Wired For Love: The Brain In Love Dr. Stan Tatkin Interview

How can we enhance the brain in love and be wired for love instead of war? How can we train our brains to stop fighting, listen, open up, and behave in ways that make our partners feel safe?

These essential questions are covered in Dr. Stan Tatkin’s marriage book, “Wired for Love.” Dr. Tatkin goes into the topic deeper and shares with the audience the key aspects of wiring ourselves and our relationship for romantic love and safety.

It’s our nature as humans to sweep our environment for threats; thus, feeling safe and secure is very critical. As we come into a secure relationship, we’re not only talking about our safety but our partner’s safety as well.

This is how we answer our own question, how to stay in love. In this interview with Stan Tatkin, the author of Wired for Love, he helps us how to create safety in relationships and to be wired for love for us to be more connected.

Key Takeaways – Wired For Love: The Brain In Love Dr. Stan Tatkin Interview

• Sweeping the environment for threats and responding to threats is a huge part of our human nature. We do not know how to stay in love with creatures that we assume are harmful, although they are not.
• The bottom of most trouble the secure relationship encounters is the small threats that we all deal with day in and day out as we bump into each other and fight, not knowing how to stay in love.
• The key to creating emotional intimacy is what couples do to make each other feel safe and secure. These are the couples who know how to stay in love in an authentic way.
• Procedural Memory gets activated when we come into a secure relationship and start to feel committed. Only then do we know how to stay in love?  It contains positive, negative, and emotional experiences we’ve had with anybody we depended on.
• The unresolved experiences related to dependency will come to the fore as soon as we commit to another person.

Help the other person feel safe

• First, understand that we’re not just dealing with that relationship and that particular partner, but we’re dealing with everybody that came before.
• Second, be fully all in because it gives you safety and freedom, and it teaches how to stay in love.
• Next, understand that nobody acts normal under those conditions when people are worried about the unstable ground they stand on.
• Also, partners should say, express, and teach one another how to stay in love and show they’re committed to their relationship and no one is leaving.
• Another is stirring up novelty by doing novel things together, particularly how to stay in love.
• Lastly, use the environment to amplify each other and learn different ways of ‘how to stay in love.’

Create a secure relationship

• One of the most self-harming things people can do in a relationship is to throw doubt as to whether the relationship should exist.
• Being unafraid in the relationship starts with being unafraid at home. Fear does not teach you how to stay in love.
• People coming from insecure attachments and cultures where intimate relationships didn’t come first are more hesitant about commitment and more fearful about dependency. They pay less attention to how to stay in love.
• A secure functioning relationship is a necessity. It’s there for us to be able to survive.
• There’s a need to pair bond to protect each other from the environment to survive time, and to learn how to stay in love.
• Nowadays, because of electronics, it is very hard for people to find each other and stay for a time without getting distracted; therefore, they do not focus on how to stay in love.
• Understanding the nature of a secure relationship can constantly regenerate the feeling of exciting passionate love.
• You get much more dopamine and much more of a surge when you’re using the environment together.
• People can play many times if they don’t have anything in common anymore.
• People could co-create at any time by starting something new

Transcript: Dr. Stan Tatkin Interview – Wired For Love – The Brain In Love

Kamala Chambers Today, we’re going to talk about how to create safety in relationships and how to stay in love. Now, safety is important for feeling relaxed, connected, intelligent, inspired, and turned on by life. Today, we’re going to talk to the master himself on creating safety and being wired for love.

Luis Congdon Today’s guest, Stan Tatkin, PhD, is someone who I truly admire. His book Wired for Love really had a big impact on me and really made me want to make some key changes and decisions to have a more thriving relationship, have more success in my passionate love life, learn how to stay in love, and be a more committed and healthy partner.

The kind of partner that supports my other half and having a better life and supports her in feeling safe, feeling awesome, and having, ultimately, the kind of relationship where both of us feel totally in love, nurtured, and supported to go on into our future, to move together, and to really be united.

So on today’s show, we’re bringing on Dr. Stan Tatkin, who will share his views about how to stay in love. Welcome. Stan Tatkin, it’s a real pleasure to have you here. I’m a big fan of your work.

So, your book Wired for Love really impacted me. Kamala and I consistently have this conversation about, “Are we wiring each other for love and safety? How to stay in love in an authentic way?

Creating a nervous system that’s wired for love

Are we creating a nervous system that’s wired for love, and are we impacting each other’s nervous system in a way that we feel safe and loved by each other?”

I really want to dive into this with you because a lot of people think about giving each other romantic love, and it becomes a very psychological thing, but there’s a whole nervous wiring that happens that even though I might be giving love, if my partner hasen’t been wired for love and really worked on the nervous system as well so that they feel safe, it’s very hard to create that connection.

Thus I really need to learn how to stay wired for love. Can you tell me a little bit about that or start this conversation with us?

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 threats like abusive relationships where there’s physical abuse.

It’s about so many small threats, which is what we all deal with day in and day out as we sort of bump into each other and 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 is, I think.

