Stan Tatkin I sure am.

Stan Tatkin Well, we could say that at the bottom of most trouble that relationships encounter is the matter of threat and I’m not talking about big teeth threat like the abusive relationships where there’s physical abuse. It’s about so much small teeth threat, which is what we what we all deal with the day in and day out as we sort of bump into each other and we fight. It’s about how people fight, what they do in sort of the trenches together in terms of making each other feel absolutely unequivocally safe and secure. That is where the key, I think. There are other things like being able to co-generate excitement, how to stay in love, exciting love, and quiet love. All of those things are very important but if a couple can’t be safe, a couple can’t manage or co-manage the stress in a way that shortens it and attenuates it, dampens it down and takes it off the table, then, their relationship will eventually I think be in trouble because that is a huge part of our human nature. Such couples shall stay more focus on how to stay in love. Sweeping the environment for threat and responding to threat and here I mean, faces, voices, movement, gestures, postures, and dangerous words and phrases.

Stan Tatkin First of all, I have to mention that when we come into a relationship and we start to feel committed to another person, a memory system gets activated and this memory system we call Procedural Memory that teaches you how to stay in love. It contains every experience particularly positive, negative, and emotional experiences we’ve had with anybody we depended on going all the way back to our earliest relationship with our mother. So, the unresolved experiences related to dependency will come to the fore as soon as we commit to another person. So we’re not just dealing with that relationship and that particular person, we’re dealing with everybody that came before and that goes in both directions. If people don’t understand that this is natural, that this is supposed to happen but then, they could run into trouble. For instance, I’m not your mother. Don’t project on me. But the thing is these relationships are almost totally projective especially in the beginning. Who else are you going to project onto except for the person who is here and now. So, that’s a normal thing but a lot of people have trouble with the idea that they’re bringing in memories from past experiences into the relationship and that is going to come up as soon as people start to depend on each other. That’s one. The other is this matter of being fully in. We know that relationships where one person or both people are not fully in, its so hard to teach one another how to stay in love, those relationships are by definition more threatening because we want to eventually feel that we can take certain things off the table, that are resource draining such as, “Will this relationship exist tomorrow?” After a period of time, let’s say maybe 2 years tops, that should be taken off the table or people should break up. Let’s say it’s not taken off the table and they’re not breaking up. This idea that there is sort of an underlying threat to the relationship continuing because one or both people, when they get into a fight say something like, “I don’t know if I can do this anymore,” or “I don’t know if I love you,” or “I’m not so sure about you yet,” and this causes a lot of damage and a lot of unsettling on a day to day basis. I am really wondering how to stay in love in such relationships. We know from studying babies and children that when the relationship itself is insecure, in other words, the baby can’t depend fully on this caregiver, their attention goes out the window. Their ability to focus and concentrate and even balance their body is impaired to compromise and it wreaks havoc on the health of the body. So, people have to understand that there is a safety and a freedom to strapping yourself in for the ride and committing, going all in, and putting all your money on this other person that you’re going to pair bond with. It’s hard for many people because I think some folks, depending on their background, they think that if I fully go all in, I’m trapped, I’ll lose my freedom, I’ll lose my independence, I’ll lose my stuff, and it’s actually the opposite.

Stan Tatkin We begin to be ourselves within the confines of the agreement or the commitment that we’ve made. There is a tremendous amount of resources that are released as a result of this but the opposite is true. If people are not fully in, if they don’t strap themselves completely in for the ride, they will be afraid to fight because anything they do can and probably will trigger some kind of threat to the relationship. They’re basically hobbling themselves in creating a stressful situation that being in a relationship is supposed to actually resolve. So, one of the biggest problems going into a relationship is the matter of really fully being all in that really helps to know how to stay in love. Unfortunately, a lot of people that I see in my practice, whether it’s 3 years or 30 years, oftentimes, there’s one person who’s wavering still and it’s so much hard in order to learn how to stay in love in such kind of relationships.

