Remember back when you were first dating and falling in love? Oh, what a feeling! You may not realize it, but Mother Nature played an important role. You see, we don’t know what causes that first spark of attraction to fly, but we do know that once it does, your brain produces a hormone cocktail that has the same affect on your brain as cocaine. Mother Nature gets you so doped up on hormones and so lovesick you can’t see straight. Mother Nature understands that love needs to be blind because if you noticed your sweetheart’s annoying machine-gun laugh, gum-smacking, argumentative nature, etc., you’d cut and run. You need to think you found The Perfect 10. That’s why new lovers idealize the relationship, maximize their lover’s virtues, and minimize or explain away their sweetheart’s faults.

Once the hormone effect wears off, however, you realize that your Perfect 10 is really a flawed 6 or 7. You begin to see and focus on the “negatives.” Unfortunately, it’s human nature to have a negativity bias. This is the result of our fight-or-flight instinct.        That instinct is located in our reptilian brain, the first part of the human brain to develop. In cave man days, it was critical that when our ancestors came face-to-face with a threat such as a saber tooth tiger, they knew in a twinkling whether to stand and fight or beat feet. If they hesitated, they didn’t live long enough to become our ancestors! Negative experiences, therefore, have more “stickiness.”

When it comes to your marriage, it takes five positives to overcome one negative. Do the math and you see how easy it is to end up (and stay) in the doghouse. Let’s say that Rob has a habit of leaving his dirty socks on the floor and this makes Elaine crazy. Assume Rob starts with a clean slate. On day 1, he leaves his socks on the floor. He’s down by 5. For the next 2 days, he puts his socks in the hamper. He’s still down by

3. Even when he does it “right” more often than he does it “wrong”, he’s in the hole. From Elaine’s point of view, Robert “always” throws his socks on the floor but that’s not true.

It’s important that you stop believing your negative thoughts. Remember, people used to think the world is flat—thoughts aren’t always true. When you have a negative thought, consciously restate it. For example, when Elaine has the thought that Robert always leaves his socks on the floor, she should restate it to Robert sometimes leaves his socks on the floor but more often than not, he puts them in the hamper. She should then follow up with a positive thought about Robert such as, “Robert is often kind and thoughtful.” I’ll be talking more about this is upcoming articles.

Part of my ReDate Your Mate strategy is ReCreating the Dating Mindset by focusing on the positive. I recommend that you keep a Generosity Journal in which you record everything your sweetheart does that makes you feel loved, supported, and cared for. Your brain isn’t an old dog, it can be taught new tricks. If you consistently focus on the positive, you will create new neural pathways in your brain that make it easier and easier over time to change your negativity bias to a positivity bias.

Give it a try. You’ve got much to gain and nothing to lose except a negative point of view.