Want to know how to have a healthy relationship with your partner ? Then you’re in the right place.
Most couples don’t break up over one dramatic fight. They drift. A missed “look at this” here, a sarcastic reply there, a few years of being too tired to ask how the other person’s day actually went.
It works in reverse, too. Healthy relationships are built in small, boring, repeatable moments, and relationship scientists have spent decades filming, surveying and following couples to work out which moments matter most.
This guide pulls that research together into 12 habits you can start this week. None of them require a weekend retreat or a personality transplant. Some will feel obvious. A couple of them might surprise you. And if you’ve ever wondered what true love really is once the early rush fades, a lot of the answer lives in the habits below.
1. Notice the small bids for attention
In 1986, psychologist John Gottman set up what reporters nicknamed the “Love Lab” at the University of Washington in Seattle: a studio apartment fitted with cameras, where couples spent ordinary hours cooking, chatting, reading the paper and occasionally bickering. Through the 1980s and 1990s, with funding from the National Institute of Mental Health, his team watched what happened between partners when nothing much was happening at all.
What they kept seeing were “bids.” A bid is any small attempt to connect. “Wow, look at that bird.” A sigh. A hand on the shoulder. The partner can turn toward it (respond, even briefly), turn away (ignore it) or turn against it (snap).
Those tiny reactions turned out to be anything but tiny. According to the Gottman Institute, when the newlyweds were followed up six years later, couples who were still married had turned toward each other’s bids 86% of the time. Couples who had divorced averaged 33%. That’s an observational finding, so it can’t prove that ignoring bids causes divorce. Still, the gap is hard to ignore.
Turning toward someone is a form of everyday empathy that makes people feel understood. It doesn’t need to be big. Looking up from your phone counts.
Your move: for the next three days, count how often your partner reaches for your attention. You’ll probably be surprised how many bids you’ve been missing.
2. Get excited when they share good news
We tend to think the real test of a partner is how they act when things go wrong. Research from Shelly Gable and colleagues suggests the opposite moment matters just as much.
In Gable, Reis, Impett and Asher’s 2004 study on sharing good news, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the researchers looked at how partners reacted when one of them shared something positive. Across four studies, including 59 dating couples and 89 married couples, people who saw their partner as responding with active, enthusiastic interest reported more intimacy, trust and satisfaction. Quiet, lukewarm support (“That’s nice, dear”) was linked to lower relationship quality, which surprised even the authors. Dismissive or deflating replies did worse still. The data are correlational, so happy couples may simply respond more warmly to begin with. Even so, the pattern held across very different samples.
Say your partner comes home and mentions their manager praised a report. One reply is “Cool. What’s for dinner?” Another is “Wait, what did she say exactly? You’ve been grinding on that for weeks.” Same evening, very different message.
Asking a follow-up question is a basic skill of having a good conversation with anyone, and your partner deserves it more than most people.
Next time, do this: when they share a win, ask two questions about it before you say anything about yourself.
3. Start hard conversations softly
How you open a difficult talk shapes almost everything that follows.
Gottman and Robert Levenson tracked 79 couples from Bloomington, Indiana, for 14 years, starting in 1983. By the end, 22 couples (about 28%) had divorced. Their analysis, published in the Journal of Marriage and the Family in 2000, found two distinct paths. Couples who divorced early, around seven years in, showed high levels of criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling during conflict. Couples who divorced later, closer to 14 years in, didn’t fight that badly. What they lacked was warmth: very little laughter, affection or interest in each other.
So there’s a double lesson here. Hostile fights wear a relationship down fast, and cold politeness wears it down slowly.
In a 2024 interview with Greater Good magazine, Gottman said the first three minutes of a conflict set its course in most cases. A “harsh startup,” one that opens with blame, puts the other person on the defensive before they’ve heard your actual point. A softer opening describes what happened, how you feel and what you need. “I’m stressed about the bills piling up and I’d love us to sit down with them on Sunday” lands very differently from “You never deal with money.”
