Forget Love Languages—This Is The Real Secret To A Happy Marriage

According to social science, there is but one overarching substance to the happiest, most successful romantic relationship: a specific expression of love known as companionate love.

What Is Companionate Love and Why Is It So Important?

Companionate love is the kind of love that is rooted in deep friendship, mutual respect, and emotional intimacy. Harvard professor and PhD social scientist Dr. Arthur C. Brooks is one of the most influential social scientists specializing in happiness and human flourishing. He founded the Leadership and Happiness Laboratory at Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School, which conducts integrative research and develops resources to help leaders in all sectors understand, apply, and share the science of happiness. 

He writes weekly for The Atlantic column “How to Build a Life,” providing insights on the art of living a more meaningful, fulfilling life based on the science of happiness. In one of these articles, he defines companionate love as “love based less on passionate highs and lows and more on stable affection, mutual understanding, and commitment.” 

This contrasts with passionate love, which is intoxicating but fleeting. Passionate love typically defines the early “honeymoon” stage of a relationship, but we’re all warned: the honeymoon doesn’t last. And it’s true, passion fades. A relationship built solely on it is a house of cards. Research suggests this stage makes a swift departure anywhere from six months to two years into a relationship, but common wisdom says you have about a year before you’re confronted with the fact that your significant other is a person, not the idealized fantasy you’ve created in your head. 

The well-being benefits of marriage are about twice as large for people who consider their spouse their best friend.

Companionate love, on the other hand, is the golden ticket to lasting fulfillment. It fosters resilience, mutual growth, emotional trust, and genuine enjoyment of each other’s company. It’s not only the greatest predictor of long-term relationship success and satisfaction, it’s also the greatest predictor of life satisfaction and physical health in old age. A 2017 study published in the Journal of Happiness Studies using UK national data found that the well-being benefits of marriage are about twice as large for people who consider their spouse their best friend.

It’s not rocket science if you ask me. Companionate lovers don’t just love each other; they like each other. If you stripped away the romance, they’d still be close friends. They admire one another, have fun, share meaning, and make life feel less lonely. They laugh, they play, they grow, together.

Brooks says what you want to get to in two to five years is “best friendship.” Ideally, couples should reach this point by the time the initial passion starts to fade. Without that foundation of friendship, which lends itself to emotional trust, mutual admiration, and resilience in the face of conflict, the relationship will likely falter. While emotional intensity feels invigorating in the beginning, it’s not sustainable. Worse, it often masks a lack of deeper compatibility or trust. 

Friendship, Not Intensity Is Predictive of Relationship Success

If you recoiled when I said that the honeymoon stage doesn’t last forever, first of all, I like you, and second of all, I have high hopes for your love life. It’s both true and false that the honeymoon stage must end. In its truest sense of novelty, passion, and infatuation, this by nature is a temporary byproduct of a fresh relationship—of unfamiliarity. As you grow more familiar and the mystery fades, there’s less to wonder about your partner. But that doesn’t mean a depletion of kinship, admiration, or desire. I firmly believe that you should never stop “dating” your partner, no matter how many years it’s been. Best friendship within your romance doesn’t mean best friendship instead of romance. You need both. Otherwise, you’re just friends. And if the relationship were purely platonic, why bother with all the formalities of partnership? But if you’ve been together for years and never felt the spark fade, it’s likely because you’ve cultivated companionate love.

One of the best long-term studies establishing this in action is the PAIR (Processes of Adaptation in Intimate Relationships) Project, a 13-year longitudinal study led by psychologist Ted Huston. The study tracked 168 newlywed couples starting from their wedding day for 13 years. Huston found that the first two years of marriage are highly predictive of long-term outcomes. Couples whose relationships began as whirlwind romances with high emotional intensity and passion were more likely to end in divorce or dissatisfaction. 

Couples who built slow-burn romances and actively maintained affection and positive sentiment over the years stayed happily married. Stable levels of love, affection, positivity, a longer courtship, and realistic expectations distinguished happily married couples from the other groups (unhappily married, divorced early, divorced later). They had a relationship foundation fortified against disillusionment because they didn’t over-idealize their partner, nor was their bond based on fleeting emotional intensity. Their relationship instead was based on the tenets of companionate love: respect, friendship, and mutual support.

