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Relationships
To Stay in Love, Do This
Secure functioning is the key to successful dating.
Posted January 3, 2016
The technique social psychologist Arthur Aron developed as a means of generating closeness between two people has attracted a lot of attention in the past year. Aron and his colleagues wrote up their research a couple of decades ago, but it took a feature in The New York Times, plus a TED talk or two, to give this project legs in the mainstream media. Not to mention the free mobile app that allows you to whip out your phone and engage your date with the thirty-six irresistible questions.
All this attention isn’t surprising. Who wouldn’t be interested in an easy way to facilitate falling in love, especially when the technique has been researched, with positive results, and comes with the impressive personal testimony of an eloquent Times writer?
I have no issues with the technique, as developed by Aron’s team. In fact, it uses some of the same elements that are embedded in the psychobiological approach I follow when giving advice about how to date successfully (Tatkin, 2016). Which, by the way, is the same approach I employ as a couple therapist. The thirty-six questions remind me of the interviewing process I recommend for dating couples. The main difference is that the questions I suggest focus on you and your potential partner getting to know each other’s family background, relationship style, and emotional orientation. The goal is not to fall in love “instantly,” but rather to get to know one another well.
The other similarity is looking into each other’s eyes. That constitutes part two of Aron’s technique, and I emphasize it as a means to connect with a new partner, as well as an essential way of rekindling love between committed partners (Tatkin, 2012).
Mandy Catron, who wrote the Times article, thrust her new relationship into the limelight to an extent that apparently even she didn’t anticipate. When you begin dating, you want to vet your partner, and vice versa; you don’t exactly want millions out there vetting for you. That’s potentially a formula for failure. To her credit, Catron seems to have realized this in time, and created enough privacy for her and her partner to let things develop naturally.
About a year into their relationship, Catron did a TED talk as a follow-up to the Times article. The title says it all: “Falling in Love Is the Easy Part.” Even though Catron felt the technique caused her and her date to fall in love, that didn’t guarantee their relationship would last. They were still together, she reported. But now they were focused on what she considered the hard part: making love last.
Catron made several remarks that to me are huge red flags when it comes to relationship success. She spoke about how difficult it is to live with doubt—her own and her partner’s. She said that when they made the “choice” to fall in love, she didn’t anticipate how often she would have to remake that choice. Worse, she constantly worried about whether her partner would continue to choose her. Her conclusion? Falling in love may be easy… but being in love is “terrifying!”
What Catron described is what I call an insecure relationship. Neither partner feels secure enough with the other to be able to relax. They don’t know how to soothe or reassure each other. Of course, they probably do it on a transient basis—if not, they wouldn’t last even a few months—but they don’t know how to create lasting trust and security. An insecure relationship may hobble along for some time, but its odds of becoming a lasting, committed partnership are low.
For this reason, the first and foremost advice I give to dating partners who want to stay together is to create a secure-functioning relationship (Tatkin, 2016). This means you start to learn from the very beginning not only how to generate closeness, but also how to make each other feel secure. Obviously, how you build security on your third date is not the same as how you do it half a year in. It’s a process. But if one or the other of you is constantly worried about being rejected, months after both making the choice to be together, you have a problem to fix.
I’m not saying the creation of a secure-functioning relationship is necessarily easy. It may require learning new behaviors and ways of relating. It may mean taking some risks. But it can be done. And… that doing can be fun!
References
Aron, A., Melinat, E., Aron, E. A., Vallone, R. D., & Bator, R. J. (1997). The experiential generation of interpersonal closeness: A procedure and some preliminary findings. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 23(4), 363-377.
Catron, M. L. (2015, Jan). To fall in love with anyone, do this. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/fashion/modern-love-to-fall-in-love-w…
Catron, M. L. (2015, Oct). Falling in love is the easy part. Ted Talks. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aYWvujaT6M
Tatkin, S. (2012). Wired for love: How understanding your partner's brain can help you defuse conflicts and spark intimacy. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger.
Tatkin, S. (2016). Wired for dating: How understanding neurobiology and attachment style can help you find your ideal mate. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger.
Stan Tatkin, PsyD, MFT, is the author of Wired for Love and Wired for Dating and Your Brain on Love, and coauthor of Love and War in Intimate Relationships. He has a clinical practice in Southern CA, teaches at Kaiser Permanente, and is an assistant clinical professor at UCLA. Tatkin developed a Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy® (PACT) and together with his wife, Tracey Boldemann-Tatkin, founded the PACT Institute.
