Why good communication and conflict skills are important, but don’t tell the whole story.
So far we’ve looked at many of the pressures in relationships. The load couples carry. The way attention is constantly demanded by daily life, kids etc. How nervous systems react when stress builds and emotional safety goes missing.
When you spend a lot of time observing couples and look for gold, there is actually lots to see, and I find this hopeful. Relationships rarely struggle just because people don’t deal with conflict well. And they rarely thrive simply because people communicate well. What sustains love over time is something different.
So in the coming emails I want to change course somewhat. Away from the pressures in relationships, and toward what helps love thrive, last and deepen over time.
It may help to think about love less as something we feel, and more as something we practice.
The writer bell hooks described love in this way in All About Love. She wrote that love is not simply a feeling that happens to us. Love is a verb. It lives in what we choose to do.
Sometimes that looks very ordinary: Putting the phone down when your partner talks to you. Listening with genuine attention to something that matters to them. Checking in after a difficult day rather than withdrawing into your own reset space.
These moments may seem small, almost forgettable, however over time they shape the emotional climate of a relationship.
Love is also a decision – a willingness to keep showing up in the relationship even when things are imperfect or uncomfortable. And those times come, and go. 
Couples who remain lovingly connected over many years tend to do a few specific things. One of them is actively maintaining the bond over time. Not through big gestures, but with small repeated moments where they turn toward each other rather than away.
Researchers such as John and Julie Gottman studied thousands of couples over decades and noticed something that often surprises people. Stable relationships are not conflict-free.
What distinguishes them is the overall tone that develops between partners over time. Moments of irritation happen. Misunderstandings happen. Yet the relationship itself carries a deeper layer of goodwill.
Gottman described this as positive sentiment override.
In simple terms, partners tend to assume good intent rather than bad intent. They interpret each other generously. A sharp comment is less likely to be read as an attack and more likely to be understood as a moment of stress or fatigue.
Another pattern appears again and again in research.
Couples who remain close tend to turn toward each other’s small bids for connection.
A passing comment about the day. A shared observation. A moment of eye contact across the room.
These moments often look insignificant. Yet over time they become powerful: there is a sense that the relationship is alive and responsive.
Attachment researcher Sue Johnson described something similar from another angle. What stabilises relationships most strongly is emotional responsiveness. Partners remain accessible to each other. When one reaches out, the other responds.
Her training has strongly influenced me in my work with couples.
This is less about mastering communication techniques and more about maintaining a relational field where both people feel reachable.
Love, in other words, is not sustained by solving problems alone. It is sustained by the ongoing maintenance of connection.
When these patterns become part of a relationship, the bond strengthens. The relationship becomes a place where connection can be renewed again and again, even after ordinary strain or distance.
In many ways, this is what long-term love grows from.
In the next email I want to look more closely at the condition that allows that connection to remain possible over time.
Remember: love is less something we find than something we practice.
Or, as some of you have heard me say in session: the grass is greenest where you water it.
If this resonates
If you recognise some of these dynamics in your own relationship, counselling can offer a space to slow things down and understand what is happening beneath the surface.
I offer relationship counselling and mediation in Broome and online.
You can learn more about working together here.