HEALTH Yeah! Episode 8: Establishing and Maintaining Healthy Relationships

Hello, everybody. My name is Dr. Anthony Anzalone, and welcome to HEALTH Yeah! I’m here with Dr. Véronique Deutsch-Anzalone, who, according to my notes, is my wife. 

We’re excited for you to join us today for this very special episode of this podcast as we talk about love. More specifically, we are going to talk today about how to develop and maintain healthy relationships.

Veronique Deutsch-Anzalone, PsyD 

We have in front of us some of the most frequently searched questions pertaining to this topic, and we’re going to get right into it. 

Anthony Anzalone, PsyD

Hopefully, we have a couple of good answers for the audience here today. 

Veronique Deutsch-Anzalone, PsyD 

So the first question that we will be looking at is basically “what does it mean to have a healthy relationship?” 

00:53 What Does It Mean to Have a Healthy Relationship? 

Anthony Anzalone, PsyD

So yeah, when you’re thinking about a healthy relationship and you’re looking at some of the common ingredients, you’re talking about the one that we talk about the most, almost the hackneyed response of communication, right?

Everyone talks about communication. Everyone talks about how important it is in a relationship. I was wondering, Dr. D, could you give some ideas of what does it mean? Let’s get more specific. What does it mean to have good communication in a relationship? 

01:17 Communication, Trust and Compromise 

Veronique Deutsch-Anzalone, PsyD 

Well, definitely when you have communication, you want to be able to use more feelings, words, for sure. You don’t want to wait too long to have a conversation with your partner, especially if there’s some sort of issue or if there’s something that’s bothering you. So when you have a conversation with your partner, you want to be able to kind of say, “Hey, listen, I think we need to talk about something.” 

So you want to sit down with them and you want to use those feeling words and you want to use a lot of “we” instead of “I,” but you want to make sure that you don’t use “we” as in “Maybe this weekend we can fix the lock on the door.” That tends to be my issue. I get mixed up with pronouns and that’s kind of a joke that we have actually, because when I say “we,” I mean actually my husband, because that means that he needs to go fix the things, but rather, I mean, that we as a kind of bonding thing for partners, you want to use the word we as togetherness. 

So that is a big part of communication. But really with the feeling words is kind of helping your partner to understand how you’re feeling. And actually a good way of communicating back is by really listening and reflecting that feeling back to your partner. And that really shows that you’re listening.

Anthony Anzalone, PsyD

So that mirroring, reflecting and validating. I think we came up with a great response. 

And I also like to say that in any relationship, rarely do do conversations or arguments go well when they start with “you always” or “you never.” so to tag along with what you’re saying – being able to express statements, to express how you’re feeling towards someone. Because in relationships, healthy conflict is natural, right? 

Veronique Deutsch-Anzalone, PsyD 

Absolutely. So just as you were saying, the “always” or “never” is what we call the cognitive distortions, the black and white thinking. So if I say something like, “you know, I always have to take the garbage out, you never take the garbage out,” then that is probably going to start an argument because that’s not true. Right? Because even if I always took the garbage out, six out of the seven days of the week, that doesn’t mean that I always do. There’s probably one time that you take the garbage out, right? 

So I believe that another part that’s really important to a relationship is trust, wouldn’t you say? So what would you say about that? 

Anthony Anzalone, PsyD

Well, I think trust is really predicated is what we’re talking about before terms of that communication, because as you were alluding to, when we don’t communicate effectively, we fill the gaps with a lot of distortions. Right. So you think, “well, she didn’t respond to me, she must feel a certain way.”

So when we’re not communicating effectively, we tend to look at things distorted and we’re not being able to see the other person’s side. We’re missing a lot of evidence to help us build our thoughts. So when you don’t trust people, then that’s a slippery slope and what do we hear from a lot of our clients who you look at cell phone messages or you’re tracking people, you’re looking at their life 365. If you’re hitting that point, it usually means something’s missing in the relationship, that you haven’t had that foundation to be able to talk about things right away and resolve them instead of letting them kind of fomented, build. 

Veronique Deutsch-Anzalone, PsyD 

Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more with that. And trust and honesty goes hand in hand. That’s something that I see a lot with my patients as the needing to check the partner’s phone, you know, “let me check your text messages or let me check your Instagram or your Snapchat.”

The constant 360, the sharing where they are. It’s really about teaching, you know, our clients that they need to have that ultimate trust and honesty with their partner, then the hope is that they don’t need to go on their phone and check all the time or even ever, really. The hope is that they have that trust and honesty with their partner and that communication is key.