There are other things like being able to co-generate excitement, how to stay in love, exciting passionate 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 secure relationship will eventually I think be in trouble because that anxiety is a huge part of our human nature.

Such couples shall stay more focused on how to stay in wired for love. Sweeping the environment for threat and responding to threat, and here I mean faces, voices, movement, gestures, postures, and dangerous words and phrases.

Kamala Chambers There’s such an unwinding that needs to happen, a process that people need to go through to even feel safe a lot of times when we even enter a relationship.

I love to hear from you. What are some ways that we can respond to our partners and teach them how to stay in love?

What are some ways that really helped the other person to feel safe?

Stan Tatkin First of all, I have to mention that when we come into a secure 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 then they could run into trouble.

For instance, I’m not your mother. Don’t project on me. But the thing is, these intimate 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 secure 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 in relationships where one person or both people are not fully in, it’s 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 secure 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, concentrate, and even attempt to balance their body is impaired, and it wreaks havoc on the health of the body.

So, people have to understand that there is safety and 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, 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 into 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.

Unfortunately, a lot of people that I see in my clinical practice, whether it’s 3 years or 30 years, oftentimes, there’s one person who’s wavering still, and it’s so hard in order to learn how to stay in romantic love in such kind of relationships.

Luis Congdon It’s interesting for me to think back on my work with 300+ married couples whom I really taught how to stay in love. I’m noticing what a difference it makes when I can tell that both the couple are really fully invested in the secure relationship or where one person wasn’t as in as the other, and the other person was asking for this thing.

A lot of times, I saw women wanted the man to marry them, and it hurt them like crazy that the man didn’t want to commit to that level. In this case, the women would wonder how to stay in passionate love in such an uncertain relationship.

Answering “How to stay in love”

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 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 of how to stay in romantic love in such a 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 that it’s not stable. They act very strangely, and if somebody wants 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 onto 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.

Luis Congdon So then, what is the way that we show that commitment? Not everybody is into marriage but is that the answer for you, or is it that somehow we make the statement, “Would you make this gesture publicly?”

How do we get this crossed that we’re fully in? In your opinion, what’s the best way to signal that to our partner, and 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 instance, I have to know you better than I know myself, even if I become a Luis whisperer and you become a Stan whisperer.

Luis Congdon Kamala’s pretty good at that.

Kamala Chambers Yeah.

Stan Tatkin Okay, good! 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.

Kamala Chambers This is why I like to rush past, or I don’t trust the honeymoon phase of a relationship because you don’t really know the person, and there’s no opportunity to be a Luis a whisperer when I don’t know what the clearing of his throat means or all of those little subtle things.

Stan Tatkin I just clear my throat.

Luis Congdon Watch out, Stan, she’s on to you.

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

Luis CongdonI don’t know Kamala. I think you’re pretty good at whispering and getting me to do what you wanted from the gecko. You just become even better at knowing how to stay in love.

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

Kamala Chambers I whispered, “Quit your job and come travel the world with me,” and he did, which was so great.

Luis CongdonIt’s hard to resist that one.

Stan Tatkin Definitely. Yeah, it is.

Luis Congdon So, we’re talking about creating safety in this relationship, and I want to recap a few of the things you said and add some of my own insights into it as well in order to elaborate on how to stay in romantic love.

After working with so many couples while helping them to stay in love, I noticed this habit that couples had around,” I’m going to leave. We’re not going to be together,” or “That’s it. It’s over. I don’t know about this anymore,” and I noticed how much that hurt.

In talking to couples that have been married 30-50+ years, one of the commonalities I started to notice among these successful couples and when I measure success, I’m not just measuring time.

I’m measuring happiness, satisfaction, shared dreams together, and lovable communication. There’s this whole thing that goes into it. It’s not just time, but time is also a great factor when you also include happiness in this shared joy together.

One of the things I noticed is that these couples said, “At some point, we had to commit to where no one is leaving. We are in it.” Once we made that decision, it created a lot of safety, and we didn’t ever go and say we were going to leave.

That wasn’t a word that we used, and I noticed that consistently among really successful couples.

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

Luis Congdon I’ve had to learn many times how to stay in love.

Deciding how to stay in love

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 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, 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 have to do something to protect myself.

This is when there’s a lot of trouble and couples have a decision fatigue on 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 on the distancing side we’ll be so afraid of having their independence and autonomy stolen, including their stuff, by the way.

They have their things. They’re so 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.

Luis Congdon It’s so scary to hear myself being explained, but as you speak, I really acknowledge that I’m somebody who is afraid of having some of my autonomy taken.

I used to be way more afraid of it until Kamala came in and whispered, “Come here. Join me,” And then I noticed too that one of the things is I’m very attached to my things.

I’m very adamant about some things being mine, and through the process of being in a relationship, I’ve learned to be a lot more in community, a lot more connected to Kamala, and willing to be influenced, willing to let her make decisions or let her lead whereas that’s not something completely easy for me but it’s a healthy practice and learning how to say, “This isn’t mine anymore. This is ours and we get to share it,” and that’s been quite a process for me.

