Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

You remind yourselves that you are first and foremost friends and lovers.

Date nights are planned. Date nights are prioritized.

The goal is to have a special date once a week, and make that a priority in your relationship.

The quality of our closest relationships, more than any other factor, determines our physical health, resistance to disease, and longevity.

Happy couples are not so very different from unhappy couples; they are simply able to make repairs to their relationship easier and faster so they can get back to the joy of being together.

And every successful marriage and relationship has, at its foundation, a deep and close friendship—partners who really know each other and are, at the heart of it, on the same side, part of the same team.

Mind you, negative events and regrettable incidents are inevitable in all relationships. The positive switch is all about how couples positively interpret their negative events and their partner’s character, and whether in their minds on an everyday basis they maximize the positive and minimize the negative (in their partner and in their relationsh

If a couple starts by expressing negativity toward each other in the interview, whether in words, facial expressions, or body language (cynicism, sarcasm, eye-rolling), then it signals that a negative switch has flipped, and it almost inevitably predicts a relationship that will decline over time.

And they create intentional traditions in their relationship for connecting emotionally. We call these “rituals of connection.” Dates are an example of rituals of connection.