As I promised in an older article, I am currently reading The Science of Trust. Do you know the feeling when you are reading something and realize they are up to something? That is what I started to get around page 20 or so.
John Gottmann’s book has one thing that sets it apart from the two million or so other books on relationships: It is based on facts. Actual scientific research in his case, about 40 years of it, peer-reviewed and referenced. And like so many things that science puts its mind to, it turns out that many of the things “we all know to be true” are not, or only in specific contexts.
You need to look no further than page 35 to find a clear solution to a core problem of many relationships that don’t make it: What Gottmann calls “perpetual issues” – those small or large problems that the partners simply can not resolve. If you are anything like me or the friends of mine I’ve talked to about this, you assumed so far that successful relationships are the ones that manage to solve their problems and find solutions. It turns out that this isn’t the case. What Gottmann found out in his actual long-term research of actual couples was that successful relationships established a positive dialogue around their perpetual issues. In other words, they kept talking about it, but not in “everything is horrible, we must find a solution” problem-solving mode, but in a friendly, close and often humorous way. Acceptance that the issue will not be resolved combined with a willingness to stay in touch with each other instead of burying it is the skill that matters. Or, in a slightly more idealistic way of putting it: The ability to use the issue to stay close to each other instead of letting it put more distance inbetween the partners.
Dialogue is one important building block of trust, and trust is what makes or breaks relationships. If I combine this with my early thoughts about monogamy as a built-in relationship self-destruct device and the ideas from “Out of Character” that I’ve written about before, I can not help but arrive at a personal conclusion:
In a monogamous relationship you can never eliminate distrust and fear of cheating unless you delude yourself. Human nature contains a desire for cheating, and research proves that given the right context, circumstances or opportunities, everyone could cheat, no matter how committed otherwise. In fact, it is perfectly normal for someone to cheat one night and be absolutely committed with no reservations whatsoever both before and after. That is the strange way our minds work. For some of us it takes more, for some less, but we are all humans and share the same desires and weaknesses
Knowing your partner could potentially cheat on you while requiring fidelity as a basic assumption of the relationship is incompatible. Of course, many successful relationships have realized that. The truth is as simple as it is not part of the usual relationship literature: Accept it and establish dialogue.
Open relationships don’t have that particular problem, but even in a monogamous relationship, you can be less than religious. Even if you don’t want to grant each other the freedom to sleep around at will, why does a single night have to destroy years of trust? It makes no sense unless you subscribe to this thought of your partner finally having shown his or her “true colours”. Which is not your rational mind talking, but your ego which can not suffer the disgrace of not having anticipated some action or even the backlash of your unconscious suppression of your instinctive knowledge that your partner, too, could stray if circumstances are right.
What if the alternatives are not monogamy and open relationship, but being fanatical or relaxed about variances in your partners behaviour? That is not true for sex alone, it also extends to other “character traits” such as generousity, friendliness, honesty and more. In all of those, it is more than likely that over a lifetime your partner (and, in fact, you yourself as well) will have a general line you follow, but also experience situations in which you behave differently. Nothing could be more human than this flexibility. All of this is heavily substantiated (see the aforementioned book “Out of Character”), so it should not come as a surprise.
