I agree with the general message, but I disagree with the conclusions about what skills need to be learnt. In my view health and wellbeing are the primary loadbearing factors for developing good relationships with other people. Simply put, if you are healthy and happy, you will be pleasant and kind to others, and others will go out of their way to be pleasant and kind to you as they like to be close to you because they also want to be happy and healthy. And I do think many people are not as healthy or happy as they think they are.
If you are very healthy and just content with your life then you almost never get angry or frustrated or burden people with your worries (because you have none!). This just makes all your social relations 'smooth'. A happy and healthy person is also naturally open to hearing other people express their thoughts without judgement, they have no need to put someone down, or to expect too much from a person because they are already okay enough such that they don't 'need anything' from this other person.
In my view, what people often attribute to psychological traits such as "this person is very friendly" or "this person is very open" or "this person is securely attached" or "this person is a hard worker" is actually more a statement about the underlying physical health than it is about personality. I like to think that we are a body and brain first before we are a personality. So, how can you improve the health of your brain? How can you genuinely reduce stress and inflammation in your body?
If you have a happy and healthy dog, you can imagine other dogs may really like to be near this dog. If you have a sick dog, that has no energy, gets easily frustrated, is often annoyed, or worries a lot about things. Then other dogs may not really like to be near this dog.
Several people told me that, so I changed the title from "Maybe You Suck at Relationships..." to "Maybe You're Bad at Relationships...", hopefully that's less acerbic. My intent is not to provoke, but to inspire change.
The average person, presumably, just stumbles along in their relationships, without ever studying the science behind what makes them work.
So then what about relationships?
And yet, that’s exactly what people do. They go around falling in love with people without examining, evaluating, and testing for relationships skills. They’re just not taking relationships seriously.
Let’s get serious
To establish exactly what I mean by the word serious, and why it matters for improving your relationships, here’s an excerpt from the essay Everyone Can Tell if You’re a Serious Person:
The first time I got serious about something was right after college—I noticed that I was getting fat. Then I realized that most of my relatives were obese, had high blood pressure, and diabetes. I thought, “Oh, this will be my future if I don’t do something drastic.” So I did something drastic.
Over the course of a year, I spent 300 hours (~5 hours/week) reading books on a variety of topics.[2]
Note: it’s easy to just read a book and not make any changes to your life.
And so with every book I read, I kept asking myself, “how can I use this new information to change my behavior and lifestyle?”
If, while reading a book, I couldn’t provide a good answer to that question, I put that book down and moved on. But if I did find something useful, I would take meticulous notes in my journal, start practicing it immediately, and track my progress week after week.
I became serious about understanding this topic and used free information (via the library and the internet) to learn and experiment on myself, which changed the course of the rest of my life.[3]
This is what I mean by getting serious: it means putting 100% of your effort into something that matters to you.[4]
So if your relationships matter to you, do you take them seriously? Have you studied the available science on what makes them work optimally? I don’t blame you if you haven’t, our education system, and our culture more broadly, doesn’t prioritize teaching us this information.
Consider the amount of education and training that working professionals undergo, versus what it takes to get married:
And then we have…
I would argue that entering into the most significant emotional and financial agreement of your life (ie: marriage) should warrant at least a bare minimum examination of the science behind relationships (that is, if you want it to go well).[6]
Given the seriousness of this topic, how come we don’t learn about it in school?
My high school offered nothing on the topic of relationships. That’s because K-12 education prioritizes standardized/testable academic subjects. Additionally, some people have strong political opinions on whether emotional and interpersonal subjects should be taught in school, versus taught at home. So while my high school taught me nothing on the science of creating and fostering a healthy relationship, I did get taught in sex-ed how to put a condom on a banana…
As for university, upon checking my alma mater’s course catalog, I see that only the Psychology major has courses relevant to relationships, such as:
But that’s just for Psych majors. Since I studied Data Science and Statistics, none of my required courses taught me anything about the science of relationships.[7]
Okay, so we can’t expect our education system to teach us anything about relationships. So what do we do?
Well, what do working professionals do?
They spend a hell of a lot of time studying, practicing, and mastering their crafts. The answer to getting better at relationships, is to take them seriously.
To get good at a relationship skill, learning something once isn’t enough. You must practice that skill over and over until you internalize it. Fortunately, the field of neuroscience explains how to efficiently learn a new skill so that you never forget it.
The Neuroscience of Myelination (ie: Deep Practice)
In author Daniel Coyle’s book The Talent Code, he describes the neuroscience of efficient skill building, and explains how those who understand this concept can access a zone of accelerated learning:
People often make the same mistakes in their relationships, they keep having the same fights. By engaging in the same behavior over and over, they're (unintentionally) reinforcing that this is the best way to navigate the situation. And so the behavior continues.
