The 5-Second Relationship Trick You Didn’t Know You Needed

Are your conversations as bad as this?

You say to your partner, “It’s Saturday. What would you like to do today?”

They say,“I need to finish that report I didn’t get finished, then I just want to do nothing for a while.”

“What about lunch? There’s a new Cuban restaurant downtown.”

“Nah, I won’t like it.”

“Oh, let’s go to Tres Amigos! You took me there on our first date.”

“Boy, that was ages ago.”

That really set you off.

“Fine! You don’t have time for me, but you always have time for work — and for drinking. You’re a drunkard, you are. Don’t wait up for me!”

Whether your conversations are this bad or not, you’re reading this because you know your relationship lacks something important.

You want someone who values who you truly are.

You want genuine closeness with your partner.

But that’s not happening. You may be drifting apart. You may be worrying that you can’t stay in this relationship.

Fortunately, there’s a way out of this.

I am a therapist. I’ve spent almost 20 years studying human behavior and helping people.

I know where authentic happiness in relationships comes from, and I can show you how to get it, in a way that is:

• Quick
• Easy
• Something you do every day
• Guaranteed to work

I am going to teach you a technique that I call “swaying your partner”. It combines four Big Ideas into two rules and a small set of guidelines that will deliver what I’ve just promised.

But before we can know how to become happier as a couple, we must first gain the best knowledge available on how to become happier as an individual.

Each Big Idea adds to what has come before it, so before we can add the first Big Idea, we have to have a place to start. To understand what this starting place is, we have to begin with a dime store during the Great Depression.

A Seed Planted in the Great Depression

1938 was the year that Superman made his first appearance, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, and the 19% unemployment rate in the United States was the second highest of the Great Depression. Thousands of people who desperately needed a job couldn’t find one anywhere.

But millionaire William Thomas Grant had exactly the opposite problem — he couldn’t find employees good enough to hire for his chain of dime stores. But he had his own Big Idea. He realized that if he could discover what successful young men had in common, he could use this to find the best employees.

Nobody could have predicted that Grant’s problem would uncover the secret to how a person can have a happy life.

Grant funded an extensive study of 268 promising Harvard sophomores, which continued through the entire span of their lives. This became known as the Grant Study. Later, it was merged with similar studies of women and blue-collar men, the result being the Harvard Study of Adult Development — a longitudinal (across many years) study of 838 men and women.

It took the work of hundreds of researchers, across over 70 years, to turn the data from all these studies into a definitive answer.

The Secret to What Makes a Happy Life

In one of the 10 best TED talks of all time, Robert Waldinger, the director of the Harvard Study, said that when it comes to happiness throughout life:

“It’s not just the number of friends you have, and it’s not whether or not you’re in a committed relationship, but it’s

the quality of your close relationships

that matters.”

This answer is no longer just somebody’s opinion. It’s the conclusion of researchers analyzing 75 years of data from the lives of over 800 people.

We now have the best available advice on how to be happier as a person: increase the quality of your close relationships. But wait — isn’t your partner one of your close relationships? (And if it isn’t, you want it to be, right?)

You want to be happier with your partner, so the best way to do this is to improve the quality of your relationship with your partner.

As a therapist, I can assure you that doing this is very, very hard. And I promised that “swaying your partner” will be easy.

To get to the starting point that all the Big Ideas then improve upon, we need to change “working harder” into “working smarter”. Fortunately, there is a powerful skill for doing that.

The Skill: Getting More from Less

Who’s rich, who’s poor, and who’s in between? And how many people are at each level?

Vilfredo Pareto was an expert in multiple areas — engineering, economics, sociology — but our interest here is his work on income distribution. In the early 1900s, no economist could answer. Pareto became famous because he answered these questions in a way that surprised his contemporaries — by looking at a lot of numbers.

What he discovered is a rule of thumb that makes it possible for “swaying your partner” to be easy.

His key finding, based on publicly available data on income, was that 20 percent of Englishmen owned 80 percent of the country’s wealth, a finding that Pareto later found to be true in other countries and other situations.

