An award-winning social psychologist, global thought leader and relationship expert, Dr. Sara’s mission is: to create world peace, one relationship at a time. Her work bridges personal intimacy, professional excellence and intercultural fluency. She has authored multiple books, book chapters and white papers, including her award-winning 2024 book, ‘Love by Design: 6 Ingredients to Build a Lifetime of Love’.
This post is a short edited excerpt of Dr. Sara sharing the couple conflicts that inspired her to research and develop the Emergent Love Model. Listen to her full interview on The Gifts of Trauma Podcast.
Couples I counsel usually want some sort of communication alignment. This is what sparked my research for my book, Love by Design. When we talk about sex, anger, respect, trust, love, all of these big concepts, we assume that our partner knows exactly what we mean. When couples say, ‘I love you,’ ‘I’m not in love with you,’ or, ‘I respect you’, do they mean the same thing? I learned that often, they don’t.
I worked with a heterosexual couple who were married for 10+ years. When the husband traveled for work he slept with other women. Every time the wife found out, she was hurt. Their issue was, somebody was having casual extramarital sex and somebody was getting hurt.
I took it as lack of respect, because from my perspective, when someone signs a marriage contract, they’re declaring themselves monogamous. This couple hadn’t discussed open marriage and yet the husband chose to sleep with other women. For me, that was a lack of respect. But his wife saw it as a lack of compassion. For the husband, it was a lack of shared vision, as infidelity was part of his vision of marital life. When we have different perspectives of what the other is saying, we can really go off the rails. I wasn’t immediately aware of these differences. Like everything in my work, it emerged. That’s why I called my model Emergent Love. We need to keep open minds, go with the flow, see what comes out of it and work with that.
When I was counseling a couple on Zoom, the woman said, “I don’t know why, but I can’t open up when we have sex, I have to close my eyes to go inside my body.” While we were speaking, when the man spilled his drink on the computer his reaction was out of this world. It left my body shaking and I was miles away. When they had cleaned up the computer and our session resumed, I asked the wife, “Is the reason you don’t want to have sex with him that you don’t feel safe with him?” It had never occurred to her! Intellectually, emotionally and relationally she wanted to be intimate with him, but what her body remembered was his violence, his explosions, which kept her body on guard. That was what inhibited their sex life.
Love is misunderstood and under served, as when we study love, we bring it down from its pedestal, we invade its sanctity, and we think we shouldn’t do that. Something that really inspired me to write Love by Design was being unable to bear the pain of my clients. I couldn’t just sit and hold the space for them. I knew better. I’ve worked with so many people, I’m in such a privileged place, if I didn’t offer something different, who would? I’m also tired of people thinking, ‘I fall in love, I fall out of love.’ Falling happens when we’re not paying attention. Should we use that language for the most important thing in life?
My research included 312 couples I had worked with for at least a year. Retrospectively, I reviewed all of their session notes and identified 6 ingredients that need to be present for love to have a chance of emerging. Imagine the spark that, with oxygen, dry wood and a dry environment, ignites a log. We can create a fire that keeps burning, as long as we keep giving it oxygen and dry wood. If the wood gets wet and the flames go out, we don’t have a fire. People don’t pay attention to their ‘love fires’. They come to me saying, we’ve lost our attraction. Attraction is not the first thing we lose. First we stop liking each other, and without liking-ness, relationships begin to wane.
I took my 312 couples’ results and added them to a research study with 159 *US representative couples who’d been together for one to 40 years. Then I broke the 159 couples down into 314+ individuals who took part in my survey. I did this as I to ensure my model was scalable. Out of that research came eight different relational configurations plus new definitions of reciprocal -compassion, -trust, -loving behavior, -attraction, -respect, and shared vision.
The Relationship Panoramic Inventory also came out of my research. It’s a 360° assessment that couples complete to see which ingredients are working well, and which need to be adjusted. For example, if one partner gives themselves a high score in respecting their partner, and their partner says, “I don’t feel respected in this relationship.” Knowing how respect is experienced by the other person helps eliminate misunderstanding and assumptions.
My goal was to give people practical tools that answer the questions, “Tomorrow, what do I do differently? What do I do more of, or less of?” With Emergent Love, couples are able to individually define: ‘What is our log, what is our spark?’ That was my purpose in uncovering the six ingredients. I call them ingredients because they shift. One day I may need more compassion. Another day, I may need more respect.
When I asked my couples, how do you know your partner is attracted to you? They might say, “Because I put gas in their car?” We also talked about the different type of touch we give to each other, our different ways of being with each other. If your love language is acts of service, you might make me a cup of tea, but that doesn’t invite me to have hot sex with you or even watch a TV show with you. So I needed to ensure that people had enough agency to create their own ‘love soup’ with these 6 ingredients. They also needed to know what’s non-negotiable, and what they mean when they say, I love you. People say I love you to their partner, their pets, even their favorite food or dessert…
I’m hoping you really give Emergent Love a chance, and if it resonates, use it to cultivate the thriving, loving relationship you desire. Please don’t settle. There is another way.
*US representative, means representatives of the US distribution of race, sexual relational orientation, gender, ethnicity, education level, etc.
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