But how are we supposed to change, and do something differently? The author answers that question:
Okay, so we're supposed to pay attention and make mistakes. Then what? Are we magically different? No, to build skills through deep practice, it takes a long time and many iterations:
So, iteration is more important than perfection (I like the phrase: “start messy, polish later”). Keep making mistakes, but make new mistakes, and pay close attention to why you did something incorrectly, and then fix it.
On this matter, John Wooden, widely considered the greatest college basketball coach of all time, had this to say:
This is what serious people do: they practice a skill and don’t stop until it feels natural to them.
So, are you “serious” about relationships?
As an example of a failure in the education system, let’s take a look at attachment theory: a scientifically grounded framework within developmental psychology, social psychology, and neurobiology, which helps explain interpersonal bonding (ie: parent-child relationships, and also romantic relationships). We know that 50% of people are estimated to have an insecure attachment.
50%!
Half of all people!
And yet this is a completely solvable issue. Research shows that our brains are plastic, and therefore “are capable of rewiring themselves after repeated positive experiences. So, [finding and staying in] healthy relationships can rework our early insecure bonds.”
Given the ubiquity of insecure attachment, I would argue that a person who is serious about relationships would, upon their thorough investigation of the science, discover this relational concept and determine if they are insecurely attached, and then, if necessary, devote the time to fix this about themselves (ie: go to therapy, read books on attachment, and use this information to identify good potential romantic partners).
Attachment theory is great, but there are also plenty of other worthwhile relationship concepts to learn about. For example:
These skills are just out there, waiting for you to learn them.
“Well,” you might object, “it’s hard to notice patterns in ourselves. It’s much easier to see the mistakes other people make.” I would agree with that. We often watch our friends make the same mistakes over and over when it comes to love. When we try to step in, they sometimes push back, so we watch from the sidelines as we bite our nails, hoping that they’ll change. But isn’t it possible to see these patterns in ourselves?
Ask yourself: are you iterating by making small/slow changes over time, or are you merely repeating the same mistakes without ever changing anything?
Maybe you’re just not a serious person when it comes to relationships.
When I decided to become serious about relationships, here’s what I did:
I spent 120 hours across six weeks (~20 hours/week), getting up at 6am to study for two hours before work, and up to eight hours on the weekends. The following is what I worked on during that period.
First things first: I asked my friends to call out my relationship Perceptual Blindspots (ie: the things our friends see about us, but we’re not aware of). I got a decent list from them, with the biggest issue being that I probably had avoidant attachment. Then I started reading books on the science of relationships, and I wrote down all the concepts I’d never heard of and hadn’t practiced before.
Here are the books I read/reread over those six weeks:
After compiling a discrete list of skills from my friends and the books I read, I got to work researching, practicing, and cementing them in my behavior with repeated iterations (ie: myelination).
For avoidant attachment, one friend told me that she was able to completely overcome it with therapy and take-home worksheets. So I hired a therapist that specialized in attachment theory. In between appointments, I requested supplemental materials on the science of relationships, and asked for homework to practice in the real world.[10], [11]
Another friend told me (which my therapist confirmed) that you can attain secure attachment by creating a healthier bond with your original attachment figures (ie: your parents), and by having a healthy/secure romantic relationship. The first one seemed easier, so I set out to strengthen my relationship with my parents.
I hadn’t felt close to them in a long time. I called them up and explained that I needed their help with healing my attachment, and that this could be a win-win for all of us.
“Hey, mom and dad, I feel like we’ve grown apart over the last five years, and I want to have a closer relationship with both of you. I’m not interested in blaming either of you for anything—that doesn’t help anyone. Instead, since you’re both my primary attachment figures and my original role models for what a healthy relationship should look like, in order to feel more connected to you, I'm going to start gently asking for what I want in the present, so that we can all have a better future.”
To their credit, they replied, “Wow, that sounds great. How can we help?”
I then started calling them once a day for a month, and in the process, completely reshaped my relationship with them. Within a few weeks, I began to emotionally feel safe enough to be vulnerable, and ask for their support and guidance during hard times—something that would have been unimaginable just a few weeks prior (it surprised me how quickly things changed between us, and that’s simply because I took that first step of being vulnerable and opening up to them).
Eventually we reviewed the past, not for the purposes of blaming anyone, but so that we could understand the intergenerational patterns in our family. I constructed a family tree of trauma/hardship, then I went and read psychology books on family dynamics, trauma and regrowth, parenting, and psychotherapeutic techniques for emotional regulation—all the while performing deep practice by taking what I learned, and executing on a plan to act differently until I internalized each new skill (ie: myelination).
