Enjoy the episode? Send us a text!
Ready to stop feeling frustrated and start feeling fulfilled in your relationship? Join Kimberly Beam Holmes and producer, Jason Marcum, for this insightful and empowering episode!
This episode of It Starts With Attraction dives deep into the research on what truly makes relationships tick , and more importantly, what makes them fizzle out. We'll crack the code on the biggest relationship dissatisfiers, and Kimberly Beam Holmes offers 5 actionable tips you can use TODAY to build stronger, healthier connections with everyone in your life, from your spouse to your parents to your best friend.
In this episode, you'll learn:
* The key ingredients of a healthy relationship (according to science!)
* The 4 Horsemen of the Relationship Apocalypse (and how to avoid them!)
* 5 powerful strategies to boost your relationship satisfaction ✨
* Why forgiveness is a gift to YOURSELF, not your partner
* How a strong relationship can actually improve your physical and mental health
Your Host: Kimberly Beam Holmes, Expert in Self-Improvement and Relationships
Kimberly Beam Holmes has applied her master's degree in psychology for over ten years, acting as the CEO of Marriage Helper & CEO and Creator of PIES University, being a wife and mother herself, and researching how attraction affects relationships. Her videos, podcasts, and following reach over 500,000 people a month who are making changes and becoming the best they can be.
🔗 Website: https://itstartswithattraction.com
📱 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kimberlybeamholmes
👀 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@kimberlybeamholmes
Follow our other channels!
📺 https://youtube.com/@UC7gCCAhhQvD3MBpKpI_4g6w
📺 https://youtube.com/@UCEOibktrLPG4ufxidR8I4UQ
Enjoy the episode? Send us a text!
Ready to stop feeling frustrated and start feeling fulfilled in your relationship? Join Kimberly Beam Holmes and producer, Jason Marcum, for this insightful and empowering episode!
This episode of It Starts With Attraction dives deep into the research on what truly makes relationships tick , and more importantly, what makes them fizzle out. We'll crack the code on the biggest relationship dissatisfiers, and Kimberly Beam Holmes offers 5 actionable tips you can use TODAY to build stronger, healthier connections with everyone in your life, from your spouse to your parents to your best friend.
In this episode, you'll learn:
* The key ingredients of a healthy relationship (according to science!)
* The 4 Horsemen of the Relationship Apocalypse (and how to avoid them!)
* 5 powerful strategies to boost your relationship satisfaction ✨
* Why forgiveness is a gift to YOURSELF, not your partner
* How a strong relationship can actually improve your physical and mental health
Your Host: Kimberly Beam Holmes, Expert in Self-Improvement and Relationships
Kimberly Beam Holmes has applied her master's degree in psychology for over ten years, acting as the CEO of Marriage Helper & CEO and Creator of PIES University, being a wife and mother herself, and researching how attraction affects relationships. Her videos, podcasts, and following reach over 500,000 people a month who are making changes and becoming the best they can be.
🔗 Website: https://itstartswithattraction.com
📱 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kimberlybeamholmes
👀 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@kimberlybeamholmes
Follow our other channels!
📺 https://youtube.com/@UC7gCCAhhQvD3MBpKpI_4g6w
📺 https://youtube.com/@UCEOibktrLPG4ufxidR8I4UQ
Today we're going to be discussing the five top tips that you can begin using for a healthy, more satisfying relationship, and I believe that these tips aren't only going to be useful for your romantic relationships, but also every relationship in your life. In this episode, we're going to be looking at how to have healthier, more satisfying relationships by looking at what recent research studies have indicated are the most helpful things that we really can do. This podcast and all of the podcasts that I do on it Starts With Attraction are my passion project, my love for really pouring into people, pouring over the research with our research team and then pouring into people like you to empower you to make positive changes in your life that will lead to better relationships, better health and better overall wellness. There are four areas that we like to talk about in the it Starts With Attraction podcast, and they're the four areas of attraction physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual and today's episode is actually, more than you think, going to touch on a couple of these areas of attraction, but the real main focus is the area of emotional attraction, because relationships are all about emotional attraction. How are we evoking emotions within other people that they enjoy feeling?
Speaker 1:I have as a guest with me today? Not really a guest. He's on all of the Ask Me Anything episodes and our solo episodes that aren't really solo. I guess, if you're here with me, right, jason.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I guess, yeah, I guess that's how that works, yeah.
Speaker 1:So Jason is the producer of all of our podcasts, especially the it Starts With Attraction one, and as we go through these, he's also going to be the person that I bounce ideas back off of, ask him how he's processing things, and he'll intervene, hopefully, at certain points if I'm not making sense or to help clarify, in order to make sure that this episode is tactical, is easily understandable and we have key, clear takeaways that are usable in your life, starting today. Are you ready, jason?
Speaker 2:I am. I'm actually pretty excited for this episode. It's going to be.
Speaker 1:I think it's going to be fantastic.
Speaker 2:Good.
Speaker 1:I also have to point out that our research team is small but mighty here at Marriage Helper, and Alina Wisniewski is a huge part of gathering the information and the research articles that we use in this podcast. So, thank you, alina Wisniewski is a huge part of gathering the information and the research articles that we use in this podcast. So thank you, alina, and thank you, jason, for making all of this possible. All right, what is a relationship? Let's start with that definition. In this episode, we're not Well, a lot of the articles are actually going to focus on romantic relationships, but overall, a relationship is a committed association between two or more people. It includes family, it includes friends, marriage, partnership, business, business, colleagues. There's so many different types of relationships that we have and, as I said earlier, this podcast, while a lot of the research, is going to focus on what has worked in romantic relationships, it's not that far of a stretch to just tweak many of the things that we're going to talk about and apply it to all of the relationships that you want to strengthen in your day-to-day life. I will submit, though, that your marriage relationship is the most important one to focus on, so if you are married, then I would encourage you to focus first and foremost on your marriage, then, probably after that, would be your relationship with your kids, and then with other family members, friends, so on and so forth.
Speaker 1:Let's address this topic first. What contributes to an unhealthy or an unsatisfactory relationship? What is it that ruins relationships? There was a study done in 2012 titled the Areas of Marital Dissatisfaction Among Long-Term Couples, and they took 31 couples that had been married for at least 40 years and the participants took the marital satisfaction inventory, which had 13 different scales inside of it. That means that it just had 13 different types of assessments that were all measuring different things specifically. So some of these things were measuring overall distress of how you felt inside of the relationship. They were assessing different types of communication. Both affect affective communication so your affect in communication, your affect being your like, overall demeanor in how you show up in conversations and then problem solving communication. I love that they split communication into at least two different categories in this study, because even recently, I was recording a couple of videos and the team was like this one's about how to improve communication. I was like what kind of communication? There's different subsets of how we communicate, so I love that this study even looked at that.
