Can True Love Be Designed?

Transforming How We Experience and Express Love

Can True Love Be Designed?

When I was a child, I remember hearing my parents say, “Marriage is like a watermelon. You don’t know what it will look like until you open it up. Will it be tasteless, or red and juicy?” To me, that made no sense. What if you ended up with one of the tasteless ones? Was there nothing you could do to make it sweeter and juicier?

I was raised in an intercultural, interfaith household in Tehran. My mother was a social scientist and my father, who moved to Tehran as a young adult, started his career as a social worker. They met when he interned at the organization where my mother was the director. He had her favorite flower (wintersweet, also called Japanese allspice) delivered to her office every week during the winter with a note that said, “From your secret admirer.” It took my mom a while to figure out who her admirer was, but once she did, they dated, fell in love, and in their late 20s, got married.

 

Over the years, my three siblings and I observed how our parents often needed to clarify to each other what a certain gesture, word, or act meant when the other had misunderstood. We observed how they laughed together, showed up for each other, included each other’s family of origin in events and activities, went out of their way to please each other, and regularly played games like backgammon—still their favorite. Though I don’t remember ever seeing them kiss on the lips in front of us, they would kiss each other on each cheek and hug often.

“Why did you marry each other?” I sometimes asked them. Their answers were usually along the lines of, “It was destiny,” or “When you feel something in your heart for the other person, you have a strong foundation to build on.” Like the watermelon analogy, it seemed like they were telling me their special relationship was all a matter of luck. I didn’t like the idea that elements of unintentionality and chance could play such a major role in life’s biggest decisions, so I pressed the issue.

“But why him?” I asked. “Why her?”

“Your father was handsome, loyal, reliable, and loving,” my mom answered.

“Your mom was beautiful, intelligent, successful, and courageous,” my father said.

Even then, I remember thinking that there had to be more to marriage than destiny, feelings, and luck.

Two Models

My parent’s marriage wasn’t free of quarrels and fights, and I also learned about conflict management styles from them, however subconsciously. Their marriage, and other marriages I saw, were like puzzles I wanted to solve.

Years later, when I embarked on my career as a couple’s therapist, I wanted to find out what makes a relationship thrive. There were enough ideas and research on why they failed. When there’s peace between partners, it brings clarity of mind and peace of heart that extends to interactions with family members, friends, and even colleagues in the workplace. My clinical experience, spanning over two decades and across more than 41 countries, has reinforced this belief and provided a critical insight: love as traditionally defined often fails to bring lasting fulfillment. A vast majority of couples follow the same trajectory. Initially, their love is exciting, they experience a sensation of “butterflies” in their stomach when they’re with their partner, but as years pass, the initial thrill wanes, leaving them disillusioned and questioning their love for one another and their own worthiness of love. Encountering couples like this so often in my practice inspired me to delve deeper into societal assumptions about love and how these assumptions contribute to disillusionment.

I teamed up with Pejman Azarmina, a psychometric specialist. Through a comprehensive analysis of thousands of sessions with couples I’d seen and a survey of couples outside my practice, we found that there were eight common ways couples relate to one another. We also uncovered a recurring misconception: the notion that sexual chemistry and infatuation for many is a prerequisite or cornerstone of a thriving relationship. This notion is especially prevalent in Western Europe and North America, and typically leads to submergent love. If there were an equation for this type of love, it would be 1+1=1. Couples become enmeshed in their emotional and physical connection and after a while, discover that this foundation is far too fragile to sustain a long-term, thriving relationship. In short, we found that there are two main models of love: submergent, which is prevalent and often touted as the idea on holidays like Valentines Day and emergent, which can be the foundation the kind of healthy love therapists help clients build.

Submergent love model. Characterized by a strong initial attraction, the experience of submergent love is often accompanied by an extended dopamine rush and the enmeshment of two individuals. It’s static and has a quality of stuckness to it. It’s what many of us have come to associate with the ideal romantic relationship, e.g. “being one soul in two bodies.” This model is inherently unstable.

When couples root their relationship solely in the thrilling feelings that accompany infatuation, they work towards becoming one entity and inevitably let go of many crucial parts of their identities and social roles that make them stand-alone individuals. They overlook the fact that at the heart of most relationships, there’s an exchange of sorts—like a currency, driven by expectations. But if you’re truly “one” with another person, how can you recognize your partner’s expectations? It’s hard to see them when you’re so invested in being united. This is why couples often end up feeling stuck and unsure of where things went off track after their initial feelings for one another fade and the pressures and responsibilities of day-to-day life together close in. This realization often comes too late. Clients lament that their love didn’t last, question their worthiness, or blame themselves for picking the wrong person. They’re bewildered by the discrepancy between their initial feelings towards their partner and their current reality, and sometimes feel duped or betrayed. Some even try to introduce a new love-object to the mix (be it a new partner, a child, or even a pet) with the hope that it will help them get unstuck.

There’s plenty of information out there explaining why this model isn’t the one to pursue, however, most couples don’t have an alternative for submergent love—one that’s well-researched and offers an actual pathway for cultivating a loving relationship consciously and intentionally.

Emergent Love model. This model was informed by systems thinking. It materialized from my clinical practice and was solidified by my research with Azarmina. The submergent love model posits that fulfilling and thriving relationships (regardless of their length) are possible when the key ingredients needed to create them are in place. Unlike submergent love, where love is considered static, eternal and all-powerful, the emergent love model is dynamic and emphasizes maintaining individuality and remaining differentiated from your partner while also cultivating an interdependent relationship that grows from a grounded and balanced state. If there was an equation for emergent love, it would be 1+1=3 (the numerals representing each individual partner and the relationship they co-create).

The model’s six ingredients are mutual compassion, mutual trust, shared vision, mutual loving behaviors, mutual respect, and mutual attraction. Just as a spark, wood, and oxygen are baseline requirements for creating a fire, so too, these ingredients provide a baseline in a relationship for sustainable love to emerge. If you take away one of the ingredients for one or both partners, you risk smothering the possibility of emergent love. I call these elements “ingredients” because different phases of life require more or less of each, but they’re all necessary for love to have a chance to emerge.

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Ideally, love should give our heart a break—not break our heart. As therapists, I believe that we have the privilege and responsibility of guiding clients towards a more fulfilling and resilient understanding of love. It’s not enough to hold space as we allow clients to fumble around searching for a path. We need to offer alternative paths. We can help couples shift their focus from the ephemeral excitement of infatuation in the initial stages of their relationship to deeper, more enduring relational resources that support long-term satisfaction. Many don’t fall short due to a lack of effort; rather, they fall short because they’re unsure where to direct that effort. That’s where we come in. We can educate them about different models of love, different relational configurations, and share the distinction between submergent and emergent love. We can also assess which of the six ingredients are resources for our clients, and which need strengthening. This won’t only improve their lives—it will contribute to a more peaceful and connected world, one relationship at a time.

Sara Nasserzadeh

Sara Nasserzadeh, PhD, is a social psychologist, speaker and thinking partner specializing in sexuality, relationships, and intercultural fluency. She’s authored three books, including Love by Design: 6 Ingredients for a Lifetime of Love.