How about compromise. What would you say about that? 

Anthony Anzalone, PsyD

I always compromise. Yeah. I think in any relationship, and I’m sure we’ll talk a little bit more about this later, but in any relationship you have, you want to think, are you being really rigid or are you being able to compromise? Right. 

As I alluded to before, the “must” statements, those rigid, they “must” meet certain expectations versus being able to see the other person’s point and have a give and take in a relationship. 

Because if you don’t have that collaboration in any relationship in your life, then it starts to degrade. Right. 

Veronique Deutsch-Anzalone, PsyD 

Yeah, absolutely. Something with compromise with healthy partners is, what I can think of, is with your your own families. Having to spend, you know, holidays with, you know, your family or my family and having to have that equal opportunity to see everybody’s families.

That’s definitely compromised because you get pull from either side on. I think a lot of partners probably have things like that or even when you have children and compromise with, “can you take the kids to this” or “can you take the kids for this so that I can have time with my friends or you can have time with your friends.” 

This makes for a healthy relationship because you need to have time to yourself as well. Or times that I’m tired and you take the kids or you’re tired and I take the kids. So it’s a lot of compromising that you need to have a healthy relationship, even if you don’t have kids yet, if it’s a healthy relationship.

Anthony Anzalone, PsyD

I like to say “you’re not acting like an actuary.” You’re not keeping tabs, like, “well, I did this, this, this. So you will do this, this, and this.” On the other side of the coin, you want to make sure that you’re within the ballpark, that you’re helping each other. And as you were referring to before, you know, to compromise requires collaborating; any situation where you’re going to collaborate, the solution has to be viable for both people and it has to be realistic.

So being able to go back and forth and not hold onto things, not being able to pocket something. Like, “Well, you know what? I woke up with the kids both times today. So you owe me this.” Rather, you do it because you love your partner. You want to be able to help them out. 

Veronique Deutsch-Anzalone, PsyD 

Well, I’m certainly glad that you don’t tally that since you let me sleep late almost every day and weekend. So I don’t think the kids would let me sleep late. 

So let’s talk a little bit about how you build a healthy relationship. 

09:00 How to Build a Healthy Relationship 

Anthony Anzalone, PsyD

Yeah, absolutely. So as we were talking about the things before, you know, in the beginning of your relationships there’s no stress. But as relationships continue to grow, it’s so important to be able to have those conversations with your partner about what type of person you are, a person that wants some space to cool down or you need to resolve it right away?

So having those tough conversations early, which we generally don’t, don’t think about because when we’re young and in love, we’re just thinking about where is the next place we’re going to go out or what are we going to go, where are we going to go? And it’s important, that is, as your relationships advance, to be able to consider other people’s styles and their mannerisms and to be able to let certain things go, not to nitpicked, to know how you like to communicate, and what works best for that partner.

So the more open you are with telling this works for me, the less that partner partner’s going to engage in distortions.

Veronique Deutsch-Anzalone, PsyD 

Right, exactly. And there we go with that communication piece again. Because if you don’t communicate that you prefer to kind of cool down and walk away during an argument, then maybe your partner is going to follow after you and continue to scream at you. Right. Because they think that you’re ignoring them or if you are the type of person that gets extremely anxious and feels like you need to talk right away about a problem. And then if your partner doesn’t know this, then that’s going to be even worse, right? You might have a partner that has a panic attack and that partner might not understand what’s happening.

So it is really important to communicate that, listen, if there’s a problem, then this is the way that I need to have this argument for sure. So there we have the communication piece again. 

Anthony Anzalone, PsyD

Yeah, absolutely. Go into what you said before, like when we work with, say, individuals with ADHD, we will come across couples that will say, well, if he truly loved me, he’d remember to pick up the milk and not understanding, well, this has nothing to do with love. This has everything to do with the exception of executive functioning problems and being able to work with that person to help them out. So that way there’s not the nagging and there’s more supporting each other. 

So when we’re talking about, say, depression, anxiety or any mental health problem, being able to communicate to your partner so that way you could support them, educate them, support them and not devolve into those thinking errors.

Veronique Deutsch-Anzalone, PsyD 

And there we go with that cognitive distortion again of mind reading, right? That they should know better. They should know that when I come home late from a late shift, that those dishes should be done, that counter should be cleaned and the kids backpacks should be packed and all set so that I can just rest on the couch.

Anthony Anzalone, PsyD

It’s a good thing we’re both guilty of that. Right? 

