The Secrets of Successful Relationships

by The School of Life

The key ingredients to contented love—quintessential advice on relationships from The School of Life, with an approachable tone 

It can sometimes seem a mystery why some couples stay together and thrive – while many more split up or drag on scratchily. While we might think happy love is left to chance, there are some identifiable secrets that underpin good relationships that we can learn and put into practice. 

The first title of a new series, The Secrets of Successful Relationships draws upon the expertise of The School of Life therapists to teach us the key ingredients of contented love. Chapters such as “Learning to Love Oneself”, “Knowing What to Overlook”, “Good Listening” and “The Importance of Bad Dates” prompt us to think about how we can achieve success in love. In a tone that’s warm, encouraging and funny, we how to communicate effectively, how to manage differences, what to do when sexual problems arise, how to air grievances, the best way to share a home and – when things grow truly problematic – how to judge whether or not we should stay or leave. 

This handbook shows us how to take the necessary, careful, intelligent steps towards the contented love we deserve.

Genres: Relationships, Nonfiction

192 pages, Hardcover

Published October 8, 2024

About the author

The School of Life is a global organisation helping people lead more fulfilled lives.

We believe that the journey to finding fulfilment begins with self-knowledge. It is only when we have a sense of who we really are that we can make reliable decisions, particularly around love and work.

Sadly, tools and techniques for developing self-knowledge and finding fulfilment are hard to find – they’re not taught in schools, in universities, or in workplaces. Too many of us go through life without ever really understanding what’s going on in the recesses of our minds.

That’s why we created The School of Life; a resource for helping us understand ourselves, for improving our relationships, our careers and our social lives - as well as for helping us find calm and get more out of our leisure hours. We do this through films, workshops, books and gifts - as well as through a warm and supportive community.

Reviews

[Elena Pup · Rating 5 out of 5]

An eye-opener to how love actually works. I am sharing some of my notes and favourite quotable sentences. I am going to demand that every future date/potential partner reads this.

This book dismantles the romantic ideal of effortless love and replaces it with something far more resilient and realistic: a compassionate, psychologically informed approach to (emotional) intimacy.

Love is not about admiring perfection. “Don’t mistake lovability for perfection.” Real love is “the compassion of the fallen for the fallen.” We all carry emotional wounds. The key is to be met with “a generous, compassionate response to our flaws and errors,” and “a sufficient lack of anger.”

Love isn’t about perfection or worthiness. “Love should and must be deployed to soften our judgment.” Like a parent with a difficult child, it “tries to understand the reason behind the behavior.” It’s “curiosity and empathy,” not outrage. “True tenderness targets the undeserving.”

Love is not defensive. It isn’t fragile in the face of arguments or irritations — “It bounces back.” True intimacy stems from “the heroism of vulnerability”: the courage to reveal the “small fragile places of our past.” A good relationship is where “we become stronger by learning to speak the language of weakness.”

Relationships thrive when both partners can “adopt a therapeutic attitude towards the other’s compulsions, blind spots, rages and eccentricities.” That means understanding how “powerful emotions in the present are triggered by traumas in the past.” We’re encouraged to ask: What sequence of unfortunate experiences could have led a person to react this way?

The book urges us to “locate our anger,” not to destroy love, but “to protect it.” Resentment builds not from major betrayals, but “a succession of minor disappointments” that are never acknowledged. If we fail to process them, we fall into detachment and coldness. “Buried anger shows up as detachment.”

The authors emphasize that relationships are full of projections: “We interpret our partner’s behavior for what we think it means, not what it actually means.” To break the cycle, we need to paraphrase, acknowledge, and show we understand their unique suffering. “Feelings get less strong, not stronger, once they’ve been acknowledged.”

Even hatred and anger, when safely processed, don’t mean a relationship is doomed. “There’s no love that is not accompanied by a certain degree of hatred.” The problem isn’t anger — it’s when secure attachment is lacking. Then, even minor disconnection feels catastrophic.

Before leaving a relationship, we’re asked to consider: “Is it not a lack of love that draws us away, but a love that feels too frightening, given what our childhoods have taught us?”

Good relationships ask us to accept and integrate all parts of ourselves: the adult, the child, and the parent. “We need to be known and accepted by our partner in these ways.”

One of the book’s most profound reframes: Relationships are schools for emotional growth. They aren’t failures when they end — “The ideal duration of some relationships could be a month or some decades… A relationship should finish not because it failed, but because it succeeded.”

The book closes on a darkly poetic note:

“A relationship should be framed as the coordination of the most impossible task of coordinating the almost impractical existences of two insanely different individuals... Both attempting to grasp the unsatisfaction of the necessary clash between their complex demented histories and the ticking of the clock towards the painful, eternal demise.”

