A very popular topic on blogs is relationships, and Acculturated is no outlier. They are fun to talk about, everyone has opinions, and everyone has stories. What makes love work? Who should people marry? How do relationships stay happy? Like many of the other writers on Acculturated, I have written extensively on this topic, but none of us are exactly experts. So I thought it might be good to talk to someone who actually does this for a living – Ty Tashiro, author of the new book: The Science of Happily Ever After.
In this book Dr. Tashiro draws on hundreds of studies from the social sciences to examine how people fall in love and can live happily ever after. It is not preachy or a how to guide, but presents research findings in an easy to read fashion and allows readers to ponder how it applies to their own lives. I was fortunate to have Dr. Tashiro as a professor in graduate school at the University of Maryland. When he took a new job, I was actually asked to take over his interpersonal relationships undergraduate class. This was definitely no easy task getting handed the baton from someone who had just won professor of the year.
Upon learning of his new book, I decided to interview Dr. Tashiro, asking him several questions about romantic relationships.
1. It seems like it is a good idea for people to lower their expectations in choosing their long term partner. But how do you do this while avoiding potential feelings or resentment over settling?
That’s a great question and an interesting conundrum…Should you settle for “good enough” or shoot for the stars with the realization that you might never find that person? I think you can do a bit of both. Most people wish for too many traits or characteristics in their ideal partner and end up getting little of what is really important for long-term relationship success. In The Science of Happily Ever After, I suggest that people are better off prioritizing the three most important characteristics in an ideal mate and then being very intent on getting those characteristics.
So, you’re not settling on the traits that are most important to you, but it requires letting go of the unrealistic expectation that a partner will be your EVERYTHING. That expectation of partners being perfect or ideal often leads to further problems down the road when people realize that someone they idealized has flaws. Although that sounds like common sense, it happens all the time.
2. You talk about having three – and only three – wishes in a future partner. Obviously having some wishes are better than others in terms of long term success (e.g., it’s better to wish for someone who is empathic then someone who is tall). With this idea in mind, what do you feel are “the best” three wishes to have? Or perhaps put another way, if you had a child and wanted them to have the best chance for long term success, what are the three things you would tell them to wish for?
Although I begin with this premise of prioritizing three wishes for the ideal partner, I should also mention that people will get far more than three great traits in a partner, unless they manage to choose someone who is an abnormally abysmal partner. Just by probability, people will get “lucky” and get additional traits they wanted or surprises they never even considered. That being said, there is a vast amount of research that can inform what people can wish for in a partner that significantly improves their odds of finding satisfying and stable relationships. I won’t give it all away here, but in The Science of Happily Ever After I explain how nine different characteristics or wishes can improve people’s odds of finding enduring love.
For example, sometimes we date people who are very fun, spontaneous, and exciting. Often, these enthralling partners also get very absorbed in the relationship and into you, which can feel pretty good to have someone so head over heels for you. However, psychologists would categorize this type of person as someone high in “novelty seeking”, which is also associated with some less than desirable outcomes. Novelty seekers get bored more quickly with things, which means that they will get bored with you. They are also impulsive, which is associated with things like cheating, substance abuse, and a host of other negative outcomes. So, there’s an example of a trait that seems very desirable at first, but then morphs into something that can sabotage long-term satisfaction and stability in a relationship.
If you want a positive example, nice guys sometimes get a bad rap and so do nice girls. Imagine that you take out a new partner to meet your friends and at the end of the night when you ask them what they think, they say that he or she was “nice”. It’s almost taken as an insult, that the partner is boring or doesn’t bring anything “interesting” to the table. However, agreeableness is a personality trait that is predictive of many positive relationship outcomes, including empathy, altruism, and kindness, which is exactly the kind of thing that pays off over the long-run in a relationship. Once again, people might say that this is common sense, but people will wish for looks or money ahead of agreeableness when you actually watch how they select partners.
3. Building on that a little bit, how would your advice be similar and different for people choosing long term partners in their 20’s versus in their 30’s or 40’s?
