Editor’s note: Ian Kerner is a licensed marriage and family therapist, writer and contributor on the topic of relationships for CNN. His most recent book is a guide for couples, “So Tell Me About the Last Time You Had Sex.”
I bet you’ve experienced sexual chemistry with someone. But have you experienced what’s called sexual harmony? Maybe you’ve fallen in love? But was it “emergent love,” a concept that requires certain elements for love to emerge? And once your relationship got rolling, what kind of couple were you?
Whatever your relationship looks like, my colleague Dr. Sara Nasserzadeh has seen it. Based in Los Angeles, Nasserzadeh has a doctorate in social psychology and focuses on sexuality and relationships in her private practice as a therapist. She been researching and working with couples across more than 40 countries for more than two decades and seems to be in a state of perpetual curiosity about what makes them tick.
Nasserzadeh is also the author of three books, including the recent “Love by Design: 6 Ingredients to Build a Lifetime of Love.” I sat down with her to learn about these ingredients, the most common types of couples, and more.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
CNN: You write that many of us were raised to believe that true love means finding our other half. But you contend that this view is flawed. Let’s talk a little more about that.
Dr. Sara Nasserzadeh: I’ll give you an example: One of my clients was very successful, very attractive, had everything going for her. She also wore a pendant of a little keyhole around her neck. And when I asked her about it, she said that her goal was to find the key to this keyhole.
And you should have seen my face, because I thought, if you think there’s only one person in this whole world with the key to your heart, you’re not giving yourself a lot of options. But most people, including myself, grew up thinking this way, because the narratives around love basically tell us that we need another half to “complete” us.
CNN: You talk a lot about “emergent love.” Can you explain more about that concept?
Nasserzadeh: What I’m offering is a new model, based on more than 10 years of research, which requires certain ingredients for love to emerge. If you think about emergent love as a log and a spark, when these two come together, we have a beautiful fire. As long as we have all the elements available, the fire will burn beautifully and give us the warmth we want. But if you take one of the elements, or ingredients, away, the fire will die.
CNN: What are those ingredients?
Nasserzadeh: There are six ingredients: mutual attraction, trust, respect, compassion, shared vision and loving behavior. With attraction, think about the attributes you like about yourself and the ones you want to be around. Attraction could be social, physical, financial — you name it. It is constructed for you and only for you.
Respect includes the way that you would like to be treated and how you would like to treat other people. When people say, “I’m not respected by my partner,” I ask them, “Are you respectable? Where are your boundaries?” Respect literally means to see and to see again, to prioritize what matters for the other person and to prioritize what matters to us over time.
For trust, two elements are very important. One is consistency, and one is reliability. Trust includes financial trust, social trust, loyalty. If I tell you my secret when we are in an intimate moment, are you going to share it with your parents and all our social circles later? These are the elements of trust, as well compassion, which is when you are there for the other person without making it about yourself.
Another ingredient needed for emergent love is shared vision. Shared vision is commitment, especially when you don’t feel like it. It’s easy to commit to something, but when you’re angry at the other person, are you committed?
And last but not least is loving behavior. I describe that as tenderness through touch, through words, and exclusiveness of that touch and those words. Giving the person benefit of the doubt and making them feel special — these are all elements of loving behavior that you don’t necessarily share with others unless your romantic relationship involves more than two people.
CNN: One of the parts of your book that I was most intrigued by is the idea of configurations, and that every couple falls into a certain kind of configuration. For example, you talk about the “contemporary” couple, which is most couples.
Nasserzadeh: When we choose different configurations, we choose how our priorities look, right? Resources, as I define them, are time, energy, attention and money. With the contemporary couple, they preserve parts of themselves and have a shared space between the two of them, but not much of a sense of their coupledom as a separate entity.
These relationships tend to involve a lot of negotiating when boundaries become blurred around power dynamics, allocation of resources, and division of labor, particularly if there are children involved. They believe in 50/50 in everything. They’re focused on staying in balance and being fair in terms of how they’re bringing their resources to the relationship. The majority of fights that I hear about when working with contemporary couples are around fairness.
CNN: What about the “leftover” couple?
Nasserzadeh: Leftover couples are pretty common, too. What happens with them is that they are trying to manage those resources on their own, and whatever is left will go to the relationship space. These couples are prioritizing their individuality over the relationship, sometimes by choice, sometimes by demand. They do see their relationship as a separate entity from themselves but relegate it to just one more item on the to-do list.
CNN: What is the “submerged” couple?
Nasserzadeh: In this type of couple, the partners have very low levels of autonomy and identify as one half of a couple. They tend to have a less developed sense of self, have difficulty establishing and maintaining boundaries, and risk developing codependent dynamics over time.
Unfortunately, submergent couples are the ones that are idealized by majority of the world. So when we say, “I can’t live without him, I finish her sentences” — you think you’re so in love that you can’t even breathe without the other person. This can be beautiful to experience. However, if you stay in this place, you’re doomed, because you’re so wrapped in your couple bubble that you really lose your individuality. It can feel suffocating.
CNN: What does the ideal configuration — the emergent couple — look like?
Nasserzadeh: In this type of couple, the partners are independent entities in an interdependent partnership with healthy and clear boundaries. They’re connected, but they also view their relationship as a distinct entity in which each partner participates. The relationship is based on equity: They give to the relationship and receive from it, too. The six ingredients of emergent love are present, and love emerges as the result.
CNN: When do you know that you are in an emergent love status?
Nasserzadeh: If you wake up in the morning, you’re not preoccupied by your relationship. You have peace of mind. You have peace of heart. Then you know that you are in an emergent love context. And there are certain things that couples need to do daily, weekly, monthly and annually to make sure that they remain in emergent love.
CNN: To that point, you have lots of tools in your book for couples to get in and maintain an emergent love configuration. What are some of those exercises?
Nasserzadeh: One of them is the daily check-ins. I call them “oy and joy.” On a daily basis, the couple check in with each other and start with the “oy.” You just share something that is heavy on your heart on that day. And then the “joy,” something that brought a smile to your face. It could be anything, a clip that you watched, whatever.
The number one reason people separate is because not somebody slept with somebody else. It’s because they drifted apart. That’s why that daily practice is extremely important.
CNN: Finally, you mention sexual chemistry, which I think is a concept we’re all used to, but you also talk about sexual harmony. What’s the difference between the two?
Nasserzadeh: Sexual chemistry is either there or not. If you just leave it at that, it might fizzle out, as many couples experience. But you can turn it into sexual harmony, meaning that you take that initial fiery spark and then turn it into attunement (a mutual awareness of each other), learn about each other, go over things with each other over and over again. You play a tune; I play a tune.
At the end, we have a beautiful harmony, and with that, you will never get bored, never because there are unlimited songs to be produced and harmonies to enjoy over our lifetimes.
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