Just as atoms bond in diverse ways (covalent, ionic, and hydrogen bonds, to name just a few), the humans in my clinical practice regularly surprised me with diverse ways of making marriage work, though usually not happily (no surprise, given my sample bias):
Monovalent bonding, multivalent bonding, unstable-but-exciting bonding, stay-together-for-the-kids bonding, roommate-type bonding.
The chemistry metaphor was interesting, but it only seemed to go so far.
Yet, I wondered: does it have to break down, or is there a deeper correspondence? Is the metaphor only a metaphor?
The answer turned out to be much more mathematically interesting than I expected.
It was during my training with the Gottman Institute that I realized something:
John Gottman wrote a book with mathematical biologist James Murray (and others) called The Mathematics of Marriage. In that book, they fit nonlinear difference equations to Gottman's decades of data from studying couples. It turns out the math could reproduce and categorize what couples would do.
In other words... the math worked out.
At this point, a question started tickling the back of my mind. Could the same kind of math describe both bonds: how atoms influence each other and how two people influence each other?
What my chemist heart was really asking was: is chemistry the same chemistry, at different levels of existence?
It turns out that the answer is yes. And, the correspondence goes a few layers deep - deeper than a pretty metaphor. It also has clear practical applications for your marriage.
The first layer is that both are nonlinear dynamic systems. Now, "nonlinear dynamic system" is a very big tent - many interesting things in life fall into this category, including the weather, traffic, and the stock market.
However, both chemistry and relationships are a particular kind of system: a bond. A bond is two distinct things coupling into a configuration steadier than either could hold alone, without collapsing into each other. Bonding is its own specific pattern that recurs throughout nature. So when I was seeing parallels between my lab work and my clinical work, I was in fact watching the thing I'd spent a decade studying show up again, a few scales up (from molecular to interpersonal).
But it gets better: I think there may be a deeper, formal correspondence here - the kind philosophers of science call a formal analogy, where the same mathematical structure governs two very different domains. I'm still working out exactly how far it goes.
What I can say is that chemistry is full of the same kinds of behavior the marriage researchers found: systems that settle into more than one stable state, that get trapped in a stable-but-not-best configuration, and that resist brute force and shift only when the conditions change. Those are things I worked with at the bench for years. We can get deeper into the chemistry, but I realize most people's eyes glaze over at the mention of o-chem! So that dive will be for a future article.
What's on my mind today is why this all matters, and how it helps your marriage.
Why should you care that both chemical bonding and romantic bonding share the same underlying mathematical structure?
Here's why:
It gives a new way of thinking about relationships that those of us who subscribe to the more analytical side of life can appreciate. That's because the same habits of mind a scientist uses to create successful bonds can and do apply to marriage.
The math shows you why all your efforts to create better connection (aka bonding) in your marriage haven't worked. Our brains default to linear thinking - but a marriage is a nonlinear system.
Systems theory gives you a clear path forward: the highest-leverage moves to make.
Here's an example. In chem lab, when I was trying to form a new bond in a synthesis, building a complex molecule one bond at a time, all the effort in the world couldn't make a bond form if the conditions or the pathway weren't right.
When faced with a reaction that just wouldn't proceed, I had to manage my frustration and get my brain into a state where I could think deeply, take a step back to look at the system overall, and make the right change: adding the right catalyst or reagent, using a different solvent, or choosing a different type of reaction altogether. When I got the conditions right, the reaction would proceed enthusiastically.
What most people don't realize about chemistry is that the great syntheses are art forms. The work goes into the design (the right conditions, the right pathway, the right shape of the molecules), not into forcing a particular pathway. There was a deep listening, along with the logic. Get the design right, and complex molecules come together elegantly, almost on their own.
In a marriage, when you want a better bond with your wife, the same principles apply. Pushing harder when the pathway or the conditions are wrong doesn't go anywhere.
If you've ever tried to have your date night go better by asking harder or arguing more, you already know this.
Instead, you need to take a step back and look at the system overall: the environment between the two of you. Most of the time, the environment has decayed over the years. The required conditions for bonding are no longer present, and the reaction pathways that used to work no longer do.
The problem is that we default to thinking about the lowest-leverage moves to fix this - things like trying not to upset her, or buying more expensive dinners, quietly hoping.
This idea of high- versus low-leverage moves comes from the systems theorist Donella Meadows, who mapped the places you can intervene in any system and ranked them from the weakest to the most powerful. Her central observation was that we instinctively reach for the weak ones. Meanwhile, a higher-leverage move like fixing the information flows between you goes unaddressed, and the feeling of unspoken expectation puts a covert pressure on all your interactions and drives her further away.
I'll be unpacking all of this in future articles to show you the highest-leverage moves you can make - the marital equivalents of "catalyst, solvent, pathway."
At the end of the day, here's something I invite you to take a step back and consider. You are already made of bonds. Everything you are is held together by the same kind of coupling we have been talking about, and now, you are trying to do at the scale of a whole life what your atoms have been doing all along. What I hope to offer you is that the thing you have been struggling with is not a flaw in you. It is one of the oldest patterns there is, asking you for a different kind of attention.
In other words: maybe you're not stuck - maybe you've just been using the wrong math.
If this is how your mind works, the next step is The Chemistry Experiment: a free three-part audio series where I walk through the highest-leverage moves, the marital equivalents of catalyst, solvent, and pathway.
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