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I was looking for a photo of my passport, and Ifound a different photo instead.
2014. A wedding in Valencia. A friend's wedding.And next to me, with his arm around my neck,
a man called Tomas. Tomas was the person who kneweverything about my life.
Every job. Every girlfriend. Every stupiddecision.
Is, was, I do not know. When did you last speak tohim?
I would have to check. That is the answer.
That is the answer. We never argued. Nothinghappened. We just stopped calling.
And now you have a photo and a name and a silence.
And a question. Why do we expect the people welove to stay in our lives without any effort at
all?
Welcome to Your English Toolbox, the podcast thattrains your English while you live your real life.
I am Martin. And I am Julia.
This is the third conversation in our series abouthow to live a good life.
Four conversations about happiness, relationships,
purpose, and the small choices that improve ourquality of life.
In the first episode, an 80-year study told usthat relationships are the foundation of a good
life. In the second, we learned how to start onewith a stranger in 30 seconds.
And today, the hard part. How to keep the peopleyou already have.
Because the strangest thing about relationships isthat we lose most of them without noticing.
Let me start with two surveys because the changeshocked me.
Please.
In 1990, a Gallup survey asked American adults howmany close friends they had.
3% said none. Not one close friend.
And then?
In a different national survey in 2021, 12% saidnone. Four times as many.
Different surveys, different methods.
So, we should be careful with a direct comparison.
But the direction is difficult to ignore.
03:00
Some people call it a friendship recession.
And most of these friendships did not end in afight.
The people simply drifted apart.
To drift apart? Like two boats on a lake withnobody rowing.
Nobody decides to drift. It just happens if nobodyrows.
So, here is the mistake. And I made it with Tomás.
We believe that a shared history keeps arelationship alive.
Ten years of memories, a wedding, a thousandconversations.
But the history is the past.
And the relationship lives in the present.
It lives in the last phone call, not the firstone.
I want a comparison because I think there is agood one.
There is. Nobody expects to run a marathon on thetraining they did ten years ago.
Nobody.
And yet we expect a friendship to survive on theeffort we made in 2014.
The authors of the study we talked about inepisode one have a name for this.
Social fitness.
Social fitness. Relationships are not possessions.
They are living things, like a body.
And like a body, they lose strength if you do notuse them.
So, today is a training session?
A gym for your relationships.
Okay, before the training, the medical check.
Oh no.
Every gym does a medical check on the first day.
I have seven questions, and you have to answerhonestly.
This is a trap.
It is a trap.
Question one.
Who makes you feel safe?
My dentist.
Your dentist?
He is very calm.
He has a very calm voice.
I am writing that down.
Question two.
Who makes you laugh?
My sister, easily.
Good.
Question three.
Who challenges you?
Who tells you when you are wrong?
My landlord.
Your landlord?
Every month.
Question four.
Who asks you honest questions about your life?
Take your time.
I am thinking.
Question five.
Who could you ask for practical help?
Moving a sofa, a lift to the airport.
My neighbor, probably. He has a van.
Question six.
Who is allowed to ask you for help?
Who would call you at three in the morning?
And question seven.
With whom can you be completely yourself?
No performance, no good version of you.
I think you know the answer to that.
Tomas.
Tomas.
So, seven questions, two clear answers, two jokes,and three silences.
06:03
And the silences are the diagnosis.
Yes, this exercise is inspired by the socialfitness assessment in the book,
and it is not about counting friends.
It is about whether your relationships cover basichuman needs.
Safety, laughter, honesty, help, challenge, andbeing known.
Everybody has gaps, everybody.
And a gap is not a failure.
A gap is a task.
It tells you where to train.
Now, I want to talk about something smaller than agap.
Something so small that we do not see it.
Go on.
Last Tuesday, my partner was telling me about aproblem at work.
An important problem.
A conflict with his manager.
And?
And halfway through, my phone buzzed and I said,
One second.
