Ask someone what a great relationship is built on and you’ll likely hear some version of the same answer: find the right person. Someone you’re wildly attracted to, someone who makes you feel alive, someone with whom the spark never fades. The implicit model is that love is something you fall into — and if it doesn’t last, it’s because you fell into it with the wrong person.
Dr. Sara Nasserzadeh, a social psychologist and relationship therapist who has spent over two decades working with couples across more than forty countries, calls this the submergent model of love. And her research suggests it’s one of the most reliable ways to end up disappointed.
Over a decade, Nasserzadeh analyzed clinical notes from 312 couples to understand how cultural narratives shape the way people define and practice love. She then partnered with Dr. Pejman Azarmina to validate her findings against a sample of 159 US representative couples — 314+ individuals who had been together anywhere from one to forty years. What she found was that the submergent model, in which two people merge completely and lose themselves in each other, might feel exhilarating early on, but when the dopamine-driven chemistry fades and deeper alignment is absent, partners begin pushing each other away in ways that create resentment and drift. The very thing that felt like love — that total merger — becomes the source of the erosion.
Her research led her to an alternative: what she calls Emergent Love. Rather than something that happens to you, love is something that arises from, and is sustained by, six ingredients cultivated over time: attraction, respect, trust, compassion, shared vision, and loving behaviors. These are not character traits to screen for in a partner. They are relational practices — things that couples do, or fail to do, continuously.
The first ingredient is attraction, which Nasserzadeh calls the most dangerous of the six because of how badly it’s typically misunderstood. The initial butterfly feeling — the infatuation that Western culture has elevated to the status of a prerequisite — fades on average around the two-year mark, according to the research she cites. If that’s all attraction means to a couple, the relationship is already on borrowed time. Nasserzadeh reframes attraction as an ongoing appreciation of your partner’s values, qualities, and roles — something that must be actively attended to, not passively received.
Respect and trust function as the structural load-bearers of the model. Both are straightforwardly important, but Nasserzadeh’s clinical work revealed a subtler problem: partners frequently don’t mean the same thing when they use these words. In one case from her practice, a husband’s repeated infidelity was interpreted by Nasserzadeh as a failure of respect — a violation of an implicit monogamous contract. His wife, however, experienced it primarily as a failure of compassion. Same behavior, different relational meaning. This definitional mismatch, she argues, is pervasive in couples and is one reason her model insists on precise, partner-specific definitions rather than shared assumptions.
Compassion, too, comes with a counterintuitive finding. Nasserzadeh distinguishes it from empathy — a distinction that surprised many readers and interviewers. Empathy means being with the other person emotionally, feeling what they feel. Compassion means being there for them while maintaining your own perspective. In long-term relationships, she found that empathy’s blurring of emotional boundaries tends to generate enmeshment rather than genuine support. Thriving couples, her data suggested, practice compassion more than empathy.
Shared vision answers the question of where you’re going together, and loving behaviors addresses how partners actively signal, in the specific ways that land for their partner, that they are cherished. Neither is static. One of the model’s central findings is that the six ingredients shift in priority — a relationship may need more compassion one month, more trust after a disruption, more intentional attraction after a period of drift. Nasserzadeh visualizes this using a Venn diagram, where the overlap between two individuals constitutes the “we-space” — a living, dynamic entity that requires its own maintenance.
The book draws on Nasserzadeh’s original research while synthesizing adjacent work by the Gottmans, Brené Brown, and Esther Perel, among others. It produced, as a clinical output, the Relationship Panoramic Inventory — a 360° assessment tool that asks both partners to rate each ingredient independently, then surfaces the gaps. If one partner scores themselves highly on respect but their partner reports feeling disrespected, that discrepancy becomes the intervention point. It’s a diagnostic logic that treats love less like a feeling to be chased and more like a system to be understood.
The book won the 2025 Clark Vincent Award from the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists. The award recognizes outstanding contributions to the field of psychotherapy and public understanding of relational dynamics.
Nasserzadeh’s central claim is not a modest one: that the cultural story most of us were handed about love — the soulmate myth, the significance of the spark, the idea that the right person makes it all work — is not just incomplete but actively harmful. The evidence from her research suggests the ingredients matter more than the match. Love, on this account, is less something you find and more something you learn to make.