Stan Tatkin Yes or committed to it and then later said, “I wasn’t that sure” or “I was sort of forced into it.” People do a lot of things that raise profound doubt in the other person and that creates a very bad situation where people are found to be auditioning for too long where they’re constantly under this threat that the relationship may not exist tomorrow. They are in continuous search to find the answer to the unique question how to stay in love in such case. What people don’t understand is that nobody acts normal under those conditions when people are worried about the foundation, the ground that they stand on in that it’s not stable. They act very strangely and if somebody’s wanting their partner to perform better, that would not be the way to do it. We only do really well when we’re believed in, when our partner puts everything onto us in a good way. Puts all their money on to us and ensures that we feel great about ourselves. That’s what we do for each other. We make each other feel great about each other, we lift each other up, we’re the best things since sliced turkey and if we didn’t do that, if we don’t do that, if I look at you and say, “I’m not so sure about you. You underperform for me.” And so, nothing about it makes sense. One of the most self-harming things people can do in a relationship is to throw doubt as to whether the relationship should exist. In a doubtful relationship, couples always ponder about how to stay in love.

Stan Tatkin By being available to say it, express it, and show it whenever necessary, “I will never leave you. I may be angry with you and you want to wring your neck but I’m not leaving and you’re not leaving. We’re going to do this.” This is the perfect answer to your question, how to stay in love. There are things that both partners have to do because they’re stewards of this couple bubble that they’re creating, the third entity. The relationship that provides them shelter and resources allows them to be unafraid in the world and it starts with being unafraid at home. If a couple is afraid at home, then it ruins the whole idea of being coupled. What do you need that for if you could hire someone to do most things that another partner does? Let’s say in a relationship, you and I are willing to do things for each other that nobody is willing to do for us even if paid because it takes too much time and effort. For instances that I have to know you better than I know myself even that I become a Luis whisperer and you become a Stan whisperer.

Stan Tatkin Okay, good! And you wanted to go in both directions because if you look at this in a realistic way, the two of you are creating an agreement, a bond, or a union to survive the world. This is how to stay in love. Basically, to take care of each other, to have each other’s backs because we assume that only the two of you are really going to care that much.

Stan Tatkin I just clear my throat.

Stan Tatkin Yeah, your suggestion is so suggestible. Love your idea about how to stay in love.

Stan Tatkin She whispers, “Get your ass out of bed”.

Stan Tatkin Definitely. Yeah, it is.

Stan Tatkin Yes, and some of those successful couples learned by putting their hand on the stove.

Stan Tatkin Right. So, many of my successful couples actually did do that at some point and then they knew, without being in therapy, they knew to stop it, “Let’s not do that.” So it is a major issue and I think it comes from people’s backgrounds. People coming from insecure attachments and cultures where relationships didn’t come first are more gun-shy than others, more hesitant about commitment, more fearful about dependency, and more likely to do things like threaten the relationship. Such couples have to make extra efforts to know how to stay in love. So, I think people who understand as secure functioning from the gecko, which means that they’re engaged in a system that’s fully mutual and collaborative and they’re committed to maintaining a safe and secure environment, they tend to know better not to do that because they have an idea that that’s not going to work out for them very well. But it’s the people who have been hurt in the past, people who are afraid that if I depend on somebody, something so life-threatening to me is going to happen again that I had to do something to protect myself. This is when there’s a lot of trouble and couples have a decision fatigue how to stay in love. People who are insecure on the clinging side and afraid of abandonment, do a lot of pushing and pulling. Pushing away, pulling toward, and pushing away. Their ambivalence comes up when they start to feel good. They start to feel good in their body. Their memory tells them, “Another shoe is about to drop,” and so, they sort of foreclose on it happening to them by doing it and pushing their partner away. People in the distancing side we’ll be so afraid of having their independence and autonomy being stolen including their stuff by the way. They have their things. They’re worried about their things being taken that they do a lot of distancing, a lot of pushing away but both sides are equally good at threatening the end of the relationship and as soon as we have to settle these people down and teach them how to work with each other in order to start to feel safer.

Stan Tatkin Right. Before I answer your question, I feel the same way about my wife Tracy. I was much more of an island before I met her and she brought me in much further into this secure area. So, I think this happens with us. We find somebody who’s not terribly far away from where we are, who’s massively insecure as not unlikely to meet somebody or to be met with, who is really dead center secure. However, we get somebody who’s closer to it than we are and we can be pulled into secure functioning by that person. Also, it must be said too that the opposite can happen that we can be pulled out of it as well by somebody who is more dominant in the relationship and is more insecure. That can happen as well. We generally call that a folie à deux in someone’s sense where the stronger person is the one who is more unstable and can pull both partners into that but generally speaking, in no either way and of course, we much prefer the ones the way that we’re talking about, which is being pulled more into security with our partner.