We’re encouraged to give up the fantasy of effortless bliss, and instead approach love “not as an angry customer whose guarantees have been betrayed, but as a parent, looking at their willful, very naughty and only intermittently sane child — knowing that whatever the chaos and the challenge, love will go on.”

[Kat · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Ultimately every relationship is a meeting between two shockingly complicated people and their tortuous and only half-understood histories".
"Love is - in the end - a skill, not an emotion".
"Defensiveness is a legacy of early pain."
"When searching for a partner, we need to look out for someone who can join us in the noble quest to recognize and overcome defensiveness."
What are the keys to having a happy, or rather a successful relationship? Well... I'm still not sure.

[Kamran Rahman · Rating 2 out of 5]

It’s difficult for a self-help book on relationships to stand out in a crowded market. The School of Life has been publishing self-help content on line for many years. Their videos are well explained, and the comforting, authoritative tone of their voice-overs have are quite popular. So, when I saw this book on NetGalley I thought it would be worth looking at, given that I have recently published my own book on relationships, and have some knowledge of the field.

There’s a lot of great advice in everything that the SOL does. But at times it’s a bit like the stopped clock which is accurate twice a day. Most of the time, this book is inaccurate. Overall, I think this book makes some very useful points and can be of some help to most people in most relationships. But it’s theories are full of holes, so I would treat it with a great deal of caution.

The SOL project is deeply wedded to a very narrow, outdated view of psychology and psychotherapy, which is that issues we face in adulthood are all inextricably linked to the way we’re parented. According to this view, relationship with siblings, mistreatment or bullying by teachers at school, being betrayed by friends, your earliest stirring of romantic longing, or romantic rejection, early employment experiences, etc, have absolutely no affect at all on you.

This outdated idea (that all adult behaviour can be explained by childhood experiences) has seeped into our collective consciousness, and seems to most people to be self-evidently, intuitively and obviously true. But, just a slight scratch beneath the surface shows that it’s plainly wrong. Having researched this area thoroughly in writing my own book, I found that there is no reliable or well-replicated research which has supports the idea. The main culprits who spread the idea are people like Freud, who never did any research, and whose ideas are discredited by all serious thinkers today. Secondly, John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, whose research on infant “attachment styles” has been widely criticized as being designed to promote the ideal of the middle-class white Christian two parent, two children family, and has been found to lack cross-cultural validity. Most of the world lives by the maxim, it takes a village to raise a child. But not the Bowlby/Ainsworth model. If ever there was psychology research which suffered from being applicable only to WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) scenarios, it’s Bowlby/Ainsworth infant attachment styles. And yet it forms a large part of the foundations of the SOL project.

The idea of our adult behaviour being linked to childhood experience has two notable problems which its proponents can’t answer. Firstly, there is the nature/nurture debate. It was the racist eugenicist, Francis Galton, who in the 1860s claimed that all human behaviour was because of “race”, which was accepted at the time as evidence for the racial superiority of whites. But at the same time, the growing science of psychology was claiming that behaviour could be affected by our experiences rather than our genes. So, who was right? The racist eugenicists, or the widely discredited Austrian pseudo-scientist? Well, research on twins (which ironically was made famous by Nazi scientist, Josef Mengele, a.k.a. the angel of death) has now established conclusively that our genes are responsible for a lot of our behaviour, but that our upbringing and experiences also contribute. Nature and nurture both affect you.

The second problem for the “childhood experiences make you” idea is that it falls apart when we ask on what date do experiences stop affecting your character? Is it on your 7th birthday? Or your 13th? Or when you turn 18? In fact, we can now say, very conclusively, that experiences never stop affecting you and moulding you. If you had a perfect childhood and were mugged, abused, or assaulted on your 21st birthday, that’s going to change your psychological make-up forever.

There is another, separate, problem with the idea of examining childhood experiences, and that is the unreliability of memory itself. When psychotherapy started over 100 years ago, people pretended that unreliability of memory wasn’t a thing. If a patient said something happened twenty years ago, then it 100% definitely happened exactly that way. But research in the last 50 years has shown that the way that memories are formed and recalled means that distortion is inevitable. A good summary of the current state of the strong academic research on the malleability of memory and emotion relating to childhood experiences appears in the 2024 paper “Reappraising a Parent can Occur With Non-suggestive Questions: Changing Emotions and Memories of Emotion”, by Patihis et al. SOL seems to be completely stuck in the past when it comes to these important advancements in psychology.

Where does all this leave us? It means that if we are looking at an aspect of adult behaviour, such as defensiveness, aggression, withdrawal, we face this huge problem; we know that the behaviour is a mix of nature and nurture, but we have no way of knowing how much of it is caused by nature and how much by nurture, and we will never be able to test any hypothesis we make. It’s like asking 100 people “who do you think lives at 35 Acacia Avenue in Neverland?” but knowing that you will never be able to go there to find out. If 80% of the people say Jane Smith, it’s meaningless, because unless you can test a guess or hypotheses against reliable observations, it doesn’t get you anywhere, it’s all completely meaningless, and it definitely doesn’t count as “science”. Science only works when you can TEST things.