It’s known as the Pareto principle, and it was later named the 80/20 rule. It’s a rule of thumb because people have found it works in many, many situations. The way it’s most often described is “You can get 80 percent of the desired result from 20 percent of the effort”.

The 80/20 rule is actually a rule of thumb — the numbers won’t be exactly 80 and 20. Here are some examples:

• 80 percent of a company’s profits come from 20 percent of its products
• 80 percent of sales come from 20 percent of the salespeople (and for them, 80 percent of their sales come from 20 percent of their customers)
• 80 percent of traffic accidents are caused by 20 percent of all drivers

I sum it up like this:

You can often get a lot, from a lot less

This is the skill we will use to improve your relationship with a lot less work.

The easy thing that couples do every day

A quality relationship — that’s the goal, but how do you get there? Expensive gifts? A luxurious house in the best of neighborhoods? Vacations to exotic destinations half a world away? Fortunately, it’s something else, something that anybody can do.

What then is:

• something that you do with your partner
• something you do often (which gives you more opportunities to improve your relationship)
• Something that’s easy to do and doesn’t take much time?

Talk.

Just talk to your partner.

This is the starting point that we have been looking for: improving your relationship by talking to your partner.

Now let’s start making it better.

Big Idea 1: The Feedback Loop

Why do apples ripen?

A single apple will ripen on its own, but it ripens faster when you put it in a bowl with other apples. Apples on the same tree ripen together. People used to get apples to ripen by putting them in crates (remember those vintage fruit labels?) and putting them in a closed room with a wood fire.

Why do all these help the ripening process?

The answer is ethylene. Apples produce ethylene, which causes the apple to ripen a bit, and this causes the apple to produce more ethylene, which causes the apples to ripen even faster — and this process loops again and again with ever-quickening results.

So ripening apples is an example of a positive feedback loop, which is a dynamic process that happens everywhere:

• In finance, your money grows more than you would think because of compound interest.
• In acoustics, the sound system in an auditorium screeches when too much of the sound finds its way back to the microphone.
• In politics, a small group of people is demonized when one person says something terrible about them, and then more and more people repeat what they’ve heard.

In your relationship, a positive feedback loop looks like this:

You say something to your partner that makes things better, your partner does the same, and the process repeats.

Without a feedback loop, you can’t use talking to grow a happier relationship.

And the same thing happens in relationships — but not always. Why?

Look at the dialog at the beginning of this article; is that a positive feedback loop? Certainly not — it’s what I call a “go-nowhere loop”. What these two people are saying doesn’t make their relationship better.

It’s at this point that we come to a fundamental insight. Sure, you talk to your partner. But if your talk doesn’t doesn’t increase your emotional connection with your partner, then you can use the 80/20 rule to get a lot more (a positive feedback loop) from a lot less — nothing more than changing your talk so that your conversation becomes a positive feedback loop.

Going from the vague “becoming closer as a couple” to the specific “changing how you talk” — already we have a huge improvement:

Realizing that conversations are feedback loops is our first Big Idea. But talking to your partner often goes nowhere.

The question then is how to turn a conversation into a positive feedback loop.

The answer comes from the man that Psychology Today called “the Einstein of Love”.

Therapy, Meet Data

John Gottman’s world turned upside down almost 20 years into his research on how couples interact and how their relationships change over time.

From his first research in 1972, Gottman’s work had gone above and beyond what others had done. All research before 1972 had used self-report questionnaires to gauge happiness in marriage, but these are notoriously unreliable.

Gottman went way beyond those questionnaires. He got millions of objective measurements from a very wide range of marriages — not just white heterosexual couples, but also rich and poor couples, same-sex partners, couples from different racial and ethnic groups, and even more subgroups.

Let’s see how he did it.

A Live Laboratory of Love

In 1986, Gottman built the Love Lab, a nice studio apartment on the campus of the University of Washington. Couples would spend a normal weekend there, bringing whatever they needed to be comfortable — things like groceries, computers, even pets. And the studio came furnished with a full kitchen, furniture, even a television.

