Drs. Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks on Appreciation and Creativity in Relationships
There is something quietly powerful about living in a space where nobody is keeping score of your mistakes. When blame and criticism drop away, a kind of creativity opens up that feels almost impossible to reach otherwise. So one of the most practical moves you can make is to put yourself on a diet: no blame, no shame, no criticism, starting as soon as you can manage it.
Kathlyn calls the replacement for all that criticism a bit magical. Instead of pointing out what's wrong, raise the amount of appreciation you give. Close connections grow in an atmosphere where people feel appreciated, and once she and Gay saw this, they leaned into it hard. They started appreciating each other out loud, and also without words, through touch. Gay would hide little notes for her to stumble on in odd places, and she loved finding them.
She uses cooking as her own channel. She enjoys it anyway, but what she really enjoys is making the dishes Gay loves. She also pays attention to whatever he's working on so she can keep noticing fresh things about him, some new angle she can direct her attention toward.
The number they came back to is a ratio. Relationships that flourish tend to run at least five appreciations for every one criticism. If you want a close relationship to feel better today, pick the people you'd like to feel closer to and simply appreciate them more.
Creativity is one of the running threads in their book Conscious Loving Ever After, which was set to come out later in 2015. For roughly a decade they'd been looking at what keeps relationships alive in the second half of life. Midlife and beyond often gets marked at around 42 and up, and they were working with people in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and sometimes 70s, asking how those partnerships could stay vital rather than coast.
What kept surfacing was how much creativity a person actually lives out day to day. It doesn't have to be writing poetry or composing symphonies. It can be any regular practice that stretches you, something that expands you creatively and asks a little more of you than yesterday did.
For Gay the channel is writing. He's written plenty of books over the years, but in the last decade he picked up a new habit that turned into something closer to a second career: mystery novels. Five of them have been published, there's talk of a television show built around them, and none of it was anything he pictured himself doing ten years earlier.