Becoming Good Friends
Learn the secrets to maintaining a loving marriage by understanding your partner’s inner world and nurturing fondness and admiration for them.
Transcript
INTRO
For those of you who are married, I have a question. You’re a married couple, but are you married friends?
That’s the question of our current series as we look at the research of world-renowned relationship expert Dr. John Gottman. After 40 years of researching couples, he can accurately predict divorce with 91% accuracy.
But he’s also developed seven research-based principles for what makes happily married couples different from everybody else.
PRINCIPLES 1 & 2
Here’s what Gottman says about it:
“At the heart of the Seven Principles approach is the simple truth that happy marriages are based on a deep friendship. By this, I mean a mutual respect for and enjoyment of each other’s company. These couples tend to know each other intimately. They are well-versed in each other’s likes, dislikes, personality quirks, hopes, and dreams. They have an abiding regard for each other and express this fondness not just in the big ways but through small gestures day in and day out.”
This quote perfectly introduces Gottman’s first two principles for making marriage work: Enhance Your Love Maps and Nurture Your Fondness and Admiration Now, one of these probably seems clear, while the other… maybe not. Let’s start with that one.
Enhance Your Love Maps
A Love Map is Gottman’s term for that part of your brain where you store all the information about your partner’s life.
Personally, I find that term strange. It sounds like a Valentine pirate’s side quest. On the other hand, I’d watch that show, as long as you gave it an animal sidekick. Everything’s better with an animal sidekick. Just ask Disney. But I digress.
The principle of building love maps focuses on the importance of building a deep and nuanced understanding of your partner’s hobbies, likes, and dislikes.
But it’s much more than just an online profile. It’s also knowing their inner world—their fears and worries, joys and dreams. And, when done well, it should be constantly updated with new information as life changes.
Nurture Your Fondness and Admiration
Gottman argues that a strong, robust love map naturally leads to the next principle – Nurture Your Fondness and Admiration.
Gottman says, “Happily married couples don’t just know each other. They build on and enhance this knowledge in many ways. They use their love maps to express not only their understanding of each other but their fondness and admiration as well.”
What is fondness and admiration? It’s routinely focusing on the positive qualities of your partner and the positive experiences you’ve shared rather than dwelling on negative aspects, like offenses or conflicts.
Why is this principle so important? Because, according to Gottman, fondness and admiration serve as a buffer against negativity that can corrupt a relationship. They enhance mutual respect and appreciation, helping you navigate disagreements and challenges more lovingly.
The Song of Songs
So, what does a relationship look like where you’re good friends, you deeply know your partner, and you’re overflowing with fondness and admiration of them?
Believe it or not, the Bible has one of the best pictures of this type of relationship found in any sacred text. Nestled in between Old Testament history and the Prophets is the most unexpected book—a collection of love poems called the Song of Songs.
The core structure of the book is a back-and-forth conversation between a young woman and a young man, deeply in love with one another. It’s full of vivid imagery, strange to us but fitting for its time. It’s romantic, evocative, and even a bit racy. (So be forewarned.) And like any good love poem or Nicholas Sparks novel, it’s not meant to be felt and analyzed.
Before we dive in, I want to give you a little sample from the first couple of chapters. But to do this properly, I’m gonna need a little help from my Valentine, Pang Foua.
Solomon 1:9-2:3, 8-9, 14, 16
HE: 9 I liken you, my darling, to a mare among Pharaoh’s chariot horses. 10 Your cheeks are beautiful with earrings, your neck with strings of jewels. 11 We will make you earrings of gold, studded with silver.
SHE: 12 While the king was at his table, my perfume spread its fragrance. 13 My beloved is to me a sachet of myrrh resting between my breasts. 14 My beloved is to me a cluster of henna blossoms from the vineyards of En Gedi.
HE: 15 How beautiful you are, my darling! Oh, how beautiful! Your eyes are doves.
SHE: 16 How handsome you are, my beloved! Oh, how charming! And our bed is verdant.
HE: 17 The beams of our house are cedars; our rafters are firs.
SHE: 2:1 I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys.
HE: 2 Like a lily among thorns is my darling among the young women.
SHE: 3 Like an apple tree among the trees of the forest is my beloved among the young men. I delight to sit in his shade, and his fruit is sweet to my taste. 8 Listen! My beloved! Look! Here he comes, leaping across the mountains, bounding over the hills. 9 My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag. Look! There he stands behind our wall, gazing through the windows, peering through the lattice.
HE: 14 My dove in the clefts of the rock, in the hiding places on the mountainside, show me your face, let me hear your voice; for your voice is sweet, and your face is lovely.
SHE: 16 My beloved is mine and I am his.
Now that you are sufficiently inspired, confused, or a little weirded out, here’s a Bible Project video to help you understand this book a little better.
