Relationships really confuse us. On one hand we say we want a real, intimate, relationship.  On the other hand, we know that relationships are hard.

     

    I see this tension in my students’ struggles to have relationships. When I ask “…why are interpersonal relationships so difficult to manage,” I get a lot of responses.

• Because we disappoint other people
• Because we place expectations on people and are disappointed
• Because we interpret things differently
• Because we are ego-centric (always believe we’re right)
• Poor communication skills
• Situations change (i.e. moving to a new location)
• People have different beliefs
• Because we try to please everyone
• Money
• Because we’re never satisfied
• Because we have difference experiences/backgrounds
• People are selfish (i.e. want instant gratification)
• Interpersonal relationships are too time-consuming
• People lie
• Imbalance in affection
• New/different social influences
• Because we’re scared to be vulnerable
• Because we have a tendency to be judgmental
• Because we have different desires and goals
• Because of the different investments placed towards the relationship
• Lack of respect for personal space
• Different styles of managing stuff
• Trying to fit in too much
• Immaturity/inexperience in relationships
• Different interests
• Sexual incompatibility
• Because your relationship with Person A can affect your relationship with Person B (i.e. your girlfriend doesn’t like your best friend)
• Jealousy
• Because we aren’t mindful of others
• People are stubborn
• Because the more we get to know people, the more flaws we observe
• People are sensitive
• Because we’re not the same and that might cause difficulty
• Because we attribute people’s behavior to who they are, not the influences which might have contributed to their development (i.e. blame others)
• Don’t let go (i.e. hold grudges)
• People have different orientations
• Alcohol
• Because we have images of perfection
• People aren’t faithful
• Stereotypes are placed until broken
• Power struggles
• Inability to empathize
• We all do wrong and we know it

    In the Fall of 2011, from a class of 207 students, those were the responses I got to my query, “Why are interpersonal relationships so difficult to manage?”  And when that last response came, “We all do wrong and we know it,” I stopped and looked up into the auditorium. 

 

     I wanted to look in to the eyes of the person who said that; who admitted that.  He was a young white man with floppy dirty-blonde hair, and a look about him of being separate from others. I looked up into his eyes, nodded to him, and again repeated it for the class…

     “We all do wrong and we know it.”

     Even listing all these facts that make interpersonal relationships difficult to develop and maintain, my students also seem to want to believe that relationships shouldn’t be this hard.  And therein lay the problem.

     Look, relationships are hard not just in our imaginations, but because all relationships involve two people with two different social histories; two reasonable sets of opinions; two reasonable sets of preferences.

     That’s why people say, “…relationships are hard.”  That’s why we find ourselves saying things like:

     “God he gets on my nerves.”

     “I don’t know why she just won’t do it the way I told her to do it.  Humph…”

      Langston Hughes, the poet, describes one part of the struggle of relationships, saying,

            “Late last night I

             Set on my steps and cried.

             Wasn’t nobody gone,

             Neither had nobody died.

             I was cryin’

            Cause you broke my heart in two.

            You looked at me cross-eyed

            And broke my heart in two—

            So I was cryin’

            On account of

            You!”

     Being in a relationship, being interdependent with another person is not easy.  It’s not just a matter of what we or they think. Interdependence is about concrete social connections, social ties, that influence our behavior and our friends’, co-workers, lovers’, teammates’, parents’, behaviors.

     When we take that for granted by assuming that the other person can just think their behavior into shape for us, we deceive ourselves and belittle those with whom we are interdependent. Yet, people sometimes fear the scientific truth.  They fear it not simply because they will find out they are wrong, but more because they fear that it will take away the magic.  But knowing the truth does not take away the power of the magical and inspirational. Fully understanding the real nature of relationships will not make our social lives more mechanical, but will give us an appreciation of the struggle and make what we achieve feel even more magical and inspirational. 