Measurements were taken for each couple — three video cameras recorded the couple, clip-on microphones recorded sound, and a small box on each of them captured data on heart function, stress, sweating, breathing, and other body factors.

And these measurements were absolutely essential to Gottman learning how happy couples talked to each other.

After the weekend was over, trained staff meticulously examined the audio and video footage, observing and measuring — at intervals of less than one second — specific observable events, including such things as individual facial and body movements, voice intensity, each person’s movement within the apartment, and much more.

Years passed. The couples’ weekends continued. A tsunami of data was collected and analyzed. And Gottman still didn’t know what mattered and what didn’t.

Gottman: “Boy, was I wrong”

Psychotherapists at that time maintained that the key to a good relationship was soulful disclosures that led to, as Gottman put it, “intense, intimate level[s] of connection”, and this was taken to be absolute fact. Gottman created the Love Lab so he could get the data he needed to prove to “hard science” scientists that this assumption was objectively true.

But he found the exact opposite. In his own words:

Boy, was I wrong! After collecting and viewing hundreds of hours of videotape, [I found out] there were few heart-to-heart exchanges about broken dreams, hidden fears, or unfulfilled sexual desires. Instead, I had endless hours of exchanges like these:

“Get me a cup of coffee, will you, honey?” “Sure, as soon as I turn these pancakes….”

“Here’s a funny comic strip…” “Will you please be quiet? I’m trying to read.”

Let me add a third exchange. (You’ll see why later.)

“You’ll never guess what Ken said on ‘The Masked Singer’!” “Shut up! It’s a stupid program, and you’re stupid for watching it!”

This is when Gottman realized something that demolished a cornerstone of behavioral psychology. He said, “Maybe it’s not the depth of intimacy in conversations that matters. Maybe it doesn’t even matter whether couples agree or disagree…

Maybe the important thing is how these people pay attention to each other, no matter what they’re talking about or doing.”

After about six years of studying his videotapes, Gottman finally found what he was looking for.

Big Idea 2: Gottman’s Bids for Connection

When your partner says something, you always respond. Whatever you say or don’t say is your response. Gottman called whatever one partner says to the other — throughout the entire conversation — a “bid for connection”.

There are three kinds of bids, which I’ll explain through these examples:

• Kyle and Steve have a great relationship. When Kyle talks, Steve listens, often commenting in a way that says “I’m interested in what you have to say.” For example, when Steve asks for a cup of coffee, Kyle replies, “Sure, as soon as I turn these pancakes.” This is called turning toward a bid.
• Carina and Mehar lead busy and separate lives because both of them are driven to succeed. When Carina talks, Mehar’s response makes it clear that their bodies are in the same room, but their relationship isn’t. When Mehar shares something amusing, Carina curt reply is, “Will you please be quiet? I’m trying to read.” This is turning away from a bid.
• René and Yoshi are grimly committed to staying together, largely because their parents want them to. It is a marriage of heated arguments and frigid silences. When Yoshi wants to share what someone on TV said, René explodes with “And you’re stupid for watching it.” This kind of intentional hostility is called turning against a bid.

Now we know exactly what to say — and not say — in a conversation.

Replacing the turning-away and turning-against bids with turning-toward bids is the best way to create a positive feedback loop. The more you can do this, the more you will create the safe and friendly space — what therapist Harville Hendrix calls “the space between” — that you will want to share with each other.

Here’s where we are after adding Big Idea 2:

Unfortunately, there’s a problem with bids.

Why Bids Aren’t the Right Tool for You

Unfortunately, “bids for connection” aren’t right for our situation because for them to work, your partner must know about bids and be motivated to use them — both of which happen only in couples counseling.

Partners who don’t know about bids are more likely to respond to your bids like they usually do, with turning-away bids (“Will you please be quiet? I’m trying to read”) and turning-against bids (“Shut up! Every time you talk, you make me sick!”). When couples counseling is not part of the picture, the technique of “bids for connection” is doomed to fail.

