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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Here’s one I did on monogamy:

Are we hardwired to be monogamous or is it a social construct that is arguably unnatural?

Like most aspects of human experience our relationships styles are biopsychosocial. It’s not a matter of nature or nurture, hardwiring or social construct. Rather the way we form relationships is influenced by a complex web of biological, psychological and social aspects which would be impossible to disentangle.

Certainly the diversity of relationship styles across humans and other animals suggests that it is very unlikely that any one kind of style (monogamous or non-monogamous) is ‘hard-wired’ from the start. However, the processes of our bodies and brains certainly operate together with the experiences we have through life and the messages we receive from the culture around us to shape the ways in which we experience love, desire, and so on.

How hard or misleading do you think it is to live with the view that boy meets girl, they fall in love, get married, remain faithful and live happily ever after?

I think that there is a problem when any one model of relationships gets presented as the ideal and/or only acceptable way of doing relationships. It would be just as much of a problem if the ideal was that everybody had to have five concurrent partners, or that relationships were only expected to last for two years, for example.

The reality is that different things work for different people at different times. There are a vast diversity of ways of doing relationships: serial monogamy, polygamy, hook-ups, friends with benefits, life-long relationships, celibacy, swinging, singledom, open relationships, polyamory, and relationship anarchy, to name just a few. And even within any of these examples, there are a myriad different ways of understanding and experiencing the relationships involved.

A one-size-fits-all model is damaging for anybody who doesn’t fit and is therefore excluded, and often stigmatised and given fewer rights. It is also often damaging for those who do fit, but feel a massive pressure to ensure that their relationship meets the narrow range of expectations which are placed upon it. For example people often feel that they must meet every marker of a ‘successful’ relationships (living together, marriage, kids) at the ‘appropriate’ time, and believe that they have to demonstrate ‘happily ever after’ constantly, rather than being able to admit to the inevitable tough parts of a long term relationship.

How much has our concept of marriage changed over time and how would you describe it now?

Marriage has changed a great deal over time. I’m not a historian myself, but Stephanie Coontz’s book ‘Marriage: A History’ is very helpful on this. She explains how, in Western cultures, it is only in recent decades that marriage has become so much about romantic love. Previously it had much more to do with, for example, bringing families together and matters of economy, work and child-rearing.

Changes such as declining religion, unstable jobs, and the fact that people move around rather than staying in smaller communities have all meant that people look to romantic relationships to meet all of their needs in a way they never have before. Partners are often now expected to be best friends, passionate lovers, constant companions, support networks, sources of validation, co-parents, and carers-when-ill. And romantic love relationships are often viewed as being by far the most important relationship in our lives rather than one of many relationships.

I think this does put relationships under a lot of pressure. Many people – whether in monogamous or non-monogamous relationships – are looking for ways of managing things differently in this rather new situation that they find themselves in.

How acceptable do you think polyamory, negotiated infidelity etc are in the UK? Why do we shun these?

Things have certainly shifted in the last decade to the point that there is greater awareness and acceptance of various non-monogamous ways of doing relationships: whether openly (like polyamory) or more secretly (like negotiated infidelity). However, there is still no legal recognition of such relationships (indeed the very notion was ridiculed on all sides of the recent same-sex marriage debates) and there remains a good deal of stigma around both infidelity and forms of consensual non-monogamy.

In a time of uncertainty I think people often want to cling to the idea that there must be one true, natural, right, normal way of doing things, and that ensuring that everyone does things that way is the best way of keeping everyone safe. However, I think that actually the opposite is the case. Restricting people in this way is often very damaging to both those who fit the ‘norm’ and those who don’t.

A model which appreciates that there are diverse ways of doing relationships, being sexual, expressing love, parenting, forming families, and so forth, is kinder and more flexible, and enables us to focus on things that really matter such as how to treat each other ethically and how best to communicate and support each other in all our relationships.

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Here’s one on love myths.

How do we, in general, conceive relationships today? How strong are the ‘love myths’?

