Your partner says, "Look at that sunset." You glance up from your phone, say "mm-hmm," and go back to scrolling. It takes two seconds. It feels like nothing. But according to four decades of relationship research, what just happened is one of the most consequential moments in your relationship.
That comment about the sunset wasn't really about the sunset. It was what Dr. John Gottman calls a "bid for connection," a small attempt to say, "Hey, I want to share something with you. Are you there?" And your response, that half-attentive "mm-hmm," was what Gottman calls "turning away." Not hostile. Not mean. Just absent. And it's these absent moments, accumulated over months and years, that quietly erode the foundation of even the strongest relationships.
We tend to think relationships are built or broken in the big moments: the proposal, the betrayal, the midnight fight about something that's been building for years. But Gottman's research tells a different story. The relationships that last are the ones where people consistently show up in the small, unremarkable, easy-to-miss moments. The ones that don't even feel like they matter.
The Research That Changed How We Understand Love
In the early 1990s, Gottman and his colleagues at the University of Washington set up what journalists later called "The Love Lab," an apartment-like space where couples were invited to spend time together while researchers observed their interactions. What Gottman was tracking wasn't the big conflicts or the passionate declarations. He was counting something much smaller: the number of times one partner reached out to the other, and whether the other partner noticed.
These micro-moments of reaching out, what Gottman termed "bids," could look like anything. Pointing out a bird outside the window. Mentioning a stressful email from a coworker. Laughing at something on television and looking over to see if the other person noticed. Sighing heavily. Reaching for a hand. Saying, "You won't believe what happened today." Each bid is an invitation, a small request for attention, acknowledgment, or connection.
The findings were striking. In a six-year follow-up study of newlyweds, couples who were still together had responded to each other's bids 86% of the time during laboratory observations. Couples who had divorced? Just 33%. The difference wasn't in how much they loved each other at the outset. It was in how consistently they turned toward each other in the moments that seemed too small to matter.
What Bids Actually Sound Like
The challenge with bids is that they rarely announce themselves. Nobody says, "I'm making a bid for emotional connection right now." Instead, bids arrive disguised as ordinary conversation. A partner says, "I had the weirdest dream last night." That's a bid. A roommate says, "Ugh, traffic was brutal today." That's a bid. Your teenager shows you a meme on their phone. That's a bid, too.
Gottman identified three possible responses. "Turning toward" means acknowledging the bid, giving it some form of attention and engagement. "Turning away" means missing or ignoring it, not out of cruelty but often out of distraction or preoccupation. "Turning against" means responding with hostility or dismissiveness: "Why are you always complaining about traffic?"
The critical finding is that turning away is nearly as damaging as turning against. When someone reaches out and gets no response, the message they internalize isn't "my partner is busy." It's "my partner doesn't care." Do that enough times, and people stop reaching. They stop sharing the weird dream, the frustrating commute, the beautiful sunset. They stop bidding. And when the bids stop, the relationship begins to starve.
Terri Orbuch, who directed the Early Years of Marriage Project at the University of Michigan for over three decades, found something complementary in her longitudinal research tracking over 370 couples. The couples who reported the highest relationship satisfaction weren't the ones who went on the most vacations or had the most passionate romance. They were the ones who had what Orbuch calls "small, positive interactions" regularly, brief moments of genuine acknowledgment woven throughout the day. Ten minutes of daily focused attention, Orbuch found, was a stronger predictor of marital satisfaction than the quality of conflict resolution.
The Multiplier Effect of Good News
Most of us assume that what really tests a relationship is how you handle the hard stuff: the job loss, the health scare, the fight about money. And those moments do matter. But psychologist Shelly Gable's research at UC Santa Barbara revealed something unexpected: how you respond to your partner's good news is actually a better predictor of relationship quality than how you respond to their bad news.
Gable identified four styles of responding when a partner shares something positive. If your partner comes home and says, "I got a promotion," you might respond with enthusiastic engagement ("That's amazing! Tell me everything, how did it happen? How do you feel?"), which Gable calls active constructive responding. Or you might respond with quiet acknowledgment ("That's nice, congratulations"), what she calls passive constructive. You might shift the focus to potential downsides ("Does that mean you'll be traveling more?"), an active destructive response. Or you might change the subject entirely ("Did you pick up the dry cleaning?"), a passive destructive response.
