How to forget about finding “The One”— and build a lasting relationship (with Dr. George Blair West)
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TED Audio Collective. You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. If you choose to partner up, one of the most important decisions of your life is who you're going to partner with. How do you pick who you're going to spend your life with?

What is the right selection process for a decision that enormous? Not to mention, you got to pick someone who also picks you. And then even once you've found a person, you're nowhere near close to done. I mean, how do you be a good partner? How do you avoid divorce? And is there really just one perfect soulmate out there for each of us?

As you can tell, I have a lot of questions. You probably do too. And luckily, today's guest, George Blair West, has some answers. He is a relationship expert, and here is a clip from one of his talks. Almost 50 years ago, psychiatrists Richard Ray and Thomas Holmes developed an inventory of the most distressing human experiences that we could have. Number one on the list, death of a spouse. Number two, divorce. Three, marital separation.

Now, generally, but not always, for those three to occur, we need what comes in number seven of the list, which is marriage. Fourth on the list is imprisonment in an institution. Now, some say number seven has been counted twice. I don't believe that. When the life stress inventory was built,

Back then, a long-term relationship pretty much equated to a marriage. Not so now. So for the purposes of this talk, I'm going to be including de facto relationships, common law marriages and same-sex marriages or same-sex relationships soon hopefully to become marriages. And I can say from my work with same-sex couples, the principles I'm about to talk about are no different. They're the same across all relationships.

I believe that the most important decision that you can make is who you choose as a life partner, who you choose as the other parent of your children. And of course, romance has to be there. Romance is a grand and beautiful and quirky thing. But we need to add to a romantic, loving heart, an informed, thoughtful mind as we make the most important decision of our life.

Are you ready for more from George? He only wants to help you with the biggest, most important decision of your life. And we will have so much more on how to not mess it up right after this break.

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Hello, hello. I'm Malik. I'm Jamie. And this is World Gone Wrong, where we discuss the unprecedented times we're living through. Can your manager still schedule you for night shifts after that werewolf bit you? My ex-boyfriend was replaced by an alien body snatcher, but I think I like him better now. Who is this dude showing up in everyone's old pictures? My friend says the sewer alligators are reading maps now. When did the kudzu start making that humming sound?

We are just your normal millennial roommates processing our feelings about a chaotic world in front of some microphones. World Gone Wrong, a new fiction podcast from Audacious Machine Creative, creators of Unwell, a Midwestern Gothic Mystery. Learn more at audaciousmachinecreative.com. Find World Gone Wrong in all the regular places you find podcasts. I love you so much.

I mean, you could like up the energy a little bit. You could up the energy. I actually don't take notes. That was good. I'm just kidding. You sounded great. So did you. And we are back. We are talking about how to pick the right partner and just as importantly, how to stay with them with Dr. George Blair West.

Hi, I'm George Blair-West. I'm a doctor specializing in psychiatry in Brisbane, Australia, where I work in private practice. And for the last 25 years or so, I've been working in the relationship therapy space. What do you think about that idea that there is a one for us out there? I'm a romantic. I kind of like the spiritual element of this idea. But what I find is that there are special people who come into our lives who

but I don't think we have to marry them. You know, often we have intense relationships with people, we have this sense that there's some kind of metaphysical connection with them,

But I don't think that has anything to do with having to spend the rest of your life with them. I think people come into our lives to teach us very important lessons and very important experiences. But there is no reason at all why that has to turn into who you spend the rest of your life with. There's also this other element to it, which is we can fall in love with lots of different people. We've got that capacity. And it's out of that group of people that we fall in love with that we want to choose who we've got the best chance of having a rewarding lifelong relationship with.

So these two ideas are more compatible than I think people might realize. It also has always seemed to me like the idea that there's only one person who's out there, just one in all of the humans alive that could match with you. It seems to make less sense and in some ways to be less romantic to me than the idea that there are multiple people, but that you and one other person have chosen to work together and build something special that only the two of you could build.

