I’m sorting out my nineth month of foundation projects for the year. The focus of this month is on connection – improving the closest relationships in your life. As part of my efforts this month, I read seven books on the subject, including one textbook.
For those interested, here is my previous reading list of fitness, productivity, money, food, reading, outreach, sleep and reflection.
1 minute summary I learned
Relationships are important. Not only is relationships one of the best predictors of happiness and well-being (married people are happier on average than singles), but they are important to your health. Bad relationships are associated with poor health, and social isolation is just as bad as smoking every day.
How do you build a good relationship?
- Good genes help. Personality is related to good relationships. People agree that people with lower neuroticism and higher conscience perform better. And, of course, personality is at least moderately inherited.
- Stay positive. When the ratio of positive to negative is at least 5:1, the marriage is successful.
- Keep losing your temper. It’s a myth, you need to “spread steam”. Expressing anger can often make you more angry. It is better to collect yourself before participating than to respond out of anger.
- But avoiding conflict is not good either. All relationships have conflicts, but it seems that how to manage these conflicts is more important than the conflict itself.
Notes of 7 books I read
1. You’re not listening to Kate Murphy
Our culture is biased. We present awards to the best speakers, those with the fastest wit and the sharpest arguments. By contrast, listening is almost completely without our efforts to improve communication.
Murphy proved that this was seriously misleading. We need to listen more and better. However, what is needed is not a special skill or technology – we already know how listen. Instead, we need to find motivations to really understand what people are talking about, not just trying to project our own thoughts and motivations.
2. Sherry Turks’ Retraction Dialogue
Turkle sued our modern technological environment to undermine our ability to communicate in real life. Young people feel unable to talk over the phone, worrying about the improvisational nature of conversations that won’t happen on the text. The family claimed the dining table was a “phone-free zone”, but the parents pulled out the equipment at the first empty moment. AI chatbots use Sycophantic Simulacra instead of real friends.
Twenty years ago, when I started writing online, it was easy to feel optimistic about the role of technology in enhancing communication. Today, it is hard not to become a pessimist. It turns out that while technology has enabled some new virtues (video calls are a real improvement for long-distance friends and family), it mainly exacerbates our vices.
3. Why did marriage succeed or fail? John Gottman
Everyone claims to know the secret to a successful marriage, but few have data. Gotman did it.
Gottman has studied couples for decades, bringing them into a lab environment to re-engage the recent conflict while capturing the details of their interaction. He found that there are three “stable” styles of relationship conflict: validators (compromise and discussion), passion (they are stronger but stronger) and avoiders (they are more willing to let sleeping dogs lie).
His research found that the key variable in marital lifespan is the ratio of positive to negative. Couples with a positive rate of at least 5:1 are most likely to get married. His team also has an impressive track to predict marriage success, with a 94% success rate in anticipation of future divorces.
In addition to staying motivated, avoid encountering four knights in relationships: criticism (critics, not situations), defensiveness, contempt (titles and verbal attacks are intended to hurt), and stone walls.
4. Roland Miller’s Intimacy
This is my textbook of that month. Data on relationships is broad and often counterintuitive. For example:
- People who live together before marriage are more likely to divorce later.
- Those who got married experienced a bumpy bump, but a few years later, the bumpy bump returned to baseline.
- Research has found that marriages tend to fail when people have unrealistic expectations about marriage (for example, the intensity of expectation of initial passion remains high forever).
- Despite stereotypes, men tend to be more romantic in their beliefs about relationships, more likely to fall in love at first sight, and less likely to compromise their passion for practicality.
- Playing hard doesn’t work. Both men and women prefer a partner who is interested in them (only them).
Most of the data here describes relationships rather than providing useful advice for building better relationships. But descriptive statistics are often underestimated – if you don’t even know what is typical, you won’t be able to advise.
5. Esther Perel imprisons mating
Sex therapist Esther Perel asked about the long time that sex was still hot after being combined. Overall, her answer is… maybe?
Despite her ambiguity, I found the book interesting portraits of her clients: those who feel they have a good relationship but are not satisfied with their sex life. Perel believes that the mistakes in modern relationship counseling are assumptions that if a couple communicates simply, sexual dysfunction will be resolved automatically. Instead, good sex life depends on psychological separation and intimacy.
Overall, I found it difficult to connect with many of Perel’s clients, not to mention the many tentative suggestions she discussed – having your spouse visit, but keeping together or agreeing to an unmarried partner seems to be a high-risk dick just to be a bit seasoned in the bedroom.
6. Marshall Rosenberg’s non-violent exchange
Rosenberg believes that much of our communication is essentially “violent”. We threaten, cajole, criticize, attack and hurt each other with our words. He proposed a way of communication that expresses our feelings while also being responsible for them. By being understanding and conveying our needs (not demands), we are more likely to get what we want from others.
I must admit that I was a little skeptical when I heard this book, but the detailed example of the method won me. Saying things like “It bothers me when you’re late” sounds harmless, but it puts another person in a defensive state. Rosenberg’s prescription is to express your feelings while also taking responsibility for them. “I feel very annoying because I expect you to be earlier than you,” it does improve.
7. New Psychology of Love by Robert Sternberg and Karen Weis
I didn’t manage to complete the entire volume because it’s more theoretical than useful.
The book is largely about different theories of love, from explanations of the origin of love to the theory that constitutes love. The basic conclusion is that love is universal throughout the culture, evolutionarily adaptive, and has multiple components (love/attachment/sex, passion/intimacy/intimacy/commitment), although researchers cannot fully agree with which one.
*8. Sam Peltzman’s Happy Marriage Anatomy
OK, technically it’s a paper, not a book, but I found it so interesting that I just need to include it here.
Economist Sam Peltzman studied data from the General Social Survey of the United States, including a question asking people how happy they are. Those married people enjoy a strong advantage of happiness compared to those who are unmarried. The difference is not trivial: Married people in one of the poorest 10% of households (total household incomes of less than $19,000 per year) need to earn more than $200,000 per year to make up for the happiness penalty for being single.
The premium of marriage happiness is powerfully good for all ways you can cut into data. Living together also increases happiness (but not as good as getting married). When you control age, gender, income, race, education, whether you are gay or blunt, the marriage premium won’t go away even if your marriage is gender-free.
The simple conclusion is that getting married may be the first thing you can do to improve your happiness. But the correlation is not a causal relationship. Indeed, from Intimate relationship The arrows that suggest causality may be reversed – after marriage, people don’t seem to get much permanent happiness.
Instead, a more reasonable (although disappointing) meaning is that happy people are more likely to get married and get married. Still, I found this study refreshing, an antidote to numerous cliches, which is the cause of pain – the final data suggests that those with partners are happier than their single peers.
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It’s my reading. In the next post, I will share a month of personal thoughts, focusing on connections.