It wasn’t easy. I struggled (and sometimes cried) during some tough conversations, but now we’re closer than ever as a family.
That’s all well and dandy, but there’s only so much you can learn about romantic relationships without being in one, so while I’ve been dating casually for years, I finally decided to get serious about relationships.
Next I tackled my social anxiety. Approaching and talking to women always stressed me out. So I started studying the evolutionary origin of the feeling of social anxiety by reading the works of Jaak Panksepp (who founded the field of affective neuroscience) and reading behavioral psychology articles on PubMed.
Eventually, through enough experimentation, one day my social anxiety just turned off like a light switch. It’s not a problem anymore. It doesn’t affect me in the slightest. (I’ll write a blogpost explaining what I did some day.)
With my newfound freedom and confidence, I began approaching cute women at public events, chatting them up, and making them laugh. If I liked their vibe, I’d say to them, “Hey you’re cute, are you single?”[12]
Over just a couple weeks, I asked out a half-dozen women at bars, coffee shops, and social events. (Which was wild to me, given that I had only done that once before in my life).
Eventually I met a woman and we clicked. With each date we went on, I took the opportunity to practice everything I learned. Remember, myelination is slow. You can’t learn a new skill the first time you attempt something. It takes repeated iterations of deep practice to internalize a new skill.
Recall what the basketball coach John Wooden said:
From Dr. Amir Levine & Rachel S.F. Heller's book Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love, I learned that:
And that:
So with the new woman I began seeing, I would catch myself falling into avoidant patterns, correct myself, and watch how with each repetition it became easier and easier to act in a healthy/secure way: I started discussing our relationship needs, our communication styles, and how we prefer to express love.
It went really well.
Why? Because I decided to take relationships seriously and put in the work.[13]
What happened after my initial intense six week period?
Eventually, I got to a place where I felt competent in my skills to be able to successfully navigate relationships, knowing full well that I now had the tools to develop myself further as necessary.
As a result of my efforts, I now know:
Since then, my approach to dating and relationships has completely changed. I used to just wing it and go off vibes. Here’s an analogy for what I do now:
When going in for an operation, you don’t ask the surgeon to provide you with their qualifications. Because the hospital hired them, you presume the surgeon is legitimate. But for relationships, people don’t come pre-vetted. Therefore, it is your responsibility to perform the due diligence, to determine, if a potential romantic partner has the right qualifications to be able to serve as a good emotional attachment figure.
I learned to start asking things like:
Of course, it would be kind of weird to ask these, one-after-another, on a first date. At the beginning of seeing someone new, I mostly just try to have fun and see if I can be my authentic self with them. But by the third or fourth date, I think it’s fair game to start initiating serious conversations about:
The aforementioned two lists of questions will begin to paint a clear picture of:
“Wow, this seems like a lot of effort!”
^If you’re thinking this, then I’ll remind you of this quote from earlier:
Maybe you object, “I don’t have the time to learn all this!” Yes, you do.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ recent American Time Use Survey, American adults spend, on average, 3 hours a day watching television and using social media → 3 hours * 7 days = 21 hours per week.
It only takes ~6 hours to read a 250 page book. So going without TV, you could finish a book in just two days.
We have plenty of leisure time, we just choose to allocate in different ways.
“Therapy is expensive!” No, not really. And besides, there are alternatives.
A one hour therapy session costs anywhere from $100–200 without health insurance, and is often cheaper with insurance. It’s another resource allocation issue: we make sacrifices for the things that matter to us.
If you decide to try therapy, find a specialist for whatever specific thing you need help with. There are experts in: relationships, attachment, sex, trauma, anxiety, etc.
It was difficult for me to swallow my pride and ask for help from a therapist, but I’m glad that I did. As my dad used to tell me growing up, “There’s nothing more important than your health.”
The good news is: if you do try therapy, and uncover maladaptive coping strategies, or flawed logic that’s preventing you from having healthy relationships, then you get to potentially develop new skills that'll stick around for the rest of your life.
That’s some of the best ROI (“return on investment”) you’ll ever get.
Besides individual therapy sessions, consider couples therapy once you’re in a relationship and if you’re having troubles. They’re professionals and have considerable education and training:
They’re experts for a reason. Learn from them.
Besides therapy, many religions have premarital counseling, which is a 12-week course that goes over things like: communication, conflict resolution, money management, family boundaries, parenting styles, how you enjoy expressing/receiving affection, and expectations around intimacy. You get assigned homework each week to learn how to have a successful marriage.
Free alternatives
If you’re truly strapped for cash, there are free resources:
I recommend you read books on topics like: relationship science (shout out to researcher/author John Gottman!), emotional intelligence, anxiety, and trauma. Read books written by credible authors like psychologists, doctors, and licensed professionals (not celebrities or gurus).