Chris, if we take that a step further, it's quite a ludicrous idea, really, when you think about it, isn't it? I mean, and what if that person is halfway around the planet, you know? Yeah, that's bad luck. If there's only one, you don't meet them. What you're seeing here is that it's more about who you have the opportunity to build intimacy with.

than about finding the one that romantic destiny might suggest we need to do. The logical extension from the one is what people really mean is they want to have a successful relationship. They want to be happy with this person. In fact, Chris, can I just say, I think it's more than that. I think they want, I think they want it to be ordained in heaven. Yeah. You want to know that you didn't make a mistake. They're like, even when it's hard, well, this is the person, right? It has to be this person. I didn't choose. Well, how do successful couples stay in love? What do they do to stay in love?

Yeah, now this of course goes to the heart of it. Well, this is where I want to step into the world of arranged marriages if I can, because they really clarify some of these issues for us in a really powerful way. And as you drill down on this, you keep coming up with this same central concept, which is the answer to your question. And that is commitment. When you go into an arranged marriage, you commit to making it work because you know that there's nothing else that's going to carry the relationship.

You can't rely on love to carry it. You've got to say, okay, I'm going to go down this path because I want to give this my best possible shot. And that's a commitment to growing a relationship. And this commitment leads us to build love around this triad of trust,

which allows you to be vulnerable, which then allows acceptance by the person who cares for you despite your shortcomings that you're vulnerable. So you have the intimacy being built on that trust and that vulnerability. And that spirals upwards in a healthy direction over time. You talked about a triad. Can you just tell me what the three parts of the triad are?

Yes, okay. So this fits in with how I define love. I mean, one of the things that I really enjoyed the opportunity to visit here was redefining how love works. And I'm going to suggest that love is built around two things. The feeling of being accepted by a partner who knows you despite your shortcomings.

And secondly, a commitment to personal growth in the other person as well as in yourself. And I'd like to sort of pull that apart if we can. But the first part is what we're talking about now, that triad, which allows you to build this intimacy, this feeling of acceptance is that you have to trust that if I share something

with you that makes me vulnerable, that you will not use that to hurt me later on. You will not disclose that to other people inappropriately, that you will keep my secrets, basically. So that's the trust element. And with that bit of trust, and we only have one way to test that, which is to start to put our toe in the water and see what happens. So then we get vulnerable and we share something that is something that we're anxious about people knowing about us,

And then the intimacy, which is the third part of this triad, then starts to build as we realize that our partner is still going to care about us despite declaring our vulnerabilities and our shortcomings. So that's the beginning of the first half of the way I would redefine love. You know, it's this, the feeling of love that a long-term relationship is built on is a feeling of acceptance.

The flip side of this then, of course, is divorce. So what causes divorce and how can we prevent it? Well, that's a rather big question you've just asked. I imagine that's the whole interview. So it's fine if we just start, we dip our toes in the water here and then we can ask some follow-ups. That's totally fine. Pretty much it's the whole interview, the whole book and my whole career. I think if we just play with where we've started here, we start to see where this goes, right? Because if we redefine love around accepting someone

our partner, them accepting us. And then the second part, which is nurturing personal growth in ourself and the other person. And these two things might look like they're opposed in some way, because how can you accept somebody as they are, but also want to nurture their personal growth. But in fact, that's actually not difficult at all. You know, I can accept my partner with her shortcomings, and I'm happy with who she is. But of course, she wants to grow, and I'm there to support her in that growth.

And it's like growing a plant in some ways. You know, you supply the sunshine, the water, the fertilizer, but you don't force the plant to grow. You just provide these resources for it to grow. And that's what we need to do with our partners. Now, when I see couples or individuals who come from failed relationships, which goes to the heart of your question, what's happened?

Partly that's because in some cases, one of the parties have not allowed themselves to be vulnerable and let their partner get to know them. So they deny themselves the experience of being accepted. Yeah, I think it's one of the most tragic parts in some ways of this.

fear of vulnerability is that we were afraid to be vulnerable because we are afraid that the other person won't accept us. And because we never put ourselves out there, we never get to see that they would have. And so we just walk around with that worst case scenario, never being challenged. Chris, you've just nailed it in one. That's exactly the problem. And that fear of intimacy stops that spiral into a healthier place.

