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The Unspoken Grammar of Love

John Gottman, one of the country's leading relationship experts and founder—alongside his wife, the esteemed psychologist Julie Gottman—of the famed Gottman Institute, has spent decades studying the architecture of romantic breakdowns.

But he didn't set out to do that.

Born in 1942 to Orthodox Jewish parents in Brooklyn, he originally studied mathematics at MIT, drawn to the clean logic of equations. Still, the question he’d spend his life trying to answer tugged him elsewhere: Why do some couples make it while others don't?

By the 1970s, Gottman had pivoted to psychology. Alongside psychologist Robert W Levenson, he created the Love Lab—an apartment outfitted with cameras, microphones, and biometric sensors—where real couples lived for a weekend as researchers observed every micro-expression, gesture and interaction.

Gottman and his team coded these interactions with mathematical precision, tracking heart rates, stress hormones, and the exact words couples used when they fought about money or sex or whose turn it was to take out the trash.

What he discovered was revolutionary: Love follows patterns. And patterns can be studied.

Gottman eventually became famous for predicting divorce with eerily high accuracy—93.6%. But his most important finding wasn't about fighting styles or love languages. It was about the smallest, most easily missed behaviors between people: a raised eyebrow, a sigh, a passing comment.

Because hidden inside these everyday exchanges is a secret system—one that determines whether a relationship strengthens over time or begins to decay. It's something far more mundane and far more profound: how couples responded to each other's smallest attempts at connection.

That’s right—the most predictive factor in relationship success isn't compatibility or shared interests or even great sex; they’re bids for connection.

Bids happen all day long and the way we respond—or fail to—turns out to be one of the best predictors of whether a relationship survives.

The couples who stayed together responded one way 86% of the time. The couples who divorced responded that same way only 33% of the time.

Yet, most of us don't know what our partner's bids even look like. More chilling: we don't even know what ours are.

Once we know, we can begin to understand what's really happening in these moments and what makes meeting them in the right ways powerful enough to save your marriage or relationship.

But what are bids for connection? And how do we meet them and get ours met?

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