Jacqui and I are also producing some short YouTube vids with our wonderful colleagues the Open University pulling out some of the main themes from the book. I’ll be posting those up here as they become available, starting on Valentine’s Day of course.

Meanwhile here’s a Q&A with me about the book.

How did The Secrets of Enduring Love happen?

Jacqui and her OU colleagues did the Enduring Love? project over the last few years. They studied how long-term relationships work with a major survey and in-depth interviews.

I was involved in the project in a small way, particularly in relation to public engagement. As part of that we decided to look into the possibility of a self-help style book based on the research findings. Penguin RandomHouse got interested, and that’s how the idea for the book came about.

Jacqui and her co-author Janet Fink published an academic book about the project Couple Relationships in the 21st Century last year. At the same time, I started work on pulling together some of the ideas from that book – and from the various reports of the study – into a book for the general public, including lots of extra quotes from the people who were involved in the research. Jacqui and I bounced this back and forth between us till we were both happy. Then our editors at the publishers helped us to polish it up into the final book, with all of their expertise about what readers are looking for.

What’s the book all about?

I guess the big idea is that the experts on long-term relationships are the people who’re in them. The Enduring Love? study wanted to find out what folk actually did, on an everyday level, to sustain their relationships.

A lot of relationship self-help books don’t really draw on the research evidence about relationships, so we wanted to put that at the heart of our book: both the Enduring Love? study, and other research that has been conducted on relationships, from across psychology and sociology. However research findings can be a little dry so we also wanted to bring them to life with loads of real-world examples from the people who took part in the study, as well as activities for readers to try themselves – if they wanted to. I particularly enjoyed creating a few magazine-style quizzes for the book (mostly A, mostly B kind of thing)!

We divided the book up into chapters about the main themes that came out of the research. So we start with everyday kindness and the role of thoughtful gestures in sustaining relationships. Then we cover different living situations and how they impact people’s experiences. After that we look at communication and how things like laughter, silence, and bickering are important in people’s relationships. Then we consider the role of sex and physical affection. Following that we cover how our relationships are supported and sustained by ‘third elements’ like other people, religious beliefs, pets, and leisure pursuits. Finally we finish the book by thinking about how we tell the stories of our relationships to ourselves and to others, and the role of different kinds of love.

What are the key messages in the book?

Perhaps the main one is that different things work for different people, and at different times in their relationships. Again we try to challenge the common relationship self-help message that there are any ‘one-size-fits-all’ solutions to making relationships work. Instead we spend a lot of time exploring the diversity of ways in which people manage their relationships, and helping readers to figure out what works for them.

Another big message is that it’s often the small stuff that’s important. People put a lot of emphasis on everyday messages of affection, cuddles in front of the TV, or having a laugh together. There was far less emphasis on grand romantic gestures, big declarations of love, or swinging from the chandeliers style sex.

Are you saying that people should try to make relationships last in this book?

Definitely not. We make it clear in the introduction that the common idea that ‘successful’ relationships are those who last a long time is problematic and pressurising. Many successful relationships are more fleeting, or are those in which the people involved recognise when it’s time to end – or change – the relationship.

Also, of course, many people choose not to have relationships in the way we often understand them: romantic partners who live together and share large parts of their lives. There’s a lot in the book about how people are doing their relationships in increasingly diverse ways and how helpful that can be in lifting the pressure to fit a limited model of what a relationship looks like.

We like the idea that ‘enduring love’ has a double meaning: it can mean love that lasts, and it can also mean surviving – or enduring – the ups and downs of love relationships. We try to make it clear that relationships of all kinds are immensely challenging at times, and to help readers to explore different ways of navigating the inevitable changes and fluctuations in relationships over time.

Is this book just for people in fairly normative long-term relationships?

I hope that anybody could pick up this book and find it helpful. The Enduring Love? study focused on people in long-term partner relationships, but there was a lot of diversity in what they meant by ‘long-term’, and also in the kind of relationships that they had. Jacqui and her colleagues deliberately included relationships that were monogamous and non-monogamous, same-sex and different-sex, sexual and non-sexual, living apart and living together, as well as people across different ages, generations, classes, and cultural backgrounds.