Stan Tatkin Harville’s a friend and I’m very familiar with Imago and his idea that one of the purposes of relationship is to heal each other and how to stay in love, I agree with that. I agree that that’s one of the reasons we could think about a relationship and soon, I agree that I think all three of us agree. We’re part of a relationship’s first group but my view is even a little bit more basic. That is there’s biological need to pair bond. Not just to protect offspring but to protect the pair. We see this in many mammals. Not all but many mammals. That they’ll pair bond as a way to protect each other from the environment, from predators and I think it gets more down to the nitty-gritty of what is our nature and why do this thing other than we have a biological need for love. We need for love, we need for sexual intimacy, and all of that. However, we also need to be safe and when you look at people who do this really well, they form this couple bubble and they truly know how to stay in love. They’re in the foxhole together. They protect each other. It’s not so much about healing childhoods, or whether they have found their soulmate, or whether they’re still attracted to each other or sexually turned on to each other. It’s much more fundamental than that. So, we see street people, many of which are mentally ill and as crazy as they are to the outside world, when you watch many of these couples that are homeless, they’re doing secure functioning. They know everything about each other and they know how to stay in love. They understand each other. They take each other as they are. They know how to protect each other, have each other’s backs, and would die for each other. We see this with navy seals. Although the system demands they have that kind of ethic, that kind of vision, that your life is not so important. Your partner’s life or your buddy’s life, they’re important and everyone is protecting each other. I’d put my life at stake because I can’t bear to see you be hurt in the battlefield. We see that with cop car partners, the union that they create because they have to survive together in the environment. Therefore, I think culturally, we need something that’s grounding like that.

Stan Tatkin If it’s done right, it helps us to thrive and become more developed, better people, better citizens, more creative, more productive, more successful, better parents. We pair bond to survive the environment and to survive time because we’re moving through time together and there all this things coming down the road that we don’t even know but we know not all of them are great. Do we have a partner? Do we know how to stay in love? Do we have somebody that we can depend on that we can navigate through those times as a way to feel tethered, to feel connected, and to feel safer in the world? And that’s kind of lost. There’s no message in our culture that’s really driving that home to people. That’s what we’re trying to do but it’s an uphill battle.

Stan Tatkin Well, I think it’s true. We live in a very addictive time. There is this 24 hour new cycle and electronics. I’ve always been big on electronics and I was always the first to doctor. There’s no way I could be a first to doctor today. Everything is changing so quickly. There are so many shiny objects to look at and to get excited about. There are so many distractions that I think it is very hard for people to find each other and stay for a time without getting distracted. That’s a problem I think for me, for Tracy, for everybody right now. We’re not talking about spending hours of having deep talks about a relationship. That shouldn’t happen anyway. We’re using each other to resource ourselves, to regenerate, and to be present. There’s nothing like looking into the eyes of another person and to force yourself to be very present. It is about as real time as we can get because the brain actually has a lag time. Our sense of real time isn’t really real time. There’s a delay but it’s the closest we can get. Also, the eyes are so fundamental to falling in love. This is where we fall in love. It’s through the eyes and the face. The people are depriving themselves of a regenerating of a kind of feeling of love and sometimes infatuation by just spending time face to face, eye to eye, and skin to skin too. But skin to skin alone is not the thing. There are a lot of people who do that but they don’t connect. We’re talking about the eyes and just being together or creating novelty together. The brain loves novelty and of course, we can’t have that in our partner because that ship sailed after we automated them. They’re novel in the beginning and then our brain automates everything that’s new and makes it old. So that can happen but with the way we stir up novelty is by doing novel things together. You and Luis were talking about traveling the world. Through third things that we co-create, we can constantly regenerate that feeling of exciting love, which is the addictive and the dopaminergic kind, by just understanding the nature of relationship and understanding how we can co-generate these states. We can do a lot with relationship in terms of changing our inner state. But again, most people don’t know that. A lot of people are afraid of that. They don’t trust that and so, they go to their own devices as a way to change their internal state. Video games, pornography, drugs, alcohol, whatever it work. These things were intended to happen in a relationship but people have become so fractured and the culture has become so alive with distraction that I think it’s a hard sell for people but if people would just do it and try it, they’d understand I think what we’re talking about.

Stan Tatkin She’s another dear friend. Both Tracy and I love her.

