Want to Improve Your Relationship? Start Paying More Attention to Bids

The waiter appeared at our table again, this time offering a basket full of bread rolls just pulled from the oven. I picked out my third piece of the night, and carved out a heap of cultured butter, flecked with sea salt.  

“What have you been up to at work?” I asked my boyfriend Scott.

This was last June. We were at a corner table at a Michelin-star restaurant in New York. We’d been dating for three years, and living together in San Francisco for a little over a year. I’d temporarily moved to New York to participate in the four-month TED Residency. He’d surprised me with this dinner to celebrate the end of the program.

It was a grand gesture, and one I appreciated, because we were not doing well.

Our relationship had been shaky since January, turned upside down by several big changes in my life. After almost a decade in the corporate world, I’d quit my job to pursue my passion. I’d gone from earning a tech salary to earning no salary, and from working in an office with thousands of people to working alone at home.

We’d had several long, difficult conversations over the past few months. I told him what I needed from him and the relationship. I stated my values that I felt weren’t being met (community, friends, travel) and asked him if he could meet me halfway. We even went to a terrible couples therapist. He quoted his own Facebook posts to us and suggested that we, neurotic Jews, should start doing extreme sports together to reconnect. Ironically, we bonded over our mutual dislike of him.

During one of those difficult conversations, Scott mentioned that I never seemed to listen to him when he talked about work.

“You think what I do is boring,” he said. “It’s not. We’re trying to help save women’s lives by improving breast cancer screening.”

He was right. I never really understood what he did. I worked in tech but I’m not a particularly technical person. I could barely work my DSLR camera. When people asked me about my boyfriend’s job in artificial intelligence at Google, I replied with a word salad of “machine learning,” “computer vision,” and “medical imaging,” until they nodded sympathetically and the conversation moved on.

Finally, the four months of long-distance were over. Scott had flown across the country to see my TED talk, which focused on romantic relationships. I work as a dating coach and researcher, studying ways we can make better decisions in our love lives. The irony wasn’t lost on me that I was helping others create lasting love while my own relationship faltered. There, at that corner table at that fancy restaurant, I finally decided to learn what my boyfriend did for a living.

He provided the basics of his job—what he does and why it’s different from traditional radiology. When I asked more questions, he explained that mammograms consist of four pictures—one of each breast from above and from the side. Radiologists usually look all four images together to look for cancer, but Scott’s artificial intelligence team only looked at the two images from each breast, not the pair.

I began to ask him what the radiologists gained from looking at the four together, which the machine learning algorithms were missing out on.

“Sometimes a pattern appears in both breasts in the same place, which makes it less likely to be malignant,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “So why don’t you train the model to take one set of images and compare it to the other to see if it’s symmetrical? Then you can rule out cancer if it is.”

“How would you do that?”

“Take one set, flip it, and put it on top of the other.”

He put down his forkful of “foraged seaweed” and stared at me in disbelief.

“What?” I said.

“Wow, I’m just so impressed. That exact idea was used by one of the most competitive entries in a recent machine learning competition.”

I sat there, proudly listening to him explain the intricacies of his role on the mammography team. I felt connected to him, wondering why I’d never cared to ask him about his work before. I felt he too was seeing me in a new light, pleased with my newfound interest in his job.

I realized how much I’d asked him to change for our relationship, without being willing to put in the work myself.

And I knew this was the work. The paying attention, the asking questions, the listening. I knew this because of innovative research conducted by John Gottman, one of my relationship science heroes. Earlier that spring, I made a video with The Gottman Institute about “bids,” which are attempts a person makes to connect with their partner.

Gottman’s groundbreaking ideas about bids were born from his 40-year-long quest to answer one question: What separates the relationship masters from the relationship disasters?

He conducted this research with his colleague Robert Levenson at the University of Washington. He brought couples into an observation facility, dubbed the Love Lab by the media, and recorded them discussing their relationship. He asked them to share the story of how they met and then to recount a recent fight. He even had some couples spend a week in an apartment decked out with cameras (with their permission) to see how they interacted during everyday moments.

Six years later, the researchers followed up with the couples and divided them into two camps: the masters, couples who were still happily married, and disasters, couples who had either broken up or remained together but were unhappy.

When he studied the tapes of these two types of couples, he looked for differences in the content of their conversations. What did the masters discuss that the disasters didn’t?

In his book “The Relationship Cure“, Gottman writes, “But after many months of watching these tapes with my students, it dawned on me. Maybe it’s not the depth of intimacy in conversations that matters. Maybe it doesn’t even matter whether couples agree or disagree. Maybe the important thing is how these people pay attention to each other, no matter what they’re talking about or doing.”

Simply put, successful couples are attentive. They listen, and they put their phones down when the other person wants to chat.

This research led Gottman to develop one of the core tenets of his philosophy for building successful relationships: healthy couples constantly make and accept bids to connect.