Why we’re betting on more and better love
By Tal Zlotnitsky
The statistics are unkind, and they don’t lie: We don’t love the one we’re with very well — not in America, or anywhere else.
Consider this: An average first marriage lasts less than 8 years. A couple married today has just a 33% chance of making it to 40 years. With 876,000 divorces a year, at an average cost of $15,000 each, we spend over $13 billion a year in America alone to break up.
Some breakups are, of course, inevitable and even healthy. The thing is, according to a national SurveyMonkey survey run for the founders of Our.Love in October 2020, most Americans would rather figure out how to be happier with our current partner, assuming it isn’t too late! (more on that later).
83% of us report loving and being loved more and better within our existing romantic relationship as one of our top three priorities. For nearly 6 in 10 of us, it is our top priority. What’s more, happily coupled individuals are healthier, too; happily coupled people have fewer incidents of heart attacks, diabetes, or strokes, and live an average of 4–8 years longer. You’d think employers would be vigorously supporting their employees’ relational wellbeing, even if merely as a means of reducing healthcare costs, if not for the morale, productivity and customer service improvements.
So… why don’t we do better with loving the one we’re with? Let’s review the reasons:
We Don’t Learn Love Skills in School
Two years ago, Robin Pendoley, a thoughtful expert in Social Impact Theory & Practice, published an article, “The Essential Role of Love in Teaching and Learning” about the vital role love plays in learning. Speaking of the observations of the late, great Brazilian philosopher and educator, Paulo Freire, Pendoley writes:
Freire posited that . . . the classroom determines the degree to which education oppresses or liberates . . . all humans hold the capacities to learn about our endlessly complex world and to teach about their unique experiences in it . . . Freire equated such learning relationships to love [itself].
Serious people can agree or disagree on whether teaching love etiquette in school is a good idea, but what is inarguable is that our schools don’t directly teach the proper vocabulary to love more and better, or how and when to apply it effectively. Without the proper vocabulary — vocabulary being the core tool of comprehension for adults — it is near impossible to change mindsets, and it takes changing mindsets to change outcomes.
We Wait Too Long to Ask for Help
The world we live in today is more disorienting than it has been in decades; self-reported stories and glossy portraits of peers living it up on Instagram, SnapChat or Facebook, can cause our relationships to seem boring, or even dreary. Misconceptions and skewed impressions about what a happy life and “true love” are “supposed to look like” driven by social media can and do cause relational strife. The more disillusioned we are (often subconsciously), the further apart we grow, and the further apart we grow, the harder it is to see or admit we need help.
And so, most couples don’t seek professional help…. ever. For reasons that vary widely — stigma, shame, cost, past experience, a history of trauma — 81% of couples choose to never go to counseling. Then there is this: Even among the 19% of couples who do seek therapy, the most common thread is waiting too long; on average, couples who do seek therapy wait six years to start. For many couples a delay this long is too much to overcome; even among couples who go to counseling, 38% still divorce within four years.
Held back by a combination of the misconceptions about love we are accosted by daily on social media and the vocabulary to love more and better we didn’t learn, many of us end up accepting relational mediocrity or worse — persistent relational unhappiness.
A History of Trauma
One of the most outstanding institutes in the world dedicated to the impact and remediation of ACE — the Pinetree Institute, advises that “childhood trauma, in particular, can have lasting physical, mental, and behavioral health consequences on the adults we become.”
CDC research shows that “more than 60 percent of American adults have as children experienced at least one Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACE, and almost a quarter of adults have experienced 3 or more ACEs.” CDS believes that the latter number is “likely an underestimate” and it is well established that the numbers are even worse in disadvantaged communities and communities of color.
The impact of childhood trauma on adult relationships and communication is not well appreciated by most of us. We may be mindful of it in the abstract, but in practice, most of us do not know the best way to reach our partner’s best self. Rather than mindfully balancing our approach and expectations with consideration to our partner’s past trauma, most of us assume we’re all “about the same.” We’re not. And most of us aren’t blessed to be the beneficiary of a spouse who does it better.
When I founded Our.Love, I was deeply fortunate to recruit Dr. Larry McCullough, to become our Chief Product Science Officer. Larry is a rare breed: He is a scientist but also an acclaimed creator in the space where science and technology intersect. He is also a co-founder and Executive Director of the aforementioned Pinetree Institute.
On the bright side, under Larry’s leadership, we at Our.Love see this vexing challenge as one that is well suited for a machine-learning influenced solution that is deeply rooted in sound science; key features in Our.Love’s platform will be specifically mindful of the needs and challenges of ACE survivors or their loved ones.
