Happy Together: Creating a Lifetime of Connection, Commitment, and Intimacy

all.

the happiness c.u.r.e.

Oh, the comfort—the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person—having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.

— Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

IT WAS A HOT SUMMER DAY in Santa Monica back in 1983 when Jake and Brenna walked into my office for their weekly therapy session. I was testing my new video recorder and wanted to try it out on them. With their permission, I started it rolling.

They were an attractive couple in their mid-40s who had been married just two years when their conflicts began to escalate. Jake seemed bewildered when they arrived, so I asked him what was bothering him. They had quarreled earlier that day, and he couldn’t grasp why Brenna was so upset. She had accused him of raging at her about money, and she told me she did not feel good about the way he had spoken to her. Jake denied raging and insisted that he was only trying to make his point. He was making one excuse after another.

About half an hour into their discussion with me, Brenna blurted out, Jake, you are just so cheap! Jake, who had forgotten about the camera, bolted upright, screaming, How dare you say that when all you do is spend, spend, spend! He launched into a tirade that left Brenna in tears.

They had been down this road before, always with the same outcome. Brenna melted into the sofa and wept while Jake raged. This was their dance, and it was disastrous for them both. As they were leaving, I handed Jake the videotape to review before our next session.

The next day Jake phoned me, horrified. He sputtered, Who was that on the tape? It was shocking to realize that he did not recognize himself as he was in the video. How could this be? I was filled with curiosity about how he could be so blind to himself. It wasn’t the first time I had seen such a contradiction in action: although Jake’s behavior was extreme, I had observed the same pattern in other patients who couldn’t see how they were expressing their personal issues to others.

I began searching for answers to the questions raised by Jake’s encounter with his wife and with himself. How can someone experience a powerful emotion like rage and not be aware of it? Why do some relationships withstand rage—or loneliness or infidelity or loss—while others break apart? How can we heal the pain that divides us from the ones we love? Ultimately, what does it take for us to be happy together?

Since that day, in three decades as a psychotherapist and couples counselor, I have searched for answers to these questions in the varied experiences of patients who have come to me for help in making their relationships work, and in nearly 20 years as a husband, I have learned how to make our relationship work, or, quite frankly, I could not have written this book. I have seen firsthand what makes love last. Happy Together is the result of these explorations.

Watching the unveiling of the intricate workings of intimacy—of the process by which lasting love is created and sustained—has convinced me that love works on a far grander scale than eyes meeting across a crowded room. Happiness is not something that just happens to us, and love is not something that we just fall into, even though it may seem that way when a relationship begins. No matter how much passion there is at the start, for love and happiness to last a lifetime, they must be actively made. Love is a creation; it is fashioned by acts of loving kindness, which can produce something that is at once durable and a thing of beauty. Creating a happy and enduring relationship requires that we understand how our underlying and often baffling personal issues impact our ability to connect with others—and, crucially, with ourselves. It calls on us to make conflict and personal pain into resources for ever deeper intimacy.

Love is an unparalleled life experience. When we accept that it will include times of great difficulty, we can approach them with gentleness and care, and we can learn the skills we need to quickly and smoothly solve problems. Love is what life is all about, and it is life’s sweetest reward—the cake and the icing on the cake. It’s a flame that can indeed burn for a lifetime, if we tend it well.

Our journey toward enduring love and lasting happiness begins by developing a solid base of safety and security. We set out equipped with honesty, tolerance, and a willingness to reach out to each other when we need to. The path is paved by our intention to solve problems with reasoning and to listen to different points of view, rather than holding on to being right at the expense of our most valuable loving connection. And, as we learn to accept and support our mutual strivings, we find our way toward an ever more satisfying relationship life—and a rich and meaningful inner life too.

HAPPINESS IS AN INSIDE JOB

The idea of happiness, like the concept of love, turns up all over the place in literature, in media of all shapes and sizes, even in scripture. It’s as elusive as it is ubiquitous; it seems impossible to pin down exactly what it is to be happy, and yet we know it unmistakably when we are. And if we look closely, some patterns emerge. Skiing down a slope after the first snow, looking into a lover’s eyes after a night of lovemaking, inventing something that will help others, completing a task that has been long and hard—in all these moments, we know we are part of something that engages our deepest being, in harmony with others, with our environment, and with ourselves.