Speaker 1:But it was also looking at time together, things that people disagreed about role orientation, so how a husband or a wife felt about their role as husband or wife in the relationship, and different things like that. So here's what the results found and again they were looking for what was leading to the most dissatisfaction in the relationship. So global dissatisfaction, so just overall. When someone says I'm not satisfied in my relationship, that's what the global part of it means. It's just attributed to several things. They're not trying to figure out the one thing causing it.
Speaker 1:Global dissatisfaction, often accompanied deficits or struggles in problem solving, lack of time spent together and disagreement about finances. So the couples who were the most dissatisfied said the reasons they were the most dissatisfied was because they felt like they couldn't solve problems effectively together we're going to talk about that more. They felt like they didn't spend a lot of time together We'll talk about that more and they felt like they were disagreeing about things, especially about finances. Now I will say that the scales that they used didn't assess other types of disagreements. They specifically were asking other types of disagreements. They specifically were asking about disagreement about finances in that scale.
Speaker 1:So I would not extrapolate from that verbiage that disagreement about finances, specifically, is one of the top three things.
Speaker 1:We just know that disagreement is one of the top three things that leads to dissatisfaction, and for this study in particular, they were only looking at disagreement about finances.
Speaker 1:So, as we continue on, for both men and women, dissatisfaction with the amount of understanding and affection meaning they felt like they didn't have support from their spouse or empathy from their spouse, or that there wasn't mutual disclosure were also related to dissatisfaction in all of those areas, as well as dissatisfaction in sex. So here's the key takeaway from that when we feel like our partner can't empathize with us, really what we're getting to there is when we feel like we're not being heard or our partner doesn't understand where we're coming from. That's when we are more likely to be dissatisfied. And then I thought it was also interesting that mutual disclosure when there was a lack of mutual disclosure that that led to an increase in dissatisfaction. And I found this interesting because this was something you brought up in a recent episode that we did. You didn't call it mutual disclosure, though, so we were talking about I think it was in an AMA that we recently did, and the question was what are some of the things that lead to emotional unattractiveness?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I do remember this.
Speaker 1:And what we remember, what you said.
Speaker 2:It was something to the effect of not being emotionally available. That's what it was.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so when the other person is closed off, so that, look at that, you were.
Speaker 1:I was right, you were right, grounded in the research, right there. So, and that's what it means when, when one person is open and vulnerable and sharing a bunch of things with the other and it isn't reciprocated, then there's not mutual disclosure there and that can lead to problems and dissatisfaction in the relationship. And then the results also suggested that when couples believe that they are unable to talk through differences or talk to each other about sensitive topics, then they're less likely to have shared interest or shared leisure activity. I thought this one was super fascinating too, when we talk about the pies physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual attraction.
Speaker 1:Intellectual attraction is all about having shared interest, having things that you can talk about apart and separate from the relationship. From this study it's suggested that couples are going to struggle with intellectual attraction if their communication in non or let me say it this way, when their communication about relationship topics is frustrated, when they're unable to talk about how they're going to handle the budget, who's going to take out the trash, different things like that. Now we don't know which way this works and I think that would be an interesting study to do, but if they're struggling to handle even minor differences, then they're less likely to want to have shared interest with each other. And again, we don't know the directionality of that, but I think it's interesting. What do you think?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think it kind of makes sense too. I feel like if you're, if you're not able to talk through the small things, if you're not able to have that communication, then trying to do something that you're interested in, I think the level of risk goes up between so like, say, like I'm interested in doing something and if I was married my spouse was not really that interested but she was going to do it with me. But we're not good at communicating, even in like the little things. If we did something, the risk, my risk of her like bringing something up and then us not being able to communicate, the risk of that activity now being tainted by our lack of communication issues, goes up because of that, I think that's a great point.
Speaker 1:Another point that I could see happening here as well is, if my interest is, my like sacred space, and I feel like you're going to taint my sacred space.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Then I may be less likely to want to invite you in and do that thing with you too. Yeah, again, I think it's. I think it would be interesting to understand the core, the, the directionality, because could it also be that the lack of shared interest and leisure activities together are that that is what negatively affects their ability to, to talk through minor differences?
Speaker 2:They don't have any common ground. They have less common ground, that's true, they have less common ground.
Speaker 1:And then role orientation. I loved this point as well, that role orientation was not related, so it wasn't like men tended to have more dissatisfaction in other areas than women. They both had the same areas of dissatisfaction and time did not appear to heal all wounds. But we know that time doesn't make your relationship problems go away. If you haven't actually focused on them and dealt with them, time only makes it worse. Therefore, it's important to actively and proactively do something today, right now, to begin to work through the issues you have in your relationship to make it better, and by the end of this episode I hope you have several things that you can begin to do for that.
Speaker 1:Also, in talking about what are the things that can lead to unhealthy, unsatisfying relationships, we would be remissed if we didn't mention the four horsemen of Dr John Gottman. These are four ways that people tend to show up in disagreements that lead to much higher rates of divorce when these are present within relationships. They can also be present in non-marriage relationships that I would say can lead to much higher rates that those relationships will end, such as friendships or hurts and hurdles with children. And these four areas, or these four horsemen that Dr John Gottman talks about are criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling. Criticism is believing well, contempt is believing that you are superior to another person, so it's addressing the other person with comments such as what is wrong with you, how could you be so stupid? That is contemptuous and that is the worst of the four horsemen. Criticism is when you aren't just focused on a behavior that you're not happy with, such as hey, I asked you to take out the trash, why didn't you? But it's criticizing the behavior of the person or the character of the person as an attack on them. How in the world could you be so lazy? Why do you never take out the trash? That's what criticism would be Again, a four horseman.
