Expressing Gratitude Keeps Our Romantic Love Alive

Editor's Note: Sara Algoe is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is founder and director of The Love Consortium CNN — Remember the last time you fell in love? If you're like a lot of people, you've probably found yourself craving moments with this person — just sitting side by side, sharing laughs over a meal, or slipping sex into otherwise hectic schedules.

We appreciate the company of the person we love This preference for spending time with someone we love isn't limited to humans — it also shows up in prairie voles and primates.

And research shows that 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 with our time.

We could start working late again; maybe kids come into our lives or we stay up late to finish a favorite tv show rather than go to bed with our partner But what if we could revive a motive to get closer to our partners, by recovering these pleasant stolen minutes? Decades of research on human behavior suggest it's harder than it looks.

People form habits and, despite our best intentions, those habits are hard to change Recently my research collaborators and I tried an approach to help people spend more time with the person they love by working with human nature rather than trying to fight it.

Here's how We believed that we could help people express their gratitude to their partner when they felt it, and these expressions of gratitude would bring couples closer together by spending more time together.

Why Gratitude? It's an emotion that reminds us of what we love about our partners in the first place To achieve this, we have developed a brief technique to help people show it.

Study participants planned to express gratitude to their partner when they felt it (Research in other fields, such as exercise and retraining goals, shows that making a plan helps circumvent willpower, making it more likely that we'll do what we're already motivated to do.

) Importantly, this session doesn't didn't take a lot of time It was a self-guided exercise that once took less than five minutes for just one member of the pair.

Just making the plan had a positive impact – people in our study realized there were a lot of things their partner did that they felt grateful for They said they were grateful to their partner for things like rubbing their backs, making them laugh, complimenting them, listening to them when something was bothering them, helping them when they were sick, spending time with family, cook them a meal and even watch sports together.

In our five-week experiment, we found that this technique worked Participating couples increased time spent with their loved one by about 68 minutes per day, on average, compared to those in the control group (who weren't encouraged to do anything differently for the five weeks ).

Expressing gratitude physically brought the partners together We know what they were doing for those minutes for 35 nights because they told us.

Couples reported spending significantly more time together, sleeping in the same bed or just being in the same room together but doing their own thing, compared to couples in the control group Some days it was much more than an hour, and some days much less.

I suspect they slipped into the time when they could, having lunch together one day, coming home on time rather than working late at the office, and sometimes spending an entire day together Gratitude for the things they appreciated in their partner brought them closer together.

And it didn't take hours and weeks of training or learning a whole host of new skills It's just the upward spiral that gratitude has triggered.

What do I mean by upward spiral? Well, just having my partner do something for me doesn't necessarily trigger my gratitude (Sorry, honey!) Research shows that the emotional response is reserved for times when I perceive it has gone beyond.

But when we feel gratitude, this little burst of emotion draws our attention to what we love about our partner and motivates us to show them that we care about them too, often through an expression of gratitude In turn, hearing an expression of gratitude makes the listener feel good about themselves and the relationship.

In a study of romantic couples, these good feelings predicted the likelihood of spontaneously kissing their grateful partner later in my lab! To get this going naturally, we needed people to notice when they felt grateful to their partner in everyday life, and then express their (true) gratitude So we turned to “if-then” planning.

It's a technique that gets people to identify opportunities to do something they already know how to do — like expressing gratitude — and make a brief plan to do it when they have the chance The exercise works toward an easy-to-remember plan: “If my partner does something that I appreciate, then I will express my gratitude.

In day-to-day life, romantic couples are constantly doing things for each other that could be appreciated – there are plenty of opportunities To be sure, we're still tinkering with how to make this work for everyone.

In this study, it worked best for two-thirds of people who were naturally more inclined to express gratitude in their daily lives before making the plan For the other third, we must continue to work.

(There were no downsides, but we have no evidence that this brief task was effective for them ) We're also banking on authenticity.

In my team's first attempt to change relationship outcomes through expressions of gratitude, it was much more complicated for the couples: the two people sat down several times over the course of a month to express their gratitude to face It didn't work, and I suspect it was because we were forcing what had to come naturally.

This study is a small step in this project, but as the first of its kind, it is very promising The joyful comfort of time with a loved one makes our days happier and our lives healthier.

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