Fortunately (as you will see when we add Big Idea 4), we can modify the concept of bids so that they will work when you are the only person who wants to be happier in your relationship.

But first we have to add Big Idea 3. It adds an additional improvement that is completely separate from the positive feedback of conversations that use a lot of turn-toward bids.

The Man Who Felt Like a Baked Potato

Canadian adventurer George Kourounis really, really wanted to be the first person to collect samples from the Door to Hell. When he descended over 60 feet into this 70-foot-wide crater in Turkmenistan, he was also holding a temperature gauge. As Kourounis put it, “I did feel a bit like a baked potato in there.”

The Door to Hell is actually a crater created in 1971 when a Soviet drilling rig fell through a thin layer of sedimentary rock. Fearing the environmental damage of the escaping natural gas, they set it on fire. This was the approved way of handling oil or natural gas that had gone out of control — doing so had few side effects, and the deposit would simply burn itself out.

But this time it didn’t, and almost 50 years later, the flames are still endangering the surrounding wildlife. Just think of it — something that one person did in a few seconds led to a problem that has done a half-century run of ongoing damage to our atmosphere.

The Door to Hell is just one example of what you already know:

It’s so easy to damage something, and so hard to repair it.

So where does this show up in relationships?

Big Idea 3: Avoiding Mistakes

One of my favorite quotes is from a self-made billionaire who has the best analytical mind I have ever encountered:

It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent. — Charlie Munger

Munger is talking about investing, but his advice applies everywhere. Even the best decisions may not get the results you wanted, but avoiding bad choices is always a win.

Always?

Could relationships be a place where “trying to be consistently not stupid” is not a win?

Why All Relationship Mistakes Are Big Mistakes

Let’s say you forget to pay your credit-card bill. What’s the obvious solution? Pay the bill as soon as you can. It’s easy to do, and that one action makes the problem go away.

What about a mistake you made in your relationship? Doesn’t saying you’re sorry make that problem go away?

No, absolutely not! That’s because making a relationship mistake takes five times as much work just to recover all the ground you’ve lost.

And you may be thinking, “It can’t possibly be that bad.”

Or can it?

Take a moment to recall how much it hurts when your partner yells at you, calls you names, or deliberately ignores your wishes. Human beings are very sensitive — so you can’t fix one relationship mistake with one action or one apology. This is especially true for turning-against bids. If your partner says, “And you’re stupid for watching it!”, even five apologies are not enough to undo all the hurt you feel.

But even a milder turning-away bid — for example “Will you please be quiet? I’m trying to read” — will make you want to get away from your partner. Wanting to isolate yourself makes things worse. As John Gottman says:

“No attention, no connection.”

Here are some research studies that show how bad it is to say certain things to your partner:

• Researcher Barbara Frederickson and others have shown that when you think of something that gets you down, it takes more than you’d think for you to stop feeling bad. But how much more?
• The diagram below shows the results of each of the studies, with each start representing a separate study, and the horizontal axis marking how many positive events are necessary to undo one negative event. For example, in two studies of college students, the answer is a little more than three positive events. In a separate study, for marriages, it’s almost six positive events to undo one negative event. (And why the red zones? Because needing almost no or really a lot of positive events means there’s something really wrong with the relationship.)

• Of course, this is something that Gottman measured too. He found his own “magic ratio” for relationships. According to Gottman:

That “magic ratio” is 5 to 1. This means that for every negative interaction during conflict, a stable and happy marriage has five (or more) positive interactions.

Gottman’s research shows how destructive even the “milder” turning-away bid is. (The ratio would be much worse — more than 10 to 1 — for a “burning your bridges” turning-against bid).

To the power of a feedback loop made positive by turn-toward bids, we have added the power of avoiding irritating and hurtful language when you talk to your partner. This action is incredibly powerful because, without it, you will have to expend a lot of energy just to get back to where you started from (and even more energy to actually improve your relationship). In other words:

Avoiding hurtful talk moves you quicker toward a happier relationship

So now we have three Big Ideas:

The fourth and final Big Idea answers the question, “How can I sway my partner without worrying about them saying something to me that is very hurtful?”

