Nurture Your Fondness & Admiration

In this edition, we continue our exploration of John Gottman’s renowned book, Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, looking at a simple but profound shift we can make to improve our relationships…

🎯 The Idea In a Nutshell:

• Setting out to strengthen your marriage can feel overwhelming.

• Gottman reminds us of a simple truth that can focus our efforts: Good marriages are built on good friendships.

• Over time, small frustrations and resentments can build up, biasing us to a negative outlook.

• But our friendships can be rekindled through simple, intentional actions designed to nurture a sense of fondness and admiration for our partners.

📝 Diving Deeper

When we think about improving our marriage, we often focus on sweeping changes—overhauling how we communicate, building conflict resolution skills, reconciling differences in our parenting styles, and so on.

But Gottman’s research shows that one of the strongest predictors of a lasting and fulfilling marriage is something far simpler: how we think about our partner.

The stresses of building a life together, especially where children are involved, inevitably bring conflict. Over the years, apathy, frustration, and resentment set in all too easily. If we’re not careful, we begin to see everything through a negative lens. When this happens, we lose sight of all the positive attributes that drew us to our partner in the first place.

The research bears this out. Studies have been conducted where couples interact under observation from a neutral and objective researcher. Afterwards, the couples are asked to watch a recording of the interaction and identify all of the positive interactions. These studies show that unhappy couples overlook a full 50% of the positive interactions that the neutral observer identifies.

In short, we get really good at tuning out the positive.

The good news is that once we’re aware of this tendency, we can take deliberate steps to counteract it. Gottman provides us with some simple ideas to rekindle our sense of fondness and admiration for our partners:

• Nurture positive habits of mind: Several times a day, while you and your partner are separated, deliberately call to mind your partner’s most positive attributes. Keep a list of their merits if you have to. Come back to it regularly.

• Write your partner a note: Tell them what you appreciate about them. Highlight how they make your life better. Retell the story of a fond memory and how it made you feel.

• Go on regular date nights: Get away from the kids. Have a nice dinner. See a movie. Do some silly activity you used to do before children entered the picture

The possibilities are endless. Keep it simple; just be deliberate about it. Nurturing the fondness and admiration that drew you together takes awareness and effort. But it’s not complicated. And according to Gottman, it’s one of the most impactful things you can do to better weather the inevitable storms of marriage.

👉 Why it matters:

• Fondness and admiration are fragile.

• If we don’t remain aware of the key role they play in a thriving marriage, they can easily fall by the wayside.

• Taking small, purposeful actions aimed at cultivating a positive outlook on your partner can have outsized results on improving your relationship.

🤔 Prompts for Reflection

• What are three things you appreciate about your partner that you haven’t vocalized recently?

• What’s one simple habit you can start today to nurture more fondness and admiration in your marriage?

• What’s one happy memory you can recall about your early relationship? What does this memory have to teach you?

Make today impactful,
~Jason