We were also mindful, when writing, of readers who might currently be single, or in relationships with more than one person, or who might never want a partner in the conventional sense. We tried to make all of the activities applicable to everyone. And pretty much all of the ideas we cover are equally applicable to close friendships, family, and other kinds of relationships. I’d love it if readers didn’t stop with applying the ideas – like everyday kindness, physical intimacy, and open communication – to their partner relationships, but also reflected on how they might apply to all of their relationships.

How is this book different to your other relationship book – Rewriting the Rules?

I think the main difference is that this book has lots more examples in it, so that you can actually read about how other people are navigating their relationships and doing these things in their lives. Also we explore some things in this book in a lot more depth than I did in Rewriting the Rules, like how people decide about their living situations, or the role of other people and interests in their relationships.

That said, there are definitely some themes here that will be familiar to folks who’ve read Rewriting the Rules, particularly the idea of different things working for different people, and the tension between being together and being separate. I liked the fact that we got to explore communication in a lot more depth in this book, which follows on quite nicely from the conflict chapter in Rewriting the Rules, and it was good to be able to bring in some of the most recent research about sex as well.

I guess the chapter with the most overlap with Rewriting the Rules would be the last chapter about love – which is where I got to bring in those ideas about cultural ideals of relationships and how they can be so damaging and limiting. But it was great to have the opportunity there to explore how people are already challenging those ideals in their day-to-day relationships.

What does this book mean to you personally?

After my long struggle to get Rewriting the Rules published I had a big goal of getting a book published by a non-academic publisher. Routledge, who published Rewriting the Rules, do publish non-academic books, but their focus is more on the academic. So it meant a huge amount to me to get a contract with Penguin Randomhouse. And it seems like non-academic publishers are a bit like buses because, at the same time as we agreed The Secrets of Enduring Love I also got contracts with Icon books to publish my next two books, and Routledge asked if I’d be interested in writing another book for them!

Another great thing for me in this book is that I got to do a lot of the illustrations myself. As people who read this blog will know, I’m a big comics fan and have plans for (very very slowly) writing my own graphic books in future. So I really enjoyed making the cartoon of the relationship escalator, and producing versions of some of the research participant’s drawings.

You wrote Rewriting the Rules on your own. What’s it like writing collaboratively instead?

I love it. In a lot of ways this book is a conversation between me (and my ideas and knowledge from my relationship therapy work) and Jacqui (and the Enduring Love? study and the participants in that). I think those kinds of conversations produce something rich that’s often greater than the sum of the parts.

I’ve written academic and therapy books collaboratively in the past, like the edited collections I’ve done with Darren Langdridge, and the books on gender and sexuality with Christina Richards. I’m really enjoying bringing that approach to non-academic work now. I’m meeting once a week with sex educator Justin Hancock to produce our sex advice book, and I’m learning so much from that process. Also there’s something very pleasant about sitting in a cafe chatting and writing compared to the sometimes painful process of sitting on your own at home with writer’s block. I also loved putting together the comic editions of Asylum magazine last year with my colleagues Caroline Walters and Joseph de Lappe. And I’m really looking forward to more writing collaborations with Alex Iantaffi later this year.

Published by Penguin RandomHouse and serialised in the Daily Mail – isn’t that a pretty different audience for you?

Yes the Daily Mail was quite a surprise! They serialised the book over the course of four days with big full-page spreads every day. The headlines didn’t always quite capture our approach (they often focused on married couples, for example), but I thought they did a really good job of bringing what we’d written to their readers.

Something that has always been important to me is to reach as broad an audience as possible. Given the focus of my work on GSRD (Gender, Sexually and Relationship Diverse) communities, it’s obviously important to me to reach people in these worlds: LGBTQ+, kinky, and openly non-monogamous people for example. However, there are a lot of people who are GSRD but don’t feel able to be open about it, and suffer a great deal trying to hide important parts of themselves. Many of those folk would be unlikely to engage with GSRD communities or to stumble across my work, but they might be more likely to come across the Daily Mail articles, or spot The Secrets of Enduring Love in a bookshop or on Amazon. Or their friends or families might do – and reading such things might make them feel more able to be supportive.

