In general, fairy tales don’t make for the best source of relationship advice. The story of Cinderella, for example, doesn’t seem to be the recipe for a healthy marriage – a man who can’t remember what you look like and resorts to getting everyone to try on your shoe? No thank you! Neither Snow White nor Aurora of Sleeping Beauty seem to be rigorously testing their long-term compatibility with their respective princes before committing to a life together. And don’t get us started on Ariel from The Little Mermaid.
But here’s an exception: look the story of The Three Little Pigs. An expert says so.
Cast your mind back and you’ll recall the general gist. Three pigs versus one big, bad wolf. The wolf wants to eat up the pigs, so goes to each individual pig’s house and tries to knock it down to get access to the inside. The pig with the straw house is in trouble. The same goes for the pig in the house built of sticks. But the pig with the sturdy brick house is all grand.
How does this apply to relationships, you might ask? Let Professor Laurent Pujo-Menjouet of the University of Lyon break it down. The professor is also the author of a new book, titled Love! Valour! Equations!, which proposes that understanding established mathematical formulas can give us a greater understanding of our relationships. A significant part of that proposal is the idea of a ‘critical threshold’, where when loving feelings drop below a specific point, the relationship is likely to break down.
Professor Pujo-Menjouet explains: ‘Just as we can predict population growth or endangered species, we can model the evolution of feelings within a couple. We’re not trying to predict who you’ll fall in love with; we’re trying to understand why some couples remain stable despite life’s inevitable shocks while others slowly drift apart. If your feelings fall below this threshold and stay there, the mathematics predicts an inevitable decline toward separation.’
The professor, along with other researchers, has looked into this threshold idea and studied what decides a couple’s threshold and why some couples are able to ‘come back’ from a threshold and some never can. And what it comes down to is a couple’s resilience and strength as a united team. That’s where the three little pigs effect comes in.
‘Life will always send its wolves: stress, illness, work, children, financial difficulties,’ Professor Pujo-Menjouet says. ‘Mathematics helps us understand how to build the brick house rather than the straw one.’
How do we go about making our relationships the brick houses, rather than ones made of straw or sticks? In other words, what does it take to build a relationship’s resilience to setbacks? We asked experts for their top tips.
5 ways to build your relationship’s resilience
Don’t be afraid of disagreements
‘Conflict doesn’t automatically mean the relationship is ending,’ says Jane James, a Relate-trained couples’ therapist of 18 years. The best marriages aren’t the ones with no arguments at all. They’re the ones where couples are able to disagree but still come back together afterwards.
Listen and learn
Try to see challenges as opportunities to learn. Let’s say you and your partner clash about money – what can this clash teach you about your other half? What can you learn about how to make the argument go more smoothly the next time this issue comes up? What does this prompt you to learn about your own approach to money?
‘A resilient relationship is one where there is room for the differences and in fact these differences can be managed and learned from and used creatively,’ says Joanna Harrison, couples’ therapist and author of Five Arguments All Couples (Need To) Have And Why The Washing Up Matters.
Approach each other with curiosity
Jane advises: ‘The three little pigs theory is all about putting in the work at the beginning of a relationship; building strong foundations like the little pig who built his house of brick. This is done by being curious about each other. Taking time to learn about each other. Finding out about hopes, dreams, lots of open, honest communication, finding out about each other’s backgrounds, values, beliefs, childhoods, views on life, children.... everything. There shouldn’t be a stone left unturned.’
Make trust a must
The key to building those foundations is trust, which is built by showing up, being reliable and doing what you say you will. ‘Trust develops over time,’ Jane says. ‘Both people communicate honestly, take accountability, respect boundaries and consistently show up. That’s when the relationship has a strong enough foundation to withstand external pressures.’
Stop trying to ‘win’
In the little pigs analogy, think of yourselves as the pigs, united against external challenges. Neither of you should ever be the wolf, trying to ‘win’. ‘What makes a resilient relationship is one where each person is able to have their views heard and acknowledged without them bringing the house down,’ Joanna notes. ‘One person might huff and the other person might puff, but instead of a constant battle for one of them to be the winner, there’s room for each of them to be genuinely interested in the other person’s view, or to bear that their partner is different.’