Before I come to the fourth problem I’ll mention the problem that the book also fails to make a distinction between character and behaviour. This matters a huge amount in resolving disputes in relationships. It’s widely accepted in psychology that there are five common “personality traits” – OCEAN – Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism. These describe your character, which is fairly fixed (but can be changed by experience or intervention). Behaviour, however, is far more flexible, and depends much more on circumstances. This matters because behaviour is much easier to change, in particular, by taking responsibility for your decisions and/or changing your circumstances – i.e. you’re less likely to eat so much, or drink so much, if you decide to surround yourself with healthy eating tee-totallers. More specifically, this matters because if you’re in a dispute with your partner over washing the dishes, you’re unlikely to resolve it if you attempt to pin something on their character “You’re so lazy”. But if you suggest that washing dishes is a behaviour issue, “You didn’t wash the dishes” then it’s much less confrontational, and more likely to lead to a resolution. The reason for the unwashed dishes isn’t your partner’s (almost) fixed character, it’s because they were tired, or pre-occupied, etc.

So, the fourth problem with SOL’s approach to childhood experiences is that it allows people to shift blame for their current behaviour decisions onto others in the past, instead of taking full responsibility for their own behaviour decisions in the present; i.e. your character is the result of nature and nurture, which you had no control over, but your behaviour is your own decisions in the present, over which you have almost full control. SOL is encouraging you to say things like, “The only reason I’m critical is because that’s what I saw as a child. Therefore, I don’t have to take responsibility for being critical.” If you were to reject the SOL approach, you could say, “It is my decision whether to be critical, regardless of what I saw as a child. I take full responsibility for my decision, and I take full responsibility for changing my decision and behaviour in the future. ” The difference is obvious.

The fifth problem is that the SOL project ignores the fact that all social animals copy each other’s behaviour for social learning and group cohesion. So, everyone copies from everyone else – children copy from each other, adults copy from each other, and children copy from adults, but not necessarily their parents – perhaps figures in media, sports, arts etc. This has been well known in psychology since Albert Bandura, the most influential psychologist of the twentieth century published his work on “social learning” in the 1960s. And yet the idea of social learning as being part of behaviour in adult relationships appears nowhere in the SOL project. It is highly likely that as adults we’re more likely to copy the things we’re exposed to in childhood, but those things are just as likely to be friends and media as our own parents.

Another point I found deeply problematic was the almost ubiquitous use of the word “anger” to describe emotions, rather than more nuanced alternatives such as rejection, frustration, sadness, hurt. This is the opposite of validating emotions. The book is telling you that what you feel is always anger, rather than allowing you to describe your own feelings in your words, and explore them, which is what validation is all about.

One of the points that shocked me most was the sentence, “Powerful emotions – therapy says – are triggered in the present by traumas and difficulties that began in a distant and usually largely forgotten past.” This can be easily falsified by showing how we regularly experience powerful emotions which have no link to traumas and difficulties in the distant past. For example, if you’re devastated because your best friend died, it’s because you loved them. The powerful emotion of devastation has no link to the distant past. That’s fairly obvious isn’t it? But SOL is wrongly suggesting that you can only experience devastation if you’ve got some unresolved trauma. This can be further falsified by looking at the counter-position, which is that someone with a perfectly happy childhood could never be devastated by the death of their best friend? No – that’s describing a psychopath.

A more accurate statement would be “Powerful emotions are triggered in the present by what happens in the present.” Simple, and obvious. Some powerful emotions in the present might be linked to things that happened in the past, but how can anyone know which emotions have links to the past and which don’t? Any therapist who says “your emotion X (being devastated by the death of your best friend) is linked to historic event Y (being shouted at by a parent)” is engaging in nothing but idle speculation. There will never be any way whatsoever to test that speculation. Repeat that a few times to yourself, and let it sink in. The therapist’s speculation is even more pointless than theorizing who lives at 35 Acacia Avenue, Neverland. If there’s no way to test the reliability of the theory, or identify which emotions are linked to which past events, then we must discard the theory.

This book also talks about the therapy tool of “repeat and rephrase” as though it hasn’t been discredited. If a therapist repeats and rephrases they sound like a therapist, but if someone does it IRL they sound like a smug idiot. The flaw in the repeat and rephrase model as a therapy tool is that you can repeat and rephrase without understanding what your partner is feeling. Understanding requires reflection, and usually takes months, or in most cases, years. Whereas repeat and rephrase takes seconds. A basic AI can repeat and rephrase without understanding and reflecting on your feelings.