Also, a lot of the ideas in my books are already fairly well known about in GSRD communities: the idea that you don’t have to have sex in a relationship, for example, or that the relationship escalator puts relationships under pressure, or that meta-communication is helpful. It feels very important to me to make these kinds of ideas available to everybody.

Where next?

This is the year of books for me: all of the writing that I did last year is coming out! The next one (in Autumn) is the graphic book about queer which I wrote last summer and Julia Scheele is currently illustrating for Icon books.  It felt like a nice balance to The Secrets of Enduring Love because it’s more explicitly aimed at queer folk – and people who want to know more about queer. It also involved delving into a lot more theory and activism, which I hope I’ve explained in an accessible and engaging way.

After that it’s all about sex, with a sex advice book and a book on the psychology of sex. These books expand on many of the things that Jacqui and I touch on in the sex chapter of The Secrets of Enduring Love. There’s also a collaborative academic book on sex advice, and an edited book on non-binary gender coming soon.

I think that all of these books this year may have finally convinced me that I’m a legit writer of this kind of book! So I’m looking forward to hopefully writing many more books and zines in the near future, particularly developing the social mindfulness and non-binary ideas that I’ve been exploring here, and applying them to relationships of all kinds.

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I haven’t posted on here for over a month. Part of the reason is that I was hit with a big illness in February which took several weeks to recover from. But a happier reason is that all of my writing time has gone into working on two exciting new book projects.

Back when I wrote Rewriting the Rules I struggled to find a non-academic publisher to publish it because all my previous books had been with academic publishers. Fortunately Routledge picked it up. They publish mostly academic books but also some books for a more general audience.

After that I was keen to move into working with more specifically non-academic publishers. I was surprised and delighted when, this year, two opportunities came up at once.

First, I was asked to write a self-help style book with Jacqui Gabb based on the Enduring Love? project which I had been involved with as a public engagement advisor throughout. Vermilion publishers (part of Penguin Random House) took it up, and I’ve just finished the first draft.

Then I received an email from Icon books asking if I’d be interested in writing one of their introductory comic-based books on Queer Theory. I’m a huge fan of those books already because I love the use of comics to communicate ideas and experiences. In fact I’ve just finished a wonderful project with Asylum magazine with Joseph De Lappe and Caroline Walters where we’ve collected together comics about mental health from multiple perspectives. The special issues and features based on that project will come out over the course of 2015.

With the Icon book I’m really excited to try to get key ideas from queer theory across in an accessible way, particularly drawing out what I see as some of the most useful concepts for everyday life.

So it has been a very exciting time for me. I’ll be updating you more on both projects in future. They should both be out in early 2016.

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Gratitude for mental health and well-being?

We probably assume that gratitude will be a positive thing for the person being thanked, but recent research in ‘positive psychology’ has found that it also has a very positive impact on the person doing the thanking.

The pioneer of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, studied all kinds of techniques for making people happier. The three he found to be the most effective were: remembering three positive experiences at the end of every day, finding a main strength that you have and applying it in a different arena, and writing a letter of gratitude to somebody and delivering it personally.

We might also consider the fact that most common mental health problems include a major component of criticism. In depression people frequently struggle with self-critical thoughts, in anxiety fear of failure is often bound up with self-criticism, and self-criticism often also has a key role in body image issues, self-harm, psychotic experiences, and addictions. For this reason, therapies and practices involving kindness and compassion have become increasingly popular in recent years. The tendency to evaluate, judge and criticise ourselves harshly is often related to a similar approach to other people. Therefore expressing gratitude and appreciation might be a useful counter to this tendency. Perhaps we can cultivate self-compassion to counter self-criticism, and appreciation to counter our criticism of others?

Finally, Open University research on relationships – the ‘Enduring Love?’ project – has found that ‘saying thank you’ was the most highly valued way in which people in couples showed their appreciation for each other. It is common, in long term relationships like those studied, for people to start to take each other for granted. Also it is very easy for people who live alongside each other for long periods of time, and who have high expectations of love relationships, to become judgemental of each other in ways that they probably wouldn’t be of other people in their lives, leading to conflict.