If you live with someone whose temper flares easily, some of the techniques for dealing with angry people apply at home too. The simplest version, though, is to rewrite your opening line in your head before you say it out loud, swapping “you always” for “I feel” and a concrete request.
4. Take a real break when you’re flooded
Ever said something mid-argument that you’d never say calm? Blame your body at least as much as your character.
The Gottman Institute describes the chain of events like this. A fight feels threatening, so the body releases stress hormones. Your heart rate climbs, on average above 100 beats per minute (around 85 for very fit people), and breathing and muscle tension change. Julie Gottman calls the result “tunnel vision, tunnel hearing”: you literally process less of what your partner says. And because you can’t take in new information, you fall back on attack or defense. The argument escalates, which keeps the stress response running.
Breaking that loop takes time. According to the Gottman Institute, stress hormones need roughly 20 minutes on average to clear, so a 30-second pause won’t do it. The advice is a break of at least 20 minutes, with a clear time to come back, and no more than 24 hours. During the break, do something that genuinely distracts you: a walk, music, a few pages of a book. Replaying the fight in your head, or texting a friend about it, keeps your body on alert.
This is mostly expert guidance drawn from lab observation, not a controlled trial of timeouts. But the mechanism behind it, that high arousal shrinks your ability to think clearly, is well described.
Start small: agree on a code word before your next fight. When either of you says it, you both stop, name a time to return, and go calm your nervous system separately.
5. Say thank you for ordinary things
Thanking your partner for remembering your birthday is easy. Thanking them for taking out the recycling feels slightly silly. Do it anyway.
In a 2010 study in Personal Relationships, Sara Algoe, Shelly Gable and Natalya Maisel followed more than 65 couples in committed relationships and tracked daily ups and downs in how satisfied and connected each partner felt. On days when people felt grateful for something their partner did, they felt more connected and more satisfied, and the effect showed up the following day too. The authors called gratitude a “booster shot” for relationships. Interestingly, feeling indebted (the sense that you now owe them one) didn’t have the same benefit.
The distinction matters. Gratitude says “I noticed you.” Indebtedness says “I’m keeping score.”
A thank-you also trains your own attention. If you’re working on thinking more positively every day, your relationship is a good place to practise.
Test it this week: once a day, thank your partner for something specific and unglamorous. “Thanks for making the coffee before I got up” beats a generic “you’re the best.”
6. Do something new together
Think of a long relationship like a favourite song on repeat. You still love it, but after the 400th play you stop actually hearing it. Something new (a remix, a live version, hearing it with a friend) makes you listen again. The comparison only goes so far, of course. A partner isn’t a playlist, and you can’t swap them out for something fresh.
But the core idea has real research behind it. In a 2000 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Arthur Aron and colleagues reported that couples who tackled a novel, mildly challenging task together in the lab rated their relationship quality higher afterward than couples given a dull, routine task. Aron’s explanation is called the self-expansion model. New experiences make you feel like you’re growing, and when you grow alongside your partner, some of that excitement seems to attach to the relationship itself. It’s lab research with short-term measures, so nobody can promise that a pottery class will save a marriage.
“New” doesn’t have to mean skydiving. It means unfamiliar to both of you. A cooking class, a hiking route you’ve never tried, a ridiculous board game. Laughing at yourselves while you’re bad at something is part of the point, and a shared sense of humor tends to grow out of exactly these moments.
A quick experiment: replace one standard date this month with something neither of you has done before. Pay attention to how you talk about it afterward.
7. Split the invisible work at home fairly
Romance gets the attention. The dishwasher gets the resentment.
When the Pew Research Center surveyed American adults for its 2007 report Modern Marriage, it asked which things were “very important” for a successful marriage. Faithfulness came first at 93%, followed by a happy sexual relationship at 70%. Third place went to sharing household chores, at 62%, ahead of adequate income, good housing, shared religious beliefs and even having children.
| What makes a marriage work (Pew, 2007) | Rated “very important” |
|---|---|
| Faithfulness | 93% |
| Happy sexual relationship | 70% |
| Sharing household chores | 62% |
That’s a survey of opinions, not a measure of outcomes. But it tells you something useful: a lot of people care about fairness at home far more than they say out loud during an ordinary week.
