When Relationships Change Fast
Are there relationship tipping points?
This article is a collaboration with the excellent Substack on business relationships, MakeBoardsWork
As I transitioned into parenthood a few years back, I became stuck in negativity in my relationship. I’m not quite sure what all went into it - covid, lack of sleep, new parent stress, or something else - but I was unavoidably crabby to my spouse most of that time period.
While it might be funny in retrospect to make fun of me as the “Crabby Crab” in the relationship, there was nothing amusing about this at the time. I could tell that I was interpreting everything Anna did in the most negative light, and it felt inevitable that this would lead to something worse if I didn’t interrupt the cycle.
Thanks to a conversation with a friend, I realized that something needed to change inside of me, and I did pull out of the downward spiral after a few weeks, almost as if a “magic switch” had been flipped – I’ll share how at the end of this article.
But first, let’s examine the breakthrough itself: a tipping point where I got a big change with small effort. This is the holy grail of relationship work! Remembering this situation made me wonder: is relationship change usually linear or are there tipping points like mine, where things can get dramatically better very quickly? If there are, how can we create more of them?
The Science of Relationship Tipping Points
There is a range of work that supports the notion that having a strong positive-to-negative event ratio indicates strong relationship health. When positive experiences with your partner significantly outnumber negative experiences, that has a good correlation with better long-term relationship satisfaction,1 mental health,2 and heart health.3 These ratios may even relate to how we evolved to interpret the environment and the current loneliness epidemic.4 While the idea of an exact ratio (3:1 being the most common) being a magic tipping point to naturally spiral upwards to better outcomes has been debunked,5 it is still likely that tipping points may exist.
Here’s why: positive experiences aren’t just a reflection of trying to do more nice things, they are a reflection of what we notice. An observational study from 1980 captured this dynamic. Researchers actually visited couples’ homes to observe them over the course of a month, noting beforehand which couples were considered happy and which were unhappy. The study found that unhappy couples were unaware of approximately 50% of the positive things their partner did, whereas happy couples rarely missed these kind gestures.6 Happiness is about perception, not just behavior.
For what it’s worth, ensuing research supported this 1980 study: while happy couples do show somewhat more positive behavior, the larger and more reliable difference lies in perception; happy couples are more likely to notice, remember, and give credit for small positive acts and repair attempts.7
So, how can we get better not just at acting, but at noticing as well? How can we ensure our positive-to-negative ratio stays at a healthy level?
How can I make positivity work for me?
Here’s what I did during my Crabby Crab funk from a few years back: I spent a few minutes each day journaling about different things I appreciated about Anna.8 After three weeks, I started to observe all the good things Anna was doing and got better at reciprocating, making me both a better partner and happier in the relationship. At the deepest level, the journaling helped me to switch from focusing on impact to intent when evaluating my partner’s behavior.9
Here are three other ideas to consider if you feel stuck in negativity:
Build a positivity ritual: Look at ways to make positive moments such as gratitude, future expectations, or affectionate touch a regular part of your life. This could be a short discussion added into a weekly family dinner or date night, morning partings, evening reunions, or any other recurring event in your life.
Name it to tame it: In a tough moment, pause and identify three specific emotions, which has been shown to improve management of negativity,10 and identify one specific cause (“sleep debt,” “deadline pressure”) instead of a global attribution (“my partner’s character”).
Be bold: Consider saying it out loud to your partner if you think you are stuck in a negative mindset. This is a vulnerable and potentially risky move, but it can be a powerful approach to a better relationship if done skillfully. I would approach this as an opportunity to “let go” and use the high-five clearing model.
While there is no magic positivity ratio beyond which everything is ponies and rainbows, there is a deeper principle at play here: it matters just as much how you think about your partner as what they do, and maybe a lot more. Whether committing to increase the positivity in your relationship leads to a “magic switch” in your happiness or just incremental improvement,11 at the core of this process is learning how to mutually cultivate love, appreciation, and respect for each other - what could be more important than that?
John Gottman’s research suggests happy couples maintain a ratio of positive to negative interactions above 5:1 in conflict conversations and below .8:1 for unhappy couples (many of which eventually divorced). This is frequently misrepresented to imply that this is a universal ratio of couples interactions, instead of something that was derived from a very specific situation: a video-taped conflict conversation in their lab.
