What Does It Actually Mean to Have a Happy Relationship?
Episode one
RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE
THE RELATIONSHIP YES! TEST: A FIVE QUESTION CHECKLIST FOR HEALTHY RELATIONSHIPS
Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994): one of the very few movies we could find depicting a truly happy (and interesting!) long-term couple
Welcome to our very first episode of Alchemy of Connection!
For this first episode, we’re asking the question: what does it actually mean to have a happy relationship?
And to answer this question, we’re going to start by asking another question, which is … what are the stories we inherit culturally about love and relationships?
Almost universally, fairy tales, myths, stories, and movies that center on love and relationships celebrate the experience of falling in love. This celebration of the experience of falling in love is so central to love stories that it nearly always becomes the whole love story.
What this means is that love stories almost always end with two people falling in love. The 1950 Disney version of Cinderella is a perfect example of this, because the movie ends when Cinderella and the Prince get married. They step into a carriage together to be carried off into the distance as we see them kiss through the back window of the carriage. This image of the two of them, being framed within the window of the carriage, becomes the last page of their storybook romance, and it’s accompanied by the words, “and they lived happily ever after.” The back cover of the storybook closes and that’s that. The end.
Whether love stories are in the form of Disney cartoons, Jane Austen novels, or modern day rom coms, the idea is that we get swept off our feet by these powerful love stories that end just as the relationship is truly beginning.
As a culture, we have a rich history of love stories that go back centuries, but when it comes to telling the story of what happens next … and what comes after you fall in love and decide to be together … that story is rarely told. Which means that we have no idea what the story of a long-term relationship is supposed to look like. We actually have an astonishingly impoverished cultural story of relationships that sits alongside this rich history of love stories.
That’s one way of describing it. Another way to say it is that we have a very minimalistic template for what a relationship is. You meet. You fall in love. Maybe there are some obstacles in this process. You leave your glass slipper behind at the ball. Maybe one of you gets a head injury and has temporary amnesia. Or you convince someone to be your pretend date at the family wedding and end up falling in love for real. But, within the span of roughly 150 pages (or 90 minutes of screen time) you overcome any obstacles in your path and end up together. You declare your love for each other. You decide to do life together: and that’s it. The book closes, curtain drops, credits roll.
I mean, obviously we know it’s not that simple. And yet … I think there’s still a part of us that really wants to believe in this kind of happily ever after. There’s a part of us that internalizes this expectation that a good relationship — a happy relationship — means living happily ever after. As thought it could be … or it ought to be … simple and easy like that.
What’s fascinating is that on the rare occasions that we get to see a portrayal of a long-term relationship … or a marriage … it never seems particularly inspiring or appealing, especially compared with the romantic portrayals of falling in love. By and large, the rare windows we do get into long term relationships and couples who’ve been together for decades are not very positive. Depictions seem to run a very limited gamut between vaguely unhappy and bored middle aged couples, to the extreme of married people who’ve been making each other miserable for decades. Because our main cultural story of relationships ends at the point when the relationship itself really begins, it’s almost as though the unspoken implication is that whatever comes next isn’t interesting enough to show.
When Daniel and I were creating our Date Night Movie of the Month, we screened dozens and dozens of movies that might be suitable for the program. We were looking for interesting movies that featured happy long-term couples and we really couldn’t find very many at all.
The vast majority of movies about relationships feature either a will they/won’t they sort of situation in which we’re not even sure if a couple is going to get together … or they show long-term couples who are unhappy together.
One of the only exceptions to this rule is actually from the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral from 1994, and the couple Gareth and Matthew who are long-term partners who seem quite happy with each other. But then (spoiler alert), Gareth dies unexpectedly in the middle of the movie, allowing Matthew to make a moving testimony about their love.
In many ways, our assumptions about long term relationships really reflect our cultural myths about aging and getting older. Where it’s all downhill after certain time or a certain age. I (Angela) remember my cousin crying on her 20th birthday because she felt old. In retrospect, as someone who’s 49 years old, that’s absurd. I feel like my life really started getting good once I was in my mid 40s.
The thing is: falling in love is a magical experience. It deserves to be celebrated. It’s a beautiful part of life. Humans find love stories are almost irresistible: they seduce us into paying attention, leaving us spellbound and breathless until we reach the climax and return to our normal routines. The best love stories show the miracle of meeting someone who awakens an innocent joy of discovery, the thrill of meeting someone whose fascinating presence extends even into their absence. Often, on the way to loving this other person, protagonists end up needing to recover themselves.
These stories feel familiar because they mirror the magic of new relationships. When we’re in a new relationship, it’s almost like we’re getting to know ourselves in a new way while we’re also getting to know the other person. It’s like you discover new parts of yourself that you didn’t know were there, or you reconnect with parts of yourself that you’d lost touch with. It’s almost like falling in love with another person is also an experience of falling in love with yourself at the same time. Seeing yourself through the other person’s eyes is an intoxicating experience.
