Your Romantic Relationships Will Last If You Express Gratitude
By CNN
Remember the last time you fell in love? If you are like many people, you probably found yourself craving the moments with that person — just sitting side by side, sharing laughs over a meal or slipping sex into otherwise busy schedules.
We enjoy the company of the person we love. This preference for time spent with someone we love is not limited to humans — it also shows up in prairie voles and primates. And research shows spending time with a loved partner seems to be good for us.
Years into a relationship, however, many of us feel stable with our partner, and other priorities can compete for our time. We might go back to working late; perhaps kids come into our lives, or we stay up late to finish a favorite TV show rather than going to bed with our partner. But what if we could reignite a motive to draw us closer to our partners, reclaiming those enjoyable stolen minutes?
Decades of research on human behavior suggests it is harder than it sounds. People get into habits, and, despite our best intentions, those habits are hard to change.
The comfort of spending time with a loved one can lead to happier and healthier lives.Rido/Adobe Stock
Recently, my research collaborators and I tried an approach to helping people get more moments with the person they love by working with human nature rather than trying to fight it.
Here’s how.
We thought we could help people express gratitude to their partner when they felt it, and these expressions of gratitude would draw the couples closer by spending more time together. Why gratitude? It’s an emotion that reminds us of what we like about our partners in the first place.
To get there, we developed a brief technique to help people show it. Participants in the study made a plan to express gratitude to their partner when they felt it. (Research in other areas, such as exercise and recycling goals, shows developing a plan helps sidestep willpower, making it more likely we’ll do what we are already motivated to do.)
Critically, this was not a time-intensive session. It was a self-guided exercise that took less than five minutes, one time, for just one member of the couple.
Just making the plan had a positive impact — people in our study realized there were lots of things their partner did for which they felt grateful. They said they were grateful to their partner for things such as rubbing their back, making them laugh, giving them a compliment, listening when something was bothering them, helping when they were sick, spending time with their family, making them a meal and even watching sports together.
In our five-week experiment, we found that this technique worked. The participating couples increased time with their beloved by an estimated 68 minutes per day, on average, compared with those in the control group (who were not encouraged to do anything differently during the five weeks). Expressing gratitude physically drew partners closer together.
We know what they were doing in those minutes over 35 nights because they told us. Couples reported spending significantly more time hanging out together, sleeping in the same bed or simply being in the same room together but doing their own thing, compared with couples in the control group.
