The Relationship Cure

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Closeness doesn’t get built in big heart-to-heart conversations. It gets built in the small stuff — a passing comment about the weather, a glance across the room, a question about your day. John Gottman calls each of these little moves a “bid” for connection, and how you answer them, over and over, decides whether a relationship grows or quietly dies. In his “Love Lab,” Gottman’s team watched 60 couples for twelve hours a day and found almost no dramatic “opening up.” Most talk was mundane. What separated the happy couples from the miserable ones wasn’t what they discussed; it was how they responded to each other’s bids.

John M. Gottman and Joan DeClaire on SummaryShelf

The Relationship Cure