     When the research knowledge developed by social psychologists is brought together with a focus on interdependence, it can provide us with tools that will help us all in our relationship struggles.  Knowing the obstacles, barriers and challenges that relationships face can only help us appreciate the joy and pain of the struggle to create and maintain those relationships.  

     Being in relationships is what activates, heats up all of our human experiences.  That’s why when I teach about relationships, I always begin with the hard truth of interdependence between two people.  I do that so that we can explore and try to understand how human experience operates within and emerges from our interpersonal interactions, so we can know what we are up against, and what joy we can really achieve through the struggle.

    I have a vague image of a woman holding a lamp that lights the way as she walks through a hospital room, watching over the sick and dying. That is the image that pops into my head when I hear the name Marie Curie.  Where in my childhood that I get such an image?

     That is the question I kept asking myself as I read Lauren Redniss book, “Radioactive, Marie and Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout.”  Turns out, I had no idea who Marie Curie had been, how important she had been to the science of radioactivity, and how she and her husband Pierre had shared a radioactive love.

     But theirs’ was not the naïve idea of hot love that we live with today.  Pierre Curie was a physicist who studied crystals, and whose work was ground breaking, setting the foundation for the creation of mechanisms that power things we take for granted today; inkjet printers, medical ultrasounds.

     Marie Curie was never a nurse. She studied mathematics and physics, and when X-rays were first discovered became interested in minerals that gave off light; uranium being one. 

     Both Marie and Pierre were high level thinkers and researchers. 

    Can two geniuses find love and sustain a relationship?  For me, as I read, that became the central question about the life of Marie Curie.  A woman of her own mind, at a time when women usually were mere baubles on the arm of a man, Marie wanted a love life, a family, but she wanted equally to be able to do her independent work.  Pierre was a man who wanted Marie the woman, but who also wanted Marie the thinker.  So they became collaborators in all things; life and work.  Noting this about their relationship Redniss writes,

     “With the constant companionship that accompanied their research, the Curies’ love deepened.  They cosigned their published findings.  Their handwritings intermingle in their notebooks.  On the cover of one black canvas laboratory log, the initials “M” and “P” are scripted directly one atop the other.”

     Today we use the phrase “power-couple.” Well here was the ultimate power-couple who shared marriage, children and a Noble Prize in Physics for their work on radium and radioactivity. It was Marie who coined the word “radioactivity.”  Her work influenced everything we learned about and now know about radioactivity.

     Set up as a graphic novel, Redniss takes us through the many facets of the questions, quandaries and paradoxes that knowledge of radioactivity has brought to human history. That, in and of itself, makes this a book that all of us need to read. And the book, with its colorful, emotion laden art (by the author), is a captivating read that took me away for three hours. 

     For me, the most compelling part of the story is the human story. In her diary Marie wrote: “We [Pierre and I] lived in preoccupation as complete as that of a dream.”  Yet dreams can contain moments of disappointment and even terror. 

     Still learning about the properties and effects of radioactivity, handling radium every day, both Marie and Pierre were being poisoned by their work. Pierre dies in part because he was so weakened by that poisoning.  Four years later, Marie takes a lover, another physicist, who is married.  That caused a scandal so extreme that two men had a duel over her honor, and she was discouraged from going to Oslo to receive her second Nobel Prize, this one in Chemistry.  Marie ignored these requests. That should have surprised no one because Marie Curie had always been an independent thinker.  That is why her greatest joys came in her relationship with Pierre. 

     What is radioactive love?  It is having someone who gets and respects your passion… that’s radioactive love.  Such mutual respect lights things up; it heats things up.  It resists random change, even as it accepts its own natural change.

     To love is to respect.  Sadly and with imminent danger to self and others, too many people use the word “love” when they mean “want.”  That is dangerous because “I want you” is only a statement of passionate desire.  “I love you” should be a statement of the interaction of desire, respect and commitment to the relationship that lights up everything. Love, you see, is a decision to bring and keep desire, respect and commitment together, in order to have an authentic, luminous, relationship.

