For five years of my PhD and three years of my postdoc, I came into the lab every morning with the same question.
Did my reaction work?
Most mornings, the answer was, sadly: nope!
(Today this reminds me how many times my clients try to initiate 'bonding' in their marriage, and how often they get rejected).
Bonding is a really big deal for a chemist. My life was steeped in it: I'd run a couple of reactions during the day and set one more to go overnight.
Most of the time I'd come back to a flask that hadn't done what I wanted.
There's no arguing with a reaction. It doesn't care how badly you want it or how hard you worked. So, I'd sit down with my notebook and regroup. I had to figure out what had happened (partial bond, no bond, or the wrong bond?) and what reaction conditions (levers) I needed to create to get the product I wanted.
Which magic lever would hold the key?
The table below is a version of the list of the most common levers I had to pull as an organic chemist and their relational equivalents.
I wrote an earlier draft of it [in this article]([LINK TO BLOG VERSION OF "A Chemist's Approach to Marriage" — not Substack]), which also lays out why chemical bonding and human bonding have more in common than we tend to assume. This version is rewritten so you don't need a chemistry degree to use it (you're welcome!).
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Here's something I've noticed over the past decade of my work with men and couples in sexless marriage.
In relationships, most of us only ever think about row four. Occasionally somebody finds row eight. The other ten are blind spots, not because we're bad at this, but because nobody ever told us they were there.
They were my own blind spots in my marriage, too.
So this is meant as two things. Permission to experiment, and a structure for the experiment, so you have something to vary besides just trying harder at the same old levers.
If you'd rather run an experiment than read about one, I made you a free companion: The Chemistry Experiment. Three short audios for men who want better bonding, sized to fit a gym session or that annoying interstitial time waiting for your flight to take off.
Below I take you line-by-line through the chart so you can see how many more levers there are to pull, including: why more effort doesn't work and the surprising power of geometry.
Most chemical reactions happen in a liquid, and the liquid (called the solvent) is not a bystander. If you change it, the same two reactants (reactants are the two different molecules that you want to bond together) give you a different product.
There's a specific solvent effect worth knowing about. Certain solvents wrap themselves around the molecule you're working with. The molecule is sitting right there, at full strength, completely available - on paper. But it's wearing a coat and can't reach the thing it would otherwise bond to.
This is the same effect your mindset has.
If you walk into the kitchen and sort her behavior for evidence of what's wrong, she can reach for you without you registering it. Not because you're inattentive. Because your filter has it wrapped.
I've seen this over and over in my work: he's looking for one specific kind of connection (a hug, for example) and missing what she is actually offering (compliments).
So he thinks she's gone cold, when she's actually also hurt and wondering why he doesn't seem to care when she reaches out.
Getting stuck scanning for what's missing instead of what is available is only one example. This row is really about mindset work in general: what you believe about her, what you expect walking in, the story you've been running since the last fight. Scanning for mistakes is just the easiest one to catch yourself doing.
One thing to note about solvent. In a flask it's shared: there's one liquid with both reactants sitting in it. However, you and your wife don't share one. Your filter is yours, hers is hers.
Which is why you can both walk out of the same twenty minutes with completely different accounts of what happened, and both of you are telling the truth about what you saw.
Take an amine (a nitrogen-containing compound), one of the most common reactive partners in a flask. In its ordinary form it has an electron pair available and it bonds readily. Add acid and it picks up a proton. Now you have the same molecule in the same amount, still sitting there. But now it's inert. The electron pair it would have used to bond is now tied up with the proton.
This switch can be sharp. Over a narrow range you go from mostly available to mostly not.
John Gottman calls the human version flooding. Flooding happens when the heart rate climbs, the body reads threat, and the capacity to take in new information shuts down. From the outside it looks like stonewalling. He goes quiet, he looks away, he's right there and yet he's not there.
What doesn't fix it: more words, a better argument, or more emotions. There's no reactive form for any of that to act on.
What does fix it: stopping, regulation practices, and time. Nervous system flooding reverses on its own once the conditions change.
In a reaction flask, you work under an inert atmosphere like nitrogen or argon so that oxygen and water can't destroy a fragile intermediate before it makes the bond you want.
Notice that this isn't a vacuum. The flask is full of a gaseous atmosphere. You're not keeping everything out - you're keeping specific things out.
That's what a good boundary is: not a wall, but a selective membrane. Love comes in. Your mother's opinion about your marriage does not.
