific factors.” Did these papers result in a torrent of pushback from the scientific community at large? Nope. 
• I’m not saying everyone should toss their meds in the trash. They do help people. But for many, it’s not because of the reasons we thought. The biggest explanation for their effects is that they simulate care. Care we’re lacking in the modern world. But what happens when someone doesn’t get the placebo? Or when the placebo effect isn’t enough? Well, they address the lack of a feeling of care more directly. With illegal drugs. 
• We all know the story of the lab rat feverishly pressing the lever to get more drugs. Bruce Alexander, professor of psychology at Simon Fraser University, wondered if addiction was the only cause. He realized that in all those experiments, the rodent junkie was alone. What happens when you put rats in a cage with friends and toys and create a rat-topia? They don’t want the drug. When alone, rats used 25 mg of morphine. In rat-topia, the animals used under 5 mg. Of course the original rats used drugs, they were in solitary confinement. 
• In the paper “Is Social Attachment an Addictive Disorder?”, neuroscientist Thomas Insel’s conclusion was: yup, our brains are addicted to other people. And substance abuse mimics the results in our gray matter, leveraging the same dopaminergic pathways. Remember how Naloxone, the opiate blocker, killed the placebo effect? It also knocks out the bonding effects of religious rituals. When we’re in a community, we get high on our own supply, but when there is no community, we must get our supply elsewhere. 
• Between 1980 and 2011, morphine usage increased by a factor of thirty. But it didn’t increase everywhere. Sam Quinones notes, “Use didn’t rise in the developing world, which might reasonably be viewed as the region in most acute pain. Instead, the wealthiest countries, with 20 percent of the world’s population, came to consume almost all—more than 90 percent—of the world’s morphine.” In a land of individualism, focused on status and control but with little care, we see an explosion of mental health problems and addiction. 

 

So let’s consider the opposite. What happens in a world where individualism is not at the forefront? Where status and extrinsic values aren’t just secondary, they’re temporarily gone? Heck, I’ll up the ante. What happens when we experience war and disaster? When things are about as objectively awful as they can be? 

• The answer is, we revert to human nature. 
• “Those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best and rear the greatest number of offspring.” 
• We tend to believe that when things are at their objective worst, like during war and disaster, humans go all “every man for himself”—but that’s just not the case. 
• Sociologist Charles Fritz did a study in 1959 interviewing over nine thousand survivors of disaster, and he found that when modern society goes to hell, we return to our natural state of cooperation. Status is temporarily put aside. We ignore squabbles over politics, class, and religion. No time for that stuff right now, grab a bucket. We gain clarity over what is truly important, a clarity that seems impossible during day-to-day life. When the stakes are life and death, what’s meaningful is stark. 
• When you have a problem, it’s your problem. But when we all have a problem, like tsunami devastation or enemy invasion, it’s our problem. We’re in it together. 
• Fritz wrote: “The widespread sharing of danger, loss, and deprivation produces an intimate, primarily group solidarity among the survivors . . . This merging of individual and societal needs provides a feeling of belonging and a sense of unity rarely achieved under normal circumstances.” And so we revert to our nature. The need for connection is wired deeper than the desire for comfort. And when things are at their objective worst, humans are at their best. 
• In 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. Eighty percent of the city was flooded, over 1,800 people died. How did humans respond? “We were trapped like animals, but I saw the greatest humanity I’d ever seen from the most unlikely places.” 
• The Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware reviewed over seven hundred studies on similar incidents and found this type of response is true in general. We don’t exploit, we unite. 
• When the group is threatened, we sacrifice willingly because it’s not sacrifice. We are happy to be needed and to contribute. 
• As a culture, we seem to believe we can “solve” all the needs and get to zero, but we still need to be needed. Junger wrote, “Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.” It took a global pandemic for many of us to be reminded how important our relationships are. 
• We have grown smarter, but less wise. And that’s not just a warm platitude, it’s science. Wisdom isn’t just raw IQ; it involves understanding others. And when researchers surveyed two thousand Americans from different income levels, they found wealthier meant less wise. No, money’s not bad. But the poor have to depend on one another more, like we did in the past, like we do during disaster. And that’s what the scientists found: “The effect of social class on wise reasoning was at least in part accounted for by a greater sense of interdependence expressed by participants with lower [socioeconomic status].” 
• Remember how friends were “another self”? Communities are the same. The self-expansion research found the same effect for groups. We include them as part of ourselves when we belong. Communities are another self, another friend. 
• a 2020 study found that we feel the most support from friends when they’re connected to one another. Feeling loved by five separate pals is less loving than five mutual pals. Friends are great. Communities can be even better. 

It’s not enough to merely have face-to-face contact. We need a community. Remember those health benefits of human contact? Psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad reviewed 148 longitudinal studies and found that people who were enmeshed in a community had a 50 percent lower chance of death over a seven-year stretch. But that community aspect is paramount. Employees and digital connections had no effect. You lived longer only by spending time with those you really knew and felt close to. 

