Throughout the day, you and your partner make requests for connection, which Gottman calls “bids.” Say that your partner is a bird enthusiast and notices a goldfinch fly across the yard. He might say to you, “Look at that beautiful bird outside!” Your partner is requesting a response, or “a bid for emotional connection.” Happy couples acknowledge... See more

Disparaging your partner in public or behind their back. “Don't badmouth each other ever — not even to close friends and family,” A.J. says. “It can become like a wedge in your relationship. Once it gets in, it can make the gap wider and wider.”

Pause and consider this for a second. Do you treat your partner how they want to be treated or do you treat them how you want to be treated? Few of us actually understand the needs of the other human being in the partnership. 

“People cheat on each other in a hundred different ways: indifference, emotional neglect, contempt, lack of respect, years of refusal of intimacy,” says couples therapist Esther Perel. “Cheating doesn’t begin to describe the ways that people let each other down.”

In good marriages, couples actively de-escalate conflicts by doing things like injecting well-timed humor into tense and difficult situations. Humor can lower the tension level of an argument, destroy the division between you and your partner, and remind you that you’re human.

The reason is that happy people are secure, supportive, and loving — not insecure, angry, and constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. Many readers wrote in to suggest that they felt miserable when they were seeking constant reassurance from their partner and waiting for someone else to make them happy.