What is the secret to everlasting love?

For a couple of years now I’ve been trying to figure out what makes a relationship work. There must be something that separates relationships that endure from those that fail.

Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson have been married for 28 years, one of the longest marriages in Hollywood. How do they do it? (Pic: Theo Wargo/Getty Images)

For a couple of years now I’ve been trying to figure out what makes a relationship work.

Like Scott Morrison endeavouring to pinpoint the policy that will fix our deficit, or scientists intent on unearthing that single irrefutable fact that proves climate change, I figured there must be something — a mindset, a practice, a clue — that separates relationships that endure from those that fail.

Of course I had no personal interest (ahem). My motivation was as altruistic as Derryn Hinch’s decision to enter politics. Obviously if I did stumble over some magical blueprint for relationship success I’d write a book and sell the movie rights to Reese Witherspoon but only because it’d be selfish to keep it to myself.

So how do you find the secret to love?

Looks like we’re going this way, folks. (Pic: Thinkstock)

Without sounding creepy, I started observing — friends, lovers on trains, people I interviewed. Imagine David Attenborough minus the hushed commentary. While I detected a lot of imbalance — one partner keener than the other, mismatched levels of affection and some just one drink away from a full-scale row — I couldn’t see conclusively what made the good relationships work.

So I asked.

“I chose the least worst and made it work,” said one pragmatic acquaintance.

“For me, interesting was always the non-negotiable. When I found it packaged with kind and nice, I married it,” said another.

And this from a dear friend: “There’s lots of good relationships but very few great ones. I wanted a great one and held out for it.” (God love her, she found him!)

Some believe the light bulb moment came in the choice of music. One writer says she knew the moment her chap played Crowded House’s Not The Girl You Think You Are. On the rebound from a cheater, the lyrics were a balm to an untrusting heart: ‘He’ll be no trouble, he won’t write you letters full of excuses...”

Lovely advice but not helpful when your first date as a newly single plays The Police’s stalker anthem Every Breath You Take.

It was tempting to analyse celebrities. Why are Hugh Jackman and Deborra-Lee Furness or Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson so happy? “Oh they fit the BWAH formula,” said a friend. The what? “Ball-breaker wife, adoring husband.”

Or maybe they just adore each other? (Pic: John Sciulli/Getty Images)

Anecdotal evidence was getting me nowhere so I turned to research. Ty Tashiro, author of The Science of Happily Ever After, found that while 90 per cent of people will marry only three in 10 will find enduring love. He advised focusing on three character traits that are important to you, pointing out there’s one personality type that stands the best chance at long lasting love. This is it, I thought. The secret. So what’s the type?

Agreeableness.

Agreeableness? Labradors are agreeable. Vanilla ice cream is generally agreeable. Surely “agreeable” is simply “boring” but in a nicer shirt? Apparently not, according to Tashiro, who points out that these types are courteous, flexible, trusting, good-natured, forgiving and... excellent in bed. It made me wonder, perhaps as well as seeking “agreeable” we have to become more agreeable ourselves?

Delving deeper through the Five Love Languages (nonsense — we all want love that’s multilingual) and marriage sabbaticals (affairs?) I stumbled over John Gottman’s “magic ratio”. Gottman is a marriage expert, which I suppose means he strolls down the beach in his rolled up jeans with his Cindy Crawford lookalike wife and never gets the shits when she can’t read Google Maps.

Gottman reckons a 5:1 ratio of positive to negative interactions between couples is the key to success. I guess it sounds like this: “I love you. Thanks for putting out the bins. Well done on your promotion. Of course you should go out on Friday night. Sure, stay later. For the love of God could you for once in your life pick up your bloody towel off the floor?”

Nice theory, difficult in practice. Not sure it’s the secret.

Onwards I went, reading Alain de Botton’s The Course of Love — “love is a skill, not just an enthusiasm” — and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Committed: “To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow — this is a human offering that can border on the miraculous.”

But none of it stuck.

The secret to love is elusive. (Pic: Thinkstock)

And then my brother David wrote a simple little post on Facebook.

He told how he and his wife Michelle, who have been together 25 years, were snowboarding in Japan in their 20s. He wanted to take the path less travelled — to drop down into a bowl of untouched powder, but the risk was they’d have to hike for hours back to the lodge where they were working the night shift. The rest of the group decided to take a safer route but when Dave turned to Michelle, she simply said: “I’m with you, Dave.”

My little bro went on to write how those four words have been the key to their relationship. “She has stood with me as I have made mistakes, picking me up from the dark places our hearts sometimes take us to.”

Love, I finally realised, is not a secret, it’s a choice. “I’m with you.”

Originally published as What is the secret to everlasting love?