And you don't run everything under nitrogen. You do it when there's something delicate and half-formed that won't survive contact with air. That could be the repair that's just starting to land, a conversation that's finally getting somewhere, or a moment where a distraction like a phone buzzing would torpedo everything faster than a term sheet dies in diligence.
Here's the thing about increasing the concentration of reactants in the reaction (aka pushing harder at the same things): it's the least effective move.
In ten years of running reactions, I don't think concentration was ever the reason something wasn't working. It was the solvent, the geometry (yes, really - more on that below), or a protecting group that wouldn't come off. When a reaction is genuinely stuck, more starting material gets you…more starting material.
Meaning: more of the pursue-avoid dance. More rejection. More "I have a headache."
This is the row almost everyone lives in. More date nights. More talking about it. More effort, more attention, more asking what's wrong.
Those aren't two strategies or five. That's one lever, pulled repeatedly.
The thing is, if the rest of the reaction conditions are misaligned, three times more of it is three times nothing. The barrier to change is too high, and you need something that smartly lowers that activation energy, not a brute force method that ignores what's inhibiting your reaction.
Trust me: I tried forcing things in chem lab - and that's how you hurt yourself, break things, or burn shit down (and not in a fun way).
When the starting materials have known impurities, it's tough to get clean bond formation. I'd run an NMR (a scan that tells you what's really in your sample) and find peaks I knew weren't supposed to be there. Then purification would take days instead of hours, and the yield would come out low.
It's what old material does in a marriage. You can tell something's stirred up, but you can't quite name it (or you're afraid to). Everything you try in terms of bonding takes more effort and time than it should.
Now, I want to be careful here, because people don't need purifying and that is emphatically not what I mean.
Instead, this lever is about understanding the wounds we carry with us.
Maybe you learned that asking for what you want is "selfish," so you tend to people-please. Maybe love came transactionally, in exchange for performance, so now there's some perfectionism. Maybe you feel like you're never quite "good enough," and there's an anxiousness about whether you'll get enough love. Or you felt smothered and intruded on, so you withdraw.
There are so many patterns we bring into a marriage. We know they're there, even when it feels hard to change them.
And while addressing what we're bringing in is a loving move, it isn't a precondition for love. A lot of wounding is relational in nature, and it might not become a stumbling block until you try to get close to someone you love. That's also when it's ripe for healing.
This one is juicy. In chemistry, the same atoms with the same connections can have different arrangements in space (this is called stereochemistry). Depending on which arrangement you use, you'll get a different product, or no product at all.
In a relationship, this is about the shape you're in when you turn toward her.
Some shapes push her away. Terry Real calls these losing strategies: needing to be right, controlling, unbridled self-expression, retaliation, and withdrawal. John Gottman's four horsemen overlap heavily with them, and criticism, contempt, and defensiveness all live in this row. (Stonewalling isn't here because it isn't a stance you choose. It's row two).
Here's what makes these so maddening: not one of them is a content problem. What you want underneath is almost always completely legitimate. You want to be respected, or understood, or to stop being the bad guy in every conversation. You're just delivering it in a geometry that repels.
Terry Real's winning strategies are examples of shapes that connect: advocate for yourself, speak to make things better, listen to understand, respond with generosity, and cherish what you have. Notice that it's the same person, wanting the same thing, just arranged differently.
Those three are just examples. A reagent is anything you add to make a bond happen that gets used up in the process (in contrast to a catalyst, which regenerates).
Another defining feature is that you need an amount proportional to what you're working with. If you use twice the material, you need twice the reagent.
Relationally, this can look like goodwill, patience, or emotional regulation - things that can help but that can be used up.
So when you snap after twenty minutes, that isn't a character failure. You ran out. And the fix is stoichiometric rather than moral (stoichiometry is just the math of how much of each ingredient you need - I've always loved that there's a whole word for it). A bigger conversation needs more. If you don't have more tonight, don't start it tonight.
Also just examples. A catalyst is anything that makes the hard thing easier and survives being used. (Pssst, like the Chemistry Experiment.)
A catalyst lowers the barrier to a reaction without being consumed itself and without changing what the system already wants to do anyway.
The best part is how little of it you need. You can run a reaction with one mole percent of the catalyst, meaning one catalyst molecule for every hundred molecules you're trying to transform.
In your marriage, think about spending one hour a week against a hundred and sixty-eight, and seeing the whole system move. That's what can happen with a good coach.
There's an honest limit built right into the definition, though. A catalyst can't make an impossible reaction happen - it makes a possible one reachable. Nobody, me included, can catalyze a marriage that both people have already left.
And here's how this row differs from the one above it. The technique or skill (like repair) is catalytic. The capacity to execute it is a reagent (you might need a LOT of patience for a repair, and it can get used up in the moment).
