Rituals of Connection
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- —
Julie Gottman's favourite intervention: activities you do together that are pre-designed, pre-planned and agreed upon, so connection stops depending on spare time and mood. They come in scales. Small daily rituals cover how you greet each other first thing in the morning and how you reunite at the end of a working day, plus shared meals. Weekly ones are the date night, the Sunday brunch, the seasonal weekend activity, the Gottmans' own after-dinner 'cuddle couch' with British murder mysteries. Big ones cover how birthdays, religious holidays, a Sabbath and vacations are celebrated — including the Gottmans' 23-year annual honeymoon, ten days at the same bed and breakfast reviewing what they hated and loved about the year and what they want the next one to be. The design conversation sits alongside dividing up domestic labour.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Hold a meeting about logistics first
Sit down — a state of the union style meeting — and divide up the labour: the house, the kids, the yard, the in-laws, and how much you want to entertain versus keeping private time. Rituals are designed on top of an agreed division of work, not instead of it.
Pro tip Sharing housework and childcare removes the 'second shift' a partner otherwise faces on getting home from work.
- 2
Design the daily rituals
Decide the way you greet each other first thing when you wake up, the way you reunite at the end of a day spent working apart, and whether you have breakfast or dinner together. These are the highest-frequency touchpoints and most couples already have unexamined versions of them.
- 3
Design the weekly rituals
A date night once a week, brunch every Sunday, skiing every weekend during the season, or the Gottmans' after-dinner cuddle couch — a chaise wide enough for a person and a half where they watch British murder mysteries with the dog squeezed in.
Pro tip The ritual only needs to be specific, repeatable and mutually enjoyable — it does not need to be impressive.
- 4
Design the big annual rituals
Decide how birthdays are celebrated in your family, how religious holidays and any Sabbath are marked, and what kind of vacations you take. These are the rituals that carry family identity.
- 5
Build in an annual review ritual
The Gottmans take about ten days every year at the same bed and breakfast — their annual honeymoon, now 23 years running — bringing the kayak and talking about what the year was like, what they hated about last year, what they loved, and what they want next year to be like, interleaved with kayaking, hiking and good restaurants.
Pro tip Anchoring the review to an enjoyable trip is what makes people actually do it every year.
In the wild
The Gottmans run rituals at two scales. Nightly, after dinner, they share a chaise lounge about wide enough for a person and a half — the cuddle couch — squashed together with the dog, watching British murder mysteries. Annually, they take about ten days at the same bed and breakfast, a tradition started when their daughter turned eight and went away to camp so they decided to go to camp too. They bring a kayak and spend the ten days talking about what the year was like, what they hated and loved about it, and what they want the next one to be, between kayaking, hiking, restaurants and the Saturday farmers market. Twenty-three years and counting.
→ A nightly connection habit and an annual review that has run continuously for 23 years.
Common mistakes
Leaving connection to spare time
One UCLA study cited on the show found dual-career couples in Los Angeles spent under 10% of an evening in the same room and talked around 35 minutes a week, mostly about errands. Without pre-planned rituals, intimacy simply isn't maintained.
Designing rituals only one partner wants
The definition requires that the activity is agreed upon and co-designed. A ritual imposed by one partner becomes another item on the other's to-do list.
From the transcript
“part of that this is one of my favorite things to do Ali is to create what we call rituals of connection”
“activities that you do together with your partner that are pre-designed they're pre-planned and they're agreed upon”
“we have an annual honeymoon that we do right”
From the episode
The Science Behind Why Relationships Last Or Fail - Drs John & Julie Gottman
Drs John & Julie Gottman