Gottman, J., & Gottman, J. (2017). The natural principles of love. Journal of Family Theory & Review, 9(1), 7-26.
This is called the Balanced States of Mind (BSOM) Model, and it suggests a ratio of less than 1:1 for individuals with clinical conditions, 2:1 for recovered individuals, and above 4:1 for those who are thriving. Schwartz, R. M., Reynolds III, C. F., Thase, M. E., Frank, E., Fasiczka, A. L., & Haaga, D. A. (2002). Optimal and normal affect balance in psychotherapy of major depression: Evaluation of the balanced states of mind model. Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, 30(4), 439-450.
If you’re looking for some light reading, there’s some really interesting stuff in here about sex differences and coping strategies.
Luque, B., Castillo-Mayén, R., Cuadrado, E., Gutiérrez-Domingo, T., Rubio, S. J., Arenas, A., ... & Tabernero, C. (2020). The role of emotional regulation and affective balance on health perception in cardiovascular disease patients according to sex differences. Journal of Clinical Medicine, 9(10), 3165.
The Evolutionary Theory of Loneliness, in which loneliness is seen as a sign that an individual is in a world of scarcity and danger, and so prosocial behaviors decline and selfish behaviors increase. See: Cacioppo, J. T., & Cacioppo, S. (2018). Loneliness in the Modern Age: An Evolutionary Theory of Loneliness (ETL). In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 58, pp. 127–197). Elsevier.
The first edition of the book Positivity, written by a leading scientist of positive emotions, claimed on the cover that there was a ”3-to-1 Ratio That Will Change Your Life.” The cited scientific paper was subsequently retracted and future editions of the book removed this claim. For the full discussion, see: Friedman, H. L., & Brown, N. J. L. (2018). Implications of debunking the “critical positivity ratio” for humanistic psychology: Introduction to special issue. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 58(3), 239–261.
This was a very small study, but it pointed the way towards later work and is directionally correct: EA Robinson, MG Price. (1980). Pleasurable behavior in marital interaction: An observational study. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.
Just a few examples:
Gottman, J., & Gottman, J. (2017). The natural principles of love. Journal of Family Theory & Review, 9(1), 7-26.
Bradbury, T. N., & Fincham, F. D. (1990). Attributions in marriage: Review and critique. Psychological Bulletin, 107(1), 3–33.
Reis, H. T., & Gable, S. L. (2015). Responsiveness. Current Opinion in Psychology, 1, 67–71.
Gable, S. L., Reis, H. T., Impett, E. A., & Asher, E. R. (2004). What do you do when things go right? The intrapersonal and interpersonal benefits of sharing positive events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87(2), 228–245.
I personally used a tool from the Gottman Institute which I swear by: it’s a seven-week course in cultivating fondness and admiration for your spouse, that only requires spending a few minutes each day answering a short journaling prompt. You can find this online or on pages 81-86 of The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work.
This is sometimes called positive sentiment override: John Gottman has hypothesized that couples move between states of giving each other the benefit of the doubt and assuming positive intent versus judging their partners based on the impact of their behaviors. There is a deeper question here of when we should judge others based on their intent (which is usually positive) to their impact. While on a societal level I think it is an important discussion, I would argue we should always try to assume positive intent and focus on that with our partners (unless there is abusive or otherwise unacceptable behavior).
See: Gottman, J. M., Cole, C., & Cole, D. L. (2019). Negative sentiment override in couples and families. In Encyclopedia of couple and family therapy (pp. 2019–2022). Springer Cham.
Kashdan, T. B., Barrett, L. F., & McKnight, P. E. (2015). Unpacking emotion differentiation: Transforming unpleasant experience by perceiving distinctions in negativity.
Brooke Feeney and Edward Lemay have shown that the reserve of emotional capital a couple has from positive shared experiences changes how reactive they are when challenging situations come up: Feeney, B. C., & Lemay, E. P. (2012). Surviving relationship threats: The role of emotional capital. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(8), 1004–1017.