The act of saying thank you for small –and big –things that we do for each other, is a good way to demonstrate that you still appreciate somebody rather than assuming that helping you is their duty or obligation, for example. It is also a good counter to the kinds of criticisms that happen in conflict situations. Researchers at the Gottman institute found that unhappy couples engaged in a great deal of criticism, whereas happy couples had five times as many positive interactions to negative ones, and expressions of gratitude and appreciation are a good example of such ‘positive interactions’.

Individual or social?

However, there are some limitations to this approach to gratitude which focuses on the potential impact on individual mental health and well-being, or on satisfaction in individual couple relationships.

As I’ve discussed elsewhere, the criticism that so many of us struggle with is not just an individual thing that we happen to do (because of faulty brains, for example). Rather we are embedded in a culture which encourages high levels of criticism and comparison. Products are advertised on the basis that we are lacking and need to improve ourselves in some way, or that having such things could make us better than other people. Make-over TV shows, the red-rings round ‘problem’ body parts in women’s magazines, and self-help books also often encourage ourselves to compare ourselves to others, to self-monitor, and to criticise ourselves and other people.

From this perspective, expressing gratitude towards other individual people would be a starting point for a wider project of countering this culture of criticism, rather than an end-point that is reached once it has resulted in improved individual happiness or decreased relationship conflict.

With a more cultural understanding we might try not to stop with gratitude visits to those close friends and inspirational teachers who have helped with our individual journeys. We might expand out to also consider the strangers who have a positive impact on us every day: the people whose work keeps our streets clean, for example, or all the many people whose collective work goes into our morning cup of coffee.

Such an approach might lead us to more social considerations of how to ensure that all people are valued – particularly those whose contribution is often undervalued in the current national and international situation. This points us towards a recognition of our interconnectedness and interdependence. It may not stop with human beings but rather it could enable us also to appreciate the other species who enable us to live the lives of comfort that we currently enjoy.

Thus expressions of gratitude in such situations may come with a call for further action. They might also help us to be more present to our lives: to appreciate things as they occur instead of only in reflection afterwards. In this way such gratitude is a component of engaging more mindfully with the world.

Gratitude or appreciation?

Another more social issue here is around the power dynamics of thanking people. I once offered a workshop at a community event to encourage people to express gratitude to those who’d helped them in their lives. A disability activist pointed out to me that ‘gratitude’ wasn’t a great word as it implies a power imbalance between the people involved. She said that disabled people are often expected to express gratitude and seldom expected to be the people who others are grateful to. For these reasons we re-titled the workshop ‘appreciation’ rather than ‘gratitude’.

I thought that this might be a useful reframing for other situations as well. For example, when it comes to mental health issues the focus could easily be on those who have struggled to thank those who helped them, but it is often so much more complicated than that. We get a lot from being the ‘helper’ as well as the ‘helped’, and situations of gratitude can set up an unrealistic ‘us and them’ distinction between mentally healthy and unhealthy. It is important to demonstrate that all people are valued and appreciated, and that can be particularly powerful in the case of those who are rarely thanked.

Bringing this back to the Open University campaign we explored the possibility of all OU people expressing their appreciation, not just the students. For example, as a lecturer I am so often struck by how much I have learnt from students: at least as much, over the years, as they have learnt from me, I am certain. A similar thing is true for the clients I have seen as a therapist. It is hard to put into words what a huge deal it is to have somebody open up their vulnerability to another person like that, and how much I have learnt – personally and professionally – from their courage. I like the idea of appreciation as a mutual endeavour rather than a one way street across the power dynamic.

Doing appreciation: Why, what, when, where and how

To end on a practical note I want to consider some of the pragmatics involved in ensuring that a thank you is ethical and consensual.

Encouragement to make grand gestures of thanks can, ironically, miss the other person entirely and become all about us, the thanker. So we need to think about the why, what, when, where and how of appreciation.

First we need to consider why we’re doing it. Personally I don’t believe that improving our own happiness is a great motivation for saying thank you! Similarly it is easy to say thank you because we feel it is expected of us, because it’s just what people do in the situation we’re in, or because we hope to get something in return (their thanks, or sense of obligation to us, for example). So we might reflect on whether we are genuinely appreciative of somebody and what they have done, as well as whether our thank you is freely given rather than in expectation of a certain response.

