Try something different! Make a plan to surprise your partner with breakfast in bed. Maybe you haven’t walked around your neighborhood together in years—after dinner instead of falling into the grooves of your usual routine, take a stroll and see what’s out there. Plan a weekly date night and take turns choosing what you will do (and maybe surprise your partner with a new activity if a surprise would be welcome).

We all fall into habits and routines. That’s normal. But often they become so rote that we cease to really notice our partners as we cruise through the day. Breaking these routines alerts our minds to novelty, and this helps us recognize and appreciate our partners in new ways. It also signals to our partners that they are important to us.

Here is where Emmy Werner’s research, our own Harvard Study research, and many other pieces of research from across cultures and populations converge to show that a critical link between childhood experience and positive adult social connections is our ability to process

emotions.

It is from our relationships as children—especially our relationships with our family—that we first learn what to expect from others. This is when we begin to develop the emotional habits, so to speak, that will be with us for the rest of our lives. These habits often define the way we connect to others and our ability to engage others in mutually supportive ways.

A crucial point here is that our ability to process emotions is malleable. In fact, managing emotions is one of the things we actually get better at as we grow old. And there is strong evidence that we don’t have to wait until late in our lives for this to happen. With the right guidance and some practice, we can learn to be better at managing our feelings at any age.

But there is a middle way. We’ve been advocating a strategy of facing toward problems, rather than avoiding them, but facing a problem is not always the same as fixing it. Sometimes facing-in to our families means learning how to sit with uncomfortable situations and emotions, and allowing ourselves to feel and express the emotions that many of us try to avoid. Sometimes the best thing we can do is respond in a way that is less absolute and more flexible, as Neal and Gail managed to do.

Neal and Gail were at a crossroad: Should they try their best to engage with Lucy and her challenges? Or should they back off a bit and give Lucy more room to either flounder or thrive on her own? While they struggled with these questions, their response was most often to face toward Lucy’s difficulty rather than minimizing it or pretending there was not a problem. When Lucy pushed them away, they didn’t throw their hands up and cut her

off. Instead, they gave her room, and waited for another opportunity. Lucy’s siblings also gave needed support to their parents and to Lucy. All through the experience, even in times of shouting and fighting, the family’s love for each other would eventually surface. They remained flexible, though none of them was perfect. Sometimes they had to step back, sometimes they had to step in. But they never turned away.”

This is what we call the “You Always / You Never” trap. Our experience with our family members starts so early in life that our expectations about relationships become deeply imprinted, and anything that happens, no matter how subtle, often gets pressed into that old imprint.

The complex emotional lattice of every family is unique in important ways, and our families affect us in ways that other relationships do not. Families share history, experience, and blood as no other relationships can. We can’t replace a person we’ve known for our entire lives. More importantly, we can’t replace a person who’s known us for our entire lives. Nurturing and enriching these relationships despite challenges, persevering, and appreciating the positive things we get from them is worth the trouble. Bob thinks of a moment when, as a young man, he was going through a time in which he was incredibly angry at his parents, and an uncle took him aside. I know you’re mad, his uncle said. But just remember: nobody is ever going to care about you this much ever again.