When it comes to the brief discussion of sex, this book is completely out of its depth. It makes the vacuous statement that “regular sex” is a “recent” and “local” invention. But, these key words aren’t explained. Is recent 100 years ago? Or 500 years? Or 1,000 years? And where is it “local” to? In fact, it originates in the 4th Century from Augustine of Hippo, who laid out in his treatise what sort of sexual acts minimized “original sin” and from there, was quickly adopted by every single Christian-influenced culture. By most reckonings, this makes it neither recent not local.

Further along, there is a troubling misunderstanding where the book says that taboo and kink are the same thing. Just to clarify, for taboo there has to be some social convention or legal restriction against it, such as sex with a step-sibling. Whereas kink is anything that’s non-standard, such as sex in a penguin costume covered in chocolate sauce. There is often cross-over between kink and taboo, depending on religious or societal norms, but they are different things. Treating taboo and kink as the same thing is like a chef telling you that salt and sugar are the same thing because you add them both to food.

[Morgan Williams · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unnecessarily convoluted.

[jebrahn · Rating 5 out of 5]

dang, check out these sore 1 and 2-star reviews.
this is one of the best, classiest, least obnoxious books on modern romantic relationships that there is. and i can't overstate British company "The School of Life"'s value throughout the past decade towards helping me understand human behavior. much of what has since become our moment's hum of pop psychology and mental health focus, i first learned of first through School of Life's youtube channel. School of Life produces exceptional books and board games: alltogether as a publishing house, their product line is curated with style, cohesion throughout, care, and *very* good taste. it's my understanding that they have at least one storefront in England. it must be dreamy.

i suggest a potential reader check out the 20-item Table of Contents to discern if this book could be useful to them personally.

(confession: i listened to the audiobook and didn't read the actual book. maybe having this information delivered in a charming female British accent is some of what makes it hit home.)

[Cherryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Secrets of Successful Relationships" is an insightful and thought-provoking guide to building and maintaining healthy, lasting connections with others. Authored by The School of Life, a London-based organization dedicated to developing emotional intelligence, this book offers a wealth of practical advice and wisdom on navigating the complexities of relationships.

The book covers various aspects of relationships, including communication, trust, vulnerability, and conflict resolution. It presents its guidance in a clear and accessible manner, making it easy for readers to apply these concepts to their own lives.

One of the most valuable aspects of this book is its emphasis on self-awareness and personal growth as the foundation for successful relationships. The authors challenge readers to reflect on their own patterns and behaviors, offering strategies for overcoming obstacles and cultivating deeper, more meaningful connections.

Overall, "The Secrets of Successful Relationships" is an excellent resource for anyone seeking to improve their relationships, both romantic and platonic. This book is a great addition to any personal development library and a valuable guide for anyone looking to enhance their emotional intelligence and create more fulfilling connections with others.

** Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing a digital copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. **

[Hestia Istiviani · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finally I can get rid of this book! 😭 As TSOL reader, I hope there is some new insights or ideas about relationship that never been elaborated before on their previous work.

I was wrong.

The main idea of this book not really different from their Relationship and Sex book—and I had read them all.

It’s kinda boring because I already got the idea of realistic approaching of love and sex. Plus, I also had read some parenting books (e.g The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read). It is formulaic and predictable. Nothing new.

Except, some of the chapters have exercises to do. Not all, but some of important chapter: about being a good listener, for example.

I am not impressed with this new book. It just usual TSOL and their approach of love, relationship, and sex.

I read the ARC version from NetGalley.

[Eviana · Rating 5 out of 5]

I highlight so many insights to read again in the future. There are no easy secrets to successful relationships, we have to keep working on them, always on progress to be better.
There is no perfect relationship, as we are also an imperfect person. this book can be a good starter to work on conflict or get to know our bad pattern in relationship.
There are some reflective questions to make it more practical. It is not easy to implement all the advice. Just pick one or two topics first that we resonate with the most.
Hopefully, this book can help more couples to maintain healthy expectations and better conflict solutions.
Thank you The School of Life and Net Galley for providing digital ARC.

[Ioana · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was looking forward to reading this book and it did not disappoint.

I find it similar to a manual, for people who don't know how to approach relationships that want to last, the advice here is gold! Anyone can learn something from this and I particularly like how thoughtful and tender the tone of the writing is.

Like a manual, I feel there is a missing spark here, but nevertheless, its a short book that is truly, truly valuable and I am grateful to have received it in order to share my view on it.

[Giorgiana · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first book I read from the School of Life and I found it an interesting lecture. I learned a few things about me, my views about relationships and about my past relationships, not only romantics but also with frienda and people I crossed pasts with.
Thank you, Netgalley, for this opportunity.

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely little thing! I like the reflective activities and nuggets of truth delivered gently and strongly :)

[Jessica Zhao · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite a pessimistic view on humans and our natures carrying out in relationships. The book is great when I take it and interpret it in my more honesty-oriented, optimistic perspective