     

    Marie Curie’s relationship with Pierre was such because they respected each other.  Losing such a rare, radiant, element would be the most difficult thing ever in life. No wonder that when he died, a day after the funeral, in her diary Marie wrote,

     “My Pierre, I got up after having slept very well, relatively calm.  That was barely a quarter of an hour ago, and now I want to howl again—like a savage beast.”

    You want to know what radioactive love looks like.  Read this book.

    Radioactive love; so many people carry that around in their heads as the ideal, romantic relationship.  A love that burns so hot that it may as well be a nuclear reactor.

  What bullshit!

     It is that kind of naïve, romantic belief about relationships that I confront and dismantle in my teaching about relationships.  Yes, a healthy, romantic relationship should have heat; hot-love, passionate sexual attraction; but not radioactive because we humans do not know how to control radioactivity.  Real love, healthy love, requires control because to love means to be able to fit our emotions into what the relationship requires.

     One of my favorite stand-alone lectures to give is the one I call, “What if the requirements of love are not the requirements of the relationship?”

     So let’s talk about the four requirements of the relationship.

     First requirement: the relationship must develop over time and circumstances; you cannot rush the evolution of the relationship.

     Getting a phone number, does not make it a relationship.

     Being kissed does not make it a relationship.

     Having sex does not make it a relationship.

     Here’s the problem.  Generally speaking, when people think they are in love, they immediately make this mistake.

     They say stuff like:

She’s great; I love everything about her.

He’s wonderful: I love everything about him.

     Problem:  They are still at the beginning of what might become a relationship; so they don’t know everything about him or her.

     That’s why we can end up so angry. At the beginning of the month we say, “I love everything about him or her.”  At the end of that same month we say:

 He’s a jerk.

She’s a … ok, she’s so selfish.

     It is as if the person has betrayed us by being who they really are. But the truth is we tried to rush things. 

     You see, relationships must evolve.  And the basis of the evolution of any interpersonal relationship is social interaction; interacting with that person, repeatedly, over time and different circumstances.  Until we have done that, we do not have a relationship.

     You cannot make a relationship grow by just being nice; you cannot make a relationship grow by partying together; you cannot make a relationship grow simply by spending all your time together; you cannot make a relationship grow by having lots of really good sex.

     Why not?; second requirement of relationships.

     Second requirement: the force that causes relationship development is conflict; relationships cannot develop without encountering and managing conflict.

     She wants to go the tractor pull and he wants to go the opera. 

     What do you do? 

     Interpersonal conflicts must occur for the relationship to grow.  Why?  Because without those kinds of conflicts, you never get to know who the other person really is, and you never get to know what they are or are not willing to adjust to for the relationship.

     So you must not hide your preferences.  You know the situation; you’ve lived it.  The question is asked, “…what do you want to do,” and the answer comes, “I don’t know what do you want to do.”

     Why is that so annoying?

     Because the person is hiding from you or you are hiding from them.

     And you are both lying.

     Always saying, “yes dear” is a sure relationship killer.  Why; because it’s hiding.

     Always saying, “…it doesn’t matter to me, I just want to be with you…” is a sure relationship killer.  Why; because it’s hiding and lying.

     Relationships cannot grow without honest self-disclosures.  Hiding your preferences stops the relationship from evolving.

     The third requirement of the relationship that we must understand is that the management of conflict will either cause the relationship to grow or will kill the relationship on the spot. 

     If any member of the couple decides to blow off a preference of their partner, the relationship is dead.  If you say “oh you don’t really mean that,” the relationship is dead.

     People you want to have relationships with had their preferences before they met you.  People do not spring into existence, just because you get interested.  Mostly they were doing fine… and you just showed up and now you want to object to their preferences.  So, if their preference is not illegal, immoral, dangerous or stinky, when you object then you show that it’s all about you having your way. 

