Don’t play with love
« Love’s a hard game to play » This good sound of Stevie Nicks ... Is the song right? And what is the link with Positive Psychology?
This summer, I celebrated 60 years of marriage for my grandparents. Next year, my sister is getting married. This month, it's my turn to enter into a civil partnership (PACs in France). If all these commitments fill me with joy, my understanding of the couple and love has unfortunately started to take shape at 4 years old with the divorce of my parents. Torned between the song "Love is a losing game" of Amy Winehouse and the leitmotiv "They lived happily ever after" of Disney, it was not easy being a kid. I still question myself about the couple.
What predicts the longevity of a couple? Is it even predictable? Positive Psychology seems to provide a positive answer to this last question. Of course, everything cannot be determined with certainty, nevertheless research in Positive Psychology proves that there are indicators of longevity and happiness in a couple.
The recipe of the happy couple according to Positive Psychology
1st ingrédient: Good news!
Positive Psychology research is quite certain: it is the way couples respond to the good news that has the most impact on the nature of the relationship, far more than their ability to support each other in difficult circumstances.
Mutual support is essential in a couple over the trials of life. Nevertheless, supporting oneself against negative events is not a factor as important as celebrating the good news within a couple when it comes to the longevity of a relationship. Happy and long-lasting couples are those who pay more attention to the positive in their lives, which would be less the case for couples who separate or are unhappy. Many studies on how to solve the conflict in the couple have been produced, but there are far fewer studies on how to have fun and laugh together in a relationship. If we stick to research, it is these last ingredients that seem to be the salt of the couple.
According to two Positive Psychology researchers, Shelly Gable and Jonathan Haidt, positive events happen three times more often in our lives than negative events.[1] It would therefore seem easier to celebrate the positive. Yet the human brain anchors more naturally the negative than the positive. It therefore requires an effort to focus on positive events and share them with our partner to boost positive emotions. We also discovered that happy couples feel more pleasant emotions on an individual level (joy, fun, love ...) than unpleasant emotions (anger, jealousy, shame ...).
So how to strengthen the celebration of positive events in our relationship? For that, you have to know how to answer good news. Positive Psychologist Shelly Gable has constructed a theoretical framework that represents the four ways to answer the good news: