Would you agree?
Mathematician Hannah Fry believes she has the secret to happily ever after when it comes to matters of the heart.
Hannah, the brains behind The Mathematics of Love, thinks that the best indicator for a long-lasting relationship is how positive and negative a couple are to/with each other.
In her book, she cites the work of psychologist John Gottman and his team who spent years researching the topic and observing the behaviour of couples.
They concentrated on people’s facial expressions, heart rates and the vocabulary they used to communicate with their partners.
This led them to establish that low-risk couples have more positive interactions while high-risk couples experience more negativity.
Fry said:
“In relationships where both partners consider themselves as happy, bad behavior is dismissed as unusual. In negative relationships, however, the situation is reversed”.
The duo found that the most important factor in a relationship is the influence both parties have on each other.
This means that if one person says something positive, the other person will react positively and of course, the same goes for negative interactions.
The healthiest relationships, according to Fry, are those with a low “negativity threshold” where couples voice their problems and work to fix them together.
“In these relationships, couples allow each other to complain, and work together to constantly repair the tiny issues between them. In such a case, couples don’t bottle up their feelings, and little things don’t end up being blown completely out of proportion”.
One of the main points she makes is to make up after a fight and not let it fester so that one person harbours a grudge.
“Mathematics leaves us with a positive message for our relationships, reinforcing the age-old wisdom that you really shouldn’t let the sun go down on your anger”.
