Book SummaryThe Master Guides: Maintaining a Happy Relationship, by Shortform

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of The Master Guides: Maintaining a Happy Relationship

What’s the secret to a happy long-term relationship? If you’re regularly fighting with your partner or just feeling a little bored, staying happy may seem easier said than done. But maintaining a happy romantic relationship isn’t as difficult as it can seem—as long as you’re armed with the right...

The Master Guides: Maintaining a Happy Relationship Summary Understand Your Needs and Your Partner’s

One essential element of maintaining a happy relationship is to understand both your needs and your partner’s. Specifically, relationship experts recommend understanding your attachment styles and your love languages.

Understand Your Attachment Styles

In Attached, psychiatrist Amir Levine and psychologist Rachel Heller contend that the best way to create a relationship that fulfills your emotional needs is to understand both your own and your partner’s attachment styles—the beliefs and behaviors that determine how you function in intimate relationships. If you know your own attachment style, you’ll better understand what you need in a romantic relationship. If you can decipher your partner’s attachment style, you’ll understand what lies at the root of your conflicts—and how you can resolve them.

There are three main attachment styles: secure, anxious, and avoidant.

• Secure attachers are nurturing, responsive, and comfortable with intimacy.
• Anxious attachers are preoccupied with making their relationship solid and constantly seek reassurance from their partner.
• Avoidant attachers...

The Master Guides: Maintaining a Happy Relationship Summary Maintain Emotional Intimacy

Relationship experts contend that another key to maintaining a happy romantic relationship is to sustain emotional intimacy. Specifically, they suggest that you regularly connect with each other and let each other and your relationship evolve.

Connect With Your Partner

In The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, relationship researcher John Gottman and coauthor Nan Silver highlight the importance of connecting regularly with your partner so that you can maintain your connection long term. They explain that happy couples regularly respond to each other’s bids, or overtures for connection. Sometimes, these overtures are obvious, like if your partner asks you to pick up groceries on your way home. Other times, these overtures are subtler—and they may even seem like a complaint. For example, if your spouse huffs that you never want to go out after work, this is actually a request for you to invite her out after...

The Master Guides: Maintaining a Happy Relationship Summary Maintain Physical Intimacy

In addition to maintaining emotional intimacy over time, maintaining physical intimacy is a key aspect of maintaining a happy relationship. To do so, relationship experts recommend that you communicate about sex. However, their recommendations for how to communicate about sex differ.

Talk About Sex

The authors of Eight Dates argue that a healthy sex life depends on honest conversation. Sex and intimacy are particularly sensitive topics for most people, which is why a lot of couples don’t talk regularly about their sex life or sexual desires. However, research suggests that couples that talk regularly about sex have better sex more often.

The authors offer a few tips for talking about sex with your partner. First, make sure you’re not doing it right before, during, or after sex. **Since it’s a delicate topic, bringing it up in the moment...

The Master Guides: Maintaining a Happy Relationship Summary Handle Conflict Effectively

No matter how well you maintain emotional and physical intimacy, you—like every couple—will inevitably face conflict. But you can still have a happy relationship despite these conflicts, as long as you learn to manage them effectively. Specifically, relationship experts recommend that you learn to recognize damaging patterns so that you can avoid them and learn to fight in a healthy manner.

Recognize Damaging Patterns

In The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, Gottman and Silver explain that conflicts can destroy relationships if they induce regular flooding—a psychological phenomenon in which one partner feels so emotionally stressed that they’re unable to respond rationally to their spouse. The authors name four damaging patterns of behavior—the “four horsemen of the apocalypse”—that you should watch out for because they may heighten the risk of flooding, which leads spouses to emotionally detach from one another.

1. Criticism. One person expresses dissatisfaction with their partner generally instead of expressing...

Shortform Exercise: Evaluate Your Relationship

Now that you’ve had a brief overview of the experts’ tips for maintaining a happy relationship, think about how you could apply what you’ve learned to your own life.

Briefly describe your relationship below. What are you most and least satisfied with?