Reading bidsbid (bid for connection)A small attempt to connect — a comment, a glance, a question — that invites a partner's attention, humor, affection, or support.Glossary → correctly is the ability to recognize that a partner's small, oblique gestures — a sigh, a "look at this," a hand resting on the counter — are quiet requests for connection, and to treat them as such.
A "bid" is the Gottmans' term for any attempt to get attention, affection, humor, or support 1. Bids are the basic unit of connection, and most are small and encoded: people rarely say "I'd like your attention now"; they sigh, narrate something on their phone, or ask a question they could have Googled. Reading bids is the perceptual half — noticing that a bid was made and what it actually is — which sits upstream of responding well. It is not mind-reading a need from silence, and it is not abstract emotional intelligence; it is a trainable attentiveness to one particular person's ways of reaching.
What the research says
What the research says: in the Gottmans' lab, newlyweds still married six years later had turned towardturning towardResponding to a partner's attempt to connect with attention, warmth, or interest, rather than ignoring it or reacting with irritation.Glossary → each other's bids about 86% of the time, versus 33% among those who divorced 3, and in non-conflict moments happy couples turn toward roughly twenty times more often than distressed ones 2. Driver and Gottman's coding of everyday interactions linked playful turning-toward to more affection during later conflict 4. This converges with an independent literature on perceived partner responsivenessresponsivenessA partner's demonstrated understanding, validation, and care — how much you feel truly seen and supported, which research treats as a core driver of intimacy.Glossary → — the felt sense of being noticed and understood, a "bedrock of intimacy" 5 positively associated, day to day, with affectionate touch 6 — and with EFTEmotionally Focused TherapyA structured, attachment-based form of couple therapy that helps partners notice and change the emotional cycles behind their conflict, aiming to rebuild a…Glossary →'s account of the question under most bids, "Are you there for me?" 7, an approach a 2024 meta-analysismeta-analysisA study that statistically combines results from many separate studies to estimate an overall, more reliable pattern than any single study alone can show.Glossary → found reliably improves satisfaction 8.
Why it matters
Why it matters. Relationships are held together less by big conversations than by thousands of small reaches met. When bids are repeatedly missed, the bidder quietly stops bidding, and the relationship contracts.
How to cultivate it
How to cultivate it. Learn your partner's bid vocabulary, lower your threshold for what counts, respond proportionally, read for the request rather than just the content, and repair your misses out loud.
The honest caveat
The honest caveat. The famous percentages come from the Gottmans' own modest newlywed samples and are correlationalcorrelationalDescribing a link between two things without proving one causes the other — the pattern could run either direction, or both could share a third cause.Glossary →, and the "divorce prediction" claims have been criticized for being fit to known outcomes 3; what survives is the convergence across responsiveness research and EFT 568, and the fact that this is a two-person skill.