Speaker 1:When these are present in relationships, it leads to much higher rates of the relationship ending. Defensiveness pretty self-explanatory. Defensiveness is basically saying I am not responsible for that. It's actually your fault. So it's like you have a shield and anything that your spouse or child or friend says to you, you're not hearing them. You're putting your shield up and you are turning the blame right back around on them.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you how many times that works. Approximately zero. It doesn't work. No one, no one wants you when they're trying to actually tell you where they're hurting, where they are giving you feedback or criticism or criticism isn't a great word to use here but when they're trying to give you feedback on something that's hurting them or something you've done that's hurt them, and then you just take it and turn it right back around on them, it breaks trust and it leads them to not actually tell you the truth again in the future. That's why defensiveness is so lethal to relationships. And then there's stonewalling, and stonewalling is basically where you just ignore and shut the other person out as a way of fighting. It's a passive, aggressive maneuver where you fight by and most of the time win because you just shut the other person out. I'm not great at stonewalling. Are you a stonewaller, Jason?
Speaker 2:Probably yeah, Probably yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, people with certain personality temperaments tend to be more stonewallers. People who are already want peace and want to avoid conflict, this tends to be the one that they go to.
Speaker 2:That is me and that is you, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yes. So all of these things, when they're present in relationships, lead to the relationship not being healthy and not being satisfying. So then, what is? And just to be clear, that is not an exhaustive list, but those are some of the key things and some of the bigger things that can lead to unhealthy relationships. So then, what are healthy relationships? What does one look like and what are the effects? So what are the benefits of being in a healthy relationship?
Speaker 1:So the characteristics of a healthy relationship, according to Heartline, are communication, trust, curiosity, intimacy and teamwork, and all of those might sound very surface level things that you would hear all the time, and that's probably because you likely do hear them very often. Communication is important, trust, of course. Intimacy sounds like it would be important, especially for a marriage and teamwork, being able to collaborate together. Curiosity may be the one that you thought hmm, I wonder why that one is a characteristic of a healthy relationship. When I had Dr John Gottman on my podcast a couple of years ago and we'll link to that in the show notes if you want to watch it it was a great episode when I asked him what would be the number one thing that you would recommend that couples do for a lifelong strong marriage. And his answer surprised me at first. But he said always stay curious about your spouse, be genuinely interested in them, in how they're doing, what they're thinking, what their dreams are. We tend to feel like we know all of that because we knew it when we were dating, but then, after we get married, we stop asking those questions of interest and curiosity. But our spouse doesn't stop changing and neither do we. So being intentional about how we maintain curiosity about our spouse and continuing to want to know them and understand them is a great indicator of a healthy relationship. Another meta-analysis research study that was done in 2004 about healthy relationships it was actually titled Healthy Relationships Where's the Research? And this was done by Young in 2004 in the Family Journal and, as I said, he did a review of several different studies and what he found was that healthy, which was qualified by stability and quality, so the stability of relationship and the quality, so the relationship satisfaction.
Speaker 1:Healthy relationships included several different things, such as how couples begin conflict discussion this goes back to the four horsemen that we were just talking about and how. When you start an argument with what is wrong with you, how could you be so lazy, that tends to not go well. The rest of the conversation is pretty much determined to go downhill, unless you are savvy in being able to use some of the empathy, connection, listening skills, that you have to turn it around, but it tends to start it off on the wrong foot. So how couples begin conflict, it matters. Communication and awareness was an important part. Intimacy, Another one, was loyalty to the marriage and to one's spouse, also known as commitment. I am going to be here for you till death. Do us part. That was an indicator of a healthy relationship.
Speaker 1:Having strong moral values, as well as faith in God or spiritual commitment, were actually strong indicators of a healthy relationship. Respect for your spouse, especially seeing your spouse as your best friend, a desire to be a good parent, willingness to forgive and be forgiven, was a strong tendency, positive affect. So generally enjoying being in your marriage and showing up with a positive mood inside of your marriage was an indicator, as well as the ability to de-escalate conversations and the ability to story one's marriage positively. So what that means is the ability to remember the good parts of your marriage and how you met, and that being a positive thing, and not rewriting your history to where you only remember the bad things, which is kind of the beginning. It's not really. It's kind of in the middle of a domino effect of a lot of negative things that can begin to happen in the marriage. So that is a brief overview of some characteristics of healthy relationships. Were there any of the those that surprised you, jason?
Speaker 2:The willingness to forgive and be forgiven. I think that's a huge one because I think it goes back to, it can kind of go into that contempt part that we were just talking about. Sometimes that's hard, it's hard to forgive, and especially, I think sometimes the people that we're closest to are sometimes the hardest to forgive if they wrong us a certain way or that we think we've been wrong us a certain way or that we think we've been wronged a certain way. And so that's probably. It didn't surprise me, but I feel like that's the one that's the most important but is sometimes not, I guess, talked about enough, especially in a marriage.
Speaker 1:Right. There does seem, or tend to be, a thought process in people of I'll forgive them when I'm ready or I'll forgive them when I feel like they deserve it.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, shocker spoiler alert forgiveness is not for them, forgiveness is for you.
Speaker 1:That's right. Look at you and those marriage helper principles just omitting from your.
Speaker 2:It's almost like a work here.
Speaker 1:It's almost that's a great one, a very important one. The other characteristic, or some of the benefits that can occur when you're in a healthy relationship, is that your physical and your mental health improves. There was a 2023 study that was titled stress, communication, communication satisfaction and relationship satisfaction an actor, partner, interdependence, mediation model, and we won't go into all of that. I'll tell you the results of it, but basically they took 643 or 634 people, who were actually only African American, which I love seeing, because typically we have a lot of white people that are involved in research studies, so I love that this one was done primarily on, or only on, african Americans in different parts of America and they gave them a longitudinal or they put them inside of a longitudinal study that lasted, for I believe actually it doesn't say here how long it lasted, but we know that there were two waves that the studies, or that this part of the research, came out of, and that was in 2007 and 2010 that they ended up pulling this research from. But they ended up giving them a mental health measure, an alcohol measure and a physical health measure and overall, what you're going to see through these results is that there were correlations between relationship, their relationship status or their relationship satisfaction, and their alcohol use and their physical health. And so what we see, as you can probably guess, is that participants who experienced declines in relationship quality also experienced reductions in their overall health relative to their single peers.
Speaker 1:So when people experience a relationship crisis or they are no longer as satisfied in their relationship, they experience a decline, more so than their counterparts who are single, moving into a high quality relationship from being single. So you move from being single either into being dating, engaged, married and you're happy with that relationship. Those people had reduced alcohol problems, so being in that relationship stopped or at least lessened the amount of alcohol that they would use, and there was also a change in relationship quality or, overall, you can see that there was a change in relationship quality in relation to the change in health. So moving from a low quality relationship, where you weren't very satisfied, to a high quality relationship is associated with a decline in both depression and depressive symptoms and alcohol problems. So depressive symptoms go down, alcohol problems go down when you go from being in a low quality to a high quality relationship, when you go from being in a low quality to a high quality relationship.