Love myths do still seem to be strong. A range of relationship styles are practised across the world (many cultures being polygamous or having relationships based on things other than romantic love). Despite this, the western ideal tends to be finding ‘The One’ perfect partner and remaining with them for life with the expectation that the relationship will generally provide happiness and fulfill all of each persons’ needs. We know that this model is common because very few other models are ever considered in mainstream media (magazines, movies, TV programmes, etc.) and psychologists like Bjarne M. Holmes have found that many people to follow those love myths. Interestingly he has also found that believing strongly in such myths often means people having worse, rather than better, relationships.

Psychologist Terri Conley and her colleagues have found that people generally think that a life-long monogamous relationships is beneficial for a couple’s sex life, happiness and well-being, and for any children they have. However, there is evidence which challenges all of these beliefs and suggests that forms of consensual non-monogamy (such as polyamory and open relationships) can be just as beneficial. It seems from such research that around 4-5% of people in the US engage in some form of consensual non-monogamy.

What do we actually know about the reality of relationships today?

The statistics suggest that up to 50 or 60% of monogamous people have at least one affair or infidelity. However, it is notoriously difficult to get exact numbers on this because people are often reluctant to open up about it even on an anonymous questionnaire. This tells us that even within supposedly monogamous relationships, non-consensual non-monogamy is actually norm.

Also, we know that people often think that they share understandings of what monogamy means in their relationships, but that frequently they eventually find out that they differ (and that can often cause a crisis). For example, it is very common for one person to think that looking at pornography or having cybersex, is okay, whilst the other person disagrees, or for there to be disagreements around remaining friends with ex partners.

When did this idea of marriage as an institution, based on love only, start to exist and why?

Indeed the western love ideals are very new. Historian Stephanie Coontz suggests that they date back only to around the 1950s and the invention of the nuclear family. Before this, marriages were frequently entered into for factors to do with family, money, work, childcare, etc. rather than for romantic love (although that doesn’t mean that romantic love was never involved).

Also our idea of what you should get from a romantic partner has altered over time such that there is a lot more pressure on partners to be ‘everything’ to each other as communities and religion have dwindled, and worklives have become more precarious. Partners are often expected to provide belonging, excitement, validation, security, and to help us meet our goals in life.

Paradoxically, this pressure makes it less, rather than more, likely that people will stay together, as it is often impossible for people to match up to the huge, and often contradictory, expectations upon them. For example, Esther Perel writes about how difficult it is for relationships to provide warmth and stability at the same time as passion and excitement.

What is the most contradictory rules of love, as you see it?

I think that so many of them are contradictory. For example the pressure to be highly monogamous and to get all our needs met by one person often makes it more likely that people will be tempted elsewhere. The pressure to be happy at all times with each other makes it more likely that people will conflict. The pressure to have ‘great sex’ makes it less likely that we will relax and enjoy sex with a partner. The pressure to stay together forever makes it more likely that we will break up!

The answer, as I see it, is to open up these rules of love to exploration and to really think about which are useful to us, which we don’t need, and which might even be damaging.

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Here’s one on non-monogamous relationships.

I understand that there has been a couple of recent books (yours and Catherine Hakim´s) discussing the attitudes about infidelity  in the UK? Do you think that is just a coincidence or is it a sign of the times?

It definitely feels like a current topic with many books and movies raising questions about the challenges of being in long term relationships and about how we deal with infidelity when it occurs.

Catherine Hakim’s book looks at the recent trend of dating websites for people who are looking for lovers outside their marriage. My book explores all of the many ways in which people at the moment are rewriting the rules of their relationships.

I think that the ‘rules’ about infidelity are being questioned right now for a combination of reasons. First, as people live longer what is meant by a ‘long term’ relationship becomes potentially much longer than it was in previously. Secondly, people are now looking for a lot more from a partner or spouse than they might have done in the past. It is common for people to expect such relationships to remain romantic and sexual throughout as well as providing a close friendship, a sense of belonging and security, and personal validation. This can be a great deal of pressure to put on one person, and that is a big part of the reason why people often end up looking elsewhere and having infidelities.

Is it more difficult to be faithful to one partner today? If so – why?

The problem relates to a common tension in relationships. At the same time that we are looking for safety and companionship in a relationship, we are also all trying to reach our own goals in life and we value our independence.