All other groups experienced an erosion of affection, positivity, and emotional intimacy. The most likely couple to divorce early started the relationship with high passion and idealized love that declined steeply in the first two years of marriage. The excessive admiration, idealization, and affection for one another at the beginning made them more vulnerable to disillusionment than other couples. Couples who divorced later experienced a slow erosion of love over time and exhibited gradual emotional withdrawal. Contrary to popular belief and consistent with Gottman’s research, conflict and fighting were not meaningfully predictive of divorce or dissatisfaction in marriage. 

Instead, the killers of a marriage are the loss of love and affection, primarily through declines in expressed affection and early drops in love and positive emotion. Happily married couples maintained high levels of expressed love and positive sentiment over the years. This is consistent with Gottman’s research that stable couples have a 5:1 ratio of positive to negative interactions during conflict (and 20:1 during everyday conversations). For unstable marriages, the ratio is 8:1 (meaning negativity has outpaced positivity in the face of conflict). Gottman’s research also shows that the four horsemen of divorce: defensiveness, stonewalling, (but especially) criticism, and contempt predict early divorce (on average, 5.6 years after the wedding). Emotional withdrawal and the absence of positive affect during conflict discussions predict later divorce: about 16.2 years after the wedding. 

The Gottman Method: Friendship is the Bedrock of Marriage

If Albert Einstein is the father of modern physics, John Gottman is the father of modern relationship science. With more than 40 years of groundbreaking empirical research, John Gottman, co-founder of the Gottman Institute, has conducted longitudinal studies of thousands of real couples, following some for decades. He pioneered the use of physiological data, like heart rate and skin conductance, to measure stress and emotional reactivity during conflict, and his prediction models have accurately forecast which couples will divorce or stay together (after only 15 minutes of observation) with over 90% accuracy. In particular, in lab-based studies, he accurately predicted which couples would divorce with 93.6% accuracy.

He developed the Gottman Method, a widely respected approach to strengthening relationships through three main categories: friendship and intimacy, conflict management, and shared meaning and purpose. His work is considered the gold standard in relationship science. The core foundations of the Gottman Method include the Sound Relationship House, a metaphorical structure Gottman developed to represent the foundational framework of a relationship and its most important layers, of which there are seven. From bottom to top, they are as follows: build love maps (get to know your partner’s inner world), share fondness and admiration, turn toward instead of away (bids for connection), maintain a positive perspective, manage conflict, make life dreams come true, and create shared meaning. On the house’s sides are load-bearing walls representing trust and commitment.

Contrary to popular belief, conflict and fighting were not meaningfully predictive of divorce or dissatisfaction in marriage. 

The house is a visual representation of Gottman’s established model for secure, thriving relationships based on extensive empirical research. The order of the layers from bottom to top represents the order of priorities. First, you need to cultivate emotional intimacy and friendship before you can properly manage conflict. The pillars of trust and commitment hold up all of the layers of the house. Without these pillars, the house would collapse. Likewise, if any floor becomes shaky, the house becomes unstable. Gottman emphasizes that the foundation of the Sound Relationship House is friendship. Gottman theorizes the secret behind couples whose marriages have lasted 62 years, saying, “I suspect most of them survive on the basis of strong marital friendship.”

Cultivating Companionate Love By Turning Towards Bids for Connection

Yet the strength of the Sound Relationship House doesn’t come from grand gestures. It’s built through countless small interactions. Gottman calls these “bids for connection,” subtle (or not so subtle) attempts to get your partner’s attention, affirmation, or affection. A bid can be a sigh, a passing comment, a story, a glance, or a touch—anything that quietly asks, “Are you here with me?” These micro-moments might seem trivial, but Gottman’s research shows they’re anything but. Couples that stayed married turned towards bids 86% of the time, but couples who divorced only did 33% of the time.

Responding to bids consistently is what builds emotional trust over time. You can turn toward or turn away when your partner makes a bid. Turning toward them could be as simple as saying, “What’s on your mind?” when they sigh. It’s how you say, “I see you. You matter.” Turning away comes in two forms: silence or irritation. Surprisingly, Gottman found that responding negatively is less damaging than ignoring a bid entirely because even frustration still acknowledges the other person’s presence. It also offers an opportunity for repair. Ignoring bids, however, what Gottman calls “diminished bids,” leads to emotional distancing and a slow erosion of connection. It’s invalidating because it signals: “You’re alone in this.” 

This is why you see so many viral videos of disgruntled wives venting about how their husbands didn’t take out the trash. It’s never really about the trash. She likely made a bid, maybe by saying she felt overwhelmed or quietly hoping he’d notice, and he missed it. Perhaps he was tired. Maybe he didn’t clock it. But eventually, she hits a breaking point. She posts about it on TikTok, saying she “doesn’t feel seen,” and the comments go wild: some insisting she’s unhinged for threatening divorce over garbage, others swearing this is proof her marriage is dead. But the trash is symbolic. It’s the visible evidence of a deeper issue: ignored bids. A specific instance of this went viral on social media recently. 

A woman venting on TikTok said that she resented becoming her household’s “project manager,” that she was responsible for everything in their house and was becoming exhausted by the “emotional labor” being extracted from her. She reaches out to her husband one day and says, “Look, I’m overwhelmed. I need more help around here. I need you to do more.” He hears her and agrees, without argument, that from now on, he will empty the dishwasher and take out the trash in the mornings to make her life easier. He’ll do it automatically without needing to be directed. He’ll take the initiative to recognize when these tasks need to be done and will do them. Great, she made a bid, he responded. Everything’s hunky dory. 

Couples that stayed married turned towards bids 86% of the time, but couples who divorced only did 33% of the time.

But then, one morning, she’s rushing for work, and the trash is still there. The dishwasher’s still full. Her husband explained he was running late for work and didn’t have time. But now she’s late, and it’s her problem again. Here are her exact words, “I felt so disrespected and unseen and unvalued at that point in time.” The internet had a lot of thoughts. It was a contentious hot debate on social media for a week. 

Regardless of what you think of their relationship dynamic or her telling this story publicly, adding that it’s why she “almost divorced her husband,” the reality is this: If you had any familiarity with Gottman’s work on successful relationships and marriage, this would have come as no surprise. She made a (rather explicit, not so subtle) bid, which he verbally acknowledged and agreed to but didn’t follow through on. That turns it into a missed bid—turning away from your partner. It’s almost worse because the verbal promise followed by a lack of follow-through erodes trust and says, “You can’t count on me when you need me.” These missed or diminished bids are more corrosive than outright rejection because they create inconsistency and insecurity. Gottman has found that when couples break up, it’s rarely over big fights or infidelity but a gradual build-up of resentment and distance when partners continually turn away from bids for connection.

Choose to Turn Toward Your Partner

It can be challenging to keep up with bids or even identify when they’re being made, especially for men. The good news? It’s one of the easiest ways to improve your relationship, and it’s not an innate skill. Anyone can learn to recognize and appropriately respond to bids to facilitate what Gottman encourages in relationships known as a “culture of responsiveness” with a bit of mindfulness and practice. Most people miss bids not out of malice but because they lack awareness of bids or are distracted. Men disproportionately miss bids more than women (and women make more bids in general), especially subtle or emotionally vulnerable ones.

However, Gottman’s research shows that men who learn to better recognize and respond to their wives’ bids had more successful, long-term marriages, so I’d start studying up, lads. But women can miss them, too, especially when men express their bids through less overtly expressive channels like shared activities or problem-solving. So, listen to his joke. Show interest in his interests, even if you know nothing about Warhammer. If he comes to you with a solution after you’ve vented to him, recognize that he’s trying to connect with you, not dismissing your frustrations. Each time you turn toward your partner by responding to bids for connection, you’re making a deposit in your emotional bank account. They build trust, connection, and resilience, the basis for companionate love.