What Are Gottman's 'Bids for Connection'?

Within his research on couples at the University of Washington’s “Love Lab,” John Gottman noticed something that happens dozens of times a day in any relationship and that, according to his analysis, predicts long-term stability better than any exceptional romantic gesture: the small bids for connection. A bid for connection can be almost anything: a comment about something just noticed, a glance seeking the other person’s, a trivial question, a “look at this” while pointing out the window. What defines a bid for connection isn’t its content, it’s its function: it’s a request, almost always implicit, for attention or company in that specific moment.

Three ways to respond to a bid for connection

Gottman identifies three possible responses to one of these bids, and argues that the ratio between them, accumulated over time, is one of the most reliable indicators of how a relationship is doing:

1. Turning toward the bid: responding with real attention, even briefly. Looking at what the other person is pointing at, answering the trivial question, holding eye contact a second longer than strictly necessary. This is the response Gottman links to stable relationships.
2. Turning away from the bid: not responding, or responding so minimally it amounts to ignoring it. It isn’t necessarily hostile, often it’s just distraction or a lack of attention, but the cumulative effect is the same: whoever made the bid didn’t get the response they were looking for.
3. Turning against the bid: responding with irritation, sarcasm, or belligerence to what was, in most cases, an innocuous gesture. It’s the least frequent of the three responses, but also the most costly for whoever’s on the receiving end.

Why quantity matters more than intensity

One of the findings Gottman emphasizes about this mechanism is that most of a couple’s life is made up of these small bids, not grand declarations or exceptional gestures. A relationship can rack up dozens of bids for connection in a single day: offhand comments over dinner, a glance while doing a household chore, a passing question about how someone’s day went. A special anniversary or a dream trip happens, at most, a few times a year. The relative weight, according to his research, clearly tilts toward the small everyday bids, simply because there are so many more of them to work with.

This has a direct implication: according to Gottman, what sets a stable couple apart from one that wears down over time isn’t the absence of bids for connection, both generate them constantly, it’s the percentage of those bids the couple answers by turning toward each other instead of turning away or responding with hostility. The couples he classifies as stable in his research showed a noticeably higher rate of “turning toward” than the ones who ended up separating.

A self-reinforcing mechanism

Gottman also describes how this pattern tends to feed on itself over time. When a person consistently gets a response to their bids for connection, they tend to keep making them at the same rate, and to read the relationship overall as a safe space to seek that attention. When, instead, their bids are repeatedly ignored or met with hostility, the person tends to reduce how often they make them, not because they stop needing connection, but because they’ve learned that asking for it in that particular context usually doesn’t get a response. Over time, this can turn into a relationship where both people are still living together but exchanging fewer and fewer of these small gestures, a pattern Gottman links to the gradual erosion of emotional connection between them.

Why the most boring moments in the lab are the most revealing

Gottman recounts that, of all the hours of footage accumulated in his lab, the scenes that interest him most as a researcher are precisely the ones that would interest anyone else the least: a husband commenting “look at that boat” while looking out the window, and his wife glancing up for a second from the magazine she’s reading to say something about a similar boat they saw the summer before. There’s no dramatic revelation in that exchange, but it’s exactly the kind of moment that, according to him, allows fairly reliable prediction of which couples will stay together and which won’t: in relationships he classifies as stable, this kind of brief, seemingly trivial exchange happens constantly; in the ones that end up separating or living together unhappily, the wife often doesn’t even look up from the magazine, and if she does, the husband doesn’t acknowledge the comment in any way.

Gottman also points out something similar about the popular idea of romantic passion, which he largely attributes to an image cultivated by film: real romance, he argues, isn’t fed by exceptional gestures but by a much more ordinary kind of attention spread throughout the day. He gives deliberately unglamorous examples: a couple at the grocery store responding with real interest to as mundane a question as whether they’re out of bleach at home, instead of shrugging it off with indifference; someone taking a minute out of their workday to leave an encouraging message for their partner because they know it’s been a rough day; someone who, even in a hurry to leave the house, stops to listen, even briefly, that their partner had a nightmare the night before, instead of brushing it off for lack of time. In all three cases, according to Gottman, what’s at stake is the exact same small decision: turning toward the other person or away from them, repeated hundreds of times over the course of a relationship.

This concept connects directly with the physical touch love language, where many of these bids for connection get expressed through the body: you can read more in our article on physical touch as a love language.