Bird/bid theory: A way to know if you're in a good relationship?

[MyrtleLion]

I've been reading so many threads today where the male partner/husband has behaved poorly to the OP, including being annoyed when his wife/partner was seriously ill with flu.

And then I read this article about predicting/knowing if you're in a good relationship: https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2025/dec/04/bird-theory-relationship

In 2022, the researcher and psychologist Julie Gottman explained the concept of a “bid for connection” in the New York Times. She explained it is best defined as an attempt to receive attention, affirmation or affection from a partner.

She gave an example: “Wow, look at that beautiful bird out the window!” This simple exclamation is an invitation for a partner to notice something with you.
Bids can be verbal or nonverbal, small or big, negative or positive. It could be letting out an , or making a direct ask for a date night. Regardless of the bid itself, “turning towards” or acknowledging it is key, according to Gottman.

Gottman and her husband, John, developed a theory about relationships based on bids for connection after tracking newlyweds for six years, starting in 1986. The Gottmans’ research found that couples who stayed together responded to bids about 86% of the time. The couples who divorced responded with an average of 33%.

I discussed it with my DH and we agreed that we are definitely in the 86% range - we are genuinely interested in each other.

What do you think? Is this useful? Is it something we should teach our kids?

Incredibly, Mumsnet doesn't actually revolve around you and what you do or do not understand.

Maybe toddle on over to AIBU and be nasty to a single mum or something, seems like it'd be more your ballpark than anything that involves reading or thinking for a few minutes 😊

@RescueMeFromThisSilliness

In a relationship we 'bid' for attention from our partners. Often we may 'bid' without knowing that's what we're doing.

An example given is saying look.at that amazing bird. In a healthy relationship where a partner is interested in their significant other, and assuming they're not super busy in the moment, they are more likely to ask about the bird. In a relationship where a partner is self-centred and doesn't care about their partner, they would ignore the other, or maybe say something disparaging - you and your stupid birds, or, it's just a bird, who cares.

The research says that they can predict with high accuracy that couples who respond to bids 86% of the time will stay together. And those likely to divorce only respond 33% of the time.

I find it interesting and wanted to know others' opinions. Could we advise our friends in relationships where their partners don't pay them attention? Could we advise our children to pay attention to their partners' interests and to bail out if their own interests are ignored?

I hope I've explained it for you. I'd love to know your thoughts.

I think there’s a bit more to this
Interpret reactions in context, says Davila. If your bid for attention is ignored during the season finale of a show or when your partner is stressed with work, it says less about your relationship and more about the general nature of attention.

hmm…surely it says something about your relationship if you make a ‘bid’ under those circumstances? - eg that you’ve got the emotional intelligence of a teaspoon or else you’re overly needy. I don’t mean that you should button up if there’s something important and urgent you need to talk about but that doesn’t really seem to be what this ‘bid’ idea is about.

So in a good relationship the partners talk to each other, listen to each other, and value each other’s communication. In relationships that fail partners do not value each other’s communication. No shit, Sherlock.

Because if you don't come from a family with healthy attachments, and you were never modelled successful relationships, your sentence doesn't mean anything. People like me need things to be broken down in small and measurable parts so we can see them in daily life.

Oh, I came from one of those. I didn't need a £20/30 book to tell me disinterest, contempt and abuse was wrong.

It's taken me 57 years minus a few months to realise that my DM values me less than my brothers. And that's only because of the way she spoke to me in front of them at the family BBQ in August. They were openly shocked and called me afterwards to check I was OK, only to be shocked again when I said she always speaks to me like that.

This bid theory has helped me understand that I was devalued as a child and I make bids all the time, often inappropriately, to get the attention I feel I need. Even though I am in a wonderful marriage where I genuinely feel valued.

This lack of value stays with you forever.

Congratulations, do you want a medal, or a sticker? Well done, darling.

I needed therapy and several books (that I could download or read from libraries, didn't pay for all of them) to understand that my marriage was abusive and that I grew up in an abusive home.

Because the authors broke down things in bite sized portions and explained them in a way that my PTSD brain was able to grasp and process.

(One of these books was "The drama of the gifted child", which explained why being intelligent didn't save me from any of that)

I like this concept, OP, thank you for posting! I hadn’t seen it before.

I agree we could teach it to help people understand social skills and also assess their own relationships.

DH was absolutely awful about responding to bids. He’s almost certainly ASD and was fairly sure that what he was doing was more important than a random bird out of the window. He also would never have thought to mention to me that there was a parrot in the garden.

We have muddled through. But I’d like to have known beforehand what I was in for! 😁

With hindsight, I was always overly responsive to bids- I’d rearrange my entire life and interests around someone else’s preferences.

I’ve got better about marching to my own drum these days.

Can the tetchy people take a breath and stop squabbling please? It’s tiring for the rest of us to read. Just ignore what you don’t like. Someone else will deal with it, or it will go away.

Why are people so cross? Its not a thread about piercing baby's ears 😅

Thank you. I also think it's much harder to see for those of us who grew up without being responded to.

I'm certainly reassessing some of my reactions.

The closest my family came to responding positively was for them to say to ignore any child bidding because "they're only doing it for attention".

Yes! So give them some positive attention and maybe they won't grow up so insecure.

Is that how your mother spoke to you? It sounds like it.

They saw your intelligence as a threat or challenge to their almighty superiority, making a point of saying stuff like 'What do you want? A Medal? It's nothing to be proud of/you're not as smart as you think you are'. Refusing to acknowledge any achievement or treating it as worthless/something to mock reinforced the status quo as you being the most insignificant little creature they had ever had the misfortune to be weighed down by.

No darling, she didn't. But she didn't teach me to be kind to the kids who needed extra help to understand things. Kids who needed, for example, books to understand things I could figure out by myself. I used to feel superior because of that, but now I know better. See the irony?

She taught you very well to be unnecessarily unpleasant to people, though. Saying darling in the knowledge that the context means it's patronising and irritating to people doesn't appear to have mentioned in your books, unfortunately.

I just had the posh voice followed by a swift punch to the side of the head when nobody was looking instead. Suppose I was so thick that it was the only language I could understand - but TV, books and seeing everybody else not being treated that way made it fairly obvious that it was something wrong.

My family was not obviously abusive, no one used drugs, my dad didn't hit my mum, there was never police involved, all kids had good grades. My XH didn't hit me. Abuse can be subtle, negligence too. And harder to spot if you never knew any different. If your mum was obvious and made it easier for you to see, it doesn't make your experience universal.

The bids concept isn't solely for romantic relationships, and yes, we can teach it to our kids through modelling how we turn towards their requests for bids and helping them to notice other's bids as well as when people are missing their bids or turning against their bids.

Oh, I came from one of those. I didn't need a £20/30 book to tell me disinterest, contempt and abuse was wrong.

Well, the concept has been around for decades largely backed by research from the Gottman Institute and the information is free on their website because while a lot of it has gone out widely into pop culture advice on relationships, there are still people who haven't heard it and don't automatically know that someone proactively turning against their attempts for connection repeatedly is often part of a cycle of abuse.

I think culturally, we spend a lot of time discussing what makes horrible relationships, and need more time discussing these things that build healthy relationships.