Julie Schwartz Gottman

Tiny little doses, every day, is what it takes to make a healthy relationship. Why? Because that’s exactly what a relationship is—not one big thing, but a million tiny things, every day, for a lifetime.

From that moment on, Mark and Annette decided to make more time for fun and adventure in their family.

For the next seven days, this will be your motto: Small things often.

“We used to be more in sync,” Alison said. “I mean, with little kids, there’s always been a lot of logistics and dropped balls. But now we’re just never on the same page.”

Here’s a massive misconception that a lot of us have: For connection to be meaningful, you must give hours of time to it. Therefore, in a busy day, we just don’t have time for it. True?

False.

The couples who got divorced had only turned toward their partner’s bids 33 percent of the time. The couples who stayed together had turned toward 86 percent of the time.

These fleeting little moments, it turned out, spelled the difference between happiness and unhappiness, between lasting love and divorce.

Think of every act of turning toward your partner’s bid for connection—even one as simple and fleeting as responding to a smile with a smile—as dropping a coin in your love piggy bank.

This is what the masters know: that a kiss on the cheek as you pass in the hallway is potent medicine. That looking up from that urgent work email to listen to a minor anecdote about what the baby did with his lunchtime sweet potatoes, in the end, matters more. That taking five minutes at the beginning of your day to connect over coffee far outweighs starting work five minutes earlier.

Turning toward is truly one of the most potent interventions we can recommend.