     And that brings us to the fourth requirement of relationships. The fourth requirement of the relationship is this; the proper management of conflict requires each partner to listen for and adapt to the strengths and limitations of their partner.

   If your partner says to you, as the Tracy Chapman song says,

 “I told that I love you and there ain’t no more to say…”

     …you need to hear that as part of who they are and how they can or are willing to express themselves.  If you want or need someone to keep proving their love to you and the person says to you “I have told you that I love you and there ain’t no more to say…” then you have to hear and understand that limitation. If you can’t accept that, the way they are, don’t expect them to change for you.  That means you need to move on. 

     Walk the hell away.

     Listen, we all know that people do try to stick with a relationship because of what they imagine to be the requirements of radioactive love.  But heat is not the most powerful force holding a relationship together.  The most powerful force is adaptation; partners adapting to the strengths and limitations of each other.

     No real relationships are without conflicts. So the point is to be in a relationship that you and your partner believe is worth adapting too.  Since the requirements of your radioactive-love are never going to fit the requirements of the relationship, you must always decide what you are willing to do for the relationship.  If you decide that you cannot adapt to your partner’s strengths and limitations, then get out quickly.  Don’t linger, because lingering will almost always lead to a destructive relationship; a relationship in which at least one person in the relationship is subject to physical or psychological harm.

     Yes it was hot-love at first; radioactive love. Yet it was love without a willingness to learn and adapt to the person we said we loved.  It was radioactive at first sight… but what if the requirements of your heat are not the requirements of the relationship? 

    What then?

     With some frequency I give this talk to college students.  And during the last six summers, I have come out of hiding to give this talk to high school students attending North Carolina’s Governor’s School East held at Meredith College in Raleigh. When I give this talk to 15 and 16 year olds, I rock the house.

  

     After my talk in the Summer 2011, one of the students, Julius Kellinghusen, wrote it up for the Governor’s School East newsletter.  With the title of the article being “Doctor Love speaks out on teen romance and relationships” he ended his write up saying:

    “While being both caring and frightening, Dr. Nacoste and his lessons will be remembered for many years to come. So when you’re in that illegal, immoral, dangerous, or maybe even stinky relationship—just remember: ‘Get up and walk the HELL away.’”

    Apparently at Governor’s School East, they call me “Dr. Love.”

    Dating and marriage are in chaos. Relationships aren’t happening, aren’t working the way we dreamed, the way we always hoped they would.

     With lamentation in her voice, Natasha Bedingfield sings:

                                                                                                           Who doesn’t long for someone to hold…

Who knows how to love you without being told…

Somebody tell me why I’m on my own…

If there’s a soulmate for everyone…

     More than ever, people want to know how relationships work. Jordan Sparks sings:

     Why does love always feel like a battlefield, a battlefield, a battlefield?

      Almost as if he is in conversation with Natasha and Jordan, John Legend sings:

                                                                                                     

‘Cause everybody knows, that nobody really knows

How to make it work, or how to ease the hurt

We’ve heard it all before, that everybody knows

How to make it right, I wish we gave it one more try

‘Cause everybody knows, but nobody really knows…

   

     To get answers to their relationship questions, to find love that lasts, to figure out how to manage their relationships, people are reading relationship columns, blogs, and books. No doubt, more than ever, people are wondering whether there is a course to take to at least understand what the hell is going on. Well, is there?

     Yes there is.

      And I have been teaching that course to college students since 1999. 

     When the summer of 1999 rolled around, I had been teaching social psychology for about 10 years.  And I wasn’t happy.

     Oh, I liked being a professor. 

     

    And I liked teaching the social psychology course.  But I wasn’t happy with the way the field of social psychology was being covered by the textbooks. 

     All of the social psychology textbooks had the same organization, and that meant that interpersonal relationships were buried in chapter 9 or 10 somewhere.  All the textbooks start with psychological stuff; how we think about things; how we feel about things.  My training and my life experience told me that that’s not social. 

