Why Relationships Matter

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Small bids for connection can determine the health of a relationship even more than big fights.

Early adversity can shape how we make bids, often leading us to make them too unclear or too small to land.

A missed bid can trigger old wounds, making our reaction far bigger than the situation warrants.

Self-awareness—"what got triggered in me just now?"—can transform reaction into reflection and healing.

Most of us have been there: You reach out to someone you love—a touch, a comment, a small shared moment—and it lands in silence. They didn't notice. And something in you cringes.

Understanding why requires us to look beyond the moment itself.

Psychologist John Gottman gave us one of the most useful frameworks in relationship research: the concept of bids for connection. A bid is any attempt to engage with a partner—a touch, a question, a shared observation, even a sigh. Bids can be clear and easy to recognize; they can also be small or subtle, to the point where they may even go unnoticed.

What Gottman found in his research on bids was striking. Happy, stable couples turn toward each other's bids—acknowledging and engaging with them—about 86 percent of the time. He called these couples the Masters. Struggling couples do so only about 33 percent of the time; the rest of the time they either ignore or reject each other's bids. Gottman called these couples the Disasters.

A key takeaway from Gottman’s research on bids is that it's generally not the dramatic fights or the grand gestures that determine the health of a relationship. It's the accumulation of small moments, day after day. Bids shared and received, that deepen intimacy, increasing the couple’s “emotional bank account.” Conversely, bids that are ignored or rejected gradually erode intimacy, turning warmth and........

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