So you’ve seen happy marriages and you want to know how they do it so you can copy it for yourself.
You know that a good marriage has tremendous health benefits for the participants, and you’d like to be in on it, but you look around and see a bunch of self-help books and Disney movies stating that the boy and girl will live happily ever after. because the Fairy Godmother will intervene.
In some ways, self-help and Disney just don’t mesh with what your real-life relationship experiences say about a happy marriage.
Because even the most suitable people for each other need to work on their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors regularly to ensure happy marriages.
So what knowledge is available that can guide us without sugar coating? Robert Epstein, Ph.D., has some very interesting thoughts on that question.
John Gottman, Ph.D., has done long-term research on the Masters of Marriage and has developed some exercises that help couples based on his research, and Helen Fisher, Ph.D., has done extensive research. powerful using fMRI or functional. Magnetic resonance images of people newly in love.
Dr. Fisher suggests that three brain systems are active in the early days of love, the lust, trust, and love systems, and each of the three systems has a hormone or neurotransmitter associated with it.
Therefore, engaging in behaviors such as athletics, which increases testosterone for both men and women, and is associated with the brain’s lust system, increases the possibility of… lust, for example.
Fisher also says we have the best chance of a successful relationship when we also do personality matching, and you can determine your personality type by completing a profile on chemy.com
Robert Epstein, Ph.D., has some very intriguing insights into happy marriages in India, where couples may meet once before getting married.
Marriage brokers and parents seek partners with an eye toward compatibility and sustainability.
So what is it that helps arranged marriages increase love for spouses so that they stay together 95% of the time, while we in the US get divorced 50% of the time in our first year? , second and third marriage, even with the intervention of the Fairy Godmother.
Epstein says couples grow their love by doing some very basic exercises like one he calls “soul gazing,” sitting quietly and looking into your partner’s eyes, trying to see into their soul. His exercises help couples pay attention to the four pillars of marriage: commitment, realistic expectations, intimate knowledge, and essential relationship skills.
Another of Epstein’s exercises is to synchronize the heartbeat.
I’ve used a tool called heart rate variability biofeedback to teach couples to do just that.
Heartmath is based on discoveries from the new field of neurocardiology, and is a feel-good tool that requires minimal learning time, and can be practiced by couples anywhere.
In other words, exercises like that help a couple grow and nurture a connection that’s like what John Gottman, Ph.D., calls “emotional love in the bank.”
That emotional account of the band full of gratitude and appreciation is there to help couples through the inevitable periods of disappointment.
John and Julie Schwartz-Gottman have created a workshop called The Art and Science of Love that can guide couples through a series of exercises that I believe parallel Epstein’s work, as the Gottmans have been studying the MA o Marriage to see what they do and do. not to do, and to help people understand that they can do more of the small, regular behaviors that build up that emotional bank account.
The Gottmans also discuss behaviors to avoid, such as putting down, critical, defensiveness, and obstructionism, which are powerful predictors of divorce, and the Gottmans suggest some very interesting insights on how to handle physiological arousal or flooding. diffuse.
Most of us would call that anger, or the fight to escape, but again there are tools available that we can use to manage negative emotions or develop more positive emotions.
When do we need to use those tools? I make sure to turn to Heartmath, for example, to return to my affiliative and cooperative heart-based physiology whenever my wife asks me to give up the remote so she can watch HGTV.
That is the season where you can see people tearing up and remodeling perfectly fine houses to make expensive and unnecessary changes.
This process is most acute when a Packer is in play.
I know I’ll be experiencing the diffuse physiological arousal the Gottmans talk about, so I’d better do something athletic to boost testosterone to get more lust from Helen Fisher.
Happy Marriage saved.