But it’s an excellent point that one of the best days of your life is when you eliminate the word “should” from your vocabulary, when you realize, yeah, it would be nice if my partner did this, but we pivot away from “should.” And then when you pivot away from should, it opens the door for that communication. 

And I think another another topic related to this is the notion that building a healthy relationship takes a lot of work, but keeping that healthy relationship is tough as well, right? Like losing five to 10 pounds is tough. Keeping it off – that’s just as tough, if not tougher.

So let’s talk about some ideas of how do you keep a relationship from going stale. 

Veronique Deutsch-Anzalone, PsyD 

Absolutely. So one of my favorite things that I like to talk about with my patients is the five love languages. So with that, we have our time spent together, we have our physical touch, we have our gift giving, our acts of service and our words of affirmation.

So everybody has a different love language, and it’s really important that you share what is important to you with your partner and that your partner shares that with you. Because it may not be that your love language is the same as your partner’s. So for me, time spent together is extremely important. I happen to know that my husband’s is the same.

However, there may be something that is also more important to you that isn’t as important to me, and you might be giving me that service, but it may not be that important to me. So you might be saying, “Wow, it’s great that I’m doing this. I’m giving you tons of gifts,” but I might not really care that much about that.

And here you might be like, “I don’t understand why she’s not caring about this so much. I’m giving her all of these gifts.” And even though that’s really nice, maybe I don’t care about that that much. I do like gifts, though. I actually kind of like all the love languages, but say it’s the opposite. Say that I’m buying a lot of gifts for you and you don’t care about gifts too much, then that doesn’t work either, right?

Anthony Anzalone, PsyD

Yeah, absolutely. So identifying what works best, what a person really appreciates. Because I think that’s a good part about a relationship is it constantly grows, it’s not stale and people grow and even their tastes kind of grow. Although I’d be curious if sushi is considered a love language, so I would definitely put that one is the sixth category.

I think that’s the important part, because, you know, relationships can either age like fine wine or like milk left on the radiator counter, depending on how much you put into it. And as we know, you know, being the Long Islanders that we are. Life gets pretty hectic, it’s pretty frenetic and sometimes things just kind of degrade over time.

So I like to say that relationships have to be kind of like a garden, if you’re not taking care of it, maybe not overnight anything’s going to happen. But if you wait a couple of days, a couple of weeks, the weeds start growing. You don’t pull out the weeds, you’re not watering it and it wilts. So we’ve got to be able to do the little things to kind of water that garden every day.

So what would be the examples of the small things that you would do just to keep the relationships fresh and prevent them from being stale? 

15:32 How to Keep a Relationship Fresh 

Veronique Deutsch-Anzalone, PsyD 

You know, I was just thinking about how you weed my garden. I didn’t actually think about this. There’s little things. And there’s big things. 

Well, I mean the little words of affirmation in general, even if that’s not your love language, it’s just wonderful to be able to tell your partner that they look nice, you know, first thing in the morning when you see them, you know, whether or not they have sweat pants on or if they, you know, are just for work.

It’s always nice to say “I love you” or that you look nice or even just when they come home from work, just asking them how their day was and actually listening. Not just saying like, “how was your day” or, you know, getting up from wherever you were sitting on the couch if you’re watching TV or something, actually getting up and giving a hug and a kiss and saying like, “Hey, how was your day?”

And instead of sitting on the couch and checking your phone and watching TV, maybe taking some time to talk about the day, you don’t have to talk about work, just talk about anything. But it doesn’t have to be for a whole hour. It could be for 10 minutes or 15 minutes. But you’re actually talking and spending some time together is another love language.

And even if it’s not your love language, it’s still important to spend time together and to talk. Also, date night. Date night is so important. If you’re like us and you’re married and you have two children, it’s hard when we have babysitters that we found they can get pricey, but it doesn’t matter. It’s important. Even if you do it once a month and you get to go out and do something, even if it’s, you know, just going out to a park, like not right now, it’s zero degrees outside, but, you know, in the summer and get out a blanket, have a picnic and have some time together.

So yeah, even getting to spend time like that is really very special, you know? And what I can even add to that, too, though, is that what is really great for a relationship is that you recognize when the person needs their individual time to is, you know, for example, on a Friday night, maybe I need to go out with my friends and you staying home with the kids or me recognizing that you need to go out with your friends and me staying home with the children.