This tension between belonging and freedom plays out in a number of ways in relationships. For example, we might find ourselves in serial monogamy where we search for a partner when we crave love and belonging, but break-up with them when we start feeling stifled and yearning for independence. Another way the tension plays out is in infidelities. These can meet our need to feel more free and to remind ourselves who we are without our partner, whilst retaining the relationship.

Another reason that it is difficult to be faithful is something that Esther Perel explores in her excellent book, Mating in Captivity. She says that we are looking for ‘warmth’ and ‘heat’ from the same relationship. We want to be secure and comfortable with a partner, perhaps building a family with them, at the same time as wanting to have a hot and exciting relationship. It is hard to get both these things from the same person, which might be another reason for people seeking infidelities.

Is there a problem with our cultural attitude about infidelity? If so – what?

There is a problem because all of the pressure we culturally put on relationships makes it more likely that infidelity will happen but, at the same time, infidelities are very frowned upon in many countries and often seen as being a reason to break-up a relationship.

Catherine Hakim suggests that people in France are more relaxed about casual infidelities (or ‘play-fairs’) and that it is generally expected and accepted that married people will have sex with other people at some point. Other researchers like Lisa Wade have written about ‘hook-up culture’ in the US where college students have several more casual sexual relationships rather than having one main relationship and additional infidelities. It is useful to see that different groups and cultures have different ways of doing relationships because it opens up the possibility of doing things differently and finding our own ways forward.

Infidelity is sometimes being presented as a way of saving marriages or long relationships? Do you agree that having a secret affair, is good for the primary relationship?

The problem that I have with all of this is with the secret aspect of it all. Certainly there are cases when people have had affairs and it is good for the relationship long term, perhaps because it came out in the open and encouraged the people involved to communicate more. However, much more frequently if the affair is uncovered it causes a great deal of pain for everyone involved. The person having the affair is often blamed and feels terribly guilty, their partner frequently feels very hurt and betrayed, and the person who the affair was with may well end up losing somebody who they loved and had become very important in their life. It can also be very hard for friends and family who feel pressured to take sides.

What are the negative aspects of infidelity? 

In the case of secret affairs which come out into the open there can be real damage to the sense of trust between the main partners because they realise that they have been lied to. Feelings of guilt and shame, betrayal and self-doubt, are also very common. It can also be very painful for the person who the affair was with, and for any children and other family members.

If the infidelity remains secret then there can be a lot of fear of being found out, as well as constraints on how the affair relationship can develop given that it has to remain hidden.

Many marriages end in divorce – what do you think are the most important reasons for that?

There are many reasons for the break-up of relationships – people changing in different directions, recognition of incompatibilities, etc. – but I think that a big part of it is the pressure that relationships are under to provide so many of our needs. When we look for a ‘perfect’ partner and try to be a ‘perfect’ partner for somebody else, we are doomed to fail, and painful break-ups often follow from the recognition that we cannot be everything to each other.

Infidelity is often involved with this because people frequently look elsewhere when they feel that their partner isn’t meeting all their needs any more, or when they realise that their partner has stopped seeing them as perfect.

A big part of the solution is to put less pressure on romantic relationships and to recognise all of the important relationships that we have in our lives (with friends, family, colleagues, and others, as well as with partners). Also if we can acknowledge that people and relationships change over time our relationships may be more flexible and able to shift, and we may feel less need to blame each other if we do go our separate ways.

Is there an alternative to the marriage plus secret affairs model?

My research has mostly focused upon open alternatives to secret affairs. Many people now are pursuing honest ways of having more than one sexual and/or romantic relationship. For example, the ‘new monogamy’ or ‘monogamish relationship’ involves having one main relationship but with openness to flirtations and friendships of various kinds outside of it. Open relationships and swinging involve having one romantic partner but many sexual partners. Polyamorous people have multiple romantic relationships in various different ways. People who are interested in relationship anarchy value the freedom of themselves and of their partners to make their own decisions in all of their relationships.

Most of these kinds of relationships emphasize ongoing trust and communication. There are an increasing number of books available about how to communicate about monogamy and other aspects of relationships. Readers who are interested might find it useful to read Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy’s book The Ethical Slut and Tristan Taormino’s Opening Up: A guide to creating and sustaining open relationships.

