Love 2.0 (11 page)

The glue that positivity resonance offers isn’t just for connecting once-strangers at the start of new relationships. It also further cements long-standing ties, making them even more secure and satisfying. Art and Elaine, a married couple living in Long Island, New York, learned this fact in a surprising way. They saw a poster in town recruiting couples to join a study on the “factors that affect relationships.” Motivated more by curiosity than the promised thirty dollars, they called to sign up. They got more curious when the person on the phone asked them about a range of medical conditions that might prevent them from engaging in physical or aerobic activity. Their curiosity rose still higher when they met the researcher at the designated lab room on campus. It was set up more like a gymnastics room, with a large gymnasium mat rolled out across the floor, covering about thirty feet. Halfway down the mat, another fat mat was rolled up like a barricade, about three feet high. As part of the study, the researcher asked Art and Elaine to complete surveys and discuss a few topics together, like their next vacation and a future home improvement project, which she videotaped for later analysis. These tasks seemed simple enough and not altogether unexpected in a study of relationships. Yet they were flabbergasted when the researcher directed them to their next task. Indeed, their curiosity about the room setup erupted into outright chuckles of disbelief as the researcher used Velcro bands to tie Art’s and Elaine’s wrists and ankles together. She told them that their task was to crawl on their hands and knees as fast as they could to the far end of the mat and back, clearing the barrier in each direction. All the while, they’d need to hold a cylinder-shaped pillow off the floor without using their hands, arms, or teeth. If they could complete this absurd task in less than a minute, she told them, they’d win a bag of candy, something she said few couples before them had done.

It didn’t take long for Art and Elaine to discover that they could only hold the pillow up by pressing it between their torsos, which made their bound-crawling all the more challenging. The whole event was
hilarious. They toppled over several times, laughing uncontrollably. By their third attempt, they finally got their limbs into sync. They beat the clock and won the prize—all smiles and (once unbound) high fives!

It turned out that other couples who’d signed up for the study didn’t have nearly as much fun as did Elaine and Art. By the flip of a coin, some couples got the same silly crawling assignment they did, whereas other couples were assigned to a far more mundane and slow-paced crawling task: Never bound by Velcro, each member of these couples took turns crawling very slowly across the mat, while rolling a ball ahead of them. Their snail’s pace was enforced by a metronome, no less! What the researchers hypothesized—and would find here and in their other experiments—is that couples who were at random assigned to the fun-filled task that required both touch and behavioral synchrony actually came to love each other more deeply; they reported greater relationship quality on the follow-up surveys and showed more accepting and fewer hostile behaviors in their follow-on discussions. Engaging in this silly, childlike activity together actually deepened loving feelings and strengthened bonds, even in long-standing intimate relationships. Experiments like these explain the observation I made back in
chapter 2
, that couples who regularly do new and exciting (or even silly) things together have better-quality marriages.

At times, the impetus for sharing a positive emotion with a loved one might be some external activity, like a trip, or the silly assignment Art and Elaine were given in that laboratory study. Perhaps more frequently, however, there isn’t any jointly experienced external trigger at all. Instead, one or the other of you starts the ball rolling by bringing your own positive emotion to your partner. Suppose your partner comes home after a long day at the office with good news to share about a breakthrough at work, or some recognition he or she received for a recent accomplishment. Through the well-worn lenses of self-absorption, you might take such disclosures as simply your partner’s
way of explaining his or her own good mood. Or more cynically, you might take it as bragging. Yet through the lenses of connection, you’re more likely to recognize disclosures like these as opportunities for positivity resonance, or new chances to stoke love and its benefits.

