A new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology evaluated the relationship between how much partners felt appreciated, and how likely a marriage was to last over the years. They found that appreciation and gratitude between two people spirals up or down; the more a partner shows gratitude, the more their partner shows them appreciation, and so it goes, back and forth, improving the relationship over time. (I don’t really need to describe the downward spiral do I?) Likewise, the more appreciation you show to your partner, the more likely you are to feel that your own needs are being met.
This makes perfect sense to me. A decade-and-a-half-ago, I worked closely with psychologist and mathematician John Gottman, PhD, who ran what was known as the “Love Lab” in which he observed couples interact. Gottman could predict, almost flawlessly, who would be divorced in five years, ten. His main litmus test: how many positive comments did each partner make for each negative one? The magic number was 5 positive comments to each negative one. Below that ratio, relationships start to break down.
Downward spiral or upward spiral — we have a choice. We humans are not static. Either we’re growing in our ability to interact with the world around us with resilience and grace, and becoming more creative, more alive, or we’re reinforcing our bad habits, becoming more stagnant, less alive both within ourselves, and within our relationships. We reach the tipping point in imperceptible increments — via the split second, blink-and-you-miss-it decisions we make about how we interact with the people we love.
Other research shows that that 5:1 scale works pretty well with everyone. Gratitude is the superglue in the intimacy bond. And we know, as you’ve read in earlier posts, that when we show gratitude, compassion, and bless, we feel much better about who we are.
I’m grateful to my husband for coming out to join me while I was walking the dogs when he pulled in. For stopping to get eggs. For cutting up all the vegetables for dinner. For clipping me two articles from the newspaper. And these were all just in the last hour. I’m going to post this, and then send a copy to him.
