Julie and John Gottman have spent more than four decades studying relationships. Especially why do they fail? They have been able to uncover some interesting patterns that people knew but could not articulate as fact. The work of John Gottman has focused on communication between couples, and figured out the proportion of positive to negative comments that would ensure a relationship last and succeed. The proportion as it turns out is for every negative comment, or quip there have to be five positive comments.
The work of John Gottman has tried to understand why negative comments have such a powerful hold on our imagination and the consequences thereof. It turns out that any positive comment might, or might not lead to a positive response, however, a negative comment is bound to create a negative feedback loop which is hard to exit.
The behavioural implication for this is huge and has been tested in the real world by other researchers. Research by Richard Slatcher and James Pennebaker had two groups of couples one had to write about their partner and the other about their daily routine. They had to do it for twenty minutes, and three days. The groups were contacted after three months, the one that had written about the partner 77% of them was still together, compared to 52% of the group that had written about their daily rituals.
Why did this happen? The researchers turned to texts sent by both groups. The group which was spending time writing about their significant other had a higher proportion of positive texts when compared with the other group.
So when in doubt just focus on the good. The Gottman's have created a good resource to spread their work, here is the link if you would like to know more https://www.gottman.com/about/the-gottman-method/.