You can know exactly how to reflect back what she said and still be unable to do it at eleven at night, not because you forgot the skill, but because the stuff the skill runs on is spent.
The same ingredients added in a different order give you a different product, or spare you a violent side reaction, without changing anything at all about what you started with.
In the lab, getting the order wrong could waste weeks of precious starting material. Occasionally it could, in fact, take out a fume hood (ie, explode!).
At home, if you lead with your case before she feels understood, the order itself does the damage. Effort in the wrong sequence isn't neutral - it actively makes the wrong product.
This row explains more failed repair attempts than anything else on the chart. It's usually why the man who tried hardest got the worst result.
Oh logic, if only marriage responded well to you.
In a substitution reaction, whatever group is already occupying a site has to leave before anything new can bond there (this is called the leaving group). If it can't leave, the reaction stalls no matter how good the rest of your conditions are.
And, the leaving group has to be stable on its own once it departs. If it has nowhere to go, it doesn't go.
Emotional charge works the same way. It doesn't evaporate just because you've decided to be reasonable about it. You have to respect it and work with it skillfully - not shame yourself for feeling or suppress it. It needs somewhere to land that can actually hold it - a walk, journaling, a friend who lets you vent the unedited version first.
But once you can let that charge move through and no longer control how you're showing up, there's so much room for connection (ahem, bonding).
Forgiveness is often the slower version of the same mechanism. Letting something leave and being more available because of it.
This one is about shadow work, which means finding a way to see parts of yourself that you aren't necessarily aware of - both the positive and negative parts (that's right, "shadow" does not equal "bad").
In a synthesis, a protecting group goes onto a site because that site is too reactive, not because it's weak. Left exposed, it would grab everything in sight and ruin the rest of the sequence. So you cap it, do your chemistry elsewhere, and uncap it later.
Sit with that one for a second. The part of you that's masked isn't the deficient part. It's the part that reacts hardest.
It could be difficult parts of yourself or beneficial parts of yourself. Maybe it's the anger you decided at nine years old was not safe to have. Those got covered because they were too live to leave out in the open, not because they were too small to matter.
Sometimes we are aware of our "protecting groups" (aka masks), but often we aren't.
Three things follow from this.
The first is that deprotection needs selective conditions. You can't just yank it off. You need conditions specific enough to remove that one group without tearing apart the molecule you spent months assembling. This is why "just be more vulnerable" fails as advice.
The second is that every protecting group costs yield. It requires two extra steps: protection and deprotection, and you lose material at both. In relationship, carrying a mask has a price - exhaustion, resentment, connection without depth.
The third is the failure mode. Sometimes a group stays on by accident, and nobody notices until the very end, when the molecule won't do the thing it was built to do.
Kind of like when you think you're ready for deeper bonding but you're actually walled off from love in a way you didn't realize.
Heat disproportionately helps a high-barrier reaction. That's why it opens routes that were closed at room temperature.
Relationally, turning up the heat (contrary to what I know you're all thinking right now) looks like having a hard conversation. Yep. It's about access to a pathway that wasn't available before. It's uncomfortable, but it gets you somewhere more useful.
This also gives you a way to tell rows four and twelve apart, because from the inside they can feel identical. Pushing for more date nights runs the open route harder. Having a hard conversation opens a closed route.
If it's something you've been avoiding, it's probably about turning up the heat.
If it doesn't scare you a little, it's probably row four.
Heat also accelerates decomposition, which is a polite way of saying you can cook the whole thing, so pulling this lever for better bonding requires careful attention.
I wrote this because I want to give you permission to use the same habits of mind that a scientist uses in the lab to study the bonding in your relationship.
After years as a scientist, I knew way too much about molecular bonding, but I'd never had a single class in human bonding, and it made all kinds of relationships hard for me, not just my marriage. It was only after I got divorced that I learned the tools that could have really helped me.
At the end of the day, every cell in our body is creating and breaking bonds. We are unconsciously doing in every moment the same thing we're hoping to get better at by reaching for our partner across the table. Yet the levers that seem obvious, like using logic, arguing more, defending ourselves, and taking out our emotions on each other - just aren't effective.
Think like a chemist and take a step back, look at the system overall, notice all the other levers there are to pull, and run a new experiment.
Dr. Jessica | Relationship Chemist
The free companion to this is The Chemistry Experiment: three short audios on why our brains default to linear thinking in relationships, and why pushing harder is the one move that reliably fails in a system like a marriage. Or a total synthesis.
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