What I missed, and what got me so lost in my personal life, was the emotional power of being seen for who I truly am. Love, in any relationship, is not protection—it is not someone reaching in and saving you from yourself.

Love is not diversity—it is not someone complementing your personality with different strengths.

Love is not similarity—it is not someone sharing your interests, or values, or dreams.

Love is someone seeing the fullness of you and wanting you to be the best possible version of you. This is what a relationship is for—any relationship, whether friend, business partner, sibling, or lover. It is for each person to do all they can to help the other express their uniqueness as powerfully as possible. Love’s goal is to make the other person bigger.

Your love will challenge them, and cajole them, and never leave them be, and if, at some point, you see them heading in a direction that will hurt them, or shrink them, you will push them out of harm’s way, even if they themselves can’t yet see the love in what you’re doing. If you love someone, you do for them what is right for them, not necessarily what they want. You are demanding, your expectations are the highest of the high.

Focus first on what’s working well. This is the easiest place to begin. Take a look at the relationships on the energizing side of your social universe and consider how you might solidify or encourage what’s great about them. Tell (and show!) those people how much you appreciate them, and why. It never hurts to double down on what’s already bringing energy and vitality into your life. These relationships are already rolling, but there are usually one or two that have slowed down and need a little push to get up and running at full tilt again. Even good relationships tend to repeat the same routines over and over. It might be time to try some new things with them.

We expected that empathic accuracy—getting the right answer about what your partner was feeling—would correlate with a stronger sense of relationship satisfaction. This correlation was certainly there—understanding how your partner is feeling is a good thing.

But more important than that, especially for women, was the empathic effort involved. If a person felt their partner was making a good-faith effort to understand them, they felt more positively about the interaction and about the relationship, regardless of their partner’s accuracy.

To put it simply, understanding another person is great, but just trying to understand goes a long way in building connection.

Some people do this automatically, but efforts to understand others can also be deliberate, intentional behaviors. It needn’t come naturally to you at first, but the more you try, the easier it will get. The next time you have the opportunity, try asking yourself:

How is this person feeling?

What is this person thinking?

Am I missing something here?

How might I feel if I were in this person’s shoes?

And when you can, let them know that you’re curious and trying to understand—a small effort that can have an enormous impact.

These findings, along with our findings about the importance of empathic effort (discussed in Chapter 5), point to an important idea about intimate relationships: if a couple can cultivate a bedrock of affection and empathy (meaning curiosity and the willingness to listen), their bond will be more stable and enduring.