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Areas › Your marriage › Fondness and admiration
The mind drifts to what is wrong. Deliberately catch what is right, then name it.
Even an atom's weight of good will be seen, says the Qur'an (99:7). If the smallest good is never lost before God, train your own eye to catch the good your spouse does, and to name it.
الزلزلة
فَمَن يَعۡمَلۡ مِثۡقَالَ ذَرَّةٍ خَيۡرࣰ ا يَرَهُۥ
whoever has done an atom’s-weight of good will see it
Qur’an 99:7read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Gottman found that couples under strain develop an eye for what is wrong and stop registering what is right. Deliberately catching one thing your partner did well, then saying it, retrains that attention.
John M. Gottman; Nan Silver (1999). The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Crown
Principle 2, Nurture Your Fondness and Admiration. An active habit of appreciation is the antidote to contempt, which Gottman names the single greatest predictor of divorce. Fondness is rebuilt by rehearsing what is right about the partner rather than by waiting to feel it.
Strength of evidence: seen more than once. Replicated observational or longitudinal work, not tested against a control.
A habit of noticing the positive counters the negativity that erodes marriages.
Where this sits: Gottman method, Share Fondness and Admiration; the habit of catching what your partner did right.