Big Idea 4: Emotional Closeness

Recently I was emailing a company about a defective product, and we had exchanged several messages. Then they started a message with “Thank you for being so patient with us.”

An hour after I responded, my brain prompted me to recall the company’s last email, and I automatically felt positive about them, even though they still hadn’t resolved my problem. Now let’s apply this to our conversational positive feedback loop.

Think about this: would your partner snap at you if you said this?

“You know, I was thinking about you today”

Would they criticize you if you said this?

“Remember that Thai place we went to when we were dating?”

Would they say something that really hurts if you said this to them?

“My love, I am so glad we’re together”

Imagine saying these things sincerely and with good eye contact. How could their reply ever be hurtful?

This is the language of emotional closeness. It persuades with emotion, which is infinitely more powerful to human beings than facts. It reminds your partner of what love felt like when you first met and brings it right into the room, right now.

Here’s what Big Idea 4 adds to the other three Big Ideas.

How to Speak the Language of Emotional Closeness

Every moment of true connection has a story behind it, the story of why you matter to each other and why you want to stay together. This gives you two ways to increase your emotional connection to your partner:

1. Search your mind for moments when you felt close to your partner, then add them to your conversation. This will remind your partner how good your relationship can be.

2. When you create a moment of emotional closeness, remember it and store it in your head so you can use it in the future.

How do you create such moments? Here is a sampling of the many ways it can be done:

• Laugh together. Videos of stand-up comedy are available everywhere. Use what has worked for you in the past.
• Say “yes” whenever you can, and be enthusiastic about it. One of John Gottman’s key pieces of advice to couples is “to accept your partner’s influence”.
• When appropriate, use the pet name or endearing words you have for your partner. (These will strengthen your emotional bond, because only you can talk to them this way.)
• Text or call them to say that you’re thinking about them.
• Revisit places and activities that you both have good memories of.
• Use in-jokes and sentences that have a meaning that only the two of you understand. (For my wife and me, it’s “Oh look, a squirrel.” See? I told you that you wouldn’t understand.)

Another thing you can do is give your partner an honest and unexaggerated compliment — but you must do it in a certain way. Saying “I really like that shirt on you” doesn’t put you in the picture. Instead, compliment your partner in a way that reminds them of a good moment you had together. For example, you can say

“We had such a good time the day I picked this shirt out for you.”

You can prepare for opportunities to do this by daydreaming about your good times together and storing a few details for future use.

Why the 4 Big Ideas Are Important

Whew! Congratulations on making it this far!

In the next section, I’ll describe the full “swaying your partner” technique. But right now I want to summarize each of the four Big Ideas, so that you’ll see what each one contributes to the overall technique:

• 75 years of research says that the quality of your close relationships is your best bet for finding authentic happiness. By using the 80/20 rule, we realized that a good starting place for “swaying your partner” is concentrating on improving how you talk to them.
• Big Idea 1 is that conversation is a feedback loop. But most conversations are “go-nowhere” loops, so we need to make conversation into a positive feedback loop.
• Big Idea 2 is the turning-toward bid for connection. It is the payload that turns a “go-nowhere” loop into a positive feedback loop, which is the only that talking to your partner will improve your relationship.
• Big Idea 3 is that turning-away and turning-against bids are very damaging to your relationship, because they require roughly five turning-toward bids to undo the damage. Avoiding any talk that damages your relationship is a big win.
• Big Idea 4 adds the element of emotional closeness in what you say to your partner. It delivers two benefits. First, it lets you remind your partner of how being with you feels so good (remember, emotions over facts). Second, because you know that your partner won’t respond in an irritating or hurtful way, you are far more likely to continue using the “swaying your partner” technique.

This stack of four Big Ideas gives us what we need for “swaying your partner”.