We also know that we can’t sustain happiness by effort; it is capricious and sensitive and by definition exists moment to moment. We don’t get there by trying to. In a sense, we don’t get there at all: as the journalist Sydney Harris wisely observed, Happiness is a direction, not a place. Eleanor Roosevelt put it another way: Happiness is not a goal; it is a by-product. We stumble upon it, or it steals up on us, while we’re doing other things—such as the work of creating and sustaining love.

In my work with couples, I have found that love and happiness are one and the same when we feel deeply understood and accepted by the ones we love. This does not mean that our partners are somehow responsible for making us happy; just the opposite. Before we can be happy together, we need to be happy within ourselves. My colleague and friend Lisa Cypers Kamen, who is a happiness expert, likes to say that happiness is an inside job, and so, we will see, is love.

Conscious Connection

Susan Johnson writes in her book The Practice of Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy: Creating Connection that adult love is an emotional tie with an irreplaceable other who provides a secure base from which to confront the world and a safe haven, a source of comfort, care, and protection. Building that bond is a complex task—though, ironically, the trick is to do the work it takes to make it simple. It asks us to come to a deep understanding of who we are and who we are with—to look not just at each other but within ourselves to see the true source of our differences, our longings, and our gifts to each other. In doing this, we’re not only building a connection with our own inner life but also communicating this knowledge to those we love, which inevitably leads us toward a deeper and more lasting connection.

An important facet of long-term relationships is the commitment couples make to maintain that connection with each other. Part of what it means to love another person is to accept that we are intimately bound to each other, not only because we have a basic need to be loved and feel connected, but because we have made a commitment to persevere. The deeper our commitment, the greater the likelihood that love will remain alive and vital. Lasting love is made from the concerted effort of two people crafting their own unique relationship from the sweat and toil of daily life and from all the difficulties, conflicts, and hardships that arise in sharing a life together.

Being truly happy together is no simple matter. It requires that we be free from guilt, shame, fear, anxiety, depression and emotional blocks. Can we love in a state of terror or sadness? Can we be happy if we are in conflict with our mate? The obvious answer is no. To love is to free ourselves, to know something of ourselves, to experience true acceptance—not so easy to produce on demand.

To make love that lasts, we must forge a high-energy emotional bond with the strength to withstand the inevitable storms, then cultivate methods to keep it strong. Knowing how to reprocess a lost connection is an essential skill for keeping love alive. Creating and maintaining an enduring connection takes energy and focus, but the miracle is that love can last and become even more satisfying over time.

Equally essential is the ability to form strong attachments in the first place, since from them we build relationships that are safe and secure. Safety and security are the cornerstones of lasting love; they allow us to open up about our secrets, our feelings, and our fears. In a safe and secure relationship, we can find the space to know ourselves and each other in the way that lasting love requires.

Insight and Intimacy

Critical to understanding how intimacy is created and maintained is to accept that it is a function of, and deeply intertwined with, our inner life. True and abiding love requires that we do some soul-searching so we can understand how experience has affected us. It calls for some knowledge about what helps us maintain an intimate connection and what gets in our way. When we appreciate how these sometimes covert processes affect our ability to love, we will be able to work through inevitable disappointments more successfully. When we map the territories below the surface of our psyche, we will be better able to find our way through our personal pain and less likely to dump it on those we love.

Coming to this kind of self-understanding in a relationship requires not only self-reflection but what I call inter-reflection. Inter-reflection is the process that lets us see ourselves from behind our lover’s eyes. This acquired ability of shifting our perspective to vicariously experience the point of view of the other is at the core of what it means to be intimately connected. It sends a message to our partners that we hear what they are trying to tell us about their experience of who we are. Expressing and using the insight we gain when we tune in to each other this way is the active process of creating a lasting and loving relationship. Inter-reflection is part of an ongoing dialogue that incorporates the constantly evolving understanding of who we are and who we want to be. Our ability to inter-reflect requires that we trust the insight of our mate and have the desire to know about who we are. Learning to trust in this way, and being open to what we learn, are the building blocks of a solid relationship and the foundation of shared happiness.

The struggle to balance two individual lives and to pay attention to the ebb and flow of moods, feelings, and passions is a challenge, but it’s the best way to an enlightened sense of intimacy. The more we’re able to be inwardly accepting, the more we’re able to be outwardly tolerant. Ultimately, to be happy together each of us must become a better person, one who is worthy of being loved, by being loving and kind ourselves. In this way, a truly committed love relationship brings light into dark places as we discover our true nature in the company of the one we love.