There’s a powerful bonding that happens when you fall in love that is anchored in the mutual discovery of similarities. It feels uncanny, like it’s almost too perfect. It’s no wonder that we use the language of fate to reflect our feelings. “You have a secret love for rereading your favorite books? Me too. That’s amazing.” “You like pasta? No way. I love pasta.” It’s pretty ridiculous. And also wonderful.
When I (Angela) think about the experience of falling in love and what comes afterward, I always think of my psychology advisor during undergrad, who was quite head over heels for the sociology professor in the next office over. One day, we were talking about love and new relationships and she said, “at some point, you have to get out of bed.” And that’s it. At some point in a relationship, you have to get back into your regular life. You have to get out of bed, and do the dishes, and feed the goldfish. And that’s the point at which most movies end … and it’s also the point at which, in my mind, the real relationship actually begins.
This is why it’s really necessary to understand that the experience of falling in love and the honeymoon period that follows is really only the first stage of a relationship. This stage is love’s childhood. It’s sweet. It’s precious. It’s also temporary, just like childhood, It’s not meant to last forever.
It can be an unsettling experience for a lot of us, finding that this period is coming to an end as you begin leaving the honeymoon stage. It can feel like something’s going wrong in your relationship … or like something’s suddenly gone missing. We’re never taught what to expect in a relationship after the honeymoon phase ends. We don’t know what to expect, so it makes dissatisfaction feel confusing. Is this normal? Is it me? Is it you? Am I expecting too much? Are we not meant to be after all? What’s going on here?
Another way to think about the honeymoon stage of a relationship is that we can use this time to create a solid foundation for a long-term relationship. But if we didn’t get to witness what a happy relationship looks like with our own parents when we were growing up and we don’t have any social models for what this looks like, we actually have to create our own vision for what a relationship can become … after the honeymoon period is over.
For most of us, the idea that a relationship can actually get better with time … that it can age well like a fine wine … is something we’ve not really considered, given our cultural story that the pinnacle of life is youth and then it’s all downhill from there. Which is why, for a lot of us, the best we can hope for is to try to extend the honeymoon phase for as long as possible based on the misperception that everything inevitably gets worse with time.
Which means that when people do try to take steps to make their relationships better, it often ends up taking the form of trying to regain something you had in the beginning. We believe, wrongly, that this retrograde motion is the only alternative, because we don’t realize that there’s anything of value that we could move toward, alongside our partner, that we haven’t discovered yet. Without a future for the love story, all that’s left is the misguided quest to recapture something you had in the past.
So the question we started out with is what does it actually mean to have a happy relationship? We’re really talking about what happens after the honeymoon ends. from our perspective, we see that there are two different models for what a happy relationship could look like, two different ways people go about trying to create a happy relationship.
We’re going to talk about these two models for happy relationships, what makes them different, and how we might be able to blend the best of both these models together. The first model we’re going to talk about is the Happy Relationship as Eternal Honeymoon model. And the second is the Happy Relationship as Adventurous Journey model.
We begin where many people do, thinking about the Happy Relationship as Eternal Honeymoon. This model sticks closely to the storyline of living happily ever after by trying to perpetuate the experience of the honeymoon stage for as long as possible. Happiness is defined as spending fun time together, prioritizing enjoyment, pleasure and ease in the relationship. The poster child for this model for happy relationships is the stock photo of a middle aged couple laughing as they dance together in the kitchen.
As we mentioned earlier, couples in the honeymoon phase tend to focus on their similarities and what they have in common. It’s a really natural part of the bonding experience of a beginning relationship. If you think of a Venn diagram with overlapping circles, in the beginning of a relationship, we focus almost exclusively on where those circles overlap. We tend to overlook our differences, those parts of the two individual circles that don’t overlap. We ignore a lot of our differences, which leads us to overestimate our similarities.
One of the key indications that a relationship is exiting the honeymoon phase is that partners start to become more aware of their differences. There can be some tension in this experience of starting to recognize differences. Maybe you realize that your partner doesn’t love jazz music with a passion that matches yours. Maybe you discover that your partner thinks Kierkegaard is overrated. With the Relationship as Eternal Honeymoon model, the response to recognizing differences is to try to minimize them and keep the focus on what’s shared in common, with the hopes that focusing on similarities will decrease the possibility of conflict or disagreement that could disrupt the easy enjoyment of the relationship.
Happily ever after is taken very seriously in this model. So ways in which you don’t see eye to eye with a partner can feel really uncomfortable, like a potential problem … rather than as something that’s a natural and healthy part of being in a relationship with someone who’s separate from you, who of course doesn’t see things exactly the way you see them.