Speaker 1:Now, this reminded me of the second episode ever on it Starts With Attraction, where I interviewed Dr Will Cole, and one of the things that he mentioned that whole episode was about inflammation and about his book, the Inflammation Spectrum, and he said in that episode how relationship health is a direct correlation to so many different physical ailments that we experience in our body.
Speaker 1:Inflammation can rise in our body just from how happy or how satisfied or how dissatisfied we are in our marriages. So it's important, like it is just as important to focus on the health of your relationships as it is to focus on your physical health, because they are very intimately intertwined, and we can see that from several of the outcomes of this study. Those in high quality relationships reported fewer depressive symptoms than those who were single, and those in low quality relationships reported significantly more depressive symptoms than those in high quality relationships. Which just goes back to when your relationship is not satisfactory, when you're experiencing relationship stress, that you are going to experience more physical symptoms such as depressive symptoms along with that. I mean we see it a lot at the work that Marriage Helper does and the clients that call.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And when their relationship or marriage is in crisis, they're saying things like I can't find the energy to work out or eat healthy and I'm like I can't focus on.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Even forgetting to pick the kids up from school, like the normal everyday tasks that they used to do become so muddied, and I definitely don't want anyone to hear this and think the outcome is oh well, if I'm dissatisfied in a relationship's taking your blood, work and looking at it and there's numbers that are high, that are that are indicating that there's inflammation or stress in other parts of your body, like that's an indicator you need to do something about it. Well, that's the same here. If your relationship is not happy or or satisfying and it's causing stress in your body, it's just an indicator that you need to do something about it. So then, what do you do? You do the things we're about to talk about right here in this episode because we believe at it Starts With Attraction that you can make a positive change on any of your relationships by first beginning to start with you. That doesn't mean that you're the problem not at all. It means that you are the opportunity for a better future for yourself and for the people you love in your life, and so it is an empowering thing Like it's an awesome and empowering thing that you have the ability, through changing yourself and working on becoming your best self, to have a positive impact on the people that you love in your life.
Speaker 1:And then, speaking of stress, people who are in healthy and satisfying relationships experience less stress, and there was a study that was done. Yes, so there was a study that was done in 2015, looking at 155 adults who were new into relationships and compared them with people who were not in a relationship, and overall it found that couples ended up having lower cortisol levels and that cortisol secretion was higher in people who were single than people who were with someone else. Now, if you're single, this isn't to say all is doomed for you. It's simply to say that there's something about having a strong, healthy relationship that is comforting to our bodies. It actually helps us to better be able to manage stress cortisol and we can see that through how cortisol was secreted. Now, these were new couples, so we would love to actually see data on what it would look like for a couple married 40 years as compared to a couple married 20 years, 10 years and so on and so forth, but I believe the premise can hold strongly either way.
Speaker 1:And then reduced loneliness is the other thing.
Speaker 1:That's a benefit of a healthy relationship.
Speaker 1:People feel less lonely, and that's even true, or even more true, of people who are in a committed relationship, as opposed to people who are single or people who are called mingles, as one study that was done in 2019 was looking at in the Journal of Happiness Studies, and it defined mingles as people who are in an intimate relationship but don't define themselves as romantic partners.
Speaker 1:So how I'm interpreting that is people who are friends with benefits, so they're not committed to one person but they would consider themselves active in different relationships. But what the research showed from this one was that mingles people who were kind of friends with benefits types reported lower life satisfaction than participants who were in a committed relationship, but higher levels of life satisfaction compared to singles. So there was kind of a hierarchy that we see here. But the committed relationship in every single part of the study that it looked at was higher for people who were in committed relationships. So all of that to say it's important to commit to a relationship, commitment is important in relationships and being in a committed relationship also has a ton of great health benefits.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it makes sense to. When you look at the, the mingles um that term is crazy, that's a crazy thing to call somebody. But the mingles um, when you look at their relationships, their relationships, they are really just exchanging something with another person. There's not really like a mutual, like growing together, it's just exchanging one thing or a couple of things back and forth. When you look at couples, I mean you're in this together, you're growing together, you have goals that you're both striving towards together, You're doing life together, and so it's. It's pretty self-explanatory that this would be the case, in my head anyway.
Speaker 1:Yeah, beautifully said, beautifully said. So what can we do to promote our own healthy relationships? We're going to cover five things here that you can begin doing, and the first one is I know you've heard it and you're going to hear it again, but we're going to dive a little deeper into it Communicate, okay. So what does it mean to communicate? There was a study that was done in 2006 titled the factors associated with relationship satisfaction importance of communication skills. There was 142 graduate and undergraduate students that were involved in it, and this was done in Turkey so it'd be interesting to also see this done in the United States and the relationships lasted from anywhere from one to 360 months, which would be 30 years, right? I?
Speaker 1:believe that's 30. I believe that's 30 years.
Speaker 2:You're asking the wrong person. I'm terrible at math.
Speaker 1:So 36 months is three years.
Speaker 2:So then, yeah, probably, maybe, I don't know.
Speaker 1:So 360, you'd add a zero, 30 years. Yeah, yes, Perfect, Okay. And they gave them the dyadic adjustment scale, so that was what they used to measure the quality of the relationship. And then they gave them a problem solving inventory that looked at their ability to solve problems as well as a conflict tendency scale, and then their attachment style was assessed as well. So participants who had a secure attachment style reported higher levels of relationship satisfaction.
Speaker 1:Again, this is not a shocker. Problem solving confidence had a significant association with relationship satisfaction. The ability to solve problems together well was the major indicator of relationship satisfaction. That was the specific part of communication that was important. So it's not just about being able to chat around the table at night about your day, although things like that are important but really, when people are saying at least in terms of this study when people were saying, or when people say we just don't communicate well, likely what you're referring to, or what they're referring to is we are unable to come together and solve problems. Okay, so then how do you come together and solve problems? Let's look at secure attachment as a way to help us answer this question, Because in this study they said that participants have higher relationship satisfaction when they have higher or when they're more securely attached. People who are securely attached know that their spouse is going to be there for them and therefore they feel more of a freedom to explore not explore like explore other relationships, but they feel like they can have their own identity. They can go out and have a life outside of just their spouse, but they always want to come back to their spouse and they know their spouse is going to come back to them.