Only active constructive responding, the enthusiastic, curious, engaged response, strengthened relationships. And here's the part that challenges our assumptions: a passive constructive response, the polite "that's nice," didn't help at all. It registered emotionally the same as indifference. Gable's research suggests that people don't just want their pain witnessed. They want their joy amplified. When you celebrate someone's win with genuine enthusiasm, you're telling them, "What matters to you matters to me." That message, repeated across hundreds of small victories, builds a reservoir of trust that sustains couples through the inevitable hard times.
This connects directly to Gottman's bid framework. When your partner shares good news, that's a bid. A big one. And the research is clear: meeting that bid with anything less than genuine engagement is a missed opportunity that quietly accumulates.
Why We Miss the Moments That Matter
If bids are so important, why do we miss them? The answer is rarely malice. It's usually distraction. We're checking email while our partner talks about their day. We're mentally rehearsing tomorrow's meeting while our kid describes a Minecraft creation. We're physically present but emotionally elsewhere, and the people closest to us can tell the difference.
There's also a familiarity problem. In the early stages of a relationship, we're hyper-attuned to bids because everything feels new and significant. A text message is exciting. A shared observation is an opportunity for connection. But as relationships settle into routine, bids start to feel ordinary. The same person making the same kinds of comments over breakfast. It takes conscious effort to keep treating those comments as what they are: invitations to connect. If you've noticed that loneliness can exist even inside a relationship, unanswered bids are often the mechanism.
The good news is that turning toward doesn't require grand gestures. Gottman's research found that successful bids didn't need elaborate responses. A bid met with simple eye contact and a brief verbal acknowledgment ("Oh, really? Tell me more") counted as turning toward. The bar is lower than you think. It's not about performing enthusiasm you don't feel. It's about showing up with a few seconds of real attention when someone reaches for you.
Build the Habit of Turning Toward
Awareness is the first step, and for many couples, simply learning about bids changes the dynamic. Once you start noticing bids, you see them everywhere, in your romantic relationship, in your friendships, with your children, even with coworkers. The concept applies to any relationship where connection matters, and the principles from repair after conflict and understanding love languages reinforce the same idea: relationships are built in the spaces between the major events.
Here are three practices worth trying this week:
Track your responses for one day. Don't change anything yet. Just notice when your partner, friend, or child makes a bid, and notice whether you turn toward, turn away, or turn against. Most people are surprised by how many bids they miss. The tracking alone creates a shift because you can't unsee it once you start looking.
Replace the half-response. The "mm-hmm" while scrolling, the nod without eye contact, the "cool" while staring at your laptop. These feel like responses, but they register as absences. Practice pausing what you're doing for even five seconds to make eye contact and offer one genuine sentence. That's it. Five seconds of real attention.
Celebrate the small wins. When someone in your life shares something positive, no matter how minor, practice Gable's active constructive responding. Ask a follow-up question. Match their energy. Let them see that their happiness makes you happy. This isn't performing. It's choosing to let yourself be moved by someone else's good moment, and that choice is the foundation of trust.
What Changes Today
You don't need to plan a date night or schedule a relationship check-in, though those things have their place. The research points to something more immediate and more available: the next time someone you love says something, anything, that isn't purely logistical, pause. Look at them. Respond like they matter. Because you just received a bid for connection, and your response is being recorded, not by cameras, but by the nervous system of the person who loves you.
The couples in Gottman's lab who were still happy six years later weren't doing anything spectacular. They were just paying attention, over and over, in the moments that nobody else would have noticed. That's the whole secret, if you can call it a secret. The relationship you want is built in the moments you're currently scrolling through.
Sources
- Gottman, J. "Want to Improve Your Relationship? Start Paying More Attention to Bids." The Gottman Institute.
- Gottman, J. "An Introduction to Emotional Bids and Trust." The Gottman Institute.
- Orbuch, T. The Early Years of Marriage Project. University of Michigan Institute for Social Research.
- Gable, S. "Building Trust Through Active Constructive Responding." Institute of Coaching, Harvard Medical School.