The tricky part is the “invisible” work. Booking the dentist, remembering that the kids need costumes for Friday, noticing that you’re out of washing-up liquid. That planning load often lands on one person by default. Fairness doesn’t have to mean a perfect 50/50 split, but it does mean both of you can see the whole list. Once tasks are divided, follow through. Reliability on small jobs builds trust in the same way keeping a promise does anywhere else. Sit down together this weekend and write out every recurring task, including the mental ones, then decide who owns what.
8. Touch more, and not just in the bedroom
Physical affection does more than feel nice. It seems to change how your body handles stress.
Sheldon Cohen and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University published a study in Psychological Science (2015) that sounds a little unusual. They interviewed 404 healthy adults by phone every evening for 14 days, asking about conflicts and whether they’d been hugged that day. Then they quarantined the participants and exposed them to a common cold virus. Cohen’s 2015 hugging study found that frequent tension predicted a higher chance of infection, but only among people with less social support or fewer hugs. Hugging accounted for about 32% of the protective effect of feeling supported. Among those who got infected, more frequent hugs went with milder signs of illness. The authors note the design is correlational, and hugs may partly be a marker of a supportive life rather than a cause on their own.
Partner touch seems to be especially powerful. In James Coan’s 2006 study at the University of Virginia, 16 married women faced the threat of a mild electric shock inside an fMRI scanner. Holding their husband’s hand calmed the brain’s threat response far more than holding a stranger’s hand, and the effect was strongest in the happiest marriages. It’s a tiny sample, so treat it as a promising signal rather than settled fact.
Here’s a simple way in: build touch into transitions. A real hug (not a pat) when one of you leaves or comes home, a hand on the back while you pass in the kitchen. Small, frequent, unremarkable.
9. Keep a life outside the relationship
There’s a modern expectation that your partner should be your best friend, your lover, your career coach, your therapist and your favourite person to watch TV with. All at once. Every day.
Eli Finkel, a social psychologist who runs the Relationships and Motivation Lab at Northwestern University, explored this in his 2017 book The All-or-Nothing Marriage. His argument is that couples now ask marriage to do far more than it used to. We expect a spouse to help us grow and find meaning, on top of love and companionship. When that works, marriages can be better than ever. When it doesn’t, he warns, lofty expectations can tip into disappointment and resentment.
One practical takeaway: don’t route every single need through one person. Friends, family, hobbies and time on your own take some of the weight off. They also give you something new to bring back to the relationship. If spending time by yourself feels uncomfortable, learning how to enjoy being alone is a surprisingly good investment in your relationship.
Give it a go: pick one need you usually lean on your partner for (venting about work, say) and share it with a friend this week instead. Then notice whether your evenings together feel lighter.
10. Treat your relationship like your health, because it is
In 1938, researchers at Harvard began following 268 sophomores, hoping to understand what makes people thrive. That project, now called the Harvard Study of Adult Development, was later joined by a study of 456 people from inner-city Boston, and it has kept going for more than eight decades. It’s one of the longest studies of adult life ever run.
Its current director, psychiatrist Robert Waldinger of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, told the Harvard Gazette in 2017 that the people most satisfied with their relationships at 50 turned out to be the healthiest at 80. The study also found that among octogenarians in happy marriages, days with more physical pain didn’t drag their mood down the way it did for people in unhappy marriages. As George Vaillant, a former director, put it: “relationships, relationships, relationships.” These are long-term observational findings, not experiments, and the original sample was all men. But few data sets follow people for that long.
If that’s true, the relationship deserves the same planned attention you’d give exercise or sleep, rather than whatever energy is left after work. Couples who do well tend to have rituals: a weekly walk, a phone-free dinner, ten minutes on the sofa before bed to actually talk. It’s one of those good habits to have that pays off decades later. Put one recurring couple ritual in your shared calendar tonight and protect it like a doctor’s appointment.
