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Hey, everybody. There is an idea that kind of circulates in popular culture, and that is that it's not really possible to have a long-term romantic relationship that is satisfying. You've heard people talk about the seven year itch, which is that after seven years or maybe even before at that point in the, in the relationship, you're, you're bored with the person. You feel an urge to look elsewhere. You have learned all there is to learn about that person. They're not exciting anymore and you're done.

But there is a survey, a global survey that has some really important bearing on this perspective that we have in pop in popular culture. So this survey is done by the Gallup organization where they, ever since 2005, they have been serving surveying people. And at this point they have surveyed more than 130,000 people from all over the world in more than 130 nations. So it's a gargantuan survey. And they survey different factors that contribute to wellbeing. Both physical and political and emotional, and they're trying to survey, basically get a finger on the pulse of the emotional wellbeing of people around the globe. And so they track things like positive emotions that you had yesterday, negative emotions that you had yesterday, things like that. There are other researchers that have gone through and analyzed this data from the Gallup organization to find that there are two important factors that are the most important in influencing how much enjoyment a person will experience on a given day. So these two factors are, one, being able to count on someone for help. And two, that I learned something yesterday. So being able to count on someone for help was the biggest protective factor against negative emotions and having learned something yesterday was the biggest factor toward whether or not somebody would, would experience positive emotions. So these two factors reflect what psychologists have talked about for a long time, that we have two different needs, which sometimes seem to conflict. One of them is that we have a need to feel safe and secure, and the other is that we have a need to grow and learn. So the popular belief that we can't have a long-term satisfying relationship seems to believe that the need to feel safe and secure and the motivation to grow and learn, they can't coexist. They're conflicting. So either you're feeling safe and secure and you always have this person that you can count on or else you're growing and learning, but you can't have both. That's what the popular perspective seems to think. But the survey seems to teach us that if we want to have wellbeing, we need to have both. We need to be able to have someone that we can count on, and we also need to, to have to be continually learning in order to have real wellbeing, in order to have the minimum number of negative emotions and the maximum number of positive emotions.

Well, there's some really cool research which shows how you can do this, how you can have both your cake and eat it too. You can both be able to count on someone for help and be continually learning. You can have a long-term relationship that is also a source for learning and growth. This research, the bulk of it comes out of the Wellbeing Lab at George Mason University, which was founded by Todd Kashdan. He wrote a book called Curious, where he summarizes a lot of this research and kind of synthesizes it for us so that we can, so that we don't have to read all of the 250 peer reviewed journals that their lab has published, and we can get the kernel of, of the implications of this research. So Todd Kashdan has studied wellbeing and resilience, but he's also studied what makes for long-term relationships, and he has studied in cooperation with other researchers, people who are able to maintain satisfying, vibrant, long-term relationships that contain this growth element and also contain the security element. And they've been able to analyze what it is that these people do that makes it possible for them to have both. So I thought it was really cool. I wanted to tell you about it today.

So those of us who do it wrong tend to feel like there's an expansion phase of the relationship, which is when you are first in love and you're learning all these things about the person, and you are so excited about everything that you're discovering about them, but after a period you feel like you have pretty much discovered all there is to discover about them, you feel like you can predict how they're gonna behave. We know how to expect, what they're gonna think and what they're gonna do and how they're gonna feel about different things. And when that expansion phase starts to fade, then that's when we start getting this seven year itch type thing. But the people who don't have this expansion phase fade do some particular things, and it has to do with the way that they view the relationship and their partner. They see their relationship as the ultimate opportunity for growth, and they are curious about their partners because they feel that their partners are vast unknown territories to be explored. So they see their, their relationship as an opportunity for discovery.

Now, how can this be possible if you're with the same person for 30 years? I've been with my husband for 31 years. How is it possible to feel that your relationship is, is a source for continual discovery? Well, it's possible because if there's one thing that's constant in this world that's change , and people are also continually changing. So you're not married to a static person, you're me, you're married to someone who is continually changing and evolving. But the other thing is that no two people are alike. There's always more to discover about the other person. You may have heard the saying before, that the past is a foreign country. The idea behind this saying is that you can't take your assumptions from the present and put them on the past because the past had different assumptions. The past had a different culture. So you have to get into the mindset of how things were in the past in order to understand the events that happened. The same thing can be said about people. The, the other person, including your partner, is a foreign country. You can guarantee that the way that your partner sees the world is not the way that you see it because they have a different childhood. They had different parents, they had different formative experiences, they have a different biology. We talked a couple of weeks ago about this technique of trying to discover in the mode of a detective how someone else sees the world, or in other words, you see someone else's emotion you're trying to recreate backwards from their emotion, the story that their brain fabricated in order to organize this emotion. So we talked about how our brains, whenever we are appraising a situation, even though this is unconscious, our brains ask and answer, how good or bad is this? Who's fault is it and what should I do? Or how is this gonna develop? And you can guarantee that the way that the other person answers those questions, even in the same situation, is not gonna be identical to the way that you answer them because their brain is working with different material, different biology, different past, a different perspective on things. I think we all have a phase where we view our partner as kind of an extension of ourselves, and we feel like we can predict what it is that they're going to do. But it's kind of like a light bulb going off when you start to recognize how foreign this other person is and how the way that they see the world is so different than the way that you see the world and how interesting it is to try and start to understand and recreate how it is that they see the world. To start to try and see it from their perspective, to try and understand why they had a certain emotion that they had, how it is that they answered those questions. How good or bad is this? Whose fault is it and how is this gonna develop. And why it is that their brain gave the answers that it Did. It's an unending quest to start to try and recreate how it is that the other person sees the world. And this can be fascinating. Discovering how other people see the world can be as exciting as going to a foreign country and seeing a different culture, being immersed in a different culture in a different language, and a different way of seeing the world and a different way of interacting. And this is one of the things that people with successful long-term relationships do is they see their partner as a foreign country, or in other words, they see their relationship as an exciting, unknown territory that can be explored but never fully discovered.
There's another thing that people with successful long-term relationships do that help them to have the security that they need, but also to continually grow. And this second thing that they do is that they explore new things together. So doing exciting, new, challenging things as a couple. When you have these challenging growth experiences together, discovery experiences together, you associate that back on the relationship and it becomes reflected on the other person so that you feel that the other person is a source of growth and also security. So this can be done with going to new countries or just new cities, exploring new places together, doing challenging new activities together. Go backpacking. Go hiking. Doing projects together that challenge you both. My husband and I are both musicians and we're in a quartet together. A lot of people don't like to work together as a couple, but for us, it has given us challenges that we both have to work on. It, it requires us to travel together, to concertize, to learn new repertoire together. to. To create these programs in all of these different situations and different challenges together. But if you feel like things are getting a little flat in your relationship, consider traveling together to somewhere new that you've never been before, or doing something that you have never done, done before together. This is something that people with these successful long-term relationships do together to be able to have that element of growth in their relationship of safety.