The Cure for What Ails Us

Ever since that morning with Brenna and Jake in my office, I have been investigating the nature of passionate attachments, trying to understand what makes love last. I’ve observed couples who have forged successful, fulfilling relationships and couples whose relationships have fallen apart. And I’ve discovered that the couples who make it have several things in common. They understand how negative interactions can break their precious connection to each other. They have made the crucial distinction between how they felt as children and who they are as adults. They grasp how the way they communicate with each other can bring deep feelings to light, and they find ways to handle these feelings that foster an even more intimate connection. They are attuned to each other in a way that allows them to have true empathy. They recognize that the goal of a relationship is to actively create love, not passively receive it.

As I reflect on the experiences of my patients and the qualities that seem to help or hinder them in their work of creating love, I have come to see that true and abiding love—like Eleanor Roosevelt’s happiness—is the by-product of loving kindness. Its core components are compassion, understanding, respect, and empathy—because these are the tools we use to develop precious insight into the inner world of our partner and ensure that we’re truly happy together, as well as the essential steps for resolving conflict when it does arise.

The pain in our relationships may run deep, but we have the cure at our fingertips. Here is how we will heal our wounds—with:

Compassion—for ourselves and for others

Understanding—of where we came from and who we are

Respect—in the way we speak and act

Empathy—toward others and ourselves

The more we are compassionate, the more we will listen with our hearts. The more we are understanding, the better we will know our partner. The more we are respectful, the more we will get respect in return. The more we empathize, the deeper our connection with others and with ourselves. These processes are the essence of inter-reflection, and these are themes that I will come back to throughout the book as we see how the C.U.R.E. works to heal and strengthen relationships at every level. As I say to my patients, if you are not using one of these processes either toward your partner or toward yourself, you are off track.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

In the chapters that follow, we’ll explore many aspects of relationship, from connection to conflict to commitment, on our way to a fuller understanding of how to be happy together. At the end of each chapter, I’ll offer a few questions for you to ask yourself—and, ideally, for you and your partner to ask each other—to open the door to inter-reflection.

Simply put, we get out of relationships what we put into them. Happiness in a relationship is a direct result of deliberate actions that either elevate and intensify feelings or shut them down. We need to be willing to express hard truths, such as how afraid or hurt or unlovable we feel or how we don’t trust that love can last. We need to discover the truth within ourselves and then speak it, not to injure but to engage our partner in a process that leads to greater closeness and ever deeper love.

If we are willing to risk opening our hearts and minds, we will find ourselves in a universe that we never knew existed. Binding our heart with another’s and finding its strength uncovers what is most precious about life. Love is what gives life its color and fills us with its meaning. It’s what keeps us sane and feeds our soul.

Lasting love is liberating and inspiring, and its effects reach far beyond ourselves, extending to our families and communities. Loving couples impact everyone around them; they offer optimism and lead others toward deeper insights about themselves. But most of all, loving relationships infuse us with hope for a more humane society. This book is dedicated to all those who yearn to build a loving relationship that will not only stand the test of time, but will flourish, helping us all live happily together, in the broadest sense, to build a better future and a better world.

how love is made

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.

— Anaïs Nin

THE WAY A RELATIONSHIP BEGINS is often a far cry from what it’s like after many years of being together, and what it’s like is what we make it. If our partner asks for help and we don’t give it—or if we take a moment to consider our partner’s point of view; if we feel entitled to scream obscenities when we’re angry—or if we pay close attention to our partner’s needs; either way, our actions will have consequences, positive or negative. To ensure that the love we begin with is still there 10 or 20 years in the future is thus a constant process of making and creating a loving environment.

When people talk about the work of relationships, what do they mean? Simply that if a relationship is to stay intimate, loving, and happy, it requires some effort on our part. We need to be compassionate and consciously available; to make sure we understand our partner’s point of view before we express our own; to speak and act respectfully; to check our defenses at the door and empathize instead of falling into tit-for-tat retaliation. During arguments we must remember who it is we love and what our intentions are for the relationship. At the same time, we must be aware of what is causing our anger, which may mean holding on to it until we do understand it. To find love is a miracle; to keep it takes focus. Relationship is at its core very simple, but