Secondly it’s worth considering the what, where and when of appreciation. There are many different ways of expressing appreciation and thanks. Do we make a grand gesture or just a simple message? Should we provide a detailed explanation of the impact somebody has had on us, or just say that we appreciate them and leave it at that? Is it important to meet in person or can it be better communicated over phone, email or message? Should it include some kind of gift or not?

This all relates to the question of how our appreciation will be received. We need to consider what we know about the person. For some people a public declaration would mean the world, for others it would be excruciatingly embarrassing. Receiving a thank you letter might be so moving that a person would want to be alone, and with enough time to process it, rather than feeling that an immediate reaction was required. If the person we’re expressing appreciation for is somebody we have drifted away from, or had problems with, they might resent our intrusion into their lives.

There are similar issues, of course, with other kinds of declaration such as the ‘making amends’ encouraged by twelve step addiction programmes, or expressing our congratulations to somebody when we don’t really know whether the thing that’s happened (birthday, promotion, pregnancy) is really a cause for celebration for them.

A couple of recent examples spring to mind for me. I’ve read several books lately where the writer has thanked their partner in the acknowledgements section to the point of saying that the book would never have been written without them, and that they actually did much of the work of writing or researching it. Sometimes I wonder whether that public thank you might feel somewhat undermining to someone who – from the sound of it – might more appropriately have been listed as a co-author.

On the other hand, I recently experienced something that meant a great deal to me: somebody thanking me for my writing which had connected with them. The respectful way in which they did that, acknowledging the potential overwhelmingness of the situation for me, and allowing me time to take it in, was really appreciated.

In closing I’d like express my own appreciation to the OU campaign people for getting me thinking so much about this topic and to you for staying with me to the end of another long blog post: Thank you!

If you like, you can read the pdf of the original article here: MetroThankYou

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Monday 16^th January 2012 saw the launch of a new Open University research project called Enduring Love? Here I will introduce the project and also summarise the talks at the launch about current thinking on relationships, and the pressures they are under.

There has been plenty of research on break-up, divorce and separation. The team behind this project decided that it was time that we knew more about what makes people stay together as well as what makes them split up.

The plan is to get as many people as possible to fill out the online questionnaire so that the researchers can get a good idea of the diversity of ways in which people are experiencing long-term relationships, as well as anything that people who stay together have in common. At the same time, there will be much more in-depth research on sixty couples who will keep a diary of their relationship, take part in interviews together and separately, and explore the way they live and how they feel in their relationship. The detailed research will consider various aspects of the couple relationship such as emotions, sex, commitment, and the way that their partnership fits with other important relationships in their lives. You can already get an idea of the kinds of things people are saying about their relationships from the video clips and podcasts that the team has put together.

The project is called Enduring Love? with a question mark to give the title a double meaning. The researchers are keen to explore what makes relationships work for those who stay together long term and who find that a fulfilling way to live. At the same time it is clear that some couples feel pressured to stay together even when they are very unhappy. It is useful to know what makes an enduring love, as well as what the experience is like when love itself becomes something to be endured. Of course many relationships include elements of both these things: when times are hard the relationship feels like something to be endured, and when things are going well the ‘enduring’ nature of the relationship is something that may be celebrated. Enduring hard times can build intimacy as well as sometimes breaking it.

At the launch event we heard from a representative from the Department of Education who spoke about ways in which the research could feed into government strategies around relationships. For example, it could help to illuminate the diversity of relationship styles that people are currently engaged in, feeding into relationship education in school PSHE, developing relationship therapy training, and informing programmes which help couples to transition to different forms of relationships (for example, those who continue to co-parent or live together when they are no longer a couple).

After the talk from the DoE, author and journalist, Kate Figes, spoke about her book Couples: The Truth which was based on interviews with a range of couples. She found that people don’t tend to reflect on their relationships whilst things are going well – only when things go badly wrong. People also felt that their relationship had to be private and that it was disloyal to talk about what went on in their relationship to anybody outside of it. Finally, people were very concerned about whether their relationship was ‘normal’.

Of course when nobody speaks openly about the reality of relationships, it is easy for us all to assume that everybody else’s relationship is much better than our own (because that is what they look like from the outside), and to worry that something is wrong with us. One reason that I love the book Mistakes were made (but not by me) is that it argues that intimate relationships are actually one of the most challenging things we can possibly do, because letting someone in so close that they get to see all sides of you is exposing, and often confronts us with difficult truths.