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Collaborative relationship therapy

The approach is the ‘collaborative couple therapy’ of Daniel B. Wile, a US therapist. You can read all about it on Dan’s website here. Personally I prefer the term ‘relationship therapy’ to ‘couple therapy’ as it recognises that not all relationships are couple relationships.

Dan’s first idea is that the aim, in relationship therapy, should be to ‘solve the moment, not the problem’. This takes the pressure off trying to fix the whole – often seemingly overwhelming – difficulty that people are having. Instead, the emphasis is placed on addressing each interaction that comes up as something that can be ‘solved’, or engaged with more helpfully. Dan shares my view that conflict isn’t a problem in relationships: it is inevitable, and it can be helpful depending on how we engage with it.

Practicing this ‘solving the moment’ approach again and again means that another way of addressing issues becomes more and more available to the people in the relationship. They will also come to understand each other better in ways that will no doubt be helpful in addressing whatever they are struggling with.

The ‘moment’ is solved in the following ways:

• The therapist regains empathy
• The relationship regains connection
• The individuals in the relationship regain their voices

Dan’s idea is that, when we have a conflict, we generally do not voice our real feelings about the matter. These often feel too vulnerable and exposing to express; and perhaps they are too difficult to identify in the heat of the moment; and we have deeply embedded habits which lead us to respond in ways other than opening up.

Instead we retreat to fallback measures which save us from voicing our feelings. The two most common are blame and withdrawal. Either we lash out and attack the other person for causing the problem, or we withdraw into ourselves and close off. Dan lists a further fallback measure where people rush to fix the situation in ways that don’t address the feelings involved.

So, for example, if we’re having an argument with a partner or housemate about who does the washing up, our underlying feeling might be of being taken for granted and devalued each time they ignore the pile of washing up: maybe they really don’t care about us. However, rather than voicing this we are likely either to blame them (lashing out at them for being lazy), to withdraw (retreating from the painful conversation and just not saying anything in future despite being upset about it), and/or rush to fix (apologising for arguing with them and suggesting we watch a movie together or something). Similarly they may well not voice the feeling they have of guilt and embarrassment at being called on their, rather entitled, behaviour. Instead they respond with blame (attacking us for making a big deal out of something so trivial), withdrawal (going quiet or leaving the room), and/or rushing to fix (giving us a bunch of flowers the next day).

In these ways we tend to get into adversarial cycles (where we blame each other, and this escalates), or withdrawn cycles (where we avoid conflicts and resentment festers). Dan’s idea is to shift such cycles into collaborative cycles through enabling people to recover from fallback measures and voice their real feelings: confiding in each other.

This is the point at which I think it gets profound. Dan notices that, as a therapist, his empathy for one or other person tends to drop when they retreat into fallback measures. At the moment when somebody starts blaming, going quiet, or trying to placate their partner, for example, he often finds himself judging them for how stupid or unhelpful they’re being. His experience as a relationship therapist has taught him that it is in those very moments that he needs to find his empathy for that person – by recognising that they are falling back on those measures in order to defend their vulnerability. His method then is to go alongside the partner for whom he has lost empathy and to voice his hunch about what their real feeling might be, to help them to voice it themselves.

Once such feelings are voiced, the other person often softens and as able to connect with them better, and perhaps to voice their own feelings. However, as we all know, the exchange easily drops back into fallback measures of blame or withdrawal. This is where Dan returns to the idea of ‘solving the moment’. One moment has been solved, now we’re onto the next moment and a new challenge to solve.

Implications

For me there is so much of use in this approach, not only as a therapist but in my own conflicts in all kinds of relationships, and in the wider conflicts that often bubble up in groups or communities.

First the idea of aiming to ‘solve the moment’ rather than ‘solving the problem’ is useful. We can get so tangled up and overwhelmed by all of the history and complexity in play when we conflict, especially with people or groups which we have had long relationships with. The idea that each moment ‘solved’ has cultivated our capacity to engage with each other a little more helpfully next time is a good way of taking the pressure off. Also I like the redefining of the word ‘solved’ as meaning finding a connection and hearing each other, rather than resolving our differences or getting rid of the conflict. That seems a lot more respectful of the inevitable differences and tensions that exist between people and groups.