Speaker 1:Problem solving at its core is being able to trust that the other person has your best interest in mind. It's basically the same thing as secure attachment. In secure attachment we trust that our spouse is going to be there for us when we need them. In problem solving, we need to trust that our spouse is going to work with us to come to a conclusion of not just the best thing for me but for the best thing for both of us and for the future of the relationship.
Speaker 1:So really, problem solving is about how well you trust each other and kind of like what Jason was just saying a minute ago about people who are in these give and take relationships. They are just looking for what the other person can do for them and not necessarily what they can do for the other person. Strong problem solving comes from both of you knowing that each of you is going to try as hard as you can to give to the other and as least as you can to take to the other and as least as you can to take. So you begin to see it not as one person winning and the other person losing, but how can we come to a solution where both of us win? That's the real goal in how to communicate with effective problem solving.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're not working to beat the other person, you are problem solving. You are working to solve the problem, right, so you're working with the other person to solve the problem, you're not working against each other. Um, and that's one thing that I think that couples who can solve problems and have these hard conversations, that's what they know, that they're doing, that's what they do well, is they don't? They're not. Yes, it'll be hard conversations, but it's not like they're, you know, knock out, drag out fights all the time with each other. The end goal in mind is to solve the problem and to work towards a resolution together, not because you just want to win.
Speaker 1:Right, absolutely. When you decide in your mind and determine that you are a team and therefore you work together to overcome it, then it changes the way you can even approach it and interact.
Speaker 2:Yeah, changes the way you communicate with each other in the moment. Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. And then, briefly, I'll cover this next one. In 2014, there was a study that came out titled couple communication, emotional and sexual intimacy and relationship satisfaction. This was in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy and it took 335 married couples and gave them a series of measurements and the outcomes. This is the part I want to focus on.
Speaker 1:So husbands' views of their wives' communication patterns predicted their own relationship satisfaction. Wives' communication patterns predicted their own relationship satisfaction. Wives' appraisal or views of their husband's communication patterns predicted their own relationship satisfaction. So both spouses' perceptions of the other spouse's communication patterns was the indicator, or one of the bigger indicators of overall relationship satisfaction. So why does this matter?
Speaker 1:It means that both spouses husbands and wives both have a responsibility and a part to play in ensuring that they are doing their part in trying to have healthy communication patterns, coming into the conversation to problem solve as a team, not trying to win, listening to the other person and trying to understand their point of views. It is the mantle and responsibility of both people and both spouses are viewing it the same way. Husband's emotional intimacy predicted their wife's relationship satisfaction, and wife's emotional intimacy also predicted their wives' relationship satisfaction, and wives' emotional intimacy also predicted their husband's relationship satisfaction. So this goes back to the mutual disclosure. The ability to be emotionally intimate, to share about your dreams, your desires, your vulnerabilities, your fears with your spouse not only will help you problem solve better because you will understand each other on a deeper level, but it is an another indicator of the other spouse's relationship satisfaction overall. Husband, husbands and wives aren't that different.
Speaker 1:They both actually mostly want the same things yeah, to be liked, loved and and this is why the people that are out there who only want to work with the men or only want to work with the women, great on my ever-loving nerves, because they they like especially men who try and speak to other men and say things like you need to take control of your relationship and show your wife who's boss. If you would just be more of an alpha male, that's what would change everything in your life. And you're what. And what was it? The? What was it that Phil on our team was saying today? It was like some marketing line that was um gosh, it was so terrible. It was something like if you follow this process, your wife would be crazy to not want to come back to you, even if she wants out right now. It's really kind of disgusting because, at the end of the day, those people don't really know what they're talking about Ultimately, because husbands and wives want the same thing. The research is showing that 100%.
Speaker 2:She got a little scared. She's passionate.
Speaker 1:It just makes me so mad because there's people out there who prey on emotionally vulnerable people and charge thousands of dollars like way more than what marriage helper charges.
Speaker 2:Especially the men. I mean we see it more with we see it more with men.
Speaker 1:We do see it more with men right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when you said alpha male, I think every, every real man kind of vomited in their, in their mouth a little bit, cause yeah, it's such a stupid term.
Speaker 1:You know, there's alpha females too.
Speaker 2:I did not know that.
Speaker 1:Like in the animal kingdom? It's not. There are not just alpha males, there's also alpha females.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I knew that. I thought you meant no, no, no. There's people out there like advocating for alpha females.
Speaker 1:Well, no, because they wouldn't do that, because in the in the whole, it would mess up the whole narrative. Because, because alpha males are the ones, yes, I believe that men are. Like I do believe that men should, for many reasons, be respected, that they are the head of the household, like I believe those things, but not to the detriment of the equality of the household. Um, like I believe those things, but not to the detriment of the equality of the woman. The woman is also an equal partner with equal respect. And, yes, like I do believe that, at the end of the day, if Rob and I come to a gridlock, and and it's not something that I'm super passionate about I'm going to honor him by by letting him. It's not letting him, but by like, hey you, yes, like I will follow you on this. Or if Rob um, you know, if someone were to, my husband is a military and cop background and so he has like scenarios of how he will protect us if something, if something were to happen. And I know, because he's he has said it that if something were to happen and he says just do what I say or just listen to me, like I'm not going to fight him in that moment. He is going to be the one that I trust to protect us and to defend us and all of those things. How did I even get on this? Here's how I got on this.
Speaker 1:I do trust that men and do believe that men should. They are the more dominant of the two, and women tend to be attracted to men who are more dominant and are more protective, and that's part of what attracts us to men, and so, yes, like they should maintain that inside of a marriage as well, that's what women want. Women want a man with a backbone, bottom line, but that doesn't mean that women are, quote, unquote, submissive to the point where they have no value, that they have no say and that they have no value, that they have no say and that they have no authority, because an egal, an equal like we are, we are partners in the marriage, and anyone trying to prey on something other than that pisses me off. All right, where are we in this?
Speaker 2:Point number two.
Speaker 1:Point number two. So point number one was communicate. Point number two Point number two. So point number one was communicate, realizing that both spouses need pretty much the same thing from each other. The second point is spend time with your spouse. This is a super fun one and this is a new one.