I (Daniel) think about this with my family growing up. I think my parents had this model of a happy relationship. But the experience of it, as a kid, didn’t seem happy. When I was growing up, it felt more like living in a museum. The focus was always on how things had been in the past. It felt like the goal was to recreate happy moments from the past rather than just be okay with what things were like in the present moment. Because I was raised to look backward, it took a long time before I realized I could have a different kind of relationship than the one my parents had, one that made space for the hard times as well as easy enjoyment.
I (Angela) had a relationship like that too. At the time I would have said that it was a really happy relationship. But we’d achieved that happiness by carefully avoiding any potential source of conflict, just kind of sweeping it under the rug and focusing on the positive. And taking lots of vacations. So when we talked about our relationship, it was always focused on the fun things we’d done together or the fun things we were going to do in the future. But we weren’t very good at being in the present moment together or knowing how to address hard things. We just didn’t talk about it. Instead, we were always trying to go back to some way we’d been together in the past.
That’s the risk with the Eternal Honeymoon model of happiness. The risk of trying to preserve or recreate something from the past reduces your definition of “happy relationship” to something impossible, something you’ve outgrown. This happens when there’s no understanding that you could have a vision for the future that could be different from the past …and also be really good. So your best option seems like it’s trying to hold onto what you had together when your relationship began.
So now let’s talk about the other model for a happy relationship. that’s the model of Happy Relationship as Adventurous Journey. In this model, happily ever after isn’t the end of the story of the relationship. It’s just the prologue. When your relationship is a journey, the best part is yet to come.
One reason why the adventurous journey model of happy relationships is useful for couples is because it accounts for the hard times that we all experience in long-term relationships. Instead of seeing difficulties as something going wrong, as a departure from the way things are supposed to be in a relationship, they become part of the journey.
When we go on a journey, we know we’re going to experience things along the way. It’s exciting. There’s anticipation. We expect there to be some hard times. We expect there to be challenges. We expect there to be lost luggage or a passport that goes missing, or a car that breaks down in the middle of the Arizona desert. That’s part of the adventure. That’s part of the story.
And when we go on a journey, we have a belief that we can meet those challenges. When we have a model of a happy relationship being all about pleasure and enjoyment, then it’s really easy to see difficult times as an indication that there’s something wrong in the relationship. There’s a fundamental assumption that these difficulties should not be happening in a happy relationship.
When we judge difficulties as a sign that things are wrong, we end up passing judgment on a lot of things. Often, at least at some level, it is common to blame ourselves for what’s wrong in the relationship. That doesn’t stop us from also blaming our partner. Eventually, if we get tired of blaming ourselves or our partner, we may decide that the relationship itself is wrong. The tragedy of this unhappy ending is that we actually miss out on the possibility that we could journey through these hard times together, and discover something new and valuable on the other side.
The other thing to consider is that the Happy Relationship as Eternal Honeymoon model prioritizes what’s familiar and tries to stay in that comfort zone and keep things the same. In the Happy Relationship as Adventurous Journey model, we’re able to develop a sense of confidence that we can venture into unknown territory together.
Speaking as someone who really gave my all in an attempt to create an Eternal Honeymoon relationship, I (Angela) think most of us have some level of fear about venturing into the unknown. At the same time, even though it can be scary to venture into the unknown, there’s actually no such thing as a relationship that stays the same over the course of time. We’ll get into that more in Episode Two which is all about change vs. growth and how to create a relationship that thrives long term.
So what happens if you have one partner who really wants to stay in the honeymoon stage and the other partner is kind of ready for that next stage … to adventure out into the unknown so to speak … even when they don’t know what that next stage looks like exactly?
This is one of the most common conflicts I (Angela) see with couples, this mismatch in their understandings of what makes for a happy relationship. And it can be hard for couples to identify the source of their conflict because they both want to have a happy relationship together. They’re both prioritizing creating a happy relationship … but they’re going about it in completely different ways. One person is trying to maximize ease and enjoyment in the relationship, by avoiding bringing up issues that might cause conflict and trying to keep the peace. The other partner is more invested in trying to talk through what’s not working in the relationship in the hopes of making it better, which I would put in the category of Happy Relationship as Adventurous Journey model. And the first partner, the one who’s operating according to the rules of the Eternal Honeymoon, is dodging these attempts to try to talk through difficult topics, saying something like, “Can’t we just agree to disagree and move on? I don’t want to argue with you about this.”
A lot of friction comes up because they’re both using the same language of “we want a happy relationship together,” but it means something totally different. We so often assume that when we’re using the same words, we’re talking about the same thing. But that’s not always true. This is why it’s so important to be clear about what we mean when we say we want a happy relationship—are we talking about ease and enjoyment? Or are we talking about something bigger than that … are we talking about traveling a road together and discovering something new and deeper and more meaningful?
