with forever, the next question is: How do you achieve happily ever
after?
According to mathematician Hannah Fry, it may come down to a simple formula.
Fry, who works at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis in
London, explains in her 2014 TED Talk and recently released book, "
The Mathematics of Love ," that the best predictor of long-lasting
relationships is how positive and negative a couple can be to one
another.
In her book, she discusses the groundbreaking work of psychologist
John Gottman and his team. Over many years they observed hundreds of
couples and noted their facial expressions, heart rates, blood
pressure, skin conductivity, and the words they used in conversation
with their partners.
They discovered low-risk couples have more positive interactions
with each other, and high-risk couples tend to spiral into
negativity.
As Fry puts it, "In relationships where both partners consider
themselves as happy, bad behavior is dismissed as unusual." For
example, a wife might assume her husband's grumpiness is due to
stress at work or a bad night's sleep.
"In negative relationships, however, the situation is reversed,"
writes Fry. "Bad behavior is considered the norm." A husband, for
instance, might think his wife's grumpiness is "typical," due to her
"selfishness" or other negative personality trait.
Gottman then teamed up with mathematician James Murray, and they began
to understand how these spirals of negativity happen. They came up
with the below equations, which predict how positive or negative a
husband and wife will be at the next point in their conversation.
As Fry explains, the model is framed as husband and wife but also
applies to same-sex spouses and unmarried couples in long-term
relationships.
The wife's equation is the top line, the husband's the bottom, and it
solves for how positive or negative the next thing they say will be.
In hers,wstands for her mood in general, rwWtrepresents her mood when
she's with her husband, and IHWshows how the husband's actions
influence her. The husband's follows the same pattern.
Gottman and Murray found that the influence a couple has on each other
is the most important factor. If a husband says something positive,
like agrees with his wife or makes a joke, the wife will likely react
positively in turn. Meanwhile, if he does something negative, like
interrupts her or dismisses something she's said, she will likely be
negatively impacted.
The "negativity threshold" pinpoints when the wife becomes so
frustrated by her husband that she responds very negatively.
Interestingly, Fry says she would have imagined that the best
relationships would have a high negativity threshold, meaning they'd
be focused on compromise and would bring up an issue only if it was
"a really big deal." But in fact, the opposite is true.
"The most successful relationships are the ones with a really low
negativity threshold," writes Fry. "In those relationships, couples
allow each other to complain, and work together to constantly repair
the tiny issues between them. In such a case, couples don't bottle
up their feelings, and little things don't end up being blown
completely out of proportion."
Happy couples, then, tend to have more positive interactions than
negative ones, and thus are more likely to give each other the
benefit of a doubt. When there is an issue, they're more likely to
bring it up quickly, fix it, and move on.
"Mathematics leaves us with a positive message for our
relationships," Fry says, "reinforcing the age-old wisdom that you
really shouldn't let the sun go down on your anger."
No comments:
Post a Comment