Speaker 1:In 2024, there was a study titled Couples, vacations and Romantic Passion and Enimacy Super fun. In the study there were two different studies that were done, on 238 participants in the first one, 204 in the second one, and it was basically looking at how long they had been married, how many times they traveled with their spouse, and then they were also measuring what they called self-expanding experiences. So here's what that means Novel, interesting, exciting or challenging experiences, so something that you a self-expanding experience. You did it and it expanded your worldview, it expanded your beliefs, it expanded your the things that you like to do self-expanding experiences. This is like when my husband and I, with the kids, went to Costa Rica last year and went surfing Super fun, self-expanding experience. Like that was novel, it was exciting, it was challenging, it was a great thing to do. And then the second study looked at similar things, but also looked at shared self-expanding experiences. Specifically, that happened on vacation. And so here were the results from both of those studies that self-expanding experiences for participants who traveled with their spouse predicted greater romantic passion.
Speaker 1:Now, when I had Dr Helen Fisher on the it Starts With Attraction podcast, she said that part of what keeps romantic love alive is doing new and novel things together. So this is right, in line with the research of what she has said. Self-expanding new novel, challenging greater romantic passion, romance is part of the three areas of love, the triangulation of love. Romance is the desire and the yearning to be with another person. So doing fun and challenging things together precipitates and perpetuates that feeling of being in love, which is fantastic. Self-expanding experiences for participants who did not travel with their partner had no impact on romantic passion, so they were able to kind of singular single out that doing it on with your or doing it on vacation or doing it with your partner, those self-expanding experiences is specifically what led to the greater romantic passion.
Speaker 1:So in the second study it found that longer relationships were linked to less physical intimacy, because couples do tend to be less physically intimate the longer that they're married, and longer relationships were linked to the number of vacations or, I'm sorry, and the number of vacations were not related to intimacy, especially in longer relationships.
Speaker 1:However, couples that reported higher levels of shared self-expanding experiences reported more physical intimacy, even after accounting for relationship length.
Speaker 1:So doing those fun and novel things while traveling did end up leading to more physical intimacy. Shared self-expanding experiences didn't necessarily significantly predict relationship satisfaction, but the authors believe that this was due to the fact that the relationship satisfaction was already high at the start of the study and that the measure was stable. So they believe that there was a ceiling effect. That happened because of the requirements of that sample, because in that second study it was a requirement that the population for that study were spouses and partners who were in a committed relationship for a minimum of a year, could not have any children in the home and were required to have gone on at least two vacations in the last year for a duration of three nights or more. So they were already looking at people who, if the results from the first study were true that going on vacations together increased your romantic attraction, they had disqualified people who would have not had as, or who would have had low relationship satisfaction. So kind of everyone in the study started high and ended high.
Speaker 2:So ultimately travel, that's the takeaway question yeah, do you have to travel to spend time with your spouse?
Speaker 1:No, but.
Speaker 2:Yes, but it's better if you do, if you can fit that in.
Speaker 1:But do you know why?
Speaker 2:No, I'm sure you're about to tell me.
Speaker 1:So specifically the travel piece of it means that you're getting out of your normal day-to-day routine.
Speaker 2:Oh, and you're doing the novel and you're doing the novelty.
Speaker 1:That's the part of it, it's the new, exciting or challenging experiences, and so travel inherently is new, novel and challenging because you have, you encounter a ton of stresses when you travel and you have to figure that out together. So it kind of also can help problem solving. Even if we go back to that second, that first point, when Rob and I went to Portugal in January, I was just about to say, especially the way that you and Rob travel especially the way that we traveled.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because we didn't for the listeners or watchers. We did not book anything but the first night's hotel, and we were going to be in Portugal for like nine or ten days and the only thing booked for the entire time when we left the United States was one hotel, and it was amazing. We had so much fun.
Speaker 2:It just stresses me out thinking of trying to do something like that I mean it was.
Speaker 1:it was stressful but it allowed us, especially cause the kids. It would have been way more stressful if we had the kids, but it allowed us to in the in the morning, like every day. It was like, okay, we have to work together today to figure out what we want to do. And it was, it was great.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I'm sure it like fostered, like really good communication too, of like here's what I want to do, what do you want to do, right? And so you kind of came to that agreement together and you were kind of forced to do that, instead of like one spouse planning the vacation or whatever, right. I guess it is a kind of a cool way to do it it would stress me out really bad.
Speaker 1:But one day on your honeymoon?
Speaker 2:yeah, maybe nothing planned just go, do it, just go somewhere just go do it.
Speaker 1:So I love that one because, again and it doesn't have to be to portugal or to costa rica it can literally be to a tiny town 45 minutes away that you've never been to.
Speaker 2:Or go to a place in like the place that you already live. Go to a place you've never been to before. Go to it's like you were. You recorded an episode, um on YouTube for the marriage helper channel talking about, uh, date night ideas and one of the things that you had mentioned was like going to downtown Nashville, going to like a hotel or whatever that you've just you and Robin never been to. Do stuff like that, like that's a great idea because it's new, right, something you haven't done before, or a new restaurant.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I hate going to the same restaurant. I always want to go to a new restaurant. Another study that looked at the this point of spending time together was in 2021 better together, Together the Impact of Exercising with a Romantic Partner Again, love this one. Alina, our research assistant, she knew the things I would love to talk about. So in this one was 165 undergraduates and they had to be in a relationship and spend time with their partner two to three times a week and have moderate to strong intentions to exercise three times per week. What do you think the difference is in moderate to strong intentions to exercise?
Speaker 2:That's such an interesting way to put it yeah, I don't know, I don't either.
Speaker 1:I don't either. But the bottom line was what they ended up finding they had a series of measurements as well was that exercising with a romantic partner was associated with higher positive and lower negative affect than exercising without a partner. So again, affect is overall disposition and mood. So higher positive disposition and mood that's a good thing. Lower negative disposition and mood also a good thing, because it's lower when they were exercising with their partner. A quote from the article said that a boost in positive affect so that's A-F-F-E-C-T positive affect was above and beyond the positive affect that typically results from exercising. As we compared days people exercised with their romantic partner to days they exercised without their romantic partner, so it was even more so. The effects were even more so when they exercised with a romantic partner, and the participants were more satisfied with their romantic relationship on the days that they exercised with their partner than on days that and then on days that they exercised without them. So it's another way to spend quality time together and go through challenging circumstances together.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was going to ask why you? Why like this makes sense, but I guess it does make sense. It's the challenging part of it is you're doing, you're working hard, you're trying to do things I mean kind of together that are a little stressful, at least stressful on the body. So, yeah, it makes sense.