What can we, as modern couples dating or married or as singles wanting to be dating or married, what could we learn from the Song of Songs? And, how on earth does this connect back to Gottman’s two principles?
Let’s start with the obvious one—this love poem is full of fondness and admiration. The man and woman absolutely adore one another.
Gottman’s principle of fondness and admiration is seeing the best in the other person and saying it. And this book of the Bible is a masterclass in that.
She calls him “My beloved.” He calls her “My darling.”
She describes him as handsome, charming, a king. He describes her as beautiful, lovely, majestic.
They shower each other with affirmations. My favorite is the man’s speech in chapter 4.
Your eyes are like doves.
Your hair is like a flock of goats.
Your neck is like a tower of stone.
Your breasts are like two fawns.
Your lips are like a scarlet ribbon. (Okay, that one’s good.)
He concludes with, “You are altogether beautiful, my darling; there is no flaw in you.” That guy’s got game!
But there’s another major theme in this book that also connects back to Gottman’s love map—intentionally knowing the details about your partner.
Song of Songs is eight chapters, full of seeking and finding. The man and woman take turns seeking after their love and eventually finding them.
Listen to some of these verses:
My beloved stands behind our wall, gazing through the windows, peering through the lattice.
Arise, come, my darling; my beautiful one, come with me.
I slept but my heart was awake. Listen! My beloved is knocking: “Open to me, my sister, my darling, my dove, my flawless one.
My dove show me your face, let me hear your voice;
All night long I looked for the one my heart loves but did not find him.
If you find my beloved, tell him I am faint with love.
I found the one my heart loves. I held him and would not let him go
It’s like seeking is a natural outcome of loving. And isn’t that at the heart of knowing someone—seeking after them? Asking open-ending questions is seeking after them. Listening well is seeking after them. And the minute you stop trying to understand their inner world better, you stop seeking after them.
That perpetual seeking and finding is part of what makes the man and woman in Song of Songs so compelling. It shows how much they truly love each other.
APPLICATION
So, how do we have a relationship that is more like the couple in Song of Songs—full of affirmations and seeking after your spouse? Unfortunately, the book doesn’t give us any guidance on that. But Gottman’s 40 years of research does.
Let’s go back to his first two principles for making marriage work:
Enhance your love maps.
Nurture your fondness and admiration.
Let’s get really practical. Here are concrete steps you can do this week to improve your relationship this week.
First, let’s talk about enhancing our love maps:
Ask open-ended questions – These are questions that don’t have yes/no or right/wrong answers. And they’re the only way to invite someone to share their inner world of hopes, dreams, fears, and desires.
Update your information – We change over time. You might be long overdue to check in with your partners to see what’s changed in them.
Listen actively – Listen with full attention. Put the phone down. Turn toward them and make eye contact. Active listening demonstrates that you value your partner’s thoughts and feelings.
Express genuine interest – Show curiosity about your partner’s life. Make it clear that you find what they have to say important and worthy of your attention.
Now, I want you to pick one of these that you want to do this week in your marriage or some other relationship. This week, I’m going to focus on asking Pang Foua more open-ended questions
Next, let’s talk about steps to nurture your fondness and admiration.
Regularly affirm your partner – Regular, even daily, affirmations is one of the most powerful, restorative things you can do in your marriage. Say, “I affirm you for…” And say it often.
Make an admiration list – Make a list of the qualities you admire in your partner. This simple act, even if you never share it with them (but you should), reshapes how you think about them.
Share stories from your past – Gottman calls this historical appreciation. Share stories of the early days of your relationship, focusing on what attracted you to each other in the first place. This can help rekindle feelings of love and admiration.
Say positive things daily – Shoot for Gottman’s 5:1 golden ratio: 5 positive interactions for every 1 negative interaction. Make it a habit to say positive things about your partner to others. Never trash your spouse to others.
Now, I want you to pick one of these that you want to do this week in your marriage or some other relationship. For my marriage, I was thinking it’s time to bring back daily affirmations. We did this early in our marriage, and it might have been the one thing that held us together through some pretty dark times. Affirmations.
CONCLUSION
In closing, let’s remember the essence of what binds us together in marriage in not just the vows we exchange, but the daily acts of love, understanding, and appreciation we show each other.
Song of Songs painted a picture, and Gottman’s research showed how to live it out. In both of those, one thing is true: the heart of a thriving relationship lies in our commitment to nurturing a deep friendship with our partner.
The long-time former editor of Psychology Today, Sam Keen, once wrote, "We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.”
Isn’t that what God does with you?
Through Christ, God doesn’t see a sinful person but a forgiven person.
Through Christ, God doesn’t see a broken person but a healed person.
Through Christ, God doesn’t see a condemned person but a free person.
He sees you, an imperfect person, perfectly through Christ.
Doesn’t your spouse deserve from you the same gift you’ve received?
