Over the next few posts, I will be discussing some of the findings of Dr. John Gottman. Gottman is a Professor Emeritus of psychology at the University of Washington, and with his wife Dr. Julie Schwartz, now heads a nonprofit research institute, the Gottman Institute. Thirty years ago, Dr. Gottman began studying couples through the University of Washington to try to understand what works and what doesn't work in relationships. He opened a laboratory where couples came and spent time together, and there he videotaped, observed, recorded and analyzed their interactions, emotions and microexpressions. In Gottman's work, he was able to predict with 90% accuracy which newlywed couples would remain married and which ones would divorce within four to six years. He was also able to predict longer marital survival rates with high accuracy.

Out of this research came some important findings about what it takes to have a successful relationship. Gottman calls the two types of couples "Masters" and "Disasters." The Disasters are those couples who either divorce or stay together for the sake of the children or some other reason, but are not happy. The Masters of relationships are those who stay together and are "relatively happy."

One of the most important findings from these studies was that how a couple responds to each other in the early moments of an interaction are great predictors of success or failure in the relationship. Gottman calls these interactions "bids" and "turning." A person is constantly making bids to his/her partner - bids for affection, attention, assistance, information - consciously or unconsciously, throughout the entire day. How the partner chooses to respond is the thing that separates the Masters from the Disasters.

Let's say that a partner runs into the house and exclaims about a beautiful sunset, visible just outside the door. The other partner has three choices as to how to respond. Gottman calls these responses "turning toward," "turning away," and "turning against." In the case of the sunset, "turning toward" the partner would mean a response such as "Wow, let's go outside and look at it!" "Turning away" might just be ignoring the partner's bid or continuing a project and not paying any attention to the words. "Turning against," however, might be an angry response such as "Can't you see I'm busy right now? Why do you always interrupt me?"

In Gottman's studies, the Masters of relationships responded to 96 percent of their partner's bids, while the Disasters responded to only 30 percent. It is obvious that these small, seemingly insignificant moments are the building blocks for a healthy, intimate relationship.

Pay attention over the next couple of weeks to how you respond to your partner's bids. Do you stop what you are doing and really listen? I know that my husband can't listen if he's reading the newspaper while I'm talking, so I will jokingly remind him to "listen with your eyes!" See what a difference it makes in your relationship if you truly "turn towards" your partner this week.

Terry McNichols is a Marriage and Family Therapist who also blogs at Grace and Gravity and Are We There Yet?