Repair and attraction.

Agreements set a relationship up. What keeps it a place you both want to be is daily upkeep: putting hurts right quickly and sharing good feeling on purpose.

Why repair has to be fast

Tatkin starts from a plain fact: you will hurt each other. No parent is perfect and no partner is either, so what marks a good relationship is not the absence of mistakes but how soon they are put right. He calls this repair.

Speed matters, he says, for biological reasons and not just out of politeness. Between the hurt and the repair a clock is running against you. While it runs, the bad feeling grows and becomes more likely to be stored in long-term memory, stress chemistry wears on the body, and you begin to look like a threat to the person you love.

His recipe for memories makes the same point. A good memory is made by doing something kind for your partner and then not spoiling it. A bad one is made by hurting them and then doing nothing about it, and it is filed as a threat, ready for next time.

So repair comes before the topic. If your partner's face falls while you are talking, stop and attend to that first. His example is deliberately extreme: even a conversation about how to cure cancer should wait.

Whoever caused it repairs it

When is a repair finished? Many people think it ends with their apology, and that any hurt left over is the other person's business. Tatkin rejects this flatly.

In his model the person who caused the hurt fixes it, and has no grounds to complain that the other is not yet mended. He calls a love relationship a pay-to-play system: the price of a repair is whatever it takes for your partner to feel better. The measure is their relief, not your effort or your good intentions.

He adds a warning about being right. You may win the argument and lose everything that matters more, because here the relationship comes before the self.

He is careful to say that this is not codependency (looking after someone at your own cost). It works because both of you do it and expect it. Then, he says, caring for your partner turns out to be the most efficient way of being cared for yourself.

Held together by attraction

If this sounds like too much to ask, Tatkin points to work partners in the police, the fire service and the armed forces, who depend on each other completely. It is done every day, he says, by people who are not anchors, so a couple can do it too.

What should hold a couple together? His answer is attraction, and he does not mean looks. He means that being with you feels good: you are the one I go to when I want to celebrate, when I am in pain and when my confidence has taken a knock.

The other possible glue is fear. He says insecure couples often keep each other close by stirring up worry about losing the relationship, much as many teenage couples do, and that it works only for a while and at a cost.

Making the relationship attractive is a job for both partners. Flirting, charm and persuasion are welcome, and threats are not. His definition of attraction has two halves: you raise good feeling together, and you bring bad feeling down quickly.

Three ways to amplify good feeling

The first half he calls mutually amplified positives. You can feel good alone, but he says making that feeling bigger takes two human brains: it does not work with a pet. He describes the result as a shared rush of dopamine, the thing that kept you coming back during courtship, and he wants you to produce it every day, in three ways.

Look at each other

Hold each other's gaze for a few moments. He describes a quick lift of excitement that settles into rest, and he stresses that this is gazing, not staring, and not for long. It is not relaxing for everyone, he adds: people who grew up with little eye contact, or with someone frightening close to their face, can find it intrusive.

Enjoy something together

Give your attention to the same thing and then turn to each other about it, which he calls joint attention. His example is a couple seeing the Eiffel Tower for the first time and telling each other how glad they are to be there together. It works as well with your children, a news story or a television series, as long as you talk about it. Watching side by side in silence is what he calls parallel play: same room, separate tracks.

Pass on a good mood

He thinks most people have never tried this one. At some point on most days you feel good for a reason unconnected to your partner: a pain lifts, a worry goes, or you simply feel a burst of joy. Take that feeling to your partner and say something loving, in person or by phone. It is honest because the good feeling is real, and now both of you get the lift.

His counter-example is a grandmother at a holiday pool who, delighted by the sight of her family, turns to her husband and scolds him for reading. She spent a rush of joy on a reproach, which he calls negative amplification. One warm sentence about being there together would have lifted them both.

The other half of attraction

The second half is what you do with distress. Secure-functioning couples, he says, are good at turning its volume down and cutting it short: they deal with a painful feeling properly and soon, and then move on. Properly does not mean brushing it aside, or announcing that you are over it and asking why your partner is not. Doing it properly takes more time and skill, and it follows from being a two-person system: if your partner is not all right, neither are you.

Put the two halves together and you have his picture of an attractive relationship: plenty of shared, amplified good feeling every day, and bad feeling that is calmed quickly. That is a place people want to come home to.

Finding novelty in the eyes

One thing works against all this: the brain loves novelty. (Tatkin's one exception is a brain that has been traumatised.) Something new makes the slower, more careful part of the brain do the work, and that feels like being more alive.

Then the brain does its job and makes the new thing automatic, to free up room for the next one. The second visit to the Eiffel Tower is less thrilling than the first, and the third less again. A person is far more complex than a monument, so it takes longer, but in the end it happens with a partner too.

So a partner who has become less exciting is not the wrong partner. Novelty no longer arrives by itself and has to be looked for, and his suggestion is to look into your partner's eyes from close by. He describes this as watching another person's nervous system live: it moves, it changes, it is a little unpredictable. You notice that there are things about this familiar person you still do not know.

As bodies age, he says, couples turn more and more to the eyes. He sums it up like this: lust belongs to distance, and love happens up close.