
Masters of Love - ca98am79
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/happily-ever-after/372573/
======
lotharbot
We buried my grandfather last weekend. He and grandma had been happily married
for 65 years.

"Generosity" was one of the most used words at the funeral. It wasn't just
empty talk; it was descriptive of how they related to each other and to
everyone else. Even after grandpa went blind, he'd "look" toward grandma any
time she spoke. Even when she struggled to walk, she'd get up to get him a
drink if she was thirsty. What this article calls "bids" for affection, they
were not only responsive to but _proactive_ about.

And it reflects in the lives and relationships of their 7 children, 27
grandchildren, 29 great-grandchildren (+2 on the way), and 2 great-great-
grandchildren. My parents' relationship now looks like what I remember from my
grandparents 25 years ago. My relationship with my wife looks a little like my
parents' relationship when I was a kid. That's one of the reasons this sort of
research is so important -- because the quality of your relationship now can
affect relationships for generations to come.

~~~
agarden
The treasure you have, and that I wish I could have, is that you know what
love looks like on a day-to-day level. You have been habituated to it, even.
There are many people, I think, who want to achieve what your grandparents did
but don't actually know how, not because they don't know that they should be
kind and generous, but because they simply don't know what kindness and
generosity look like in the mundane details that fill up most of life.

The article included a quote that said that even in bad times, usually one or
both partners are trying to do the right thing but failing. You have the
blessing of knowing what the right thing looks like. I envy you that
experience.

~~~
lotharbot
> _" You have the blessing of knowing what the right thing looks like. I envy
> you that experience."_

Thank you.

I try to pass it on, just like I was taught. We had a young couple live in our
spare room some time ago. Right now we have a divorced mom in one room and
teen parents in another. I think one of the most important things I can do for
the future is mentor those who either haven't had the experience or have
struggled to follow it.

If there's anything I can do to help you figure out the details, e-mail me
(it's slightly obfuscated in my profile.)

------
rayiner
> Kindness, on the other hand, glues couples together... Being mean is the
> death knell of relationships.

I think at a certain level we all know this, but in the same way we know "you
lose weight by eating fewer calories." Easy understand, hard to live by.

In a way, it's amazing that 30% of marriages end up happy. It's hard to be
kind to someone you don't respect, someone you think makes bad decisions,
someone who isn't kind back, someone who is emotionally selfish or self-
centered, etc. Take the large percentage of the population that fits into one
of those categories, then square that, and you're well on your way to
understanding the statistics.

Criticism is, in particular, a minefield. On one hand, once you're married,
especially with a child, you have a shared future. What your spouse does or
doesn't do affects you. On the other hand, it's impossible to deliver
criticism in a way that doesn't tear at the relationship at least a little,
and easy to deliver it in a way that tears at the relationship a lot. It can
be hard to let go of the thought that: "if he/she just did X, Y would be
better." But in many cases, fixing whatever our partner is doing wrong doesn't
justify the stress of the criticism. As my wife says: "being right isn't a
defense to the charge of being an asshole."

~~~
colanderman
_then square that_

1-(1-x)^2 to be pedantic :) (i.e. if 10% of the population is mean, 19%
(=100%-(100%-10%)^2) of random pairings have at least one mean person, not 1%
(=10% squared))

I don't know of a simple term to describe that relation though; is there one?

