A 5:1 Ratio
The famous “relationship expert” Psychologists and researchers, Dr Gottman and Janice Driver, prescribe the 5:1 ratio for positive to negative interactions as a key to making a relationship work in the long term. This is probably a good place to start in the “Healthy Relationship Recipe”.
What does the 5:1 ratio mean exactly? The success of a couple has a lot to do with how couple’s respond to each other’s “bids for attention” throughout the day. A bid for attention is a small request, comment or attempt to share something with your partner. A few examples might be: “This book I’m reading is so good”, “Can you help me put in this light bulb, I can’t reach”, or “what do you think of these shoes?” or “what did you think of the pork chops I made?”. These are bids for attention and your response to these bids is a big part of the success or lack of success to a healthy relationship.
Turning Toward vs Turning Away
If you “turn toward” your partner’s bid for attention, it means that you respond by asking more questions as in the example of the “book bid”; “oh, yeah? What’s the book about?”, or you help with the task request- putting in the bulb- or in the case of the request for appreciation: “Pork chops are great, thanks for cooking” or “I really like the color of your new shoes”. If you reject the bid (Gottman calls this “turning away” from the bid), this means that you respond to their book comment without looking up and just a distracted/disengaged “mmm hmm” or you don’t respond at all or say, “I don’t have time to deal with changing a bulb right now”.
The bid rejection that indicates that you are “unavailable at the moment” leaves open the possibility of negotiation and further opportunity to “turn toward” – “okay, can you help me later?” and you respond “sure, I’ll help you tonight when I finish this project”. This type of bid rejection is not necessarily a big problem, but what happens quite a lot in a relationship is when we miss the “bid for attention” all together and consistently.
The Recipe
The recipe to a healthy relationship can be as simple as a 5:1 ratio of turning toward bids (5) and missing, rejecting, or not responding to bids (“turning away”). In Gottman and Driver’s extensive research, those couples they observed in the “Love Lab” (a staged apartment with camera’s) that were able to “turn toward” their partner 86% of the time remain married 6 years later and those that averaged 33% ended in Divorce.
Resources
Gottman, John Mordechai, and Nan Silver. The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Cassell Illustrated, 2018.
Zetlin, Minda. “Couples Who Stay Together Do This Small Thing for Each Other 86 Percent of the Time.” Inc. , 16 Feb. 2020, Apple.news/Az9e2icUJSSiE0wB2kIfVgg.