And ultimately, if we if we really don't know how to overcome that limits the relationship. It's also so interesting because I think that when in the popular culture idea of love,

I think sometimes there is really this idea of like a single static perfect person. But in reality, right, none of us are static people. We are all changing and growing. Like you said, it's not just the relationship or the other person, but we are not the same person. I've heard it described several times that a long lasting marriage, any long lasting marriage is actually a series of marriages between several different people who just happen to share the same DNA. And.

I wonder how we can balance that idea of change and allowing ourselves and our partner the possibility of change with the reality of having to pick someone to grow with. Right. So this brings us to the second part of how I redefine love very neatly. So the second part is a commitment. And there's that word again, which is so central to a happy relationship.

a commitment to nurturing personal growth in both ourself and the other person. And that's really, really important because you see people who in a martyrish kind of way, they want to help somebody else without looking to help themselves. And there ends up being a sub agenda that if I look after you, you look after me.

And that's not quite the way it's supposed to work. So rather than it being about, I'm going to look after you and you're going to look after me, it's about the idea that I'm going to look after you and I'm going to look after me and you're going to look after you and you're going to help look after me. And it's that sort of mix because there's times our partners cannot be there for us. You know, they're going through

childbirth, raising difficult, sick children, you know, work stressors. There's all sorts of things that will take us out of our relationships with our partners at times. And this is where we've got to be prepared to not look to them for our salvation at these times and be grateful for when they can be there for us. We're going to have so much more important information about relationships from George in just a moment. We will be right back.

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There's also engineered air mesh on the upper side of the shoe that provides the right amount of stretch and structure. It'll turn everyday miles into everyday endorphins. That sounds good, right? Let's run there. Visit brooksrunning.com to learn more. And we are back. We have been talking about relationships with Dr. George Blair West. Well, one of the biggest fears in a relationship, I think for many people, is that it might end badly.

And here is what George had to say about preventing divorce. This is from his talk at TEDxBrisbane. Now, we can intervene to prevent divorce at two points. Later, once the cracks begin to appear in an established relationship, or earlier, before we commit, before we have children. And that's where I'm going to take us now. So my first life hack. Millennials spend seven plus hours on their devices a day.

American data. And some say, probably not unreasonably, this has probably affected their face-to-face relationships. Indeed, and add to that the hookup culture, ergo apps like Tinder, and it's no great surprise that the 20-somethings that I work with will often talk to me about how it is often easier for them to have sex with somebody that they've met than have a meaningful conversation. Now, some say this is a bad thing.

I say this is a really good thing. It's a particularly good thing to be having sex outside of the institution of marriage. Now, before you go and get all moral on me, remember that Generation X, in the American Public Report, they found that 91% of women had had premarital sex by the age of 30. 91%.

But it's a particularly good thing that these relationships are happening later. See, boomers in the 60s, they were getting married at an average age for women of 20 and 23 for men. 2015 in Australia, that is now 30 for women and 32 for men. That's a good thing because the older you are when you get married, the lower your divorce rate. So,

The first thing you want to get before you get married is older. I'm often intrigued by why couples come in to see me after they've been married for 30 or 40 years. This is a time when they're approaching the infirmities and illness of old age. It's a time when they're particularly focused on caring for each other. They'll forgive things that have bugged them for years. They'll forgive old betrayals, even infidelities.

Because they're focused on caring for each other. So what pulls them apart? The best word I have for this is reliability or the lack thereof. Does your partner have your back? Now, these are things that I'm saying you can look for. Don't worry. These are also things that can be built in existing relationships.

So, George, that was what you had to say about preventing divorce in your talk. I'm curious to dig in a little bit more to the science of why marriages don't work. Is it possible for you to know, oh, this couple, they are headed for divorce? It's really about how you get up to the point of making it to the altar. There's lots of books written on what happens after that and how to deal with marital problems after that. But I'm really, really interested in this period of

Because so often I would speak to somebody who'd had a failed relationship and I'd say, when did these problems begin? If you just go back and they'd go, oh, before we got married. The number of times I would hear, oh, before we got married. And then you think, well, hang on, what's going on here? And of course, this is why we need to become a lot more conscious and be aware of the fact that we can look for fairly significant factors. And one of the big ones that I talk about is influenceability. This comes from Gottman's work.