~~~
jacobolus
"Double that then subtract the square" just doesn’t have the same ring, huh?

~~~
bryondowd
Squaring alone would work if you looked at the odds of both people being nice.
If 90% of the population is nice, squaring it would give you 81% of pairings
being nice, which matches the above example. Just have to take the glass half
full perspective.

------
iamthepieman
Kindness and generosity are easy (easier) if it's to a complete stranger or at
least someone you don't know intimately. It's easy to donate money to a
charitable organization or volunteer somewhere. It's easy to offer kind words
to a co-worker or to help a friend move or with their rent even if the fact
that they need your help is due to poor planning or bad decisions on their
part.

With someone who you don't share every moment and intricacy of your life with
it's easy to see their problems as external - They have a bad landlord, they
are poor, they had a bad childhood, they aren't as fortunate as me.

When you know someone well, you're more likely to see their problems in light
of what you know about them. Everyone has long-standing endemic issues. Maybe
their bad with money. Maybe they are impatient or easily angered. Perhaps they
are insecure and cover it up with many little white lies.

And when you've dealt with the other persons issues and failings for long
enough you realize that the person is not going to change. You're the same way
of course but you still see your problems as external or at least not as big.

Love is something that comes from an individual. It is generated and has it's
source in you. The world outside of you does not affect your love. Not your
circumstances, not another person.

When you create a piece of software or a building or drawing or a delicious
meal you reshape the resources around you into something new. You turn the
clay into a pot or the machine into a system that does work. When you love you
use no external material and therefore, love is an act of creation. It is the
highest form of creativity

------
macrael
"One way to practice kindness is by being generous about your partner’s
intentions."

This stands out to me as being profoundly true about all relationships.
Communication is hard. We humans are powerful storytellers so we tend to be
able to tell most any story to fit the facts on hand. In most cases I find
what I am looking for. This is what DFW talked about in his terrific
commencement address[1]: we all ultimately choose which story to tell
ourselves. When you choose to assume/believe/hope your partner is a good
capable person who is trying hard, you find yourself a part of a much better
story than otherwise.

And this principle extends beyond our most intimate personal relationships and
can even be applied here, where most often the only thing we know about the
person we are responding to is the brief couple paragraphs they hurriedly
wrote in-between trying to get things done. How easy it is to tell a story
that they are foolish or mean, if you choose to.

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-
ydFMI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI)

------
vijayboyapati
Great article. Another type of analysis I found really helpful was done by
Marshall Rosenberg called "non-violent communication", which dissects the
"turning toward" and "turning away" phenomena in marital (and other)
communication. I cannot recommend his course highly enough, and it's free
online (the workshop he did in San Francisco):
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwXH4hNfgPg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwXH4hNfgPg)

At first I was a little skeptical because it seemed goofy, but I had never
heard so incisive an analysis of how and why communication breaks down (or
succeeds).

~~~
the_cat_kittles
careful with this link, you might get 3 hour nerd-sniped.

thanks for the video, very cool!

------
hudibras
Here's a critique of Gottman's math:
[http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2010/03/can_y...](http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2010/03/can_you_really_predict_the_success_of_a_marriage_in_15_minutes.single.html)

Found this via Andrew Gelman's blog, where he adds his own thoughts.

[http://andrewgelman.com/2010/03/31/those_silly_sta/](http://andrewgelman.com/2010/03/31/those_silly_sta/)

~~~
tjradcliffe
According to that critique it isn't his math that's wrong, but his whole
understanding of machine learning. He has apparently written a book on
statistics and has a degree in math somewhere along the line, but I've seen
people who are quite mathematically and statistically adept still draw
unsupported conclusions of the kind Gottman is making.

What he has done apparently is shown that "there exists a set of
characteristics that can be used to separate these entities into two classes",
and then claimed "this set of characteristics is generalizable to all entities
of the same kind (marriages)".

The problem with this is that if you look at any collection of entities (up vs
down days in the stock market) and any reasonably large set of attributes of
those data (daily rainfall, previous day's trading volume, etc) you'll find a
way to separate the entities into two classes without much difficulty,
particularly if you allow combinations of factors into your classifier (N
attributes gives N*[N-1] pairs and so on, creating a combinatoric explosion of
possibilities, one of which is nearly certain to be "accurate" by chance
alone.

So he basically has nothing. No conclusion can be drawn from what he's done,
if the Slate article is correct.

------
hcarvalhoalves
Love is the territory of poets. To quote one who I think best described it's
paradoxical briefness:

    
    
            Above all, to my love I'll be attentive
    	first, and with such zeal, and always, and so much
    	that even when confronted by great enchantment
    	my thoughts ascend to more delight.
    
            I want to live it through in each vain moment
    	and in its honor I must spread my song
    	and laugh my laughter and shed my tears
    	to it's sadness or to it's enjoyment.
    
            And thus, when afterward comes looking for me
    	maybe the Death (anxiety of the living)
    	maybe the Loneliness (fate of the loving)
    
            I could say to myself about the love (I had):
    	let it not be immortal, since it is flame
    	but let it be infinite while it lasts.
    
            - Vinicius de Moraes ("Soneto Da Fidelidade", adapted to English by me)

~~~
pm90
Certainly noone better than poets can express or describe poetry, but by no
means is it their exclusive domain

------
alashley
I've always thought that kindness and generosity, while very important should
be coupled with being reasonable. I had a female roommate (I'm a guy) and I
don't recall us ever having any nasty fights or disagreements.

We lived together for almost a year, and our first time meeting was that
summer. Whenever one of us needed to discuss an issue, it was always in a
lighthearted way. "You know you did this, but it would be nice if we could
compromise on how [thing] is done." I don't think either of us ever dreaded
going home. In contrast to other people I've lived with, I hope that if/when I
marry it looks like that.