Reading the right book, at the right time when you need it, is sublime: it’s the type of experience where you read one paragraph, and have to stop and think about what you just read.
It’s good to remember that self-awareness about a problem is not enough to fix it. Reading gets you knowledge, but wisdom only comes after you apply that knowledge repeatedly.
After I read a book, I take notes on what I’ve learned, and then make a plan for how I’m going to integrate that new information into my daily life until it's fully internalized.[15]
“I’ve been hurt in the past and don’t know if I can learn to trust someone again…”
From the legendary Rocky Balboa:
So, what will you do now?
When I get serious about something, I don’t settle for mediocre or average. I don’t settle for anything less than my absolute best. Relying on scientific experts, authors, and deep practice—I will become the best version of myself.
One day I will be a great boyfriend/husband/partner.
I won’t stop until that’s true.
So, are you gonna get serious about the most consequential emotional and financial decision of your life, and actually get to work studying and practicing relationship skills until they internalize, so that you can avoid being one of the 40% of marriages that end in divorce?
Or are you just gonna wing it?
Remember, everyone can tell if you’re a serious person or not.
It’s okay if you haven’t dated before. We all start somewhere. Even a surgeon eventually has to perform his first ever operation. What’s important, however, is that you’re not just winging it, and that you have a good understanding of the theory behind what makes relationships, or surgery, go well.
I read books on:
The results?
If you want a visual demonstration of what a serious person looks like, check out this video of the great Arnold Schwarzenegger (a seven-time Mr. Olympia winner and five-time Mr. Universe winner) working out with famed bodybuilder Ed Corney. The latter is screaming with each rep of the 315lbs he’s squatting, and on the verge of passing out.
After Ed’s completed 8 reps, and has already pushed his nervous system close to the limit, Arnold then casually taunts Ed by saying, “C’mon, let’s get serious,” and goads him to actually start trying. Pure savagery from Arnold. After he completes the set, Ed collapses to the floor.
People stay unhappily married because of:
Why it’s financially significant should hopefully be obvious (ie: housing, kids & their college funds, the potential of divorce, etc), but what science confirms its emotional significance? In psychology, attachment theory confirms that your partner regulates both your emotional and physical health:
As for my required general education (GE) classes, one of my requirements could have been fulfilled by taking "Introductory Psychology", but instead I took…macroeconomics.
(I got an A in that class, but unfortunately it didn’t teach me anything about the science of relationships—but hey, at least I know what a Gini coefficient is!)
Here’s an example of what deep practice looks like from the book:
Many of these skills I pulled directly from John Gottman & Nan Silver’s book What Makes Love Last: How to Build Trust and Avoid Betrayal — I highly recommend reading it.
Therapy can be an effective tool if you know what you’re doing. Sure, you can go there to vent and process your feelings, which is sometimes helpful, but I like their support because they’re professionals who are trained to see patterns in you, and they can help guide you to make realizations about yourself so that you don’t keep making the same mistakes.
For each session: I bring my journal, a list of questions for my therapist, request recommendations on books/articles/podcasts that can supplement my learning, and create homework for myself to go and practice outside of therapy each week. I turn my therapy sessions into a college class where I’m trying to learn and absorb as much as possible from the professor.
Check with your employer to see if they offer free, or reduced-cost, mental health support. Many places do, but it’s up to you to go find out. My workplace, for example, covers six sessions annually for free.
I said this to one woman and she replied, “Sorry, but I’m not into men,” to which I quipped back, “Whoa that’s crazy, I’m not into men either!” She laughed, and because she was cool, we kept on talking for a while.
On the topic of avoidant attachment, I eventually started seeing and recognizing it everywhere. It’s ubiquitous across media and literature.
During my six week period of intense learning and deep practice, I rewatched my favorite TV show of all time, HBO's The Newsroom, and read Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina.
The characters Maggie and Don in the HBO show are a classic anxious-avoidant partnership, where she keeps seeking closeness, and he keeps finding reasons to break up.
And in the 1878 Russian novel (a full 70 years before attachment theory was developed by psychologists), the characters of Levin and Kitty during their initial courtship are also anxious-avoidant, where he is obsessed with her, and she keeps avoiding his advances for love.
One time, I was going out with a woman for a couple weeks, when she told me, “My aspiration in life is to make tons of money so I can buy lots of luxury purses.” That relationship didn’t last long…
In college, people cram the night before an exam, to try to retain as much information in the short-term. But once the exam is complete, that knowledge is swiftly forgotten because they never use it again. The mantra of “use it or lose it” is validated in the neuroscientific literature: if you stay at something long enough, eventually it sinks in.