The Secret to Lasting Love | Eli J. Finkel | TED

Imagine you just died. You need to get your spouse a message that could save their life. Here's the problem. The only person who can hear you is Whoopi Goldberg. (Laughter) Yes. It's true, this is the plot of the movie "Ghost." (Laughter) Patrick Swayze is trying to communicate with Demi Moore through a psychic. But imagine that's you. What could you say in just a few urgent seconds that would convince your spouse it's really you? Patrick's first attempt fails. "Tell her I love her." Too obvious, too generic. But then he knows, it’s just one word. "Ditto." Because “ditto” was their secret code for “I love you.” Something that only made sense inside the private world the two of them had built together. I think of that private world as a relationship's lovemotif.

Just as a leitmotif is a recurring musical theme that identifies a character, a lovemotif is a recurring set of shared experiences and meanings that uniquely define a relationship. Your lovemotif includes the words that would pass your own version of the “ditto test,” but also your weird in-jokes, your distinctive moral code. It turns out lovemotifs matter a lot. I’m a psychological scientist who [has] studied love for nearly 30 years. I wrote a book, "The All-or-Nothing Marriage," to explain how the best relationships work. I cohost a podcast that analyzes romantic movies from the perspective of relationship science. It's called "Love Factually." But it was only recently that I discovered just how important lovemotifs are. In fact, they matter more today than ever before.

Because a lovemotif isn't just something you do. It helps to define who you are. These days, around much of the world, we feel increasingly responsible -- obligated -- to be true to ourselves. And in almost any long-term relationship, you'll have moments where it feels like that pursuit of authenticity is at odds with your relationship commitment. How should we think about those moments? In the past, couples who got divorced felt ashamed for getting divorced. These days, it's increasingly the opposite. We feel shame for staying if it makes us feel like we're not authentic. But there's an assumption lurking here that in those moments, we struggle to be true to ourselves and true to our relationship at the same time. We see this assumption in the movie "La La Land."

Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone have a sparkling connection. And yet, the relationship fails. Not because there's no love, not because they don't understand or support each other, but because in those me-versus-us moments, the relationship never gets a voice. Emma has this exciting opportunity overseas and Ryan says, “You’ve got to give this everything you’ve got. It's your dream." But he tells her, "I've got to follow my own plan. Stay here." This logic, as irrefutable as they find it, is flawed. That's not how authenticity actually works. Before we unpack that, I'd like to call your attention to something kind of amazing that we often overlook. At the end of a dinner party with other couples, most of us feel lucky that the person we go home with is our own partner. (Laughter) Where does that sense of compatibility come from?

We're told it comes from finding the right person. The idea is that we possess a constellation of attributes -- our personality, our habits, our preferences -- and we need to find somebody whose attributes fit with our own. It’s as if we’re a gear, and we need to keep shopping until we find a gear that's the right shape and size for us, one that will minimize friction as we rotate through life together. We can even find one on our phone. (Laughter) My “Love Factually” cohost, Paul Eastwick, and I have spent decades studying this issue across tens of thousands of couples. Here’s the surprise: compatibility is not something that you find. In some of our studies, including at speed-dating events that I emceed, we asked singles to tell us about the attributes they were seeking. Things like physical attractiveness or sense of humor or kindness. And then we introduced them to a bunch of potential partners who varied on those attributes.

Some of them were hotter or funnier or kinder than others. You'd expect that those people who told us they cared a lot about how, say, physically attractive a partner was would be more attracted to hotter partners than people who said they didn't care as much. You'd be wrong. The attributes that we think we're looking for cease to matter once we meet a live flesh-and-blood partner. Same thing with similarity. It feels like we should be especially compatible with people who are more similar to us. We aren't. What actually matters is something smaller and more profound. A phrase gets repeated. A joke sticks. A ritual forms, and a private world takes shape. Two people across countless tiny interactions, building something that never existed before.

That's compatibility. Not finding the right person. Building your private world together. I'll give you an example from my own relationship. It dates back to our earliest months together. Our "ditto" was "belly full of wine." That's a line from a Beatles song called "Her Majesty," which includes the couplet "I want to tell her that I love her a lot, but I got to get a belly full of wine." Whenever I wanted to tell Alison that I loved her, or was grateful for her, "belly full of wine" delivered. And as couples repeat and riff on these tiny moments, they cease to be random moments. They become a lovemotif. They become who we are. That's pretty cool, because it offers a happy answer to that question from earlier about whether we can be true to ourselves and true to our relationship.

And once our relationship becomes part of our identity, being true to it stops feeling like self-denial. It starts feeling like authenticity. Which is why we need to find our lovemotif. And why, once we've found it, we need to nurture and protect it. If our partner starts pulling away from our private world, it’s not just disappointing -- it's devastating. Because what we're losing, what’s being rejected isn’t just an overture -- it's an identity. Maybe you've seen the movie "(500) Days of Summer." In one scene, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel are play-acting domestic life at IKEA. She jokingly says, “The kitchen sink is broken.” He says, "Well, that's OK because --" and he runs over to the next display -- "That's why we bought a home with two kitchens." They race over to the IKEA bedding department, and they have sort of a romantic moment until they discover that they're being watched.

It's playful, it's romantic, it's theirs. But later, when Joseph reaches out for that ritual on a subsequent shopping trip, she won't meet him there. What breaks your heart for him isn’t just the rejection -- it's the loss of a private world that no longer exists. And now we can see what went wrong with Emma and Ryan in “La La Land.” They realized too late that loyalty to their private world, to their playful banter, to their dancing, wouldn't have been a betrayal of authenticity. It would have been an expression of it. They have that final, haunting glance in the jazz club, and we see the Parisian life they might have lived. The apartment, the child, the ordinary Tuesdays. Theirs wasn't a failure of love. It was a failure to protect a world.

And a beautiful relationship became a wistful memory. In one study, we asked couples to tell us about their own lovemotif. They told us about their October-long horror movie calendar. They told us about the special song they sing to their baby daughter every Shabbat. And this one is my favorite: they told us about surfing on a shrimp sandwich. (Laughter) My colleague Lydia Emery and I kept tabs on these couples every day for weeks. We're still finalizing the article, but the results are clear. Couples who leaned more strongly into their lovemotif were happier. And in fact, those who leaned more strongly into their lovemotif on a given day were happier than on days when they didn't lean as much into it. Turns out it's not just about date nights. It's about savoring your private world together. Alison left me this Post-it note a decade ago. The reason I can show it to you today is that it still lives in my cabinet, where I see it all the time.

I've moved offices since then. This Post-it note moved with me. That's the thing about a lovemotif. To the outside world, looks trivial. From the inside, it's sacred. We’re often told that relationships lose something over time: the novelty, the excitement, the passion. It's true. Some of that stuff goes. But something deeper grows. That shared history, that private world that means nothing to anyone else and everything to you. That world matters. So how do we build it? We've already seen the three moves. First, find it. Pay attention to those moments when something uniquely "us" is starting to emerge. Next, feed it. Revisit those moments, nurture them into rituals, into inside jokes. And finally, fight for it. Against distraction, against drift, against the delusion that the tiny stuff can’t really matter.

That's how those shared symbols, something as small as a Post-it note, become protectors of your private realm. Someday, one of you will be gone. And the other will be left holding a hundred tiny symbols that mean nothing to anyone else and everything to you. Please, while there's still time, build your lovemotif. So when it matters most, one word will be enough. Thank you. (Applause)