My point is that disagreements/conflict will happen, the important thing is to
remember that words and actions are powerful, so for any
friendship/relationship to last, its essential for both parties to be
reasonable about such things.

I know, easier said than done. But there are such people out there as I
learned.

~~~
testuser19
That is because she had little power over you.

Marry her and find out what a nightmare it becomes.

~~~
alashley
Doubt it. She's since met someone and they're really happy together. While I
don't know about the inner workings of their relationship, I do know that both
of them, individually tend not to sweat the small stuff.

------
pgt
There is some beautiful advice in this article, but a lot of it seems to be
correlation mistaken for causation, e.g. happy couples being kind to another -
do you expect unhappy couples to be kind to one another? Does being kind
_assure_ you will stay together, or are happy couples (who would stay together
anyway) just more likely to be kind?

That said, the openness expressed in this article reminds me strongly of
"making dialogue safe" in Crucial Conversations by Patterson et al. I highly
recommend that book and recently wrote a glowing review of it (it's on my
blog).

~~~
notdonspaulding
Agreed regarding the correlation being mistaken for causation in the article.
Although the correlations are still worth noticing.

Where it really impacts the articles credibility is when the author claims the
ability to predict relationships:

> By observing these types of interactions, Gottman can > predict with up to
> 94 percent certainty whether > couples—straight or gay, rich or poor,
> childless or not— > will be broken up, together and unhappy, or together and
> > happy several years later. Much of it comes down to the > spirit couples
> bring to the relationship. Do they bring > kindness and generosity; or
> contempt, criticism, and > hostility?

Really? 94 percent certainty? I'm willing to say that if you can do that,
people will pay you to tell them whether they're going to make it. I suspect
the "certainty" is only found when predicting the future of couples who have
been together for a few years and have developed these responsive behaviors
toward their partners. It's much less useful to be able to "predict" an
outcome after you're already committed to a course of action.

The value of being able to "predict" that a car is going to be a lemon
diminishes greatly if you can't make the prediction until the car has been
bought and driven 10,000 miles.

------
goblin89
I try to look at this logically.

It's known that in any communication you should have and remember an
objective—what you want to achieve as the result.

Sometimes this objective is immediate, which is the easiest case. Other times
it's more strategic, with long-term benefits—this one can be harder to keep in
mind. At minimum an objective can be as basic as “keeping good relationship
with”.

This objective _almost never_ involves pissing off another person. Having good
relationships, apart from everything else, helps you practically. It's
irrational to aim to piss off or let down another person. When that happens it
seems to be due to lost objective and uncontrolled thought process. (I'm
talking about personal relationships—things could be different, say, in
business situations.)

Keeping in mind your objective helps staying polite, positive and kind, but
requires certain mental resources. This could be easy for some people, while
from others more resources is required due to psychological issues (inner
fears, lack of self-confidence).

An especially difficult case, I find, is when another person initiates a
communication. Then I don't have an immediate objective in mind ready. I need
to spend some time recalling a long-term one. During that time I can be
accidentally rude and unkind (I guess I have my issues…), even to people close
to me. Sometimes I recall my objective only after the communication is
complete, to my regret.

I guess one part of the solution involves training myself to defer any
communication until I can recall my objective.

------
mjgoeke
On a related note, the book 'The Surprising Secrets of Highly Happy Marriages'
(author Shanti Feldhahn) independently found many of the same things mentioned
in the feature article.

Feldhahn takes a social statistics approach in developing her books. If I
recall correctly her work on this book is derivative of interviews and surveys
of ~1000 couples and dug deeper into the ones that both spouses rated their
marital happiness at the top of the scale.

------
noobhacker
It is true that we should answer spousal bids for attention -- but on the
other hand, we shouldn't base our emotional sanity solely on the response of
our spouses either. To expect that our spouses can respond to everything
inevitably leads to disappointment. For example, I may get terribly excited
about a piece of code I wrote, but I wouldn't fault my girlfriend for not
responding to my excitement. I guess the trick is to find the common things we
both get excited about while also maintaining hobbies and relationships
besides our own.

~~~
nybblet
I think the idea is that she should be excited that you're excited, and happy
that you're happy, not necessarily that she should be excited by the very code
you wrote. (That said, you would probably not mind if she "returned your bid"
or "opened a bid" by asking you what it did, how you came to it, and made an
effort to appreciate it with you. It would probably be less pleasant if every
time you got excited about some code you wrote, she just responded with an
indifferent "cool"\---if at all---while continuing to text her friends.)