Whether or not the feeling of love ensues, studies of couples show, hinges a lot on how you respond to your partner’s positive expressions. Do you lean in toward them? Or do you shy away? Do you meet them in kind, expressing your own genuine positive emotions in turn? Or do you shrug them off as irrelevant or point out the potential downsides? Researchers who have carefully coded couples’ responsiveness to each other in situations like these find that those who capitalize on each other’s good fortunes, by responding to their partner’s good news with their own enthusiasm and outward encouragement, have higher-quality relationships. They enjoy more intimacy, commitment, and passion with each other, and find their relationship to be more satisfying overall. In other words, when one partner’s good news and enthusiasm ignites to become the other partner’s good news and enthusiasm as well, a micro-moment of positivity resonance is born. Studies show that these moments of back-and-forth positivity resonance are not only satisfying in and of themselves, providing boosts to each partner’s own mood, but they also further fortify the relationship, making it more intimate, committed, and passionate next season than it is today. Another person’s expression of positivity, from this perspective, can be seen as a bid for connection and love. If you answer that bid, the ensuing positivity resonance will nourish you both.

Two ways to fortify your intimate relationships, then, are to bring your own good news home to share, and to celebrate your partner’s good news. Regardless of who initiates, the key is to connect to create a shared experience, one that allows positivity to resonate between you for a spell, momentarily synchronizing your gestures and your biorhythms and creating the warm glow of mutual care. Sharing or celebrating the joy of some personal good fortune is certainly not the only
way to foster the micro-moments of love that strengthen relationships. Any positive emotion, if shared, can do the same.

In collaboration with my colleague Sara Algoe, for instance, I’ve explored how kindness and appreciation flow back and forth in couples, creating tender moments of positivity resonance that also serve to nourish intimacy and relationship growth. In particular, we’ve examined how people habitually express appreciation to their partners. We learned from this work that some people tend to say “thanks” better than others. Genuine feelings of appreciation or gratitude, after all, well up when you recognize that someone else went out of his or her way to do something nice for you. Another way to say this is that the script for gratitude involves both a
benefit
, or kind deed, and a
benefactor
, the kind person behind the kind deed. Whereas many people express their appreciation to others by shining a spotlight on the benefit they received—the gift, favor, or the kind deed itself—we discovered that, by contrast, the best “thank-yous” simply use the benefit as a springboard toward shining a spotlight on the good qualities of the other person, their benefactor. Done well, then, expressing appreciation for your partner’s kindness to you can become a kind gesture in return, one that conveys that you see and appreciate in your partner’s actions his or her good and inspiring qualities.

How did we know that this is the best way to convey appreciation? Because compared to expressions that merely focus on benefits, those that also focus on benefactors make the partner who hears that “thanks” feel understood, cared for, and validated. And this good feeling—the feeling that their partner really “gets” them and cherishes them—allows people to walk around each day feeling better about themselves and better about their relationship. And in six months’ time, it forecasts becoming even more solid and satisfied with their relationship.

Saying “thanks” well then isn’t just a matter of being polite, it’s a matter of being loving, and becoming a stronger version of what together you call “us.”

Becoming Resilient.
How do you handle stress and strain? Do you at times feel shattered by adversity? Crushed during hard times? After an emotional hurricane hits, do you wallow in negativity or stumble about to pick up the pieces of your former self? Or perhaps, based on past experience, you’ve tried to steel yourself against any future emotional disasters by increasing the heft of your defensive armor. Maybe you find the prospects of being shattered so disturbing that you’ve striven to be bulletproof.

By and large, your protective armor works well. It shields you from routine emotional blows and keeps you from crumbling into self-pity or otherwise becoming devastated by negativity. Yet this sort of self-protection comes at a price. It can shield you from the especially good stuff as well. Sure enough, within your own walled-off cavern, you can and do readily experience genuine positive emotions, say, of interest, pride, inspiration, or peace. Yet your ability to share these good feelings with others is compromised. Put differently, in making yourself bulletproof you may also numb yourself to possibilities for true connection. Being less able to connect, in turn, shuts you and your body out from registering and creating opportunities for positivity resonance, which are both life-giving and health-conferring.

To be sure, there are more ways to face emotional storms than to be flattened by or impervious to them. For more than a decade, my students and I have studied the psychological habits of resilient people. These are the ones who, when faced with emotional storms, bend without breaking and bounce back to weather the next storm even better equipped than they were for the last.