Kate’s ideas resonated with my own thoughts on this topic as she highlighted key pressures that relationships are currently under, many of which I also explore in my book Rewriting the Rules, which is out later this year. She said that there is romantic pressure to find a soulmate who will provide us with our happily-ever-after; there is sexual pressure to have perfect exciting sex throughout a relationship; and there is pressure to be monogamous, with any kind of infidelity regarded as unacceptable. However, the first two pressures make it more, rather than less, likely that people will end up looking elsewhere because nobody can be everything to us, people change over time, and such insularity can leave us gasping for freedom.

Kate reckoned that important ways forward were for people to be more honest about the lows and highs of their relationships, to communicate better with each other, and to recognise the impact of our backgrounds, cultures, and family histories on how we understand relationships (which will inevitably be different to that of our partners). She also argued that the adversarial legal system is very bad for people who are trying to shift their relationship into a different form (co-parenting for example) and that mediation is a better alternative.

We also heard from academics Lynn Jamieson and Ann Phoenix who talked about their own research in this area and what their hopes were for the Enduring Love? project. Lynn spoke about the way our understandings of coupledom has changed over time. An older participant in her research spoke about the way marriage used to be just what people did at a certain age, whilst many now see love as a vital ingredient. Lynne, and others in the audience raised questions about who we count as a couple. For example, many couples now don’t live together some, or even all, of the time. There are also people who are in secret couples which others in their lives do not know about. And polyamorous people have relationships with more than one person so they may be in more than one couple, or in a triad/quad or family rather than a couple at all. In Rewriting the Rules I question the dividing rules that we have between romantic love and other kinds of relationship which are not always clearcut (what about a romantic relationship that has become more like a friendship over time, or a close friendship between people who live together and have intense rows and good times together?).

Lynn suggested that the Enduring Love? research could provide valuable insights into ‘practices of intimacy’: what are the building blocks of relationships that we may not be aware of but which we use everyday to connect with those we’re close to? What is the role of talking (and deciding not to talk about certain issues)? Other practices include practices of caring for each other, learning about each other, spending time together (physically present and digitally mediated), prioritising, and giving and receiving.

Lynn agreed with Kate about the ludicrous pressures of cultural ideas such as ‘The One’ and ‘Mr/Ms Right’, suggesting that we might move towards celebrating more pragmatic arrangements that people have in their relationships. Ann Phoenix went on to explore such ideas further in her talk which highlighted the roles of myths and stories that couples have about their relationships (which draw upon cultural myths as well as family backgrounds). Like Kate she highlighted the importance of recognising that all relationships have dissatisfactions and disharmonies as well as shared stories, even if these are more rarely spoken about with others.

Ann suggested that key areas to consider, when exploring relationships, include the diversity of experiences of those in transnational couples (who may be forced to live apart and/or have different backgrounds and privileges, for example), and same-sex couples. Like polyamorous people, such couples have the additional pressure of frequently having to explain their relationships to strangers, which is a very different experience to those whose relationship is take-for-granted and even celebrated by others and by wider culture.

Ann also discussed change, which is something that I focus on in Rewriting the Rules. She said that over time we are not the same people who we were back when we got together, never mind being the same couple. She also questioned the binary way in which we tend to see ‘enduring’ and ‘breaking up’. As I explore in my chapter on break-up, given the shifts that relationships go through over time we might begin to challenge what it means to ‘stay together’ and to ‘split up’ and what there might be between these two extremes. Perhaps ‘enduring love’ is a love that is flexible enough to shift and change over time as the situation demands it.

Hopefully the sociological approach taken by the Enduring Love? researchers will enable a continued exploration of the psychosocial nature of relationships. Our intimate relationships happen in a wider context of global, economic, political, and social change as well as within wider social networks which may support or constrain our relationships. We know, for example, that social policies influence whether people can live together or not, and economic situations and policies determine who can get married. Clearly cultural ideals about relationships impact our expectations and experiences. Relationships are not something we learn how to do once and for all, rather they are a work in progress operating within a world which is also changing all the time.

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