Anthony Anzalone, PsyD

Absolutely, right. I think the mark of a good relationship is you always want to be with the person, but you don’t need to be with the person. You have your own individual hobbies and you have shared hobbies as well. So being able to sort the partner’s interests and proclivities and as you were saying, I love what you talked about before, put the phone down for a little bit, just sit in silence, just even hold each other.

And even if you can’t make it up for the date night, make it date night in the house. Right. Decide. All right. We’re going to do something, something different. Right. It’s one of the questions I love asking a lot of my clients is when was the last time you did something for the first time? And I think even in relationships, even if you’ve you have that routines are so important, right?

Routines can help blunt anxiety, but we don’t want monotony. So being able to try new things or go new places with your partner is critical. 

19:16 Healthy Relationship Boundaries 

Veronique Deutsch-Anzalone, PsyD 

How about relationship boundaries, healthy relationship boundaries? We should probably talk a little bit about that. 

Anthony Anzalone, PsyD

That’s what we were talking about before. There’s so many different aspects of it, whether we’re talking about personal boundaries and respecting another person’s physical boundaries, as well as emotional boundaries.

What they like, what they don’t like, and making sure that relationships don’t turn to more dependent relationships as well. 

Veronique Deutsch-Anzalone, PsyD 

Absolutely. Especially in relationships in the beginning with some of my younger patients, I find that the relationships are new. They’re not really used to relationships. I’d have to say that a lot about my adolescents that I work with, where they might start texting and text multiple times throughout the day.

And then they get very anxious because they’re waiting for that text back. And then they’re checking their Snapchat and their Instagram and they’re saying, but this person, they were on Snapchat or they were on Instagram. I know that they were, but they’re not writing me back, right?

So then they get very obsessive. So it’s really important to have the boundaries to kind of also teach these younger people. But I hate to say just younger people, we have people our age that actually do that as well because I have adult clients that kind of get like this because unfortunately, you know, there’s there’s divorce and then they’re single and then they go on these dating apps and they don’t understand why they’ll have conversations and then they get ghosted.

So we have those boundaries, too, that we have to teach, right? 

Anthony Anzalone, PsyD

Yeah, absolutely. Being able to be aware, to have that mindfulness, to understand – okay, let me give some time. I don’t need it right away. And if you feel that impulse, like I have to have it right away, that could be related to even maybe projecting your own insecurities onto the other person.

And as therapist, that’s something that we work on, being able to be more aware of your thoughts right You know we think about the situation and we want to be able to pause it and look at the evidence and come up with what’s the most rational way of looking at this, why hasn’t this person responded to me.

So that way you can pause, think about it, and then respond. 

Veronique Deutsch-Anzalone, PsyD 

Absolutely. Something important is to work on your own self esteem and maybe even just put the phone to the side so that you don’t respond immediately or just not even worry too much about not getting that text right away. 

So moving on, why don’t we talk a little bit about a healthy parent child relationship?I know that this is actually your expertise. 

22:15 Healthy Parent-Child Relationships

Anthony Anzalone, PsyD

Yes. So I do a lot of parent training groups and whenever I work with parents I refer to, if you remember the poster that says “everything I needed to learn in life, I learned in kindergarten.” And I like to say that everything you need to learn in relationships you can learn in parent training, because it really applies, whether we’re talking about with children or with adults.

So when I’m doing parent training, one of the things I say to my parents is “you can’t have rules without a relationship and you can’t have a relationship without rules.” So being able, as we said before, to have boundaries, but also to have that quality time that you’re spending with children. 

So we compare children and adult relationships. There’s a lot of commonality, isn’t there? Right, Spending quality time together, having patience for your partner, having that rules and that relationship, not talking in volumes, not distorting what you think their intentions are. My child’s being a brat. My child is purposely doing this. My partner’s purposely trying to bother me by leaving the dishes in the sink. So when I’m working with parents, it’s so important that they have that engagement with their children because the more you have exposure with your children and the more you’re talking to them, the less you are going to engage in distortions.

And that’s something that’s going to apply again to any relationship. The more you’re with a person, the more you get to see them, the less you’re going to engage in  a lot of those errors.

Veronique Deutsch-Anzalone, PsyD 

And we have to do a lot of compromising with our children, right? Because we don’t want to be that authoritarian figure where it’s just like, these are my rules and that’s all that applies.

Because then we’re going to have pretty angry children. So I know that we compromise a lot with our kiddos, even though they’re 11 and eight. You know, we have to compromise quite a bit with them, especially our 11 year old who is 11 going on 17 right now and asks for Cologne for Christmas. And so that’s definitely been interesting. 