Also, what exactly do you mean by your last sentence, specifically, "besides
our own"? If, as indicated above, the idea is that both partners are happy in
the other's happiness, and want to do the things that make their partners
happy, and are unhappy doing the things that make their partners unhappy, what
does it mean to "[maintain] hobbies and relationships besides [their] own"?
Many people maintain hobbies and relationships aside from those with their
partners such that they end up maintaining separation. Why is that necessarily
desireable?

------
danielweber
Halfway though, "assume good faith" seems like a key mantra here.

~~~
colanderman
That's a good mantra for life in general. Consider the subject expert, asked
by a layperson a question which betrays a lack of domain vocabulary. Many such
"experts" would assert the question to be a consequence of an inconsistent
mental model, and question the petitioner's right to challenge the "expert" in
the first place. These so-called "experts" who assume stupidity of the
uninformed are rude, caustic, unconstructive, and contribute little to the
human experience.

The true expert assumes an intelligent, albeit subject-ignorant, layperson. By
placing themselves in the mind of the layperson and attempting to form a
reasonable (if incorrect) mental model to fit the question asked, the expert
can then explain both proper terminology, and either answer the question, or
explain why it is ill-posed. These people help spread knowledge and are a boon
to society.

As an example, consider a student who challenges a teacher of Newtonian
physics to reconcile the Newtownian assertion that an object dropped while
moving will continue to move forward, with the folk-physics belief that the
object will fall where it is dropped. The caustic "expert" will simply assert
the student is misguided and should pay more attention when he or she drops
something. Perhaps perform some experiments and then get back to them.

The true expert will expend the small effort to understand that the student's
mental model is likely formed from examples of lightweight objects being
dropped at high velocities (e.g. a paper cup from a car), as any other common
scenario results in the object reaching the ground quickly enough that the
dropper has barely proceeded from his or her location. The true expert can
then explain that indeed the student's model is correct in such scenarios, due
to air resistance, and how these scenarios differ from the textbook's
frictionless spheres in a vacuum.

~~~
mortenjorck
A very nice illustration. I often played the part of the "bad expert" when I
was growing up, but I was able to get over it by asking myself the simple
question: What do I actually have to prove? I love learning things myself; why
should I deny someone else that joy of having a concept explained with empathy
and respect?

------
jqm
This was a good article.

But, I might point out, relationships are one thing, marriage is another. The
article started with one topic and then wandered off into the other. I highly
doubt people stayed together 70 years ago because they paid more attention to
each other. I think it was just socially and economically harder to divorce.

In addition, the recommendations are good, however it takes two people to
follow them. Having had a number of short term and long term girlfriends (the
current one for over 8 years, she may be the last, who knows....), I have
found there is such a thing as an attention vampire. People who have no
respect for your space or focus. People who think your entire existence is to
pay attention to them. And, I have found that there is no satisfying these
people and they will move right on to someone else as you inevitabley become
exhausted. So, I would speculate, in addition to the excellent points in the
article, that successful couples have reasonable, respectful, and most
importantly, compatible attention requirements.

Also, paradoxically, I found that paying too much attention to __some__ people
causes them to place less value on your attention. When they no longer value
your attention, they lose respect, and this causes a downhill slide in the
relationship as well. The article is, I believe, written from a female point
of view (can I say that? does it make me a bad sexist person?). It is a
valuable and beautiful point of view. But like most things in life, balance
and measure comes into play, and failing to recognize this leads to disaster
as surely as ignoring your partners needs does.

Just my thoughts. I didn't do a study.

------
kyberias
I wonder if these 'bids' mentioned in the article extend in our times of the
internet to sending and opening of links sent to the significant other. :)

~~~
rayiner
I think it definitely does. I feel a little let down when my content-free
g-chats of "hi!" go unanswered, and my wife admitted to me the other day that
she was upset I never opened the Youtube links she sends.

~~~
pm90
I agree. I tried a long-range relationship once, and this was absolutely
crucial to maintain it....until we stopped sharing and caring.

------
greggman
The article made a lot of leaps of logic. For instance the first example of
the husband saying "look at that beautiful bird outside". The conclusion in
the article was "be kind and interested". My conclusion was "be with someone
with similar interests so you'll most often than not naturally be interested
in what they have to say"

That's not to say you shouldn't always show interest in whatever. Just that it
seems like it would be easier with common interests. I'd love to know how
common interest correlates with successful long term relationships

------
cm2012
A really interesting study that someone posted on HN in the past, that was not
sponsored by an ideological organization and controlled for a host of
variables: [http://socialpathology.blogspot.com/2010/09/sexual-
partner-d...](http://socialpathology.blogspot.com/2010/09/sexual-partner-
divorce-risk.html)

It basically says that if you have a sexual partner besides your spouse before
you get married (at any point in your life) your chance of divorce more than
doubles. There are subsequent jumps with every additional pre-marital sexual
partner.

~~~
jarvist
No it doesn't. It's a crazy bigoted rant with an undercurrent of misogyny.
Just the fact that the original 'scientific' study only looked at women
implies that something is a bit dodge.