And one third thing that people do that have these successful long-term relationships is that they add variables to their relationship. So it's true that people's behavior changes depending on who they're with. And you probably have noticed this in yourself. I, for example, I, I act differently around certain people than I do around others. I act one way around one sibling and a different way around another sibling, and a different way around my parents and a different way around my friends and a different way around my husband. Different people bring out different parts of our personalities. Around some people, I'm rather quiet and deferential. Around other people I'm more assertive and I have lots of ideas. Other people bring out sort of more of my goofy side. And so you can, you can guarantee that in your relationship, the way that your spouse interacts with you is different than the way that your spouse interacts with other people. And so another way to discover more about your spouse is to bring more people into the relationship. And one way that you can do this is by having kids. Of course, this introduces all kinds of complicated variables into the relationship in which you get to see the way your spouse interacts with your children in all different phases of their growth and all the different problems that come up. But it allows you to see a lot more different sides of who they are and their, and their personality. But also this can be done with the two of you interacting with other friends, and you get to see how your spouse interacts with these other people and see different sides of their personality that that gets brought out when they're around other people.

So I just thought it was really important to bring up what this global survey has shown that all over the world, it doesn't matter what culture you're in, what country you live in, the things that most predict your emotional wellbeing are having someone to count on and learning and growing every day. So if you want to have wellbeing, you need to find a way to have those two things in your relationships. Of course, this can be expanded to more than just our romantic relationships. This can be applied to the way that you relate to your parents, to your siblings, to your children, to your friends, to your neighbors. So these three things can really help you when you're thinking about investing in long-term, solid relationships. And that is to remember that other people are vast unexplored territories that you, there's always something to discover there, that other people are a foreign country. And the second is that if you want to infuse excitement into your relationship and growth into your relationship, then do new, exciting, challenging things together. And the third is you can also infuse growth and spark exploration into understanding the other person and how complex and rich they are by interacting with other people together and seeing how they interact with other people. But it's really cool that research has been done that shows that it is possible to not be derailed by the seven year itch, but instead be able to have a, a relationship that endures beyond that. But if it's going to endure, it needs to contain both of these elements, both the element of safety and security and the element of growth and learning. That these two things make it possible for us to feel excited and feel wellbeing within our relationships.

So that's what I have for you today. Thanks for listening. Stay tuned now for our kindness narrative. And don't forget to send in yours. It's good for you and it's good for all of us. Listening to it doesn't cost much. It'll help you to practice gratitude and even listening to other people's stories, studies have shown, will help your default levels of anxiety if you can do it regularly. So thanks and we'll see you next week.

Today's kindness narrative was shared with me by a listener by email, so I'm going to read it to you. When my husband and I moved back to the US after living for years overseas, we bought a house whose owners had stopped mowing the lawn months ago. The grass was waist high. We couldn't do anything about it because our belongings had not yet arrived in our shipping container with all of our furniture. One day when I was outside the house, a neighbor walked by, greeted me, introduced himself, and offered to cut our lawn. I thanked him, but told him that our belongings were coming soon and I would be able to cut it as soon as they got here. When our shipping container finally arrived, I got out our weed wacker and started to cut the lawn. But soon the weed whacker died because the battery was low. I hadn't thought at that point about the next problem that came up , which was that I couldn't recharge the weed whacker because it was a weed whacker I had bought overseas which plugged into a 240 watt outlet, and now that I was in the US I had only 110 watt outlets. I went over to the neighbor's house, knocked on the door and asked him if I could borrow his weed whacker to cut our lawn. Instead, he looked at me and said, why don't you just let me cut it because it's a really big industrial weed whacker, and I think it would be pretty heavy for you. He came over and spent about two hours cutting our lawn. After he was done, I asked him how we could repay him. He said, you can repay us by coming over to dinner. I am very grateful for this man and his family who went out of their way to make us feel ultra welcome in our new neighborhood and situation.