One second.
I answered a message about a delivery.
And when you looked up?
He had stopped talking.
And he did not start again.
He just said,
It does not matter.
And went to make tea.
There is no villain in that story.
No villain?
Just a phone in a second?
This is what psychologist John Gottman has spentdecades studying.
He observed thousands of couples over time.
And he used a term called a bid for connection.
A bid?
Like at an auction?
A bid is a tiny request for attention.
Look at this bird in the garden.
What a day I have had.
Did you see the news?
Tiny things.
And they are not really about the bird.
No.
The bird means,
Are you there?
And you have three basic options.
You turn towards the bid.
You turn away.
Or you turn against.
Towards is, oh look at that, what is it?
Away is, hmm, without looking up from the phone.
And against is, why are you always talking aboutbirds?
And here is the part that matters.
In a six-year follow-up of newlyweds, the coupleswho stayed married
had turned towards each other's bids about 86% ofthe time in the laboratory.
The couples who later divorced had done it onlyabout 33% of the time.
Not because of one big moment.
Because small moments accumulated.
So the bird is not only a bird.
It is a chance to say, I am here.
And it is not only couples.
Your child says, look at my drawing.
Your colleague says, I had a terrible weekend.
09:02
Your friend sends you a photo of a plate of foodfor no reason.
Bids, all of them.
And the phone in your hand does not have to beevil.
It just has to be more interesting than the birdfor one second.
Gottman's research also found what people call thefive-to-one ratio.
The famous ratio?
During conflict, stable couples had roughly fivepositive or neutral moments for every negative
one.
During conflict, not a weekly point system.
So two sighs about the dishes do not require 10compliments before Friday?
That is not how love works.
Good, because I only had three.
The point is not arithmetic.
A negative moment carries weight.
So warmth and repair matter.
Small things often.
That is social fitness.
Now, our listener has an extra complication.
The language.
The language.
Because sometimes we turn away from a bid, notfrom lack of attention,
but because we misunderstood it.
I have a story about this.
Nadia.
Tell me about Nadia.
Nadia is an accountant from Tunis in Tunisia, andshe has been in Manchester for a year.
Very good English, very careful, very polite.
And?
In her first month, a colleague called Rachel saidto her,
we should grab a coffee sometime.
That sounds friendly.
It is friendly, but it is not a fixed invitation.
So Nadia waited.
One week?
Then two.
Rachel smiled every morning, but she nevermentioned coffee again.
And Nadia assumed Rachel had changed her mind.
She pulled back.
She stopped sitting near Rachel at lunch andstopped asking about her weekend.
And Rachel?
Rachel thought Nadia was not interested.
So both women read the same silence as rejection.
When neither of them had rejected anybody.
In British English, friendly phrases are oftendeliberately soft.
We should grab a coffee sometime.
May express genuine warmth without proposing areal date.
And I will let you know, may be a promise, or itmay simply keep the answer open.
Not bad may mean genuinely good.
The words give us clues.
But tone, context, and the next action completethe meaning.
And here is the double lesson.
In English and in relationships, our firstinterpretation is not always the only one.
So how does Nadia repair it?
The authors of The Good Life offer a five-steptool called WISER.
12:05
WISER, a useful word and a useful acronym.
First watch.
Notice what you're feeling before you act.
Nadia feels hurt.
Watch the feeling.
Second, interpret.
Question your first explanation.
Rachel does not like me.
Is that the only possibility?
Or Rachel was being friendly but vague.
Third, select.
Choose what you actually want.
Does Nadia want to prove that Rachel rejected her?
Or does she want a friend?
A friend.
Fourth, engage.
Respond instead of reacting.
Ask instead of retreating.
And fifth?
Reflect.
Notice what happened and use it next time.
WISER is not about being clever.
It is about becoming slower.
And the engage step needs a sentence.
One useful sentence when language andrelationships collide.
When you said that I was not sure how to take it,what did you mean?