Anthony Anzalone, PsyD

So having to compromise on how many sprays of cologne you put on without smelling up the whole house, Right is integral. 

But yeah, yeah it’s all about being able to see another person’s viewpoint. I like to say that kids maybe don’t have the head of the table, but they should have a seat at the table because kids like to be heard and they’re going to model the relationships that you teach them in their life.

Right. So if you want kids to be flexible, you have to teach your own flexibility about things. There should only be a certain amount of things that you’re saying are inflexible. If your child wants to run into traffic, well, that should probably fall into the inflexible category. But if your child doesn’t want to eat all the brussel sprouts, well, I’m not one to pass judgment on that as well.

So finding that middle ground and teaching them the words so that way they have that emotional, social persistence, coaching to deal with things in their life to make them more resilient. So we want them to have resilient relationships. And they are our barometers. They are parrots too. So the more they see what we’re doing, the more they’re going to put it in their heads. And it’s kind of like a piggy bank. It just kind of gets stored in. And then that returns on their relationships. They’re using what we’re modeling to them. 

25:48 Adolescent Relationships 

Veronique Deutsch-Anzalone, PsyD 

Absolutely. So what about adolescent relationships versus older relationships versus mature relationships? What’s going on with that, would you say?

Anthony Anzalone, PsyD

Yeah, well, you know, when children are hitting adolescence and we have this emotional immaturity, the brain is still developing. So we have this emotional immaturity against this backdrop of risk taking. So there’s so much going on in the brain and hormonally and we know there’s so many differences. So to go back to to the notion of being able to to validate what they’re feeling, to be able to mirror, to reflect what’s going on and still to be able to have good interactions with them, that we know that families that have dinners together, that correlates so highly to to reductions in mental health problems and mental health issues.

So the more that you’re just spending time at the dinner table talking to them and I know when we say you talk to your children, you say, “how is your day at school?” “Good.” They do that one word response thing, but being able to engage them on topics that they might want to engage with you back on.

So showing investment in their life, showing that engagement and what they’re doing in asking those open-ended questions to help them relate to better and again, those relationships are going to be cast out to their other relationships with peers, and especially in this day and age of social media, it’s just so important to be able to have an open discussion about what they’re doing so that way they can think before they act.

Veronique Deutsch-Anzalone, PsyD 

Yeah, especially because that frontal cortex that we got going, you know, the organization, the planning, the emotional reasoning, it’s not, it’s not all there, not until they’re well, they used to say 18, but then they said 25, I think it’s 30 now.

So what about unhealthy relationships? We’ve got some questions about that. So what are some signs of a toxic relationship, would you say? 

27:48 Unhealthy/Toxic Relationships 

Anthony Anzalone, PsyD

Yeah, that’s Pandora’s box because you think of all the different ways that people can be in an unhealthy relationship. But as I said before, you’re the kind of person that pockets things, you don’t do active listening, or you just assume that you know what the other person is thinking about.

I think in most of these relationships we could have the overarching thing of just not being aware of your partner’s needs and their thoughts and their feelings. 

Veronique Deutsch-Anzalone, PsyD

Yeah. And I mean, when I think toxic, I just think of those people that text like all day long, like the dependent ones that are just texting and texting and texting and texting, or jealousy. Jealousy for sure. The relationships that I’m hearing about that are constantly, again with that texting, where the client that I’m working with is out with friends and they’re getting the texts that are like, where are you? What are you doing? Were you with, you know, very like, jealous or very protective of the person, especially if it’s the beginning of a relationship.

I always say you got to be kind of careful about those relationships because you have to be allowed to do the things that you’ve always done in your life and not have a partner tell you that you can’t do these things, you know, as long as it’s appropriate things that you’re doing. 

Anthony Anzalone, PsyD

Yeah, absolutely. And I think to add on to that, you talk about people who avoid difficult conversations as well, right? So maybe that’s not toxic in the beginning, but the more you avoid having difficult conversations with your partners and being able to problem solve and come up with solutions, the more that that bitterness starts to grow, right, then you start to feel hurt. And as we know, the old adage, hurt people, hurt people.

So you start to build resentment and that just starts to ferment and grow and then you just see the little things building and building. And a lot of times relationships don’t falter because of that one giant thing, that’s the signal, not the source. It’s the collection of the little things that lead to the levee breaking.

So when you’re not talking to your partner regularly, when you’re not discussing issues, when you’re not thinking ahead, then it just starts to fester. And that’s when you usually see a lot of the subsequent negativity, the avoidance of feelings, of talking, the jealousy, as you were discussing before. 

