Editor’s Note: Ian Kerner is a licensed marriage and family therapist, writer and relationship contributor for CNN. Her most recent 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 is called sexual harmony? Maybe you have fallen in love? But was it an “emergent love,” a concept that requires certain elements for love to emerge? And once your relationship started working, what kind of couple were you?
Whatever your relationship, my colleague Dr. Sara Nasserzadeh has seen it. Based in Los Angeles, Nasserzadeh has a doctorate 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 more than 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 pairings, 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 maintain that this view is wrong. Let’s talk a little more about that.
Dr. Sara Nasserzadeh: I’ll give an example: one of my clients was very successful, very attractive, she had everything going for her. He also wore a small keyhole pendant around his neck. And when I asked him about it, he said his goal was to find the key to that keyhole.
And you should have seen my face, because I thought: If you think there’s only one person in this entire world with the key to your heart, you’re not giving yourself much of a choice. But most people, including me, grew up thinking this way, because the narratives around love basically tell us that 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 am offering is a new model, based on more than 10 years of research, that requires certain ingredients for love to arise. If you think of emerging love as a log 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 heat we want. But if you remove one of the elements or ingredients, 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 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 limits?” Respect literally means seeing and seeing again, 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, are you going to share it with your parents and all of our social circles later? These are the elements of trust, as well as compassion, which is when you are there for the other person without it being about you.
Another necessary ingredient for emerging love is shared vision. Shared vision is commitment, especially when you don’t feel like it. It’s easy to commit to something, but when you’re angry at the other person, do you commit?
And last but not least is 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: These are all elements of loving behavior that you don’t necessarily share with others unless your romantic relationship involves more than two people.
CNN: One of the parts 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 example, you talk about the “contemporary” couple, which is the majority of couples.
Nasserzadeh: When we choose different settings, we choose what our priorities are, right? Resources, as I define them, are time, energy, attention, and money. In the contemporary couple, they retain parts of themselves and have a shared space between the two of them, but they don’t have much sense of their relationship as a separate entity.
These relationships tend to involve a lot of negotiation as boundaries become blurred around power dynamics, resource allocation, and division of labor, particularly if children are involved. They believe in 50/50 in everything. They focus on maintaining balance and being fair in terms of how they bring their resources to the relationship. Most of the fights I hear when working with contemporary couples have to do with 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 what they have left will go to the space of the relationship. These couples prioritize their individuality over the relationship, sometimes by choice, sometimes by requirement. 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 the “submerged” couple?
Nasserzadeh: In this type of couple, 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 are at risk of developing codependent dynamics over time.
Unfortunately, submerged couples are what 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 are doomed, because you are so wrapped up in your partner bubble that you really lose your individuality. It can be suffocating.
CNN: What is the ideal configuration, the emerging couple?
Nasserzadeh: In this type of couple, the partners are independent entities in an interdependent relationship with healthy and clear boundaries. They are connected, but they also see their relationship as a distinct entity in which each member participates. The relationship is based on equity: they give to the relationship and also receive from it. The six ingredients of emergent 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 are not worried about your relationship, you have peace of mind and heart. Then you know that you are in a context of emerging love. And there are certain things couples should do daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly to ensure they stay in a state of emerging love.
CNN: On that note, you have a lot of tools in your book for couples to achieve and maintain an emergent love configuration. What are some of those exercises?
Nasserzadeh: One of them is daily logs. I call them “oy and joy”. Every day, the couple checks in and begins with “oy.” They simply share something that is heavy on their hearts that day. And then the “joy”, something that made them smile. It can be anything, a video they watched, anything.
The number one reason people break up is because they didn’t sleep with someone else. It’s because they grew apart. That is why that daily practice is extremely important.
CNN: Lastly, you mention sexual chemistry, which I think is a concept we’re all used to, but you also talk about sexual harmony. What is the difference between both?
Nasserzadeh: Sexual chemistry exists or it does not. If you leave her like this, she may turn off, as happens to many couples. But you can turn it into sexual harmony, that is, take that initial spark and then turn it into attunement (a mutual awareness of each other), learning about each other, going over things over and over again. You play a melody; I play another.
In the end, we have a beautiful harmony, and with that, you will never get bored, ever, because there are an unlimited number of songs to produce and harmonies to enjoy throughout our lives.
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