The Love Prescription: Seven Days to More Intimacy, Connection, and Joy

Each chapter introduces a new relationship habit for a specific day of the weeklong course. Any couple can benefit from the exercises, regardless of how new they are or how entrenched their problems. New couples can implement the Gottmans’ suggestions before problems arise, just as someone who watches their diet and exercise seeks to prevent illness. On the other hand, couples who have been struggling for years still have the potential to change their unhealthy patterns, as long as they have not given up on the relationship already.

The Gottmans testify to their ability to change the dynamics of a relationship in a single week owing to an experiment they piloted with Reader’s Digest readers. Following a full relationship assessment via questionnaires, the Gottmans selected a single relationship-saving intervention for each couple. When they caught up with the couples two years later, the interventions were still relevant and the relationships had improved.

The Gottmans assert that we do not need to magically find more time in our frantic schedules to improve our relationships but instead to be more responsive to our partners as we go about our busy days. Using the case study of overworked parents Alison and Jeremy, the Gottmans explain how partners make “bids for connection”—for example, when we sigh in despair or draw our partner’s attention to something we find interesting (3). How one partner responds to another’s bid for connection is a crucial factor in predicting the longevity and happiness of the relationship. Partners can respond by either “turning toward” (directly engaging with the other’s bid for connection), “turning away” (ignoring it), or “turning against” (being openly hostile to the bid) (4). While no partner can turn toward 100% of the time, statistics show that couples who divorce only turned toward 33% of the time or less, while couples who stay together turn toward 86% of the time.

The Gottmans’ research shows that turning toward your partner’s bid for connection more often, and thereby nurturing the fun, intimate side of the relationship, is more beneficial than jumping straight into conflict resolution. An experiment they conducted, in which one group of couples focused primarily on friendship and another primarily on conflict, showed that the former group was better able to improve their relationship long-term. This is because zoning in on conflict encourages negative physiological responses that make us retreat to bad habits, such as defensiveness. While it is difficult to change how people act in conflict, it is far easier to change how they act in seemingly small everyday moments. Each gesture of turning toward your partner restores the relationship’s emotional bank account and acts as a buffer when conflict arises.

The practice for this chapter includes a 10-minute check-in with one’s partner, taking the opportunity to ask questions, such as “Can I do anything for you?” that express the wish to connect. This imparts feelings of love and trust. Other bids for connection include eye contact, smiles, and direct requests. If a bid for connection can’t be responded to immediately, the partner can always promise to return to it later. 

While in the beginning of a relationship we are endlessly curious about our partners, as time goes on, we might mistakenly assume that we know everything about them and that we do not have to check in with what kind of person they have become or how their dreams have changed. All too often, couples’ conversations lack intimacy and revolve around the logistics of running a household. This creates a rift between partners, who miss the big changes in each other’s personalities, live “two parallel lives rather than a joint one together” (22), and may even begin to fantasize about the pleasures of getting to know someone and be known by them with a new partner. If couples who lose their curiosity about each other drift apart, those who are continually interested in the other’s inner world maintain a lively dynamic, where they feel that they can continually surprise and delight each other regardless of the challenges of external circumstances.

The Gottmans create “love maps” with their clients, which are intimate guides to each other’s inner worlds, even as they change over time. Asking big, open-ended questions is an optimal way to update a love map. This practice resolved a conflict the Gottmans experienced four years into their marriage, regarding the purchase of a rural cabin. Julie, an avid nature-lover, wanted to buy a cabin in the woods, whereas John, who prefers the indoor life, thought that this was an unnecessary expense. After an unsuccessful intervention by another couple’s therapist, John finally asked Julie why she wanted the cabin so much. She revealed that as a little girl growing up in Portland, Oregon, she would retreat to the woods whenever the tension at home was getting to be too much, sometimes even sleeping there—thus, for her, the woods represented home and safety. John, in contrast, was the child of parents who had escaped the Holocaust in Europe and passed on the belief that spending money on property or possessions was wasteful because they could always be stripped away. Once the couple was able to understand each other better, they easily reached a solution to their conflict over the cabin. This also helped them professionally, as they developed an understanding of how most couples’ fights are not about the immediate subject matter but rather about “an unrealized or unacknowledged life dream, lurking below the surface” (30). Thus, the real question is what a partner’s dream or nightmare is about a situation, the goal being to understand from where they are approaching it. In the long term, this leads to endless discovery in relationships.

Day 2’s task is to ask one’s partner an open-ended question that could be either philosophical (i.e., concerning the direction of one’s life) or fun. The reader can boost the benefits of doing this by asking to hear more about the details that interest them or modeling their own approach to a big question. The Gottmans note that one should be careful about timing questions about potentially painful topics well and not asking overly personal questions early on in a relationship.