• With community comes obligation. But we need the burden, as we need the responsibilities of parenthood. We have gone a little too far in the way of freedom. We want a two-way street because too much control is unfulfilling. We need to share and be cared for, just as we need to care for others. 
• But Johann Hari points to research showing if you try to be happier, you will likely fail. Why? Because the Western definition of happiness is individualistic. And, as Brett Ford of UC Berkeley found, that doesn’t work. Your efforts will be all me-me-me, and we saw that doesn’t jive with millions of years of human nature. You’ll be going at it all wrong because you’re aiming for the wrong target. More status, more money, more control, fewer obligations won’t do it . . . Oh, by the way, if you live in Asia, ignore what I just said. There, the definition of happiness is more collectivist. To be happier, you’ll try to help others and your efforts will be more successful. As Ford told Hari, “The more you think happiness is a social thing, the better off you are.” You can get happier. But to rise, you must first think of how to lift others. 

Chapter 19

• So what have we learned?Loneliness sucks and we’re lonelier than ever, but it’s less about a lack of people and more about lack of community. And loneliness is new, born of our relatively recent story of individualism. 
• We could also use a little more deliberate solitude to be more creative, to find wisdom, and to get in touch with ourselves. But, no, we don’t need as much as our hermit Chris Knight got. (Harvard psychologist Jill Hooley actually believes he has schizoid personality disorder. If you don’t, you’re gonna require more people time than he did.)
• We need a balance between community and solitude, like we had pre-nineteenth century, but right now we’re not getting enough of either. 
• Popularity is a good thing, but as a culture we’re choosing the wrong kind, opting for status, power, and fame over being likable. This generally doesn’t lead to good things, and that’s why your daughter wants to be a celebrity assistant instead of a CEO. 
• The lack of community makes our gray matter feel unsafe, pushing us toward a greater need for control in our lives and relationships. This has led to choosing parasocial relationships with technology, which are unfulfilling. 
• Social media isn’t evil, but since we often use it to replace real relationships and community, its harms frequently outweigh its positives. Machiavelli said if you have to choose between being loved or feared, choose feared. But you’re not a prince, so sorry, we all need a bit more love. As Pepperdine psychology professor Louis Cozolino puts it, “The problem is, when you depend on a substitute for love, you can never get enough.” And please do not fall in love with a pillow. 
• Happiness is down and depression is up as a result of our hyper individualistic society. We’ve tried to cope via the placebo effects of antidepressants and the pseudo-cuddles of opiates, but that’s not going to do it. 
• What we need is more community. It’s our natural state, and when disaster briefly peels back modernity, we can see how naturally good and cooperative we are. When life is at its worst, we’re at our best, as we’ve shown time and time again from Katrina to Molokai. 
• When the need for status is cast aside, when we’re “in it together,” facing our collective problems, we find that personal comfort matters little, we don’t need the obsessive control, we sacrifice for one another, and, shockingly, we feel better. Let’s not wait for catastrophe or war. We can take a lesson from the Amish and better prioritize community. As the placebo research shows us, we all need to know that someone is looking out for us. That we’re not alone. That despite whatever ails us, help is on the way. 
• Consciously, we always strive for more autonomy and control, but deep down a “one-man show” is not what we’re wired for. If we were, the placebo effect wouldn’t work. You need someone to tell you “it’s going to be okay.” 
• The hero needs to save others and occasionally be saved themselves. 

 

CONCLUSION

The meaning of life?…. Better question:

What predicts how meaningful we perceive life to be? 

And a 2013 study found a very robust and clear answer to that question: a sense of belonging. 

• In fact, that paper, “To Belong Is to Matter: Sense of Belonging Enhances Meaning in Life,” didn’t just find a correlation. Belonging caused a feeling of meaning in life. And this wasn’t some scientific one-off. Another paper by the same author, Roy Baumeister, a professor at Florida State University, posited a need to belong as the “master motive” of our species. And far from being met with resistance, that study has been cited more than twenty-four thousand times. 
• Belonging. It’s why our species’ superpower is cooperation. It’s what we saw with drug addiction hijacking the social reward pathways of the human brain. It’s what we saw with the placebo effect curing ills by telling your body someone cares. 

I humbly submit to you: belonging is the meaning of life. 

• So what’s the answer? How do we maintain belonging when our stories are mutually exclusive? 
• The solution is simple: more stories. We can always create another story to unite us in a new way. We do it now. You may not be my family, but you are my friend. You may not be my religion, but we are part of the same nation. We may not have any of these in common, but we may both be Star Wars fans. New stories can unite us when the old ones fail to. We can always be a part of the same tribe and share a story of belonging. 
• We have an infinite number of ways to connect if we try. 
• We don’t need war or disaster to refresh our factory setting of cooperation. In the nineteenth century our dominant meta-story changed. But we can change it again if we want to. 
• We need a uniting story that goes beyond the indivIdual and makes us feel we belong. 

There’s an old African proverb that says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” 

I have gone fast for many, many years. But the road is much longer than I thought. 

Fast isn’t going to cut it anymore. I need to go far. 

Can we go together?