I guess if the goal is the same, choosing a long-term partner, then my advice would not differ for people in their 20s versus 30s or 40s. However, it’s increasingly the case that singles in their 20s are less likely to be looking for a long-term relationship than people who are older. If someone is in their 20s and is not intent on finding a long-term partner, then I think that’s totally fine. However, as Meg Jay points out in a great TED Talk, it’s probably best not to view the 20s as “throwaway” years and that goes for relationships too. Just because a relationship is short-term does not mean that people should tolerate bad behavior from their partners. In my view, 20-somethings can let their standards slide and shift their views that unacceptable relationships behaviors are alright, which can establish bad habits that carry over to selecting a “real” partner. Just as bad, they end up marrying the sub-par partner from their 20s just because that’s who is around. Sorry, got a little fired up there… If someone is not ready for an “ever after’, then have fun, but also stay intent on learning useful things about the many good things that one could wish for in potential partners. That requires dating people who have good traits and who treat the relationship with some respect.
4. OK, thinking a little bit about how all this functions in practice brought me to this question. It seems clear to me through your book and a lot of research that making relationships last and be happy is hard work, that you want to limit the things you ask for in a long term partner, and that initial chemistry is unrelated to long term success. For people who don’t think this way, how do you convince them?
As a quick side note, just because I get this question about chemistry a lot in live interviews, I think that there needs to be some chemistry or physical attraction. Although it’s generally unrelated to long-term relationship outcomes, I do think that without it people could be in a tough spot. As I say in The Science of Happily Ever After, “kissing your partner should not feel like eating your vegetables.”
Your question is a great one and something that has been a philosophical point of deliberation for me. Slate ran an article last week and the author concluded that she didn’t believe that people’s reason and intellect could successfully battle whatever destructive tendencies they might have when it comes to love. I thought that her argument was fair because empirically we don’t know whether people will use the information we give them to actually improve their partner selection. It’s like when people knew that smoking was really bad for them for decades and yet people kept on smoking nonetheless.
My take on it is this. I don’t think that you can often convince someone of a stance in matters of love. Most people don’t like to be told what to do and my experience has been that that’s particularly true when it comes to their love lives. So unlike a lot of other dating books out there, I went with the notion of just giving people the best research findings available, putting it into a structure that was straightforward and digestible, and then hoping that people who really wanted to make better choices could use that information to make their own decisions about how to wish wisely.
5. We all know that people in happy romantic relationships are the happiest people. I am wondering if it is possible though to be extremely happy without a romantic partner, perhaps substituting with other relationships like friends, family, or even pets. Or do you find that a romantic relationship will always add something unique?
You make a good point about some of the well-being data and marriage. Some of that work breaks it down into different types of marriages and they find that although people who are married tend to be happier than people who are not married, this is not universally true. As I understand the data, people who are in high conflict marriages or who end up divorcing show lower levels of happiness than people who are single. While that seems obvious, I think that people can settle on a less than ideal partner while thinking, “Well, it’s better than nothing…” and the research would suggest that’s not always true.
In my opinion, I think that we’re at an interesting juncture with the institution of marriage in our society. As I discuss in The Science of Happily Ever After, the mere fact that we live much longer than we used to makes mating decisions more compacted in some ways. I think that it’s easier now to be very happy by having a rich network of relationship besides a marital partner, but then there’s the issue of sex. There’s some people who can sustain themselves on hookup sex, but it looks to me like most studies find that a lot of hookup sex is associated with lower psychological well-being. That’s where it gets tricky in my opinion.
6. Being a counseling psychologist, I am always drawn to the personal aspects of what people do. As such I am curious, how has being a relationship expert affected your own romantic life?
Studying relationships has influenced my life in the sense that it’s given me a topic that I feel passionate about and provides me with something that I find so intellectually challenging that it brings me sheer joy just to wrestle with these big questions. I think that it’s helped me understand myself, the traits I have that can strengthen a relationship, but also the traits that are liabilities and what I need to do to mitigate their potential effects. Although the intellectual reward has been tremendous and the research has helped give me some structure to think about my own relationships, I should also say that one can easily overthink love and that one of the best points of growth I’ve had is to understand that relationships will always be a balancing act between the head and the heart.
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