11. Apologise without a “but”
Everyone messes up. The repair is what counts, and most of us are worse at it than we think.
Psychologist Harriet Lerner, author of Why Won’t You Apologize? Healing Big Betrayals and Everyday Hurts, has spent years on exactly this. Talking to NPR in 2021, she said that a “but” almost always signals a rationalization, a criticism or an excuse. “I’m sorry I snapped, but you were being really annoying” isn’t an apology. It’s a second attack wearing a costume.
Lerner also argues for keeping apologies short. A long, emotional apology shifts attention back onto the person who did the hurting. What helps more is listening, with the aim of understanding what the hurt person needs you to grasp rather than hunting for the parts you disagree with. That takes the ability to see things from a different point of view even when you feel defensive.
Next time you mess up: say what you did, acknowledge how it landed, and stop. No “but.” No speech. Then ask what would help.
12. Get help early, not as a last resort
Many couples treat counselling like an emergency room, somewhere to go once things are already critical. By then, a lot of damage has set in.
There’s solid evidence that structured help can make a measurable difference. Researchers led by psychologist Scott Stanley ran a randomized controlled trial with 662 married couples in the US Army. Half were offered PREP, a relationship education programme run by Army chaplains that teaches communication and conflict skills. The results, published in Family Relations in 2014, were mixed but notable. At the larger, higher-risk site, 8.1% of couples who were offered the programme had divorced two years later, compared with 14.9% in the control group. At the smaller site there was no difference, and gains in self-reported relationship quality had faded by two years. Two of the authors also co-own a business that sells relationship education materials, which the paper discloses.
The honest summary, then: a chaplain-led skills course nearly halved divorces among one group of higher-risk couples and showed no measurable effect in another. For a fairly light intervention, I’d still call that worth knowing about.
Timing seems to matter too. Writing on the Gottman Institute blog in 2015, therapist Terry Gaspard noted Gottman’s estimate that couples wait an average of six years of unhappiness before getting help. That’s six years of habits hardening.
One caveat. Counselling and skills courses are built for ordinary conflict. If you’re dealing with control, intimidation or someone twisting your sense of reality, that’s not a communication problem and needs a different kind of support. The same goes for recovering from an affair, where it helps to know how to deal with betrayal in a relationship before deciding anything.
Your move: if you’ve had the same fight for more than a few months, look up a couples course or therapist near you this week. Going while you still like each other is the point.
What to do when you slip
You will slip. You’ll snap after a bad day, forget to ask about the job interview, spend a whole week turning away from every bid. That’s normal, and it doesn’t undo what you’ve built.
It helps to know that a lot of conflict isn’t meant to be solved. According to John and Julie Gottman, writing in Psychotherapy Networker in 2024, about 69% of couples’ problems are perpetual. They come from lasting differences in personality or needs, like one person being tidier or more social than the other. Healthy couples don’t eliminate these. They learn to talk about them with humour and without contempt.
How you treat yourself after a slip matters as well. In a study of 104 couples, published in Self and Identity (online in 2012), Kristin Neff and Tasha Beretvas at the University of Texas at Austin found that people who were more self-compassionate were described by their partners as more affectionate, accepting and supportive of their partner’s independence. People low in self-compassion were described as more controlling, detached and verbally aggressive. It’s a correlational study, but it fits a simple logic: if you beat yourself up after every mistake, you’ve got less patience left for anyone else.
So when you get it wrong, skip the self-punishment. Name what happened, make the repair from habit 11, and go back to the small stuff. One rough evening is just data, and turning a bad day around is a skill you can practise like any other.
Final thoughts
If there’s a single thread running through all this research, it’s that healthy relationships are made of small, repeated choices. Turning toward a bid. Asking one more question about good news. Opening a hard talk gently, hugging properly, saying thanks for the recycling.
You don’t need to adopt all twelve habits at once. Pick the two that made you wince a little while reading, since those are probably the ones that matter most for you right now, and practise them for a month.
Want more practical guides on love, conflict and connection? Browse the Relationships section and pick the next habit to work on together.