     How can we call ourselves social psychologists if we wait to show what we know about relationships so late in our coverage of social psychological topics and research? How can we offer people any help with their interpersonal relationships if we talk as if all that matters is how we think?

     I was really irritated by this because using any textbook almost forced me to teach the course in the way the textbook was organized.

     I was not happy. 

     So, I did something that some of my colleagues thought a little crazy.  I threw away all of the lectures I had developed, used, and refined over ten years. 

     I threw them away.

      Then I said to myself, ok Rupert… put your time where your mouth is. I said to myself, if you can teach the course in a new way, then you can write a new kind of social psychology book. Come up with a better way to organize a book and then teach the course that way. 

     That’s what I did.  I created a new social psychology course.

    In that course, I do not offer one-shot solutions to problems that occur in relationships.  What I do is teach students about the nature of being interdependent with another person.  All relationships are relationships of interdependence; each person depends on the other person for interpersonal satisfaction.  And it turns out that being interdependent with someone, in romance or friendship, has no one-shot, one-answer solution. 

     Interdependence in its completeness is something we all need and want to understand. We search for, we long for interdependence. We have different ways of stating this longing. We say “someone to love me.”  We say “someone to watch over me.”  However it is phrased, what we search for in interdependence with another person is safety… home. 

     Yet despite our longings to be interdependent, we don’t do it very well.  Why is that?  Simple; it takes time to learn how interdependence really works.  That’s the point of my course; to give people a framework, a lens, an eye, through which to see how the interpersonal works. So, in my course we take on these questions:

 What is an interpersonal relationship?

Why are interpersonal relationships so difficult to manage?

What are the types of interpersonal relationships?

What are the general requirements of interpersonal relationships?

What dimensions of interdependence lead us to feel safe in our relationships?

What can go wrong in our relationships because we are so motivated to find safety in our relationships?

     Even books by therapists do not take on these essential questions. Books like The Dance of Anger are books that try to heal the charred skin that remains after people have been burned by trying and failing to find relationship satisfaction by living out their relationship-stereotypes and romantic ideals.  My course is about prevention.

     My idea is that if we give people a realistic, scientifically established, understanding of how interpersonal relationships work, that will go a long way to preventing people from throwing themselves into the fiery pit of relationship confusion and eventual anger.  Once I started teaching my course the new way, with the entire focus of the course on relationship-development, students went wild.

     Students started evaluating the course with comments like this:

     “I would just like to say that I’m glad that I had the opportunity to rid myself of my romantic ideals about relationships.  Although the truth is cold and the reality even colder, at least through the knowledge I have learned in this course I no longer feel lost, confused, or that I will be wasting my time with bad relationships in the future. I now feel as though I have a real chance at developing a genuine, healthy, longstanding, love-filled communal relationship.”

     Also evaluating my course, another student wrote:

     “An excellent course. This should be taught in high schools!! This should be made a university-wide requirement [because] this course… enhances students’ maturity in dealing with others, both in intimate relationships and friendships.”

     So hold on; in my posts up until Summer, 2012, I will give you a glimpse into the teachings of my course.  One of the themes of the course is this: Relationships present to us problems to solve. That means that relationships require work. What surprises my students is that some of that work is us working to understand ourselves.

     Come go with me into a glimpse of a course that causes students to learn to accept the fact that it is only through relationships, through interdependence, that we can discover our authentic-self.  Paul Laurence Dunbar, the poet, puts the invitation and experience I am offering, this way:

 Come, come away to the river’s bank,
Come in the early morning;
Come when the grass with dew is dank,
There you will find the warning –
A hint in the kiss of the quickening air
Of the secret that birds and breezes bear.

     Come along for a glimpse into a course that helps people develop a new way of looking at the interpersonal. Come along for a glimpse into a course that makes the secrets of managing interdependence coherent; the “…secret that birds and breezes bear.”  

     Come; let’s make our way home.