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: small bids for connection. It’s the central idea of his book The Relationship Cure (2001), written with Joan DeClaire, and one of the principles in The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work.

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, but 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 is 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, but 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 those who ended up separating. The most widely circulated figure comes from a newlywed follow-up publicized by the Gottman Institute itself: six years after the wedding, couples who were still together had turned toward each other’s bids in the lab around 86% of the time; those who had divorced, around 33%.

Those figures are best read with two caveats. They come from the team’s own communications, and we haven’t found a peer-reviewed paper detailing them; and, like any observational data, they show an association, not that turning toward each other is what makes a relationship last.

There is a published study on the importance of these small moments. Janice Driver and John Gottman (2004) observed 49 newlywed couples during a ten-minute dinner in the lab and, separately, during a fifteen-minute argument. Couples with more playfulness and enthusiasm in everyday moments showed more humor and affection during conflict. The authors stress that the design is correlational and that more research is needed to know which way the effect runs.

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 in which to seek that attention.

When, instead, their bids are repeatedly ignored or met with hostility, the person tends to make them less often, 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 still live together but exchange fewer and fewer of these small gestures, a pattern Gottman links to the gradual erosion of the 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 gazing 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, makes it possible to tell fairly reliably which couples will stay together and which won’t: in the relationships he classifies as stable, this kind of brief, seemingly trivial exchange happens constantly; in those 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 partner 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, if only briefly, to their partner saying they 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 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 are expressed through the body: you can read more in our article on physical touch as a love language. If you want to check how many of these bids you notice in your own day-to-day, we have a dedicated quiz: do I notice my partner’s bids for connection?

Sources

• Driver, J. L. and Gottman, J. M. (2004). Daily marital interactions and positive affect during marital conflict among newlywed couples. Family Process, 43(3), 301-314. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1545-5300.2004.00024.x
• Gottman, J. M. and DeClaire, J. (2001). The Relationship Cure. Crown.
• Gottman, J. M. and Silver, N. (1999). The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Crown.
• The Gottman Institute. Turn toward instead of away. https://www.gottman.com/blog/turn-toward-instead-of-away/