In today’s fast-driven, dating app obsessed world— long-term relationships almost seem like a rare treasure. Many people, in both heterosexual and homosexual orientations, increasingly find it more difficult to settle down. Divorce rates have hovered around 50% of new marriages in the last decade.
So what is the secret to long-lasting commitment and love? Research gathered from The Gottman Institute, run by Julie and John Gottman who have over 4 decades of research on relationships and marriages reveals the common characteristics of couples that surpass the average relationship span. Dr. Gottman can predict 90% of the time whether a marital couple will stay together or get divorced.
The factors that predict whether couples who stay together are:
- Have a strong foundation and built this through years of acquiring a deep knowledge of each other
- How good they are at diffusing conflict— using humor and 5:1 positive to negative interactions.
- Bid response
Continuous Learning and Evolving Connection
When you first start dating someone, it seems like the conversations are endless. You want to know everything about them from their favorite type of cheese, to whether they prefer spending time in the mountains or by the beach. It’s a type of infatuation referred to as the Limerence, aka the honeymoon or puppy-love stage.
However, on average the limerence phase only lasts about two years. After that, you think you already know everything there is to know about your partner. This is where most people get stuck. They start feeling like there’s nothing interesting anymore about the person to discover. In reality, it takes effort to know a person deeply. Just because their breadth of experiences might not increase, doesn’t mean you can’t get to know them on a deeper level.
One of the key things you can do to sustain a good relationship is to constantly be curious and informed about your partner’s life. Explore deeper questions together, plan to work on things for the future, and create an environment where it feels safe for your partner to share the pivots, dilemmas, and reflections of their experience in their lives.
Having someone that is more than willing to explore those changes with you, can help tremendously in creating a stronger bond. Seeing how your partner contemplates and reacts to different situations also allows you to get to know them better as people.
Couples don’t stay together until they turn grey because they always sustain an exciting sex life, or because they never get into arguments; they stay together because ultimately they know their partners to the core, and accept and love them for who they are. They see no other replacement for this level of depth and knowledge of another person, and of themselves.
Diffusing Conflict
Every relationship will encounter disagreements over its course. But disagreements that are met with contempt, defensiveness, or stonewalling are more likely to create long-lasting wounds that are hard to heal. On the contrary, the couple’s ability to deescalate conflict with empathy, emotional intelligence, and humor is likely to be predictive of stable and happy marriages.
Accepting Influence
Men actually play a big role. 85% of the stonewalling occurrences were attributed to men in studies. Stonewalling refers to the act of ignoring a partner when they’re trying to raise a point of contention. Men tend to have a harder time accepting influence from their partners, as opposed to women, because of the fear of losing power.
However, a major predictor of happy and stable marriages was attributed to heterosexual couples where men accepted influence from their wives. Emotional intelligence proves to have its benefits, especially for men. Being able to take their partner’s perspectives into genuine consideration, as well as learn to compromise and respect their partners.
Positive reinforcements
The 5:1 ratio refers to the number of positive interactions that are needed to counteract one negative interaction. Couples that regularly displayed affection, empathy, kind gestures, and gratitude generally could manage and diffuse conflicts easier, if the ratio was around 5 to 1.
This means your ability to overpass the negative emotions you’re experiencing in the moment for a broader appreciation of your partner’s positive traits is pretty crucial to the relationship itself.
Laughter as Medicine
An aspect that is often overlooked in happy relationships is not trust or empathy, but actually, laughter! Research shows that when a couple stops laughing together, it’s more likely their relationship will come to a stalemate. Humor (teasing each other, sharing jokes) is physiologically soothing according to Dr. Bob Levenson’s research which can serve to reduce stress in relationships, as well as diffuse conflict and keep the relationship alive and fun.
Bid response
Surprisingly, something as simple as reacting to your partner’s comment about a trivial thing can be an important determinant of whether your relationship will last. A bid is any attempt from one partner to another for attention, affirmation, affection, and any other positive connection.
A failure to respond to a partner’s bid frequently can lead to distance, hurt, and deterioration of the relationship. Sometimes these bids for attention are subtle, which means it takes a bit of mindfulness on each individual’s end to know when and how to respond. The most important thing is that you acknowledge and pay attention to when your partner’s talking to you, even if you’re just hanging out on the sofa. You don’t have to go out of your way to validate every one of your partner’s comments, but show them that you heard them by responding as much as you can when they’re bidding for your attention.
Conclusion
When relationships are boiled down to science and patterns, it’s not as difficult as it seems to pick up a few things when you find yourself one. Deep emotional understanding, respect and empathy, and acknowledging when your partner needs validation are great areas to develop and work on if you want to pursue a long-term relationship with the person you’re seeing.
Experts have done the research for you; your task is simply to implement some of these habits, and even a little more mindfulness can go a long way.
Secret Prose 
Leave a comment