~~~
learc83
>No it doesn't. It's a crazy bigoted rant with an undercurrent of misogyny.

That blog article wasn't written by the study authors. Also what did you find
crazy and bigoted about it? I haven't read anything else on that site and the
author may be prone to "cray bigoted rants" (I have no idea), but that the
article in question seemed to be a fairly level headed reporting of findings
in a journal article that pretty closely matches the study's abstract. Maybe I
missed something?

>'scientific'

I don't know anything about the journal that published this study, but from a
quick google search it appeared to be an actual academic peer reviewed
journal, and the author is a professor of sociology at Western Washington
University who was the chair of the department at the time the study was
written. The data used in the study also seems to be readily available from
the CDC.

Why the scare quotes? Do you have any evidence that this study is invalid?

>study only looked at women implies that something is a bit dodge.

Many studies are limited in scope in a similar manner. How you can make that
claim that a study looking only at women implies that it's dodgy?

~~~
jarvist
Both the blog post and the grandfather comment refer to gender non-speciic
'people' whereas the paper abstract is clear that the only data collected is
on woman.

The figure in the blog post is completely spurious: the study does not analyse
the number of sexual partners of the women. Having now skimmed the paper, I
know that it splits women into 'sex only with husband' and 'sex with other',
and similar for cohabiting before marriage with 'husband' 'and or other'.

The black lines in the blog figure are a complete misuse of statistics. The
confidence interval from the Student's t-test is somehow (probably not
mathematically correct) extrapolated out to the simplistic decay exponential
and then integrated out to 10 years [why? who knows]. Yet the errors for the 1
partner only women are not similarly extrapolated. These confidence intervals
are mistakenly labelled as 'minimum' and 'maximum', as if they are limits,
rather than an approximation to quality of fit.

The green bars for the background of the plot are from an entirely different,
non peer-reviewed, study by a conservative thinktank.

Presenting data like this is scientifically misleading.

The blog post refers to the study author's choice of model as 'genius', when
it appears to me that it is nothing more than the regurgitation of age old
'truisms'.

The undercurrent of misogyny is in framing the hypothesis in terms of some
purity of idealised women hood, failing to attempt a similar analysis on the
men, and consistently using language that suggests that divorce is somehow the
'bad event' ('risks' of divorce rather than 'likelihoods', etc.) So my sense
after spending a few minutes reading both the comment + the blogpost was that
both of these were being written from a strange, almost certainly male and
politically conservative perspective, and were distorting the facts of a
(possibly dubious / flawed) paper to suit a women-hating, virgin-bride
celebrating, perspective.

>Many studies are limited in scope in a similar manner.

How can you suggest your study has predictive power when you don't compare it
against 50% of the population? Why was this study limited? Surely the dataset
would have been symmetric, or a similar dataset could have been found for men?

>Why the scare quotes?

Because I generally don't consider such 'social sciences' science. This is
post-facto reduction of an extremely small self-reported dataset, with no
attempt to form experiments or apply the models predictively to other
datasets. It's an ideal place for agenda-driven research. I expect single-
author papers, in this day and age, to be relatively unsafe. Doubly so when
they're written by departmental chairs.

------
colanderman
_they also kill their partner 's ability
[[http://pni.osumc.edu/KG%20Publications%20(pdf)/109.pdf](http://pni.osumc.edu/KG%20Publications%20\(pdf\)/109.pdf)]
to fight off viruses and cancers_

Woah. This is as interesting as the article itself.

------
hyp0
Are the comments here _active constructive_? Will it predict the life of the
relationship (HN)?

Can you criticize _active-constructively_ \- or will it be too indirect to
make the point?

------
good-citizen
this thing is a mobile app waiting to happen. everyone has trouble with the
four: passive destructive, active destructive, passive constructive, and
active constructive

------
mellisarob
well slow and steady wins the race is the formula to apply

------
andywood
Come on. Why are reporters employed again? Oh, right. Because most of us are
descended from rapers and pillagers, and so are the reporters. It's a great
big circle jerk of people disconnected from their own humanity. Like a biiiig
round prison for derelicts.

