Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff.

Unless we choose to live a life of a hermit, we're going to have a lot of relationships in our lives. We're going to have friendships, some will come, some will go.

We'll have relatives, we'll have partners, people that we choose to spend our life with.

One of the areas of these relationships that have fascinated

me is marriages or partnerships because I'm a clinical psychologist and people come to me to help

often salvage their marriages when they're not going well.

And after working with couples for 25 years, there's things you notice that work and things you notice that don't work in healthy versus unhealthy relationships.

And after 25 years, I've gotten pretty good at identifying who's going to make it and who's not.

Because it's so much goes down to how we treat each other.

If we treat each other with kindness, gentleness, love, even when things are going hard,

the chances of that relationship making it are really good.

But when people come in fighting and emotionally swinging, they're going to have a much harder

time because they're focused on the negative and they're not experiencing the kindness from their partner.

And kindness really is one of those key ingredients of healthy couples.

When they're kind, they do well. When they're not kind, they don't do well.

The good news is that science backs me up on this.

At the University of Washington, there's an institute called the Gotman Institute where they look at couples

over years trying to figure out what works and doesn't work in healthy couples.

And one of the key ingredients they too found as I have is kindness.

When people are kind in a relationship, those relationships actually do quite well.

It's really a key ingredient of a healthy, happy relationship.

But I want to take the concept of kindness and extend it today,

...