Going the distance.

The last session asks where the two of you are heading. Tatkin's answer is that lasting love is something two willing people choose, say out loud, and keep up through agreements.

No lost causes, one condition

Tatkin begins with people who think their relationship cannot be saved. He has watched couples wreck things again and again and still come through affairs, hidden money and large betrayals, so he does not believe in lost causes. Nor will he decide for anyone: nobody else can tell you when to stop.

He does set one condition: both people have to want this kind of relationship. With a willing partner it does not matter, he says, how normal or how troubled that person seems.

And if your partner has no interest in these principles? He gives no verdict. He says it is something to think about, together with your own future. He calls secure functioning an anchor culture, a way of living together and not a personality type. If your partner would sooner live the island or the wave way, the decision is yours.

A note from us: The transcript's sentence about a partner with no interest is ambiguous. In context it most likely means: think carefully about whether to stay. He does not tell anyone to leave.

What he does push for is clarity. Couples stay vague, he says, so he has partners make their position explicit, for instance by promising aloud never to leave and seeing whether they can.

With a willing partner, the rest is practice. Early excitement fades as the familiar becomes routine. Secure couples, he says, recreate some of it on purpose by keeping their attention on each other.

Declaring and going all in

A declaration makes clear who you are. Tatkin's example is his own job: saying aloud that he is a therapist makes it more real. Telling your partner that you love them, choose them and will not leave does the same for a commitment. A wedding is meant to be exactly this.

The two insecure styles hold back, for opposite reasons.

Holding back costs the one who does it: islands who never declare do not feel secure, and waves stay insecure and alone. Tatkin suggests that declaring your love may do more for you than hearing someone declare theirs.

Why choosing fully pays

We live, he says, with thirty-day returns: buy it, try it, send it back, and marriage can be treated the same way. His claim, made without naming a study, is that many options do not make people happy, because they never fully commit to the one they picked. If you think you could still exchange your partner, you value them less.

Once you have truly chosen, you value your choice more. Being all in means taking the whole person and putting all your energy into that choice, like betting everything on one horse.

What goes wrong

Tatkin lists what he has seen fail when couples try to live this way.

• Staying put. One or both cling to island or wave habits: the island wants to be left alone, the wave wants things done their way.
• Shrugging off threat. A partner will not stop the eye-rolling, the belittling sounds or, worst of all, the face of disgust.
• Leaving the work to the other. One partner does not help to keep things friendly and the boat upright.
• Mishandling thirds. Someone or something keeps being put ahead of the partner, against the rule of thirds.

He adds that island and wave ways of living only look like opposites. Underneath he finds the same thing: when it comes down to my interests or yours, I take mine.

Sex as play, not performance

Sex is among the commonest reasons couples seek therapy, and Tatkin treats it as a nervous-system matter. In courtship it is usually easy, because you do not yet feel threatening to each other. With permanence the old fears arrive: being swallowed up for the island, being left for the wave.

What goes wrong is, in his account, what goes wrong in fights. Long, close contact produces more small slips between you than a dinner does. Left uncorrected and unspoken, they pile up, feel unsafe and are remembered, so next time you expect trouble. Some couples end up avoiding the bedroom.

His way back is to stop treating it as so precious:

• Do not schedule it. Anything that leaves time to worry works against you. Appointments are for things you both expect to enjoy, like an ice cream or a film.
• Keep it spontaneous, playful and slow. Look at each other's faces, notice the nervousness and awkwardness, and talk about them.
• Drop the goal. The aim is to learn each other, not to have sex of a certain kind. He says nothing kills sex, or anything else that is fun, like pressure to perform.
• Do not avoid it. However you go about this, he says, neither of you gets to stay away from it.

He expects islands to struggle most, with wanting to get it exactly right and with so much closeness. He also sees an advantage in one clearly tense area: work through it and you practise the attention and calming that are missing elsewhere. As with money or mess, the subject itself is not the problem.

What to keep in mind

Near the end Tatkin gathers what he most wants you to remember.

• Feed the love. He calls love an addiction that needs feeding, and says the eyes rekindle it.
• Check in when you are out. He cites John Gottman for the finding that couples who do well glance at each other more in public.
• Mind nights and mornings. Falling asleep is a little like dying and waking like being born, and both go better with company.
• Share something good every day. Use the three routes to amplified positives from lesson 8.
• Act as a unit. Face in-laws, children and difficult people together, and never undermine each other.
• Take threat seriously. Watch each other for distress and respond at once.
• Keep the relationship first. When something comes between you, fix it quickly.
• Allow for deficits. No brain does everything well, so go easy on each other.

Picture your fiftieth anniversary

Futurizing, an idea he credits to Stephen Covey, means placing yourselves far in the future as if it were today. Imagine your fiftieth anniversary. Who is in the room? How do they see the two of you: as a pair who stayed together because they had to, or as a couple they admire for what they came through and how they treated each other? The picture is of the couple, he insists, not of one person's career.

The same exercise points to a mentor couple: an older, more experienced couple who do this well. He and his wife have one. Look for such a couple, he suggests, and ask whether you will be one for others by your fiftieth.

He ends with a claim about cost: living the island or the wave way takes more energy and, he says without citing evidence, wears the body down earlier. A secure partnership, in his account, leaves you with more energy, confidence and health.

Why be a couple at all

Tatkin closes with the question underneath the whole program: why do this at all?

His answer is that people are built for pairs. We do not learn to love or value ourselves alone. We are hurt by people and, he says, can only be healed by people: not by a book, a seminar or this program, but in a real relationship. And as we grow older and suffer more losses, we will need someone.

So the purpose of a couple, as he sees it, is a protective bubble: two people who look out for each other and make life safer than it would be alone. What holds it up over decades is agreements. Youth goes, attraction may go, health may go. You keep doing what you agreed, also when it is inconvenient, and you keep asking each other where you are going.

One agreement contradicts common advice. In this kind of partnership each of you answers to the other for how the other feels. You look after your partner first, which is how you get looked after, and you read on their face how well you are doing. His last image is two people at the bottom of a well, who climb out by pressing back to back.