Resilient people, our studies have shown, are emotionally agile. They neither steel themselves against negativity, nor wallow in it. Instead, they meet adversity with clear eyes, superbly attuned to the nuances of their ever-changing circumstances. This allows them to effortlessly calibrate their reactions to their circumstances, meeting them with a fitting emotional response, neither overblown nor
insensitive. When the circumstances warrant, they can be moved to tears or shaken. They don’t defend themselves against bad feelings like these. Yet neither do they overly identify with them. Rather, their negative emotions rise up, like an ocean wave, and then dissolve. Strong emotions move through them, which allows them to move on in their wake.

What allows resilient people to be so agile? As I detailed in
Positivity
, their agility stems from their steady diet of positive emotion. Each successive experience of positive emotion, after all, gives them a fresh experience of openness. Resilient people come to better register and appreciate the larger contexts of life, which allows them to respond to emotional upsets with more perspective, flexibility, and grace. Our data indeed show that life gets better and better for people who experience more positive emotions than others, not simply because positive emotions feel good, but because good feelings nourish resilience. Being better equipped to manage inevitable ups and downs is what makes life itself more satisfying. Resilient people are more hopeful, more excited to rise up to challenges, more appreciative of their many blessings. These positive emotions, our lab experiments show, help flush out any lingering aftereffects of negativity within you. They dismantle or undo the grip that negative emotions can gain on your mind and body alike, the grip that—when too long-lasting—can make you vulnerable to illness and even early death.

The science of resilience has deepened considerably within the last decade. We’ve seen not only a groundswell of scientific interest in the topic but also a fundamental shift in how resilience is viewed. Before, experts saw resilience in the face of adversity as a rare human feat; we now know that, in the context of a well-functioning emotion system, resilience can be normative, or standard. We also now know that people’s levels of resilience are not set in stone, or DNA. They can be improved through experience and training. So as you practice the skills, detailed in part II of this book, to increase your daily diet of
positivity resonance, you’ll become more resilient, too, better able to adapt to life’s inevitable upsets and adversity.

Resilient people don’t go it alone. Even as kids, they were especially adept at using humor to get others to smile or laugh along with them. In these and other ways, resilient kids are adept at stoking positivity resonance with their friends and caretakers. Developmental psychologists contend that resilient kids cultivated this capacity through their experiences of sensitive parenting as infants. Some parents, more than others, are adept at interpreting and matching their infant’s ever-changing emotional states. They can smoothly repair their infant’s distress to create micro-moments of positivity resonance. These more sensitive and attuned parents help their children to develop their own store of self-soothing techniques, coping mechanisms that ultimately allow the children to become ever more self-sufficient as they grow older. Resilience, then, doesn’t just originate from positive emotions; it originates from positivity resonance.

More often than not, you don’t face stress and adversity by yourself, alone. You face it together with others. Divorce strains entire families after all; earthquakes rock whole communities; wars upend entire nations; and increasingly, an economic collapse can strain an entire planet. When resilient, you know just when to lend a hand, an ear, or a shoulder, and just when to seek out these and other sources of comfort and steadiness from others. Resilience, then, is not simply a property of individuals. It’s equally a property of social groups—of families, communities, nations, even the entire global community. Facing tough times together and well, researchers suggest, requires precisely that suite of personal and collective resources that micro-moments of positivity resonance serve to build. Social resilience becomes all the more likely when you and those with whom you share fate—at home, at work, or in your community or nation—are able and motivated to connect with one another, to take one another’s perspectives, and to communicate care and respect just as readily as you recognize it when others
convey their positive regard to you. Such emotional agility and fluid communication within groups isn’t easy to achieve, of course. Any brief reflection on politics, gossip, or any manner of nitpicking can remind you how easy it is to smother the openness, tolerance, and trust needed to support social resilience. Yet knowing that successive moments of positivity resonance shore up and strengthen these necessary resources can help you see that social resilience emerges in the wake of love.