Say it once more.
When you said that I was not sure how to take it,what did you mean?
It is honest.
It is not an accusation.
And it gives the other person room to explain.
And it is the exact opposite of pulling back.
It is turning towards.
But Nadia did something even braver.
What?
She turned the vague thing into a real thing.
She said, you mentioned coffee a while ago.
Are you free on Thursday at four?
She put a time on it.
She put a time on it.
And Rachel?
Rachel said, oh, thank goodness.
I thought you did not like me.
Which brings me to the last piece of training.
Rituals?
Rituals of connection.
Because Nadia's mistake was not the coffee.
It was believing that sometime is a real plan.
Sometime is where friendships go to die.
So you replace sometime with a ritual.
A phone call every Sunday at six.
A coffee on the first Thursday of the month.
A walk on Saturday mornings, always in the samepark.
15:03
A voice message on the way to work.
30 seconds.
No answer required.
Dinner with the phones in a drawer.
And my favorite, because it costs nothing.
Asking about something the person told you lasttime.
The third sentence from our previous conversation.
You mentioned your son had an interview.
How did it go?
And the principle behind all of them is simple.
If it is not in the calendar, it probably will nothappen.
Now, I need to address something.
Because I know what you are thinking.
What am I thinking?
You are thinking that you do keep in touch withTomas.
Because you like his photos on Instagram.
I do like his photos.
Everyone.
Everyone.
That is keeping in touch.
That is watching his life through a window.
Then how many likes equal one phone call?
Let me calculate.
Please.
None, zero.
There is no number.
Right.
Three sentences for keeping the people you love.
Listen and repeat in the pause.
Sentence one, for turning towards.
I have been thinking about what you told me.
How is it going?
Sentence two, for turning some time into a realplan.
Let us put something in the diary before we bothforget.
Sentence three, for repairing a misunderstanding.
When you said that, I was not sure how to take it.
What did you mean?
All three again.
I have been thinking about what you told me.
How is it going?
Let us put something in the diary before we bothforget.
When you said that, I was not sure how to take it.
What did you mean?
To put something in the diary is a very Britishway to say, let us fix a date.
It sounds small and it may save a friendship fromanother month of some time.
And our sentence of the day.
Ready.
Love is not a feeling you keep.
It is a thing you do again and again.
Love is not a feeling you keep.
It is a thing you do again and again.
One more time with us.
Love is not a feeling you keep.
It is a thing you do again and again.
So, the photo.
The photo.
Did you write to him?
I did, last night after I found it.
What did you write?
I wrote, I found an old photo of us today from thewedding in Valencia.
And I realized how much I miss talking to you.
18:01
Would you like to catch up sometime?
Sometime?
I know, I know.
I read it back and I heard your voice.
So?
So I deleted sometime.
And I wrote, are you free on Sunday evening?
And?
And I do not know.
He has not answered yet.
Good.
Good?
Yes.
Because the training is not that he answers.
The training is that you rode.
Here is something to carry with you this week.
The photograph of your life 20 years from now.
The people standing next to you.
Some of them are not strangers you have to meet.
They are people you already have, who are quietlydrifting out of the frame.
And they do not need a big gesture.
They need you to show up.
So here is your training plan.
Three actions this week.
Choose from the list.
A message to somebody you have been meaning towrite to.
A phone call, not a like.
An invitation with a date in it.
Or a conversation you need to repair with thesentence.
And when somebody shows you a bird this week, lookat the bird.
Next time, the last conversation in the series.
Is it too late to start again?
Crisis, age, moving country, and the life you canstill build.
And each episode stands on its own.
So start wherever you like.
Everything from today, the transcript, thevocabulary, the WISER model,
and the three sentences will be waiting for you atyourenglishtoolbox.com.
With translations, flashcards, and downloadablePDFs.
Free with a free account.
Thank you for spending this time with us.
Go and look at the bird.
See you in the next one.