This is about how much when it comes to making a major decision in your life, whether it's buying a house, taking holidays, taking a job, moving, those kinds of bigger decisions, how much are you prepared to consult with and be influenced by your partner? You can see how influenceable your partner is. And if they're not influenceable at all, if they're taking big decisions without talking to you,

Yeah, it's interesting because I think that almost everyone, if you gave them the choice, say, you know, you're making the decision with your partner where you're buying a car. I think almost everyone, if you gave him the choice and said, would you rather get your second choice car instead of your first, but also your marriage survives? Or would you rather get your first choice car and you end up in divorce? I think most people would be like, second choice is fine. I'll take second. But sometimes we forget that in the moment.

Well, and the problem is I've seen this happen with cars and houses. They fight for their first choice and then they lose it in the divorce anyway. Yeah. Yeah. For me, my wife and I have been together for a long time, for more than a decade. And we started dating when we were in school. So I'm a very different person than I was when we started dating. And she's a very different person. And when I think about what has made our relationship survive, I

A lot of it is luck, but I think that one of the big pieces is just that when things have gotten hard, we've both been willing to talk about it, to say this is hard and this is what I'm struggling with and this is what I'm scared to say to you. And when people ask me for relationship advice, that's kind of always my advice is if you just tell the other person what you're dealing with, they will have at least the chance of coming up with a solution that you haven't already thought of.

Or they just can then empathize with where you're at. And most importantly, Chris, realize that the problems occurring between you are maybe a lot less about them

than they otherwise will think it is. I think that's one of the most powerful things about having these dialogues at these difficult times is so often until we have that dialogue, our partner will feel if we're going through a troubled time, if we're not emotionally available to them, they'll either feel that we are angry with them or have a problem with them or we're ignoring them. But the moment you start that dialogue,

That just falls away. And you realize you've got another human being in front of you that's just struggling with life. And it elicits a desire and as if the fundamentals of a relationship are there, it just elicits a desire in us to want to help. And often there isn't a simple solution. I say to my patients who are often intelligent professional people and their partner is too, you know,

The chances are your partner doesn't have a solution to this because, you know, you're smart enough. You probably would have worked out there was a simple solution. But that old saying, a problem shared is a problem halved, I think is very profound. And that's how it feels for us when we share a difficult issue with our partner. And I think there's something almost magical about

about just the way in which having somebody around you during a difficult time makes a difference in a way that is intangible but incredibly powerful. And partners, I think, underestimate this. I know I underestimate it as a therapist. I thought I had to say clever shit when people used to come to see me when they were going through difficult times.

And I realized a lot of my job was just to not pull away from them as people do when they don't know how to help somebody, right? And just to say, look, I don't quite know what we're going to do to fix this right now, but hey, I'm here for you and we're going to work this out together for as long as it takes. And I think that is more powerful. And I think people just completely underestimate its power. And what you've just described with your wife and you there is a commitment to doing that when you don't feel like it.

I would say that for me, I think maybe the most powerful phrase that I've learned and learned to use in the last two years of our relationship, as we've dealt with much more serious stuff has been, that sounds hard just to say that rather than try and fix it or minimize it or, you know, show the bright side to just be like, that sounds really hard and I'm here and we're going to figure it out together, but that sounds really hard. So as someone who specializes in

relationship issues and knows more about divorce than almost anyone. What are you most grateful for in your own life? In my own life or in my own wife? In your wife, in your partner, in the partner that you've chosen. What now do you think of where you're like, I'm so grateful for that?

So there's Penny in the background there. Give Chris a wave, darling. She waved. I saw her. Hello. She's about to go out on the beach. So it'd be good if I didn't have to say this in front of her. Oh, I think it's good to say in front of her. I think she should hear. I'm just kidding. Look, I know that I don't know if Penny would disagree, but I think the single greatest thing that we have, which I'm incredibly grateful for, is Penny's also done a lot of relationship therapy.