These are the ingredients. Now — finally — it’s time to learn the recipe.

The Secret of How to “Sway Your Partner”

Question: If John Gottman’s work is all about “bids”, what is “swaying your partner” all about?

Answer: “Swaying your partner” is all about “sway”.

There are three kinds of bids, but only two kinds of sway. “Good sway” is a special form of turn-toward bid: one that also contains emotional closeness. It leads to a better relationship with your partner.

In contrast, bad sway is either a turn-away bid or a turn-against bid — or more simply, anything that isn’t good sway. It leads you further away from a better relationship with your partner.

Now that you know what good sway and bad sway are, I can show you the two rules that define “swaying your partner”:

1. Once or twice a day, say something to your partner that invokes emotional closeness.
2. Avoid saying things that would irritate them or hurt them emotionally.

You will do just fine if you keep the following guidelines in mind:

• You already know what works with your partner, so use these things again.
• Make sure that your good sway focuses on feelings, not facts or logic.
• Look for situations to apply good sway — there are far more than you think.
• When you’re tempted to respond to your partner’s bad sway with some of your own, remember that you cannot afford the penalty of bad sway.

“Swaying your partner” is based on solid research, sound logic, and common sense. It’s doable and it works.

Yes, Your Partner Will Follow

I just changed gyms, and that made me change how I behaved.

Every gym recommends that its members wipe down exercise equipment after they use them. So does my former gym, but nobody does it.

The first time I was at the new gym, I saw that everybody there was wiping down the equipment. I immediately felt bad that I wasn’t doing it (felt, not thought) — and copying their behavior felt good.

Take a moment to recall moments in your life when you changed what you did based on what the people around you did. This is called social contagion, which The Handbook of Social Psychology defines as “the spread of affect or behaviour from one crowd participant to another; one person serves as the stimulus for the imitative actions of another.”

When your partner hears good sway from you, they will begin to see you in a more positive light. Over time, your positive talk will crowd out the default (and often hurtful) talk they reply with. In addition to the effect of social contagion, your partner will want to feel good, so they will say something that will get a positive response from you.

This is why “swaying your partner” will work even when at the beginning, you are the only person using the technique. When you start giving good sway to your partner, they will eventually do the same for you.

The 10-Day “Good Sway” Challenge

Will you invest 10 days to see if good sway will make a positive difference in your relationship?

Once or twice a day:

• Say something like “Guess what popped into my head this morning — that time we _______”.
• Say something that makes your partner laugh.
• Text them to say you’re thinking of them.

Be sure to monitor yourself so that you don’t give them bad sway. You don’t want to lose all the progress you’ve made!

This 10-day challenge will take you about 2 minutes a day — 20 minutes total.

Now, whether or not to take this challenge is entirely your choice.

But if it were me? Betting 20 minutes of my life for the possibility of improving my current relationship — and every other relationship I will ever have in my life — would I give it a try?

Believe me, I’d do it in a minute.

Here’s How It Worked for Me

My wife Becky was just about to leave the house, and I said, “Hold on, I have something I need to tell you.”

“Can it wait? I’m late for my swim class.”

“It’ll just take a moment.”

“Okay, but make it quick.”

I took her face in my hands, and waited until she really saw me in that moment. I said:

“In 23 years of marriage, I can’t believe I’ve never told you this, but you’re the best friend I’ve ever had, and you always will be.”

She was silent for a moment. Then she said,

“Sweetie, thank you. That was definitely worth waiting for.”

When you sway your partner, your relationship improves, and happiness follows.

A man I know was interested in reading my article, and when I told him it was about being happier in your relationship, he said, “Well, I’ve been married for 52 years, so…” I sent it to him anyway — and he emailed me back! Here in its entirety is what he said:

“Really good article, Greg. Nice job. I sent it to [my wife] and to both our sons and their wives.”

I put everything I had into this article. That includes all my training as a therapist and my 24 years in a good marriage.

Would you do me a favor? Go to my Facebook page and share the post I put there about this article. Thank you so much!