TL;DR. A bid for connection is any small attempt to get your partner's attention, affection, or engagement. Dr. John Gottman found that how often partners "turn toward" these tiny bids predicts whether a relationship lasts: couples who stayed together turned toward about 86% of the time, while those who divorced managed about 33%. Relationships are built in these small moments, and turning toward more often is one of the most reliable ways to rebuild closeness.
By Christina Mathieson, LMFT #115093, founder of My Mental Climb.
Most couples come into therapy braced to talk about the big fights. What tends to matter more is something much smaller and easier to overlook: the dozens of tiny moments each day when one partner reaches for the other, and the other either answers or doesn't. Dr. John Gottman called these moments bids for connection, and decades of his research suggest they carry more weight than almost anything else in a relationship.
What is a bid for connection?
A bid is any small attempt to get your partner's attention, affection, humor, or support. It can be a question ("did you see this?"), an observation ("that sunset is wild"), a touch on the arm, a sigh, or sharing a video from your phone. Most bids are not romantic and not obviously important. That is the point. Gottman's research found that couples make and receive bids constantly, often more than a hundred times over a single dinner, and that the health of a relationship lives inside how those bids get answered.
The reason bids are easy to miss is that they rarely announce themselves. A partner saying "the coffee place downtown closed" is usually not making conversation about coffee. Underneath it is a small reach: notice me, be with me for a second, we are in this together. When you learn to hear the reach underneath the words, a lot of ordinary moments start to look different.
The three ways we answer a bid
Every time your partner makes a bid, you do one of three things with it.
Turning toward means you respond with some form of interest or acknowledgment. It does not have to be enthusiastic. A grunt of recognition, a quick glance up, a "huh, that's too bad" all count. You are letting your partner know you heard them and they matter.
Turning away means the bid goes unanswered. Usually this is not deliberate. You are on your phone, lost in a task, or simply did not register it. No harm was intended, and that is the tricky part, because it still registers on the other end as a small rejection.
Turning against means responding with irritation or hostility. "Why are you telling me this right now?" or "Can't you see I'm busy?" The bid gets met with an edge, and the person who reached out learns that reaching can cost them.
None of us turns toward every time. The goal is not perfection but a higher overall rate, because these responses accumulate into the emotional climate of the whole relationship.
The research behind it
The reason clinicians take bids so seriously is that the numbers are striking. In one of Gottman's newlywed studies, couples came into his research apartment and were simply observed going about their day. Years later, the researchers looked at who was still together. The couples who were still married and happy, the ones Gottman calls the "masters," had turned toward each other's bids about 86% of the time. The couples who had divorced, the "disasters," had turned toward only about 33% of the time.
Sit with that for a moment. The difference between the relationships that lasted and the ones that fell apart was not mainly about how explosively they fought or how compatible they seemed. It showed up in something as small and unglamorous as whether they answered each other's everyday bids. Turning toward builds what Gottman calls an emotional bank account, a reserve of goodwill that a couple draws on when conflict does arrive. Turning away, over and over, slowly drains it.
Why partners stop noticing each other's bids
If bids are so important, why do so many couples drift into missing them? The reasons are ordinary and have nothing to do with a lack of love.
Screens are the obvious one. It is genuinely hard to catch a soft bid when your attention is on a phone, and both partners are usually doing it. Stress and exhaustion narrow your bandwidth, so by the end of a long day there is little attention left to spare. Distraction and multitasking mean bids arrive while you are already three tasks deep. Sometimes couples have simply fallen out of the habit of looking up, so bids sail past unnoticed in both directions.
Something harder to see also builds over time. When bids go unanswered enough times, the person making them learns to stop. Why reach when no one reaches back? Your efforts get lost in a dead space. That is often what the roommate phase is from the inside, two people who have each concluded, without ever saying it, that bidding is not worth the risk. For couples where distraction runs especially high, including partners with ADHD, this can happen faster, which we get into in our piece on ADHD in relationships.