And we have, I know, a very unusual relationship in that we understand these principles to a higher level than most people do. But as I'm often saying to my patients,

We road test nearly everything I talk about in our own marriage. There isn't a strategy I will give a patient that Penny and I haven't road tested ourselves. And there's some that we don't go back to because we don't think they're actually, you know, work in the real world. But there's many that do. And I think we both recognize that. But I think what I appreciate most about Penny is I can see her commitment to our relationship and

I can see that when we have conflict over something, she goes away and thinks about it and she will often come back and work on doing it differently. And I'm incredibly grateful for that. You said that you have road tested all of the advice that you give with Penny, your wife. What is some of the most useful advice that you have kept and strategies that you keep doing regularly?

Some of them we've already spoken about. Influenceability is something that I think I've had to work very hard on to become much more open to Penny's views because we're very different in many ways.

We have very different interests, but we do have, as we've written about in the book, you need to have alignment in core values and your relationship vision, which we do. And our differences make for just a much more interesting relationship. And that's one of the, I think, other kind of cool things is that when you're very different people, you live a much richer life. There's more potential for conflict, but...

It's a much richer life. But one of the other things that we still make use of after 33 years of marriage is putting aside time to go through gripes, problems in our relationship. It's an old strategy called gripe time. And it's about this idea that you want to quarantine yourself

These times where you need to talk about problems that one or both of you are dealing with rather than have them play out in the relationship the whole time. Typically, I find couples will do this on a Saturday morning during the week. They're too busy with other things. Saturdays are a good time because Sunday's the day of rest. And they put aside, it could be 20 to 40 minutes longer, maybe less.

just talking about the things that they're concerned about, problems they have with the other person. And what happens when you do this, you don't have to get the other person to agree, right?

you don't forget the other person to apologize you just want them to hear i love that you do that it's actually something that i started doing in my own relationship and has been uh really transformative i and i think the reason is so my wife molly is very she's comfortable talking about problems and i'm not i really am conflict avoidant i like i you know i'm a comedian i want everyone to be laughing and happy all the time i never want to have the bad conversation

And so what happened for many years is I wouldn't say any problems. I wouldn't say anything that I thought was an issue until it was a huge issue. And then I would bring it up and I'd be so upset and it'd be this whole thing. And the intensity of my feeling would make it so that it was hard for her to take it in and feel like she was like, okay, this is not okay. The way that this is coming out. And also I'm shutting down a little bit. And I felt like, well, I've been thinking this for months and there was never a time to say it. So now every Sunday, uh,

We have we call it a check in. And so we share one thing that's going well in the relationship, one thing that could be better. And then what we personally have coming up that week. And I have just found that having the dedicated space means that I'm forced to say something. So if it's small, I say it while it's still small. Like it's like you talk about a lot in your book. It's prevention rather than cure.

And I thought it was so corny, the idea of having like a family meeting. I was so opposed. I was like a family meeting. We're going to on Sundays, we're going to have a little check in where we talk about like our compliment sandwich. That is horrific. And then we did it. And I was like, this is really good. This works well. You know, you're talking about this word commitment again, right? You're committing to something that feels a bit uncomfortable, doesn't feel natural.

But you're committing to it for the health of the relationship and that long-term growth of the relationship. And, yeah, I think one of the – you asked me earlier about what came out of working on this book with my daughter and writing. One of the – I was just surprised how often we were talking about this word commitment. And it really, I think, is the backbone of what makes relationships work.

And you've just given us a great example of it there. Because as you said, if we don't talk about things, one of my other favorite sayings is every big problem was a little problem once. And that means that we want to be dealing with it when it's a little problem. The other thing that couples do well who have healthy relationships is

is they enter more easily into potential conflict. And again, they're dealing with it when it's small rather than, as you say, in your own experience, you wait till you can't not talk about it. And that's not a great time to talk about it.

Is it possible for a single partner to change a relationship for the better? Yeah, that's a really good question, Chris. And now we're moving into the other part of, which is the bulk of my work, of course, which is working on people in established relationships. And more often than not, I only get one half of the relationship who comes in to talk to me about their relationship problem. And generally, but not always, what I do, I have a very particular strategy, which over the years I've kind of refined, right?

to something even simpler, which is I say, okay, what we're going to do here, which you're going to find really, really difficult, is we're going to work out how you can be the best possible partner to your partner. If they don't articulate what it is that they want from you, you're going to have to try and work it out. But, you know, we usually do get a few clues that allow us to do a degree of mind reading.