Speaker 1:And I believe there's a part of it from the study that we haven't covered on this podcast, but I covered it as part of my dissertation that looked at the 10 different things that led to higher levels of attraction, and one of those was we're attracted to people or romantic partners who even just have the habits of healthy things that we do. So like working out in general, even if it doesn't lead to a change, is an attractive thing that a wife or a husband would, that they would feel towards their the other sex spouse just because of the habit of it. Sex spouse just because of the habit of it. So what's the third thing you can do to have a healthy and satisfying relationship? Get good sleep. Do we need to say more?
Speaker 1:No but we will. In the 2022 study. Relationship satisfaction moderates links between poor sleep quality and psychological distress among couples, and this was specifically looking at couples who had type one diabetes. But let's generalize it. Let's generalize it to the general population. So they were looking at people for 14 consecutive nights assessing sleep quality, depressive symptoms, relationship satisfaction and daily sleep quality and daily negative affect. So poor sleep quality was associated with greater depressive symptoms.
Speaker 1:I've covered similar statements and sentiments in other episodes where I've talked about sleep. Spouses' poorer sleep quality was associated with greater depressive symptoms when they had lower relationship satisfaction, but not when they had higher relationship satisfaction. So it seems that there is a protective quality of the higher relationship satisfaction. But if your relationship is already struggling and you were to get a poor night of sleep, it's going to exacerbate the effects of that, such as the depressive symptoms. Poorer sleep quality was associated with greater negative affect. Mainly being in a pissy mood the next day Makes sense.
Speaker 1:Partner, poor sleep was linked with greater negative affect for participants. So like if Rob had terrible sleep, my husband the night before then in this study I would have said that I was in a bad mood the next day, which makes sense because if he's in a bad mood, it's going to put me in a bad mood because he's in a bad mood. Horror. Average daily sleep quality was associated with greater negative affect for those with lower relationship satisfaction. A little bit more of what we just said, although this is like every day when it's poor sleep quality, there was an overall negative affect, greater negative affect. And then partners poor overall daily sleep quality was associated with greater negative affect for those with higher relationship satisfaction. So actually I'm going to say those last two again poor average daily sleep quality was associated with greater negative affect for those with lower relationship satisfaction.
Speaker 1:The worse the sleep quality was on average day after day, the more likely for the negative mood. But the partner's poor over a partner's over a partner's. So if my husband Rob, if his overall daily sleep quality continued to be poor, then I would have a greater negative affect, even if we had a positive relationship. Again, I submit that this is because when someone doesn't get good sleep, they can't emotionally regulate very well and it affects how they show up in their relationships. They tend to be grumpier, as we see from this. They tend to be moodier, more depressive. So sleep it's important, and now we have the research that shows that it's important for the marriage.
Speaker 2:And if you want to learn more about sleep, just in general, we actually did an episode on sleep that released a few weeks ago, so that will be linked on the screen here or you can uh, if you're listening on podcast, you can go and click on it in the show notes as well.
Speaker 1:Sleep. It's one of my favorite things to do and to talk about.
Speaker 1:Super important super important, and I haven't always been that way, but I know it makes such a difference in our lives and in our relationships that it has become something very important. So the fourth thing that we can do for better relationships is express empathy. How do we express empathy? In a 2014 study on empathy in the Europe's Journal of Psychology, done by Levesque, lafontaine, karen and Flesch and Jornsson Starts with B, I think it's Jornsson we looked at 187 heterosexual Canadian couples that had an average age of 30 to 32 for males and females, and who'd been married for about six years. On average, they were given a couple of different dyadic coping inventories, or dyadic empathy inventories meaning. And so what does dyadic mean? It measures the degree to which couples support and actively help one another during times of stress. So the results indicated that one's own dyadic empathic concern was related to one's own ability to take perspective, and that was true, once again, of both men and women. So empathy was directly related to the ability to see things from another person's perspective. Both forms of empathy, which consisted of concern so there was concern for someone. That was one part of empathy and perspective taking, so seeing things from their point of view. So there was a compassion part of it, seeing someone being concerned about them, wanting what's best for them, and then a perspective taking, which means I want to see things the better, coping and relationship satisfaction for both men and women. So it's important overall to have concern for the other person and to be able to take their perspective. Now there was also an association with increase in relationship satisfaction for both oneself, so me feeling more satisfied with Rob as my husband when these things were present, but also it found that it was true for both people. So I wouldn't just feel that way about my husband Rob, he would also feel that way about me. And here's a quote from the article In support of this association.
Speaker 1:This finding suggests that the ability to understand the point of view and to share in the emotional experience of one's romantic partner are related to the ability to communicate stress to one's romantic partner. In other words, dyadic empathy is the is conducive to the resolution of stressful situations. This goes back to problem solving. This goes back to trying to see things from the other person's perspective. This goes back to so many of the things that we talked about secure attachment, your ability to communicate stress and why you're stressed and what you need to your spouse, allows your spouse to understand you and gives them the opportunity to express empathy back to you. Now it also allows for when your spouse shares those things with you, when they're sharing how they're stressed, it's your turn and your opportunity and this is incredibly important for you to sit and have concern, be genuinely concerned about the things that your spouse is sharing with you, about how they are stressed, and try and understand their perspective.
Speaker 1:So, as an example, my husband is currently in commercial flight school and one of the things that he has to do at times is wake up incredibly early to go and to fly. And my husband you think I love sleep. My husband really loves sleep and he tends to get like nine a good, consistent nine to nine and a half hours a night, so he sleeps even longer than I do, and so for him the day before, he knows that he has to get up at like 4am or 5am to go and fly. He's very stressed out and I may look at this as someone who's already an early riser and I could easily write it off and say you know what? I do that all the time, like be a big boy, get over it.
Speaker 1:But that is not expressing empathy and it's not leading to better relationship satisfaction.
Speaker 1:Stress is coming from Let him talk to me about that Like I'm stressed you know I'm going to have to wake up early it's affecting just everything I'm thinking about today. Fit with that. Have a genuine concern for the fact that that's how he's feeling. Do what I can to support him during that time, like me putting the kids to bed for him, doing anything I can to make sure that he knows that I care about him and that I'm on his team and I want to decrease his stress as much as possible. And then taking his perspective not pushing my perspective on him, taking his perspective of how stressful this is is what allows me to not just express empathy, because empathy, yes, it is a feeling, but empathy can also be an action, or maybe compassion is a better way to put the action that goes with empathy. Compassion isn't just passive, it is active. It's when we have empathy for someone and then want to invest In them or invest in helping them overcome the situation they're in, despite the obstacles that they're feeling. So expressing empathy is incredibly important.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like you said. It goes back to the problem solving too. It's better to have like another person in your corner than an extra person who's on the other side of the ring, who's like hitting you from one side while the problem is hitting you from the other side. So, yeah, it's better to fight the problem together and be able to empathize with the other person. Um, so they can have your back.