How to turn toward more often
The good news is that this is one of the most changeable patterns in a relationship, because the moves are small.
Assume there is a bid underneath. When your partner says something that seems minor, treat it as a reach rather than a report. The content is coffee closing; the bid is connection. Answering the bid takes seconds.
Lower the bar for a good response. You do not need to drop everything and have a heartfelt exchange. A nod, a question, a "tell me more in a sec, let me finish this" all count as turning toward, as long as they acknowledge the reach.
Name when you cannot respond fully. Turning away stings most when it feels like being ignored. "I want to hear this, give me two minutes to finish this email" turns a potential miss into a small turn-toward, because your partner knows the bid was received.
Put the phone down first. This is the single highest-yield change most couples can make. Even short windows of screen-free attention, over dinner or the first ten minutes after work, dramatically raise how many bids get caught.
Make your own bids clearer. If you tend to bid indirectly and feel unseen, it can help to reach more openly. "I'd love your attention for a minute" is easier to answer than a sigh you are hoping gets noticed.
When you have been missing each other for a long time
If reading this brings a sinking feeling, that the bids stopped between you a while ago, that feeling makes sense, and it does not mean you are stuck there. Couples rebuild this the same way they lost it, in small increments. You do not repair years of missed bids with one big conversation. You repair it by turning toward the next bid, and the one after that, until reaching starts to feel safe again.
This is also some of the most rewarding work I do with couples, because the change tends to show up quickly. When one partner starts turning toward more, the other usually starts bidding more, and the whole climate warms within weeks rather than months. If you want a structured way to rebuild connection alongside this, our post on the weekly State of the Union meeting walks through a ritual that gives bids a dedicated home, and the Four Horsemen and their antidotes cover what to do when the harder conflict patterns have set in.
The bottom line
Relationships are decided less in the big moments than in the hundred small ones a day, when a partner reaches out and you either answer or you don't. Turning toward is not a grand gesture, and it does not require you to feel more in love than you do on a given Tuesday. It just requires you to notice the reach and let your partner know you saw it. Do that a little more often, and the research says the rest tends to follow.
If you and your partner have been missing each other for a while and want help finding your way back, book a free 15-minute consult and we can talk about where to start.
Further reading: The Gottman Institute: research overview · The Gottman Institute: bids and turning toward · Related from My Mental Climb: One Hour a Week Can Save Your Relationship
Common questions
- What is a bid for connection?
- A bid for connection is any small attempt to get your partner's attention, affection, or engagement, from a comment about the weather to a hand on the shoulder to sharing something from your phone. Dr. John Gottman coined the term after watching thousands of couples in his research lab. Bids are usually tiny and easy to miss, which is exactly why they matter: relationships are built and eroded in these small moments far more than in the big conversations.
- What are the three ways to respond to a bid?
- You can turn toward the bid (respond with interest or acknowledgment), turn away from it (miss it or ignore it, usually without meaning to), or turn against it (respond with irritation or hostility). Turning toward, even in a small way, tells your partner you heard them and they matter. Turning away is rarely intentional; it is usually distraction, but it registers as a small rejection all the same.
- How important are bids for a relationship's success?
- Very. In Gottman's newlywed research, couples who were still together six years later had turned toward each other's bids about 86% of the time in the lab, while couples who had divorced turned toward only about 33% of the time. The difference between lasting and unhappy relationships showed up less in how couples fought and more in how often they answered these ordinary bids for connection.
- Why do couples stop noticing each other's bids?
- Bids get missed for ordinary reasons, not a lack of love: phones and screens, stress and exhaustion, distraction, and simply falling out of the habit of looking up. Over time, missed bids teach a partner to stop bidding, which is what the roommate phase feels like from the inside. The encouraging part is that the pattern reverses the same way it forms, one turned-toward moment at a time.
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Last clinically reviewed: by Christina Mathieson, LMFT #115093.
