Why love is hard.

Stan Tatkin opens his program with some blunt facts about people and about the brain. They explain why a close relationship is hard for everyone, and why the hard parts are rarely anybody's fault.

What this program looks at

Most relationship advice deals with what couples argue about: money, time, sex, mess, children. Tatkin sets the topics aside. He looks at how two people handle each other while they disagree, and explains it through early attachment, the brain and the nervous system.

He rejects two popular beliefs: that you must love yourself before you can love someone else, and that good partners are fully independent. People come to know themselves through other people, he says, and in his model you get your needs met by taking care of each other.

That is not codependency, which runs one way. This has to run both ways, between equals. Nor does he claim that a couple is better than being single. Plenty of single people do well.

He also asks for patience. You cannot fix what you do not understand, so the program explains what is going on before it says what to do. This course keeps that order.

Everyone is hard up close

His list of facts opens with a rude one that turns out to be a relief: nothing is harder to deal with than another person. Anyone you live with will irritate you, and you them, because two minds rarely want the same thing at once. The cap left off the toothpaste is the small version.

Nobody is low-maintenance either, once they are your primary partner: the one person you depend on most, in the place your parents once had. If friends and colleagues seem easier, his dry answer is to try marrying one of them. Distance is what made them look easy.

Two more facts follow. A close relationship is a burden both people agree to carry, and he thinks it gets lighter once you accept that. And nobody arrives trained. Partners have to learn how the other works, which he calls having each other's owner's manual, and they go on parenting each other for life.

So a partner who is hard work is not evidence that you chose badly. It is what a partner is.

You stand in for the past

When you become someone's primary partner, you inherit their history. Tatkin's word for your role is proxy: you stand in for the parents, former partners and others who came before you, including the ones who hurt them. Those people are no longer around. You are.

Say you sigh at your phone, and your partner stiffens as though you had criticised them, the way a parent used to. The tempting reply is that you are not their father.

Tatkin advises against it. You may be right, but the reply leaves your partner alone with the hurt, and there is nobody else to take it to. Skip the defence and tend to the hurt. Often a short, sincere apology is enough.

The automatic brain acts first

Most of what you do in a day happens without thought. You drive a familiar road from procedural memory, the store of know-how for things done many times. Tatkin calls the system that uses it the automatic brain. It is fast and cheap to run, and by his account it handles most of what you do.

With a partner, that becomes a problem. The automatic brain reacts from memory before the slower, thinking part has caught up, so you say and do things without knowing why.

Then you are asked to explain yourself, and a reason arrives at once, because the brain dislikes a blank. This is confabulation. It is not lying: a liar knows the real reason, and here nobody does. Asked why you snapped at dinner, you say work was stressful. It sounds right, you believe it, and it may have nothing to do with what happened.

So hold your explanations of your own behaviour loosely. Hold your theories about your partner's motives more loosely still.

A brain tuned for threat

Tatkin's bluntest claim is that the brain is better prepared for war than for love. Parts of it do nothing but watch for danger, because that kept the species alive. They catch it in a face, a tone, a gesture or a single word, and they finish before you are aware of anything.

Two things follow. You can come across as threatening to someone who loves you without meaning to or noticing: an eye-roll is enough.

And memory leans the same way. A hurt is stored quickly and a kindness takes longer to stick, so the sharp remark at breakfast is more likely to be remembered than the pleasant evening before it. This is a bias to manage, not a verdict on your relationship.

Tethered to one person

The last fact is the reason to put up with the others. To do well in life, Tatkin says, you need at least one person you are tethered to: someone you can turn to at any hour, a secure base.

He sets this against a culture that admires needing nobody. Life gets harder with age, and things happen that nobody can plan for. People cope by changing how they feel, and he sees two ways to do that: addictions, or people. A dependable relationship changes your chemistry and your mood too. He suggests it may be the best remedy there is for anxiety and depression, without pointing to a study.

So in this program, needing someone is not a weakness to grow out of. It is how people are built.

Nobody is to blame

Together these ideas lead to the stance Tatkin asks you to hold from here on: no-fault. He says he has almost never seen a partner set out to hurt, anger or frighten the other. People react fast, according to their nature and their history, mostly to protect themselves.

It changes how you read a bad moment. The thought “she does this to wind me up” assigns a motive. No-fault swaps it for a plainer one: she does this, it bothers me, and she is probably not thinking about me when she does it.

He warns against using any of this as ammunition. You picked your partner because something about them felt familiar, so whatever you are about to blame them for, you very likely do too. You notice it when it is done to you and miss it when you are the one doing it.

A note from us: No-fault describes the ordinary hurts between two people who mean well. It is not a reason to put up with violence, threats or control.