Secondly, the idea that we fall back into patterns of blame and/or withdrawal when we feel vulnerable resonates with me. So many times a day I notice that I start to become bothered and my reflex reaction is to find someone or something to pin it on, or to find ways to avoid the difficult feelings (for example, by trying to distract myself or by rushing to some kind of quick fix). Dan’s approach reminds me of how useful it can be to notice those patterns kicking in and, instead, to try to stay with the difficult feeling. I can aim to refrain from acting, or withdrawing, until I have a better understanding, and then to try to voice that understanding (to myself and/or to others concerned). Obviously this is extremely difficult and we are likely to fall back into habitual measures time and time again, but we can try not to beat ourselves up for this, and to regard each time that we manage the different approach as cultivating it in a way which will make it slightly easier the next time.

Finally, Dan’s approach alerts me to the possibility that the very moments when I find it hardest to empathise with others are the very moments in which empathy is most required, and most helpful. When somebody attacks me, or withdraws from me, I generally want to blame them or to withdraw from them myself. And such responses are easy because I have good justification. Everyone agrees with me that the other person was out of line, so I am supported in lashing out or complaining about them, or in deciding to cease engaging with somebody so painful, or in trying to insist on that the situation which is hurting me so badly gets fixed immediately.

But all those responses exacerbate the situation, hurting both me and them in the process. As Dan so wisely puts it ‘if you can’t turn your partner into an ally, you are stuck with turning your partner into an enemy or a stranger’. The approaches of blame and withdrawal just leave us – and them – with more and more enemies and strangers in our lives.

So perhaps – again probably only occasionally at first – we can start to notice those moments when somebody attacks us or withdraws from us as moments requiring of empathy, assuming that it has tapped into something so vulnerable for that person that they’ve had to reach for a fallback measure. Dan repeats the famous quote from Philo of Alexandria here: ‘be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle’.

Instead of rushing to defend ourselves, perhaps we can attempt to at least imagine what might have been triggered in the other person, using our own desire to defend, withdraw, or fix, as a way into connecting with them rather than disconnecting. Again the aim here is not to smooth over conflict, to deny difference, or to get rid of difficult feelings that may be present. Rather it is to ‘solve the moment’ by turning it into a moment of potential connection and empathy where we have voiced our own vulnerability, and have opened up space – if possible – for the other to voice their’s (if they are in a place where it is possible for them to do so).

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Question 1: What kinds of relationship are most successful?

I write a lot about different possible ways of doing relationships: monogamous, monogamish and openly non-monogamous relationships; living apart together and long distance relationships; sexual and non-sexual relationships. Something I’m often asked is whether a certain form of relationships can be successful. My question back is always ‘what do you mean by successful?’ It generally turns out that people mean longevity. While studies have found that all these forms of relationships can last over time, I question whether that is the best measure of relationship ‘success’. Perhaps that is something else that is worth thinking about.

Question 2: Will things get easier if I change how I do relationships?

When people contemplate a different kind of relationship – such as an open relationship or polyamory – they often imagine that it will solve all of the problems they’re currently having. I’ve called this the ‘poly grail’ (although it happens with all kinds of relationships). Sadly the answer is that any different way of doing relationships has its own challenges. It’s tough to be in monogamous, it’s tough to be single, and it’s tough to be non-monogamous (whether you do that openly, or secretly in the form of affairs). It’s well worth finding a kind of relationship that works for you, but it’s far too much pressure to expect to find the ‘one true way’ of doing relationships, just as it’s too much pressure to expect to find ‘the one’ partner who’ll fulfil all your needs.

Question 3: How do I go about finding the kind of relationship that works for me?

Instead of searching for the perfect relationship, it’s helpful to figure out what’s important to us, and to communicate about that. For example, where do you stand between wanting just one very close person in your life and wanting lots of friends or partners who are equally close? What about between sexual exclusivity and having many sexual encounters (online or offline)? Is it important to have a clear agreed contract for how you do relationships or for everyone to be free to make their own decisions? Do you like to be private or are you keen to share everything with partners? Communication won’t resolve all the differences we have in relationships, but it definitely helps to be open about such things from the start and to accept that people can feel very differently about them.

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