But what I say is what we're going to do is we're going to get you to be the best partner to them you can be because only then will they start to reflect on how to be a better partner to you because that's the principle, okay, that we want to have connection before conflict. So the way we build connection is by starting to actually meet our partner's needs and nurture their personal growth. I want to go back to this point that I touched on earlier

The second part of love is nurturing personal growth in ourself and the other person. And that requires a high degree of empathy because for me to nurture my wife's growth, I've got to know where she's at and what's important for her. And that means I've got to empathically connect with where she's at and understand not what's important for her in her whole life, but right now, what is the thing that I could do for her that would really help her the most in terms of getting to where she would like to be?

And we've got to check in with our partners on a regular basis to do that. We've got to know where that's no good knowing that, you know, six months ago they wanted to go back to university. If right now that's the furthest thing from their mind because they're trying to work out how to deal with, you know, problem with their sister. So we've got to be tuning in to our partner and asking them, you know, what's happening for you right now? And it's from that place that we can then start to nurture their growth.

And what I see when couples, well, when I'm working with one half of a couple, it's like one day the light bulb goes off because they start to give to their partner and then they realize something really special, which is that the act of giving love is rewarding in its own right. So not only do you set things up for that person to down the track, start to think about, okay, how do I give something back to you?

But the act of giving, if you can come from a place of genuinely wanting to do something for your partner that is of value to them. That is such an interesting concept, the fundamental idea that the way that we experience love may not be the way that our partner does. That I feel like is a very important concept to take away.

We are coming really close to the end of our time. But first, I think it is important that we kind of have this disclaimer, which is as we're talking about relationships that are maybe not working or that are potentially heading for a breakup. Certainly, there must be some relationships where it's not it's important to not make that relationship work, where they're unhealthy or they're dangerous. And how can you know that line?

Yeah, look, that's a really good caveat, which we don't talk about enough in these situations. I would take it a step further, Chris, and say that there's a lot of people out there who should be working on how to exit their relationship because of the fact that it's unhealthy for them. And obviously, a physically abusive or emotionally abusive relationship is pretty clear. But there are also relationships that are beyond saving for a whole variety of reasons.

And you're probably familiar with the entrepreneurial idea of how it's a good idea to fail fast at a project so you can learn from it and go to the next one.

And in a similar vein, I would suggest there are some relationships where you are better off working on how to separate. And I actually will do this with a couple. When I see this, I'll say, look, really, guys, what I think I need to do is help you guys separate with the minimum of fuss and the minimum of pain. That's the most useful thing I can do for you. Because the acrimony that occurs around divorce, in fact, nothing brings out

hatred, I believe more than being built on top of a background of love. I think it's very difficult to hate people we have no connection with.

The hatred, as I think we conceive of it and we see it in its greatest form, is nearly always a blowback from love. That's something that we want to try and be avoiding if at all possible. Well, George Blair West, it has been a pleasure talking to you. We've learned so much. I'm going to use these things in my own day-to-day life. And it's just been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Chris, I really appreciate not just being invited on the show, but what you're trying to do here. The world needs people working on this, and I really appreciate your help. Thank you.

That is it for today's episode. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and this has been How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to our guest, Dr. George Blair West. On the TED side, this show is brought to you by Abhimanyu Das, who is nurturing positive growth. Daniela Balarezo, who communicates openly and honestly. Frederica Elizabeth Yosefov, who puts aside time to deal with issues. Ann Powers, who empathizes before problem solving. And Kara Newman, who never makes a big decision without consulting first.

From PRX Productions, How to Be a Better Human is brought to you by Jocelyn Gonzalez, who accepts your imperfections. Pedro Rafael Rosado, who schedules quality time with you. And Sandra Lopez-Monsalve, who is planning a really special and thoughtful gift for you right now. Thank you for listening and make sure that your person listens too. Have a great day. PR.