How to Love the Work of Your Relationship
What I learned from the best goal I ever set
In 2017, I set the best goal of my life.
I was pushing myself to pick goals that could actually transform my life in the coming year, and I landed on a common one: I wanted to exercise more to look and feel healthier.
I’d tried this before, setting specific goals like “run three times a week for 30 minutes.” But despite these efforts, I consistently failed to sustain a running habit. So instead, I set an intention to “fall in love with running.” Once this intention took root in my head for a few weeks, I started seeing ways to make running something I could actually enjoy doing, rather than a necessary evil.
First, I focused only on trail running, which would take a bit more time but would ensure I was running in my favorite place in Portland. Then, I decided to sign up for a race every other month so that I would have a bigger goal to work backwards from. Lastly, I convinced Anna to join me in running.
The intention worked. To this day, I am an avid runner who runs multiple half marathons a year and, sometimes, marathons.1
So what does this have to do with our relationship?
Most of us approach our relationships the way I used to approach running: as an obligation we know we should do, but secretly resist. We schedule a date night. We read a book. We promise to communicate better. But underneath it all, the work still feels like a chore.
Running only changed for me when I stopped asking, “How do I force myself to do this?” and started asking, “How do I make this something I love?”
I think our relationships need the same shift. The goal is not merely to do the work. The goal is to fall in love with the work.
So, how can we do this?
The Science of Positive Emotions
Negative emotions2 are relatively easy to understand because they grab our attention, have a distinctive physiological signature3 we feel in our body, and push us toward taking action.4 Anger moves us toward a perceived wrong. Anxiety focuses us on a future threat. Fear tells us to escape.
Positive emotions are stranger. Joy, curiosity, excitement, gratitude, and love do not point us toward one obvious action. They also don’t have a consistent physiological signal. They do something broader: they open us up. They make us more likely to explore, connect, play, experiment, and keep going long enough to improve.
This is how upward spirals begin.
Think of a child learning a new sport. At first, they may be terrible.5 They miss the ball, run the wrong direction, and have no idea what they’re doing. But if they are having fun while playing, they will keep coming back. Over time, they improve. As they improve, they enjoy it more. And because they enjoy it more, they practice more.
The same loop can happen in adulthood:
Activity → Positive emotion during activity → Seeking it out in the future6
The crucial piece is timing. The positive emotion has to happen during the activity, not just before or after.7 A reward at the end may help, but it does not teach our brain to love the activity itself. To create an upward spiral, the work has to become rewarding while we are doing it.
So the real question is not, “How do we work on our relationship?”
It is: “How do we make the work of our relationship so enjoyable that we want to come back to it?”
How to Fall in Love with Relationship Work
Most of us already know the kinds of practices that support a healthy relationship: regular check-ins, date nights, meaningful hellos and goodbyes, and sometimes therapy or coaching.
The harder question is not whether these things matter. It is how to make them feel less like chores.
Choose one relationship activity that currently feels like work and ask each other: what would make this something we might actually look forward to?
Usually, the answer involves changing one of three things: the environment, the content, or the timing.
Here are some examples:
A weekly check-in might work better on a walk, in the hot tub, or over a glass of wine.
A goodbye becomes more meaningful with a six-second kiss or long hug.
Date nights might become more fun if you trade off planning them, so each person gets to bring more of what they love.
One couple I know does a monthly date night challenge where they have to do something novel and exciting neither of them has done before.
Another couple stopped doing date nights and started doing date hikes.
When Anna and I meet with our relationship coach, we always start with a five-minute meditation to calm down from the busyness of life and remind ourselves that we get to spend this time connecting and growing together.8
So why was my goal of falling in love with running the best goal I ever set? Because exercise and relationships are both “keystone” areas of life. When they improve, the benefits tend to spill over into almost everything else, including living longer and having better mental health.9 In other words, when we learn to love working on our relationship, the work stops feeling like maintenance and starts becoming a source of energy, health, and connection.
So, what’s one relationship activity you want to fall in love with?
Humblebrag? Perhaps! But I have failed to complete 50% of the marathons I trained for.
A negative emotion is just an emotion that doesn’t feel good, not something that is inherently bad. All emotions are healthy and functional within reason if they are not avoided or something we get stuck in.
Check out this article for an amazing visual of the physiological “signatures” of different emotions. Nummenmaa, L., Glerean, E., Hari, R., & Hietanen, J. K. (2014). Bodily maps of emotions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(2), 646–651. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1321664111
This is known as an “action tendency.” It can be a useful way to engage with a difficult emotion: What is this emotion asking me to do, and how could I respond productively?”
If you or your child were always good at sports, we don’t want to hear about it.
This is called salience: when something feels rewarding, our brain is more likely to notice it, seek it, and want to return to it. It is the same basic mechanism that can make a sweet treat suddenly feel irresistible when our blood sugar is low, but here we are trying to attach that pull to something healthier and more meaningful.
Fredrickson, B. L., & Joiner, T. (2018). Reflections on positive emotions and upward spirals. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 13(2), 194–199. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691617692106
The meditation is more of an incentive for me, I have to admit
Relationship quality is associated with increased longevity and better mental health. See: Robles, T. F., Slatcher, R. B., Trombello, J. M., & McGinn, M. M. (2014). Marital quality and health: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 140(1), 140–187. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0031859
Exercise is associated with better mental health, in addition to research linking it to improved health outcomes and greater longevity. See: Chekroud, S. R., Gueorguieva, R., Zheutlin, A. B., Paulus, M., Krumholz, H. M., Krystal, J. H., & Chekroud, A. M. (2018). Association between physical exercise and mental health in 1·2 million individuals in the USA between 2011 and 2015: A cross-sectional study. The Lancet Psychiatry, 5(9), 739–746. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(18)30227-X