We Focus Less on Love Than Our Other Top Priorities
When it comes to most things we care about — our jobs, our calendar, email, the news, reminders, keeping track of sports scores, our children’s grades or school assignments, our bank balance, saving for retirement — we stay on top and on track by using technology to keep us aware, mindful and accountable. We use technology for personal tasks too, like weight loss, dating, meditation, reminding us to take our medicine, track our periods, or help with ovulation.
When it comes to leveraging technology to give our most important lifetime relationship the best opportunity to be happy? Crickets. 99% of us don’t leverage technology for our relational well-being. We patch it together — a text here, a facebook story or joke there, a blog or an article we want our partner to read, a date night idea, a video to watch, games, a grocery list — about as randomly as a two year old’s hand-painted art. Is it because we do a great job of it manually and simply don’t need the help?
The results suggest we are not.
We at Our.Love believe it is time for a different approach.
Relationship Happiness, not Relationship Crisis
Our research and focus groups show that we are ready to use technology for love, but want technology that has broad features, helps us stay connected, gain awareness of our relational well-being in real time, learn in a way that doesn’t feel too therapeutic or academic, celebrate each other more, and have a lot of fun.
In short, we want a relationship happiness solution, not a crisis management solution.
Our.Love is introducing a first of its kind relationship technology happiness platform, designed to make it fun and rewarding for couples to find their footing and stay on track under a framework developed by our esteemed science team. The Our.Love Seven Love Skills and Five Stages of a Love Journey will be the North Star that we follow for all our features and content. The magic will be in doing it in such a way that it doesn’t overwhelm the fun!
The framework has been developed under the executive leadership of my friend Dr. Richard Safeer — an Our.Love co-founder and board member who is also the Chief Medical Director of Employee Health & Well-being at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Safeer assembled the science team. Day to day oversight of the work and its integration with the product has been led by Dr. McCullough.
We will accomplish our mission of improving love by melding relationship science with popular culture and gamification. We will help shift mindsets and teach vocabulary through reward-based participation, bite-size content, easy private sharing of photos, memories, appreciations and other artifacts, alongside “just for us” A.I. enriched digital communication. We will augment these features with real-time relationship health tracking and scoring (ready to know your partner’s daily stress score and in-day moods?)
Informed by science, but designed for pleasure, Our.Love will bring stigma-free relationship happiness technology into the mainstream, the way Calm or Headspace brought individual mindfulness to where it is today.
A Stand-Alone Love Company is Needed
The problem isn’t lack of content… The New York Times, Medium and Cosmopolitan magazine all offer content about love.
It’s not the same.
The human mind appreciates order most. Our studies and focus groups show that consumers much appreciate (love, in fact) the idea of having one platform to go to for all things to maintain and improve their romantic relationship.
For this reason, we believe achieving the best outcome will require standing up a platform that is exclusively for our most loving relationships (not casual acquaintances), starting with our romantic partners. Considering how much of our lives occur online now, the two universes — one intimate, one not — can and need to co-exist in the virtual world just as they co-exist in the physical world, in order for us to experience more and better love.
We Hope to Not Stop There.
We have a lot to do to execute on a brilliant platform concept for couples. We are not arrogant enough to think we’ll get it right immediately, but we are committed to learning as much and as fast as we can through iteration and feedback. We are going to stay focused on romantic relationships as long as we must.
We do hope in time to expand the tool to other critical relationship. The breadth may widen, but the mission will remain very much the same: To help people connect, to understand each other, to show appreciation and be accountable with less shame, guilt or anger. To laugh more, be more aware of what matters. To love more and better.
The end result, we believe and pray, is going to be a ripple effect of happy people, with a widening circle of wellness and joy.
Will we achieve it? Well, we are determined to make at least a mighty, mighty dent in the challenge. We have as good an opportunity to lead in this market as anyone who has ever attempted it. We’re just a couple of months from market and we’ve built an outstanding team. And our team is only about to get better, as we will be announcing in the coming days and weeks.
We’re betting on less harshness in the world, brought on by more and better love. Join us.
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Tal Zlotnitsky has started and led companies as CEO since he was 19 years old. Over a career of nearly 30 years, he has learned nearly all the lessons of leadership first hand, including what not to do. He decided to resign as CEO of his last successful startup, iControl Data, to start Our.Love Company, motivated by his own failures at love, Covid-19’s siren call to a more meaningful life, and a desire to apply his leadership experience to a mission he felt more passionate about than anything he’d ever set out to do.
Originally published at https://medium.com on October 23, 2021.