30:50 Dr. Vee and Dr. Anzalone 

Veronique Deutsch-Anzalone, PsyD

So this wasn’t a question on the Internet, but this is a question more for us. Being clinicians ourselves and being married, does it have us look at being in a relationship as a different perspective? Like do we have an advantage in our relationship being a clinical psychologist? 

Anthony Anzalone, PsyD

I guess that’s the question of like, “what you know versus what you practice”. You practice what you preach, let’s say for the most days when we get enough sleep, you know, we practice it, but we’re human.

There’s the grouchy days that we’re not getting enough sleep or the dog’s waking us up early. But yeah, I think as clinicians, hopefully we have the same score card of how we’re doing. But, but yeah, there’s a lot of “I” statements, a lot of attention to detail, making sure that we don’t take things for granted. And I think that’s so important.

Like how easy it is to let little things go. And as you said before, being able to say, “I love you” every day, being able to say you look beautiful, being able to thank a person just for something little like you cleaned the dishes – thank you so much. And for a lot of people, that’s a huge thing.

Veronique Deutsch-Anzalone, PsyD

I’d have to agree we bring a lot of humor into our relationship. That’s a really important thing for us, at least. I do feel that it’s important in general, but it just makes life easier. 

But I do think that we do have a little bit of an advantage just having the skills of communication When something’s bothering us, we do tend to try to talk it out before it festers and gets worse. 

But he’s absolutely right. If there are days where one of us is in a bad mood, it happens. We’re human. But yeah, I’ve definitely gotten that where it’s like, well, you guys are both psychologists, so you probably are able to deal with arguments a lot easier.

So I do think we have a little bit of an advantage. 

Anthony Anzalone, PsyD

Yeah, well, like, like any relationship, it’s how much you’re practicing, right? If you go to the gym once a week, you’re not going to get in shape. And I think in relationships it works the same way. If you’re not practicing your skills every day, you know, relationships require skills.

And if you’re not practicing them every day, those skills degrade. 

33:28 Self-Love 

Veronique Deutsch-Anzalone, PsyD

Exactly. So I think we’re kind of wrapping this up, but we wanted to close out the conversation and talk a little bit about self-love, because whether you’re in a relationship or not, it really is the most important relationship – to take care of yourself, right? Because you can’t be in a romantic relationship that’s healthy if you don’t care about yourself.

Anthony Anzalone, PsyD

Absolutely. Being able to have the grace when you do something wrong, right. To be able to let that go, to be able to learn from your mistakes rather than being defined by them, being able to have your own self-love and self-care. Right. There’s another thing that’s so quick to go because our lives are so hectic that you don’t take the time to yourself to do the things that help recuperate, that reinvigorate you.

And when you’re not reaching out to other people and you find yourself being more isolated again, it starts to fester. We like to say, you know, success breeds success and failures breed failures. So when you’re not doing the things that make you feel good, then and it can be a slippery slope where you start to reject that self-love and engage in a lot of that negative self-talk.

34:40 Tips for Healthy Relationships 

Veronique Deutsch-Anzalone, PsyD

Absolutely. So, Dr. Anzalone, if you were to give a tip out to the audience, what would your tip be for a relationship? 

Anthony Anzalone, PsyD

Well, if I’m going to harken back to our magical wedding night, I was like going to what the longest married couple had said, I don’t remember how many years, maybe you’ll remember that – over 40 years or so. And it was “think twice, speak once.” And that has been the thing that helped kind of put the pause button on and remember what’s important. You know, the love in the relationship. So let’s all let the little things be little so we can focus on the important stuff. 

Veronique Deutsch-Anzalone, PsyD

I couldn’t agree more. 

Anthony Anzalone, PsyD

Well, Dr. Deutch Hanson, this was a lot of fun. I say that we go on a date night soon. 

Veronique Deutsch-Anzalone, PsyD

What a great idea. I’ll get the babysitter on speed dial. 

35:24 Closing Remarks

Anthony Anzalone, PsyD

Well, on behalf of everyone from Stony Brook’s HEALTH Yeah! podcast, thank you very much and have a great day.

Announcer

Stony Brook Medicine is Long Island’s premier academic medical center. We transform lives through scientific discovery, education and care, and we bring together innovative research, advanced education and extraordinary health care expertise to set the standard for how healthy communities thrive. For more information, visit stonybrookmedicine.edu or follow us on social media.