How To Stay Married
DR SHAADY HARRISON | 3 minutes
It’s the first time I’ve held a kidney.
We’re in the basement of Guy’s Hospital, waiting for the next surgery to kick off.
Getting the second patient into theatre is taking a while, which isn’t particularly out of the ordinary, but what doesn’t make sense is her age.
Otherwise healthy people in their forties can spend years waiting for a call that never comes – a seventy-four-year-old getting to the top of the transplant list isn’t just lucky, it’s completely unheard of.
As the clamps come off it’s time for the moment of truth; nobody speaks as every eye in the room stays fixed on the kidney, silently willing it to change colour. For a few seconds, it stays lifeless and grey.
Then slowly, it turns a warm and unmistakeable shade of pink.
Almost directly upstairs, her seventy-six-year-old husband is staring up at the ceiling waiting for news, with twenty-two staples tracking their way down his side.
Shared Files
Scientists have spent decades trying to figure out what the best relationships do differently. The list of ingredients is long and complicated, but in amongst all the noise one finding stands out.
The happiest couples stop thinking of themselves as two separate people.
Our brains keep a detailed folder on every person we know. It holds everything from their sense of humour to their annoying quirks and it’s updated every time we see them. Usually, the “self” and “other people” files are kept pretty separate.
But in strong relationships, the two begin to blur.
This also holds true in deep friendships and close family bonds – their problems start to register as our problems, their wins become our wins, and their pain lights up the same parts of the brain as our own.
Most importantly, this process happens without either person disappearing into the other.
Both have lives of their own, with separate friends and ambitions, but the happiest partnerships stop keeping score of where one person ends and the other begins.
Back-Up
Stress is essentially a maths problem.
Every time something difficult comes our way, the brain runs a split-second calculation: on one side sits the size of the problem, on the other sits the resources it thinks it has. When demands outweigh resources, the body mounts a threat response, flooding the bloodstream with cortisol and narrowing our thinking. When resources feel like enough, it mounts a challenge response instead – energy rises, focus sharpens and the mind widens rather than shrinks.
Another person in our corner suddenly gives the same problem a much more generous answer.
Over decades, that extra pair of hands lowers the background load on the body, turning down the volume on a lifetime of small worries. That doesn’t mean the weight is always split down the middle – things can look lopsided for years as one pair of shoulders takes most of the strain.
That said, the arrangement only works if at some point it runs both ways.
The healthiest partnerships tag in and out, until over time they look less like two people living in the same house and more like two bodies splitting the work of a single nervous system.
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Close relationships as including other in the self. Aron, A., Aron, E. N., Tudor, M., et al. (1991). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60(2), 241–253.
Lending a hand: Social regulation of the neural response to threat. Coan, J. A., Schaefer, H. S., & Davidson, R. J. (2006). Psychological Science, 17(12), 1032–1039.
Stress appraisals and cardiovascular reactivity: Challenge and threat. Tomaka, J., Blascovich, J., Kelsey, R. M., et al. (1993). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(2), 248–260.
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About The Author
Shaady Harrison is a British medical doctor, writer and executive advisor specialising in neuroscience, leadership and high performance.