We’re raised with these love stories that are grounded in this sort of Disney fairytale meets rom-com version of happiness. And, when we’re in a long term relationship, we’re never really encouraged to check up on that definition of happiness as we get older. The reality for a lot of people is that they eventually find themselves at a point in life where an earlier definition of happiness no longer suits them. They start asking themselves, “What is it that I want? I know I want something with this person, but what is it exactly? What would make me happy?”
This is why it’s not always helpful to say, “When I got married, this is the happiness I had in mind, therefore I need to stay with this exact thing.” This attitude closes the door on one of the amazing things about growing older, which is how what we want out of life can change so dramatically. Things are possible as we move into the future that were unimaginable in the past. What we can’t know when we’re young is that, as we move into the second half of life, our attention and our desire starts to turn more in the direction of creating a sense of meaning and purpose. The question of what makes life meaningful becomes more important …and this extends into our relationships. A question you might ask yourself is, what do meaningful interactions look like in my relationships?
This focus on meaning is a major reason why the Happy Relationship as Adventurous Journey model is so important. It accommodates for change over time in a relationship. It allows relationships to evolve naturally. When you’re at the beginning of a relationship that’s going to go on for decades, you can’t possibly anticipate the ways in which the relationship might change and grow and evolve over time.
Its chilling to overhear someone tell high school students, often with a tone of resentment, “High school is the best time in your life so enjoy it while you can!” This sentiment reflects a rather grim outlook on life, that your life has peaked before you’ve even become an adult. And the same is true when it comes to relationships. The honeymoon period is great and wonderful … but that doesn’t mean it is destined to be the best time in the life of a relationship.
There’s a very important distinction between these two models for happy relationships, in how they serve to guide the way we deal with conflict. Our perspective is that some level of conflict is inevitable in long term relationships. And that it’s not a bad thing. Conflict can actually lead to profoundly positive growth and healing in relationships. But the tendency in the Eternal Honeymoon model is to avoid conflict if at all possible. Squash disagreements before they get started. Sweep them under the rug, move on, focus on the positive. Even when both partners are committed to this version of happiness, there are still challenges that will arise, because hard things just have a way of coming up in relationships.
When you can accept challenges as inevitable and when you see difficulties as a natural and potentially beneficial part of your path as a couple, then, when you encounter challenges along the way, you’re not going to immediately panic that there’s something wrong with your relationship. You can approach those experiences together, knowing that there’s a potential for something good to come out of working through hard times.
Of course, this brings up the question of how you can tell the difference between the natural, expected challenges that come up in healthy relationships and potential signs that your relationship has more serious problems that might need a different kind of attention. For that, we created the Relationship Yes! Test, which is a simple five question checklist for healthy relationships. You can also check out Episode Seven, which offers advice for the hard times.
Fortunately, it is possible to blend the two and get the best of both models of how to have a happy relationship. From our perspective, the crucial benefit of the Adventurous Journey model is how it looks toward the future and also being able to approaches conflict in positive ways. The risk of the Eternal Honeymoon relationship is that it will always be facing toward the past … toward the beginning of the relationship as though that was the pinnacle of what the relationship could be.
But there’s another way of approaching relationships as an eternal honeymoon. This is by prioritizing enjoying each other in the present moment, savoring time together and those experiences that bring both of you pleasure.
Remember, part of the magic of falling in love is how it brings you into the present moment so powerfully … you’re so immersed in the experience of being together that you lose track of time. Hours pass in the blink of an eye. This quality of experience is something that actually becomes more possible as you know someone better. The more deeply you know someone, the more the little differences unfold into new realizations—new ways to be fascinated by the person you love.
There’s this sense of discovery and exploration that we sometimes lose as a relationship goes on. We make the mistake of believing that we know everything about the other person. We lose our curiosity about our partner’s inner world. So part of tending to the sparks of a long relationship, and nurturing its fire, is just finding time to be in the present moment with each other, without distractions … letting yourself forget the dishes and the goldfish … and just climbing back into bed to stare into each other’s eyes and try to see the universe within the other person.
That’s how to make relationship magic.
What’s your relationship archetype?
about angela Amias & Daniel Boscaljon
We’re the creators of the Five Relationship Archetypes and the hosts of the Alchemy of Connection. It’s been known for a long time that painful childhood experiences, including trauma, affect adults at many levels, from physical and mental health to emotional well-being to relationships. While the impact of early trauma on adult relationships is frequently noted by trauma experts, there’s been very little in terms of practical, useful advice or programs that adults with childhood trauma can use to improve their own relationships.
Our programs are designed to fill that gap—to help you understand how your own past experiences influence your relationship with yourself and your relationships with others.
Healthy relationships are an essential part of living a good life and yet, many of us (perhaps even most of us) have core wounds from childhood experiences that affect our ability to have the kinds of intimate relationships in adulthood that we long to have.
