Transcription
What is the bird theory? What are bids for connection? And what is turning toward, John?
>> Well, you know, it came out of our apartment laboratory. Our came to be called the love lab. And you know, we had 12 hours of video of a couple, you know, a newlywed couple and we had it for 130 couples. So, mostly nothing happens on these videos. And you know, and we were sitting there looking at these videos where almost nothing happens and thinking, you know, we just wasted years of our lives.
And there were these moments when one person kind of turned to the other and really try to get their partner's attention or interest. And often the response was, "No, I'm not interested in you. I'm not available. Leave me alone. stop bothering me. Stop annoying me. You know, I'm I I'm in my bubble and you're bursting it." And many times the opposite was the case. You know, they would say, "Oh, that's great. Yeah, tell me about what you're thinking and that is pretty funny what you talked about." Or, "Yeah, look, there is a bird out there. You know, that's interesting." And it turned out that those moments were so predictive of the future of the relationship. It was amazing.
So 17 couples had divorced six years after we started this newlywed study. When we look back six years earlier, their percent turning toward their partners' bids was 33%. The ones who were still married when we looked back six years earlier their proportion of turning toward was 86%. So 86% versus 33%. That's a huge difference right and these small moments that seem so insignificant turn out to have an enormous amount of power.
One of my brilliant graduate students, Janney Driver, discovered was that when people turn toward at a high level, they automatically have a sense of humor about themselves when they're disagreeing. And that is magic. That is gold. If you can laugh at yourself even when you're disagreeing, you have a way of coming together even when you disagree and really enjoying humor and enjoying that sense of being together, but also it reduces physiological arousal and allows you to really delay responding quickly and aggressively or defensively. It allows you to respond with some care, with some thought. Uh, delay is universally the way to engage the frontal cortex. So, you're not responding automatically with defensiveness or aggression. You're actually being thoughtful about what your partner's asking for.
So, the bird test is a wonderful way of summarizing those findings. turning toward turns out to be so powerful because these moments have very little emotion. They're really ordinary moments, but they're ordinary moments with so much latent power, hidden power beneath them that when you turn away from your partner, they kind of crumple a little bit. They kind of sag into themselves. It's a sad thing when you turn toward it validates the fact that you find them interesting and you're curious about what their thoughts are, what they're what they're looking at, what they find interesting and you join them in such a way in an ordinary moment when there is no physiological arousal, there's no conflict. It's just an ordinary moment of connection. And that turns out to be the basis of an emotional bank account that you're building with your partner. A bank account of emotional safety and security. And boy is that worth its weight and gold. So that's what the bird test is about.
And you know the peel and orange test, even a bigger test where you say, "Will you peel this orange for me?" And the natural response is peel it yourself. you know, but if you say, "Oh, sure. Yeah, let me peel it." You know, I wonder if I can peel it all in one peel. You know, and then you give the orange back, you know, there's an enormous gift. Giving gifts is very powerful. And in fact, it's one of the ingredients of having a happy sex life that was discovered uh in this wonderful book, The Normal Bar, which studied 70,000 people in 24 countries and asked the question, what's different about people who say they have a great sex life and people who say they have an awful sex life? This turning toward is a big part of it. ordinary affection, communications of respect, giving compliments, being physically affectionate, cuddling with one another. All of those things are very powerful. having weekly dates, taking romantic dates, not neglecting the relationship, not destroying the relationship by having it just be a managerial relationship where you're handling reality and doing this, you know, these tasks of the infinite to-do list that we all have in managing life together, but actually managing to make the relationship a priority. Make affection, make cuddling, make turning toward an essential part of a relationship. Boy, is that different. Because then being in love, and Helen Fischer showed us this, being in love has no shelf life. It can last forever. You can be in love with somebody for your whole lifetime. I am. I'm in love with my wife and I'm as much in love with her now, maybe more even than when we first met. Um, so that's what the bird test is really about. It kind of scratches the surface of what deep connection really means.