Seesaw / Relationship studies

“Look at this” is a small question. It means: are you there?

John Gottman filmed 130 newlywed couples in an apartment set up as a lab. He counted every one of these moments. A joke, a photo, a bird outside the window.

Then he counted how often the other person looked up.

At home it looks like this.

You’re reading. They say “look at this”. You say “one sec”.

You mean it. The minute passes. They’ve put the phone down.

Nobody is upset. That is why it’s easy to miss. Nothing looks like it went wrong.

Looking up took about three seconds.

They looked up and said “show me”.

“Show me at dinner” counted too, as long as they asked at dinner.

You’ll hear one tonight.

Gottman and Levenson filmed couples arguing about a real problem for 15 minutes. Then they counted every moment.

Good: a joke, a nod, a touch, “fair point”, a question.

Bad: criticism, an eye roll, sarcasm, going quiet.

Years later they checked who was still together.

The couples who lasted still argued. They still had the bad moments.

The difference was what happened in between. They kept laughing, agreeing on small points, and touching each other in the middle of the fight.

Outside of arguments, the same couples were nearer 20 good moments for every bad one.

At home it’s the argument where one of you says “okay, that’s fair” halfway through.

Or makes a joke and the other one laughs, even though the argument isn’t over.

Those were the moments being counted.

The 5 to 1 happened inside the argument. Both groups had the argument.

Ted Huston interviewed 168 newlywed couples, then kept going back for 13 years.

By the end, about 4 in 10 were happily married, 2 in 10 were married and unhappy, and 3 in 10 had divorced.

Then he looked at what the first two years had predicted.

The couples who divorced later did not argue more as newlyweds.

What changed was affection. Over the first two years, the kissing, the compliments and the small favours dropped off faster for them than for anyone else.

The couples who stayed happy started lower and stayed level.

Starting at the top meant there was further to fall.

The couples who lasted were the ones whose level of affection stayed where it was, year after year.

The number that mattered was how much it changed.

Laura Stafford’s team followed 335 college students in long-distance relationships.

180 of them ended up moving close to their partner.

Before the move, nearly all of them expected things to get much better.

One in three of the reunited couples broke up within three months of the move.

The reasons they gave: less time to themselves, more arguments, and finding out things about their partner they hadn’t seen from a distance.

From far away, visits are short and everyone is on their best behaviour.

You never see them on a Tuesday when they’re tired.

The couples who had built the most perfect picture of each other were the least stable after the move.

The version you see on visits is real. It’s just not the whole week.

Matthew Montoya and his team pooled 313 studies on attraction. 460 results in total.

They checked two things: how alike two people actually were, and how alike they thought they were.

Both were strongly linked to attraction.

Thinking you were alike mattered almost as much as actually being alike.

The idea that being different pulls people together did not show up anywhere in the data.

The myth sticks because the differences are the part you notice.

You’re tidy, they’re not. You’re loud, they aren’t.

In the data, the things you have in common are what drew you to each other. They’re easy to miss, because you both do them.

The things you agree on never come up, so you don’t count them.