Speaker 1:A hundred percent, yeah. And then our fifth and final although this is not exhaustive but for today's episode, our fifth and final tip that we're looking at, for what can enhance relationship satisfaction is building trust. This was done by Fitzpatrick and LaFontaine in 2017, looking at attachment, trust and satisfaction in relationships. So, again, we had just shy of 200 Canadian heterosexual couples 18 or older who were in a relationship for at least a year. They were given some trust measurements, relationship satisfaction measurements and an attachment style scale style scale and what we found, or what they found from those results, was that male avoidance so a male being avoidant, dismissing of their partner, kind of shutting things down, wanting to wall themselves off was linked to lower male trust, meaning that the female didn't tend to trust the male as much when he was walling her off. That makes sense which was linked to lower male relationship satisfaction. So then the husband the male was not satisfied in the relationship, even though he was the one being avoidant, because of the way that his wife didn't trust him. And then the same thing was found with females. So it ended up being the same both ways. If there was a female who was avoidant, then it lowered the trust that the husband had toward the wife and it was associated with lower female relationship satisfaction. So here's the bottom line. The bottom line of it is, when we are scared that our partner, that our spouse, is going to leave us, when we don't feel safe and secure in our relationship, clearly that's going to lead to dissatisfaction in the relationship and we can begin to do behaviors that kind of put us in a cycle of chasing the other person or wanting them to chase us or walling them off from us, but really we wall them off because kind of we want them to pursue us, and it leads to behaviors and actions that aren't healthy and they aren't sustainable inside of the marriage. So then, what is the bottom line? To build trust. How, how do you build trust, especially if you're scared that the other person is going to leave you? You build trust over time by continuing to do the things that are best for the relationship, not for you. That is the basis of trust.
Speaker 1:It's not a zero sum game. It's not a win or lose. It is making the decision that is best for the relationship, not for me. It's making the decision that, even if I want to go and invest you know a ton of money in Bitcoin because it's taking off and whatever that is, which I have not been the one to want to invest in Bitcoin just for them, and I don't really care for your commentary on it. I'm trying to wrap my mind around it and don't really care for your commentary, but I need to look and say what is best for the marriage.
Speaker 1:It's not just about what I want, it's not just about my goals, it's about our goals.
Speaker 1:It's not just about my needs, it's about our needs.
Speaker 1:It's not just about my wants, it's about our wants. It's not just about my future, it's about our wants. It's not just about my future, it's about our future. And when you begin to make decisions that show your spouse that you are choosing the actions that are best for the relationship even something as simple as I'm going to look you in the eye when you speak to me and not at my phone that might seem crazy as a way to talk about building trust, but you're showing your spouse that that decision of where you're going to put your attention when they are trying to speak to you, that your decision is going to be what's best for the relationship, not what is captivating your mind on Instagram at the moment, or TikTok or YouTube, whatever it is putting it down and looking the other person in the eye. It's about when you say you're going to take out the trash or you're going to help with the dishes, or whatever it might be that you actually do it, even when you're tired, because that's the decision that's best for the future of the marriage. It's the decision that is best for your spouse to begin to realize they can trust you and depend on you and rely on you to do what you said you were going to do. That's how you build trust.
Speaker 2:Building trust is a very foundational thing to relationship to Like it's. It's almost like building a house on sand If you don't have trust, like nothing is going to be able to stand like through that relationship If you, if you're not able to trust.
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:I mean it's like like, if you don't have trust, like you're not going to be able to do anything without the other person thinking that something else is going on or anything like that. And so I mean you can have, you can communicate, you can go do spend time together, but the moment that you're not spending time together, this moment that they're doing something else, if you don't have the trust, then none of the other stuff is going to matter.
Speaker 1:Jason, you're well on your way to becoming a relationship expert.
Speaker 2:Well, step one ladies line up. Oh my God, please line up. Oh my gosh, all right, we want to walk back through the five.
Speaker 1:We'll do the recap. So what have we talked about today? Here are the biggest problems that exhibit in relationships that lead to relationship dissatisfaction or unhealthy relationships. The biggest problems are that there's a lack of problem solving, that there's a lack of time together. Disagreement specifically in the studies we looked at about finances, was a problem. There was a lack of support or feeling like there was empathy from your spouse towards you and there wasn't mutual disclosure. These are the biggest problems.
Speaker 1:So what are the benefits of healthy relationships? There's a lot of physical and mental benefits, especially to long-term committed relationships, especially to marriage. There's a decrease in stress, there's decrease in loneliness. All of those are great things. So then, what can we do to have healthier and more satisfying relationships?
Speaker 1:The first thing is that we communicate, and specifically through problem solving. We communicate as a team. We approach issues together and we make the decision that we aren't trying to find a win or a lose. We're doing this to do what's best for the relationship. The second thing is spending time together.
Speaker 1:We talked about going on vacations, we talked about exercising together, but really the core message here is what can you do that's new and novel? That will also be challenging, because those are the things that can continue to breed romantic love. We also talked about getting good sleep, because sleep is foundational in how our moods and our dispositions are the next day, and even when our spouse doesn't get good sleep, it can negatively affect us, so it's important for both of you to prioritize sleep. Fourth, we talked about expressing empathy, and empathy was seen and described as having genuine concern for the other person, as well as taking their perspective about the stresses in their life that they're facing, and then showing them that you support them through it, and then, finally, building trust, and trust is built when we make decisions that are best for the relationship and that are not zero sum. It's not that one of us is trying to win and the other one is trying to lose, but we are finding a way to both win together.
Speaker 2:That's all folks.
Speaker 1:Simple.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Not always easy but simple but simple.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:If you liked this, we would love for you to leave a comment. If you're watching on YouTube, just drop your comment there. I read them, every one of them. Love hearing from y'all. If you're listening to this on podcast, then be sure you hit that follow button because it allows you to get the latest updates when we come out with new shows and same on YouTube. Go and hit that subscribe button as well. Share this with a friend if you found it fascinating or interesting, or you have a friend that you believe would benefit from it. That's a great way to help grow the show and to get the message of what we're doing with. It Starts With Attraction out there. And finally, remember until next week, stay strong.