I know that as I’ve done that, it’s really helped my own maturity. There’s this aspect of relationships, and I’d love to hear a little bit of it from you that we come in with these aspects of ourselves that are underdeveloped and how to stay in love in this case.

Somehow, through early stages of childhood, we didn’t develop them or something while we were constricted in some areas. We need a partner who seems to be more developed in that area, and it seems like that’s where the power struggle begins.

Our partner really wants us to become more in some ways like them, and it can actually be a healthy practice for us to bring that out and to know how to stay in love.

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 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 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.

Luis Congdon I want to touch on something that you said earlier, and Kamala, feel free to jump in if you have something about how to stay in love. I get so excited talking to Stan.

Kamala Chambers I do have something, but go ahead, Luis.

Luis Congdon Okay. So, one of the things you were talking about is the development of self and how there is a child in a sense that we’re healing through the relationship, and I’ve jokingly said to people that a relationship is the best therapy session you will ever have.

It’s the most in-depth one, and I really believe that. There’s so much healing that happens when you truly know how to stay in love.

However, as you were talking about the child, developing and nurturing the child, and how the relationship is a place to come home to for this child to be healed and even grow up, very much like Harville Hendrix said in our interview with him as well.

I just love this. And Dr. Susan Johnson really came to mind for me around her attachment therapy and how there is some attachment therapy that we have to do with our partner.

I’d love to hear a little bit about that with you or some of the ways that we can create that safety and begin wiring our partners in order to know how to stay in romantic love at a deeper level. We’re going back to the same thing, but I wanted to bring it more on that childhood conversation.

Creating safety in intimate relationships

Stan Tatkin Harville’s a friend, and I’m very familiar with Imago and his idea that one of the purposes of a 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 a 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. 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 romantic love.

We need romantic love. We need 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 whom 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 hurt on 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 are all these 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 romantic 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.

Kamala Chambers One thing I think is so powerful about what you’re saying is just really driving home the importance of safety, the importance of togetherness in a sense of building those mini-communities, even between a couple or between a group of police officers and one thing that I see a lot is we go out into the world and our nervous systems get high jacked.

There’s a lot of stimulation, even like traffic or drinking too much coffee or just feeling stressed out by a job, and then, if we have time to reset by connecting with our partner and feeling safe there, then our baseline is so much more powerful.

We have that opportunity to come back to homeostasis. And I’d love to hear a little bit more about that process from you.

The Brain In Love

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 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 forcing yourself to be very present. It is about as real-time as we can get because the brain in love 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 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 regenerating 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 in love 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 the brain in love automates everything that’s new and makes it old. So that can happen, but the way we stir up novelty is by doing novel things together.

You and Luis were talking about traveling the world. Through the third things that we co-create, we can constantly regenerate that feeling of exciting romantic love, which is the addictive and the dopaminergic kind, by just understanding the nature of the relationship and understanding how we can co-generate these states.

We can do a lot with relationships 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 works. 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.

Luis Congdon Stan, what you’re talking about really resonates with me, and it’s really beautiful.

We’ve actually brought on Dr. Aaron where we talked about some of the research, and he was one of the first people to do research on novelty and finding that that was one of the keys to marital success and longevity and researching and how when couples that have been together for a long time when they do new novel activities together, the brain in love starts to fire off these neurons.

This is for the audience here. I know you know this stuff, Stan. But what happens when you do new novel activities with your partner is this neurons in your partner’s brain that used to fire when you first fell in romantic love fire off again. We also had Dr. Helen Fisher as a guest.

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

Luis Congdon So beautiful, we had an opportunity to listen to her speak and meet her in New York. One of the things that she talks about is novel doesn’t have to be this crazy thing. It doesn’t have to be this out-there thing.

Novelty can be walking through a different area of your neighborhood, going to the theatre together if you’ve never done that, like going and watching plays, or just doing something different and switching things up a little bit so that the brain shuts off this automation part and you get a chance to explore and see your partner and yourself in this new dynamic or new setting.

Stan Tatkin What you’re saying is extremely important. There are a lot of people out there who take this idea of novelty, a desire for novelty in how to stay in love, and they take it into their own worldview.

What they’re doing is instead of jointly attending to something new, they’re doing a 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 romantic 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 these 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 say, “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 assists in knowing how to stay in romantic love with each other.

Forever hunting and gathering, 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 home for us to share. It’s kind of the same thing.

So there are all these ways that people could use novelty. And here’s another thing. People can play many times if they don’t have anything in common anymore.

Luis Congdon Oh, that’s a big one. That is what I hear a lot.

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 the 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 to 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.

Kamala Chambers Well, it’s been so amazing to have you on the show, and I really loved your views about how to stay in love. Before we close out, is there any last pearl of wisdom that you just want to drop?

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, and learning how to work collaboratively.

Somehow to battle the message that is been out there and is still out there, you have to do this on your own.

You have to love yourself before you can 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 who 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 met but my hope is to become one of the most successful people you’ve ever met.

Luis Congdon I really love that.

Kamala Chambers Beautiful. We’ve been here with Stan Tatkin. Thank you so much for coming here.