Stan Tatkin What you’re saying is extremely important. There are a lot of people out there who take this idea of novelty, novelty in how to stay in love and they take it into their own world view. What they’re doing is instead of jointly and attending to something new, they’re doing parallel play. Parallel play is where you’re both maybe in the same room even doing the same activity but you’re not using it as a way to jointly attend to it to create an amplification effect between these two brains which does not contribute to how to stay in love. We’re just basically drooling in our own worlds, on our separate tracks, and that’s not what we’re talking about here or they’re doing something that we call Auto regulatory. Auto-regulation is a strategy of self-care but it’s strictly restricted to self-stimulation and self-soothing. No person is really required. And, that’s not what we’re talking about either. We’re talking about two people using the environment to amplify each other and not just simply themselves because you get much more dopamine, you get much more of a surge when you’re using it together than you do if you use it alone. It amazes me how many people don’t know this. I’ll talk to couples about how to stay in love and they’ll go on this romantic trips and I ask them, “When you look at this Eiffel tower or whatever it is you’re looking at, you look at each other, right? You looked at each other, you said “Oh God! I’m so in love with you. I’m so happy I’m with you.” You did that, right?” No, they don’t. It didn’t occur to them to do this. They’re on their own separate tracks and join this thing and they’re not using it at all for the relationship. I think some of this is what you see in your family of origin and some of this has to be learned. Here’s another example by the way Luis. We don’t have a term for this yet but let’s say I am personally excited about something. Let’s say my new computer arrived and I’m so excited about everything it does. If I call Tracy and said, “Oh, honey, you got to see what my computer is doing.” That’s a problem because I’m asking her to basically externally regulate me. I’m asking her to come to see my computer. It’s not for her, it’s just for me. But if I were to use that excitement and I feel so excited about my new computer and I call her up and I just use that excitement in a way that she can use it, “Honey, I love you so much,” “You’re the best,” or “I’m so proud of you,” whatever it is but I’m using that personal excitement to throw it to her in a way that we both can use and amplify. That’s another trick I think most people don’t understand. It’s the use of personal excitement or personal relief in those moments to throw that to your partner for that mutual amplification effect where we both get high not just one person that assist in knowing how to stay in love with each other. Forever a hunting and gather, I’d go out and I’d leave my family and I come back every day fatter than the next and I’d say, “I got nothing”. That’s because I’m eating everything out there and I’ll bring it back to home for us to share. It’s kind of a same thing. So there’s all this ways that people could be using novelty. And here’s another thing. People can play many times if they don’t have anything in common anymore.

Stan Tatkin Yeah. It’s supposed to stay. You and I are supposed to have the same interests Kamala and we’re supposed to want to do the same things at the same time. No, that’s in courtship. After that, we’re two separate brains that chances of us wanting to do the same thing at the same time are about, what? No. People don’t understand that they could co-create at any time by starting something new. Instead of bringing you into my tennis game, we take a cooking class together. We do something that neither of us knows anything about. And that’s how we get back on track and use the third thing to amplify each other, something exciting, something novel and there’s only a million of those things out there, right? It’s not hard to find something we both could learn to do that we both don’t know how to do.

Stan Tatkin I wish that we could launch some kind of messaging, especially now in terms of how to really do relationships. The world needs it. We need it right now in terms of learning how to get along with people, learning how to influence people, learning how to use attraction to get what we want, not fear, threat or guilt, learning how to work collaboratively. Somehow to battle the message that is been out there and still out there, you got to do this on your own. You got to love yourself before you could love another. You have to be self-made. You don’t need anybody else. We have a lot of work to do to change the messaging in our culture and it’s the messaging that’s causing a lot of trouble for us. If people are inspired by what we’re talking about, inspire other people about this idea of secure functioning being in the foxhole together. You can tell it. I don’t talk about my business. My business is not something that I do and I think it’s fairly successful as a channel but for the most part, I don’t want to become the wealthiest guy that nobody likes. Mere being wealthy is not the key to success. I don’t want to become the guy that got too busy making a living that I forgot to make a life. There are all these puns that I can just keep going with in terms I don’t want to be the richest guy in the graveyard. That’s the life that I want to stay away from and I define the key to success on my own terms. I might not be the wealthiest guy that you’ve ever meet but my hope is to become one of the most successful people you’ve ever meet.

Stan Tatkin May I say one more thing. Is it okay?

Stan Tatkin We have PACT institute. PACT institute is the approach I’m talking about. We train therapists all over the world and certainly throughout the country. If people are interested, those who are mental health professionals and want to learn psychobiological approach to couple therapy, then go to the thepactinstitute.com and there, you’ll also find out about our couple’s retreats as well.