Does The Magic Relationship Ratio Work On Yourself?

Photo by Oliver Hihn on Unsplash

I've been thinking lately about John Gottman’s 5:1 magic relationship ratio. This might seem strange, since Gottman’s rule typically applies to married couples, and I’ve been divorced for six months.

The truth is, I’m wondering whether the magic ratio might apply just as equally to myself.

Gottman claims that marriages have a default setting that tilts toward the positive or toward the negative. In healthy relationships, this positivity override allows a couple to absorb the occasional fight or snippy exchange, because the set point for equilibrium is trust. In failing relationships, the set point is negative, which overrides what’s still good. 

A relationship needs a minimum of five positive interactions for every negative one to stay on the sunny side. An overwhelming positivity override. Once the emphasis tilts in this direction, the salient memories of a relationship are anchors: reminders of how the love story began. If the ratio flips to the negative side, the most prominent memories are fissures that foretell the end. 

So I wonder: Can I practice the 5:1 principle on myself? Or is this precisely the self-helpy strain of positive thinking that I’ve learned to distrust? Sometimes the rubble is real, and you aren’t conjuring the blackening skies. What then? 

Those five positive inputs only work if they’re true.

I'm a native Montanan, raised in a logging and mining family, a card-carrying member of Generation X. Hardship and cynicism are birthrights. I love nothing more than pushing my limits in the gym, embracing the burn. I struggle to practice self-love. Even writing that phrase makes me squirm. 

But Gottman isn't spouting fluff. His Seattle-based lab has tested the magic ratio against thousands of marriages to prove that it holds. 

By the time I discovered Gottman’s book, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, it was too late for my marriage. I recognized his Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse immediately — Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness, and Stonewalling — along with the other markers that he uses to predict divorce with 91% accuracy: harsh start-ups, flooding, and failed repair attempts. 

No wonder one therapist’s suggestion — to just tell myself to trust, trust, trust, until that hope came true — felt so laughably wrong. 

What I needed then was more than one person could give. Almost as soon as I announced my resignation from a tenured faculty position, my grandfather died. A few months later, I noticed my grandmother slurring her words on the phone, and by that summer we learned that ALS was attacking her throat. I flew to Montana the very day she entered hospice, and I was moistening her lips with a swab five days later when she struggled for a breath that never came. Two months later, one of my cousins, just 40 years old and mother of seven children, died of Covid in Alaska. My last day in the office felt like another death. 

No one prepares for grief at that scale. You don’t trust, trust, trust your way out of it. Not without an overwhelming sense that you’re safe with your people, that they’ll never wash their hands of you.

If that assurance slips, the avalanche takes you wherever it wills. 

By the time I left academe, I’d been running a deficit for at least five years.

Hallway conversations with colleagues devolved into grievances about administrators. For every class that gelled, there were five others soured by a group's lack of participation, preparation, or attendance. For every hour of writing or professional collaboration, at least five devoted to committees, assessment, or data-dump meetings. Not to mention the budget shortfalls and cuts that relentlessly targeted the arts and humanities.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are still running roughshod through American universities.

To take stock of a troubled relationship, you have to stop brightsiding, stop explaining things away with hope, and name the realities for what they are. Any attempt at repair has to begin with the truth before warmth can creep in. 

When you are made to feel that you are what’s wrong, that you can’t trust what you see with your own eyes, survival means you must split. 

So what does Gottman’s ratio have to offer the trauma survivor, the divorcée, or the person blindsided by grief? It’s hard to imagine a positivity override when you still hear a ringing in your ears, even if you know that you can’t stay in your bunker forever.

For me, a tentative answer lies in the knowledge that I can’t divorce myself, can’t draft a resignation letter to my future. Not if I want to survive. Not if I want to thrive again one day.

I like Gottman’s ratio because it’s precise, like the number of reps in a weightlifting set. In that way it feels more achievable as a daily practice than more abstract forms of mindfulness. And just as getting back into shape requires some soreness before the burn starts to feel good again, I can accept slow growth if I have a clearly defined goal. 

I didn't realize I was practicing the magic ratio when I allowed myself to focus on coaching and writing for a season. But it's how I spend my days now. An hour with a client is a 10:1 positivity override. Losing track of three hours to draft a new essay? Pure joy, even when the words come hard. 

What a privilege. What a gift to be writing for you. 

As my friend

Dee Rambeau

reminds me, I don’t have to feed the rage algorithm, even if it rewards us for our choicest screeds, even if it is perpetually baiting our primal screams. Did a particularly asinine premise (which I’ll forebear repeating) really deserve my attention in the comment thread? I have a choice about what and where to engage.

Practicing the 5:1 principle doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy a takedown now and then, like

Kat Rosenfield

’s excoriation of choreographed divorce. But what if I only allow myself one of those before seeking out five more restorative pieces to read? Like

Zina Gomez-Liss

’s comparison of grief to a grown child who sometimes returns home,

John Pistelli

’s new book deal,

Tara Penry

’s reminder that we can enjoy peaches even if the world is aflame,

Imola

Zsitva’s view of stress as essential to growth, and

Latham Turner

’s courageous farewell to his readers, which is really a hello to new pursuits.  

Gottman's principle shows that idealism is evidence-based, not a fantasy. Those of us who want our lives to be driven by purpose, to hear and to speak five affirming words for every critical one, aren’t refusing to grow up. We're trying to reclaim a healthier way of being. We’re trying to prop our elbows on the rubble, see it for what it is, and pry ourselves out. With time and discipline, we can do better than that.

I’m reminded of the simple answer that Lucy Gayheart found for her grief, a revelation powerful enough to tip her default setting toward hope:

What if—what if Life itself were the sweetheart? It was like a lover waiting for her in distant cities — across the sea; drawing her, enticing her, weaving a spell over her…. Oh, now she knew! She must have it, she couldn’t run away from it.

Each of us is a memoirist in word or in deed. We choose the tone, the slant of light, and the details to recruit from our past. 

Neuroscientists call this a cognitive blend. It’s not the whole truth about our origins. It is a network of memories, associations, and shared structures that coheres into identity, the story we come to believe about ourselves. Our emotional truth.

For too long the fissures in my past have loomed as the most salient memories. But I’m still standing. Really believing in my own resilience may be the start of self-love. And the reward for tipping the scale back toward the sun? 

Life as a Sweetheart beckoning up ahead for all the years left.

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