Editor’s note: Ian Kerner is a licensed marriage and family therapist, writer, and contributor on relationship topics for CNN. His latest book is a guide for couples, “So Tell Me About the Last Time You Had Sex.”
(CNN) – I bet you’ve experienced sexual chemistry with someone. But have you experienced what’s known as sexual harmony? Maybe you’ve fallen in love? But was it “emerging love,” a concept that requires certain elements for love to develop? And once your relationship started to work, what kind of couple were you?
Whatever your relationship might be, my colleague, Dr. Sara Nasserzadeh, has seen it. Nasserzadeh, who resides in Los Angeles, has a Ph.D. in social psychology and focuses on sexuality and relationships in her private practice as a therapist. She has researched and worked with couples in more than 40 countries for over two decades and seems to be in a state of perpetual curiosity about what motivates them.
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 argue that this view is misguided. Let’s talk a bit 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 little keyhole pendant around her neck. And when I asked her about it, she said her goal was to find the key to that keyhole.
And you should have seen my face, because I thought: If you believe that there’s only one person in this world who has the key to your heart, you’re not giving yourself many options. But most people, myself included, grew up thinking this way, because the narratives around love basically tell us we need another half to “complete us.”
CNN: You talk a lot about “emerging love.” Can you explain more about that concept?
Nasserzadeh: What I’m offering is a new model, based on over 10 years of research, that requires certain ingredients for love to emerge. If you think of emerging love as a trunk 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 desire. But if you take one of the elements or ingredients away, the fire will go out.
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 people you want to be with. Attraction can be social, physical, financial, whatever. It is built for you and only for you.
Respect includes how you would like to be treated and how you would like to treat other people. When people say, “My partner doesn’t respect me,” I ask them: “Are you respectable? Where are your boundaries?” To respect literally means to see and again see, prioritizing what matters to the other person and prioritizing what matters to us over time.
For trust, two elements are very important. One is consistency, and the other is reliability. Trust includes financial trust, social trust, and loyalty. If I tell you my secret when we’re in an intimate moment, will you share it with your parents and all our social circles later? These are the elements of trust, as well as compassion, which is when you’re there for the other person without it being about you.
Another necessary ingredient for emerging love is shared vision. The shared vision is commitment, especially when you don’t feel like it. It’s easy to commit to something, but when you’re angry with the other person, do you commit?
And last but not least, there’s loving behavior. I describe it as tenderness through touch, through words, and the exclusivity of that touch and those words. Giving the person the benefit of the doubt and making them feel special: all of these are elements of loving behavior that you do not necessarily share with others unless your romantic relationship involves more than two people.
CNN: One part of the book that intrigued me the most is the idea of configurations, and that each couple falls into a certain type of configuration. For instance, you talk about the “contemporary” couple, which is most couples.
Nasserzadeh: When we choose different configurations, we choose how our priorities are, right? Resources, as I define them, are time, energy, attention, and money. In the contemporary couple, they maintain parts of themselves and have shared space between the two, but they don’t have much sense of their relationship as a separate entity.
These relationships tend to involve a lot of negotiation when boundaries become blurred around power dynamics, resource allocation, and division of labor, particularly if children are involved. They believe in 50/50 across the board. They focus on maintaining balance and being fair in terms of how they contribute their resources to the relationship. Most of the fights I hear when I work with contemporary couples revolve around equity.
CNN: What about the “leftover” couple?
Nasserzadeh: Leftover couples are also quite common. What happens with them is that they try to manage those resources on their own, and whatever’s left goes to the relationship space. These couples prioritize their individuality over the relationship, sometimes by choice, sometimes out of necessity. They see their relationship as a separate entity from themselves, but they relegate it to just another item on their to-do list.
CNN: What is a “submerged” couple?
Nasserzadeh: In this type of couple, the members have very low levels of autonomy and identify as half of a couple. They often have a less developed sense of self, have difficulty setting and maintaining boundaries, and risk developing codependent dynamics over time.
Unfortunately, submerged couples are the ones that most of the world idealizes. So when we say, “I can’t live without him, I finish his sentences,” you think you’re so in love that you can’t even breathe without the other person. This can be a beautiful experience. However, if you stay in that place, you’re doomed because you’re so wrapped up in your couple bubble that you really lose your individuality. It can become suffocating.
CNN: How is the ideal configuration, the emerging couple?
Nasserzadeh: In this type of couple, the members of the couple are independent entities in an interdependent relationship with healthy, clear boundaries. They are connected, but they also see their relationship as a distinct entity in which each of the members participates. The relationship is based on equity: they give to the relationship and also receive from it. The six ingredients of emerging love are present, and love emerges as a result.
CNN: When do you know you’re in a state of emerging love?
Nasserzadeh: If you wake up in the morning and you’re not worried about your relationship, you have peace of mind and heart. Then you know you’re in a context of emerging love. And there are certain things couples need to do daily, weekly, monthly, and annually to ensure they remain in a state of emerging love.
CNN: In that sense, you have many tools in your book for couples to achieve and maintain an emerging love configuration. What are some of those exercises?
Nasserzadeh: One of them is daily check-ins. I call them “oy and joy.” Every day, the couple checks in and starts with the “oy.” They simply share something that weighs on their heart that day. And then the “joy,” something that made them smile. It can be anything, a video they saw, whatever.
The number one reason people separate is not because they slept with someone 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 are all familiar with, but you also talk about sexual harmony. What’s the difference between the two?
Nasserzadeh: Sexual chemistry exists or it doesn’t. If you leave it at that, it may fizzle out, as it does with many couples. But you can turn it into sexual harmony, meaning taking that initial spark and then turning it into harmony (a mutual awareness of each other), learning from each other, going over things time and again. You play one melody; I play another.
In the end, we have a beautiful harmony, and with that, you will never get bored, never, because there are an unlimited number of songs to produce and harmonies to enjoy throughout our lives.
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