Relationship glossary

Everyday mechanics

Bid for connection. A small attempt to get a partner's attention, affection or support — a comment about something out of the window, a hand on a shoulder, a link sent with no message. From the Gottman Institute's published work. Easy to understand and genuinely hard to notice in the moment, which is the entire point. Fifty concrete examples.

Turning toward / turning away / turning against. The three responses to a bid: engaging, missing or ignoring it, or responding with irritation. Turning away is usually inattention rather than rejection, and it is the most common of the three.

Drift. The gradual reduction in everyday connection with no precipitating event. The most common way long relationships get into trouble, and the hardest to notice from inside because nothing went wrong.

Logistics creep. When conversation collapses into scheduling and handovers. Urgent things displace non-urgent ones, and non-logistical conversation is never urgent.

Repair attempt. Anything said or done during conflict to de-escalate — a joke, a softening, an acknowledgement. Whether repair attempts land is more informative than whether conflict happens.

Ritual. A small repeated thing with a fixed shape — a weekly check-in, a walk after dinner, a question at breakfast. Rituals survive because they do not require a decision each time.

Conflict

Perpetual problem. A disagreement rooted in stable differences in personality or values that will not be solved. Published relationship science holds that a substantial share of couple conflict is perpetual rather than solvable, and that the task is managing it rather than resolving it. Treating a perpetual problem as solvable produces the same argument on a loop. Questions for that.

Gridlock. A perpetual problem that has hardened — each round more entrenched than the last, both people defending a position rather than describing a need.

Flooding. Physiological overwhelm during conflict — heart rate up, thinking narrowed, nothing landing. The reason a break mid-argument is a technique rather than an evasion, and the reason a break needs a stated return time to work.

Soft start-up. Opening a difficult conversation without blame or contempt. How a conversation starts predicts a lot about how it goes.

Stonewalling. Withdrawing from an interaction — no response, no engagement. Frequently a flooding response rather than a punishment, though it is almost always received as one.

Repair after rupture. The idea that what matters is not avoiding ruptures but reliably repairing them. One of the better-supported ideas in the field.

Structure

Attachment style. A framework describing patterns of relating formed in early relationships — commonly secure, anxious, avoidant and disorganised. Well studied and useful as description. Frequently over-applied, particularly as a fixed label for a whole person rather than a pattern that varies by relationship and context.

Differentiation. The capacity to stay yourself while staying close to someone. The alternative to both fusion and distance.

Interdependence. Two people whose outcomes affect each other, which is most of what a relationship is.

Emotional labour. The unequally distributed work of noticing what needs doing, remembering it, and managing how everyone feels about it. Usually invisible to whoever is not doing it, which is why naming it changes the conversation.

Load imbalance. The practical version — who plans, who remembers, who initiates.

DTR. "Define the relationship" — the explicit conversation about what this is.

Contested, and worth knowing why

Love languages. The framework proposing that people have a primary preferred mode of receiving affection. Impett, Park & Muise (2024), in Current Directions in Psychological Science 33(2):87–92, examined its three core assumptions and found none well supported: people tend to rate all five as meaningful rather than having one primary, factor analyses "deviated from the proposed five-love-languages structure," and there is "no empirical support that couples in which partners match report higher relationship satisfaction." The authors propose a "nutritionally balanced diet" model instead. Full write-up.

Also a legal note: the phrase is a registered trademark whose registration covers mobile applications about personal skills and relationships. It is fine to discuss it editorially. It is not a name for a product feature.

The 94 percent divorce-prediction figure. Widely quoted, and contested. Heyman & Slep (2001), in the Journal of Marriage and Family, argue the accuracy figures came from models fitted and evaluated on the same sample without cross-validation — which measures fit rather than prediction. This site does not use it.

"Communication is the key to everything." True enough to be unfalsifiable and vague enough to be useless. More communication about the wrong thing, at the wrong time, in the wrong register, makes things worse. Specificity is what helps.

Quiz archetypes. Any framework that ends by assigning you a type. The type is not the problem; ending there is. A category label does not tell you what to say at 9pm on a Tuesday, and this is the most common complaint across the entire couples-app category.

Product terms

Daily question app. One prompt a day, usually answered by both partners. The dominant format.

Simultaneous reveal. Both partners answer before either sees the other's answer. Prevents anchoring, which is the whole reason it exists.

Shared streak. A streak that only advances when both people participate. A streak one person can maintain alone is measuring the wrong thing.

Conversation deck. Prompts grouped by situation rather than pooled generically. The situation is what makes a prompt land.

One-subscription-unlocks-both. A pricing model where one partner subscribes and both get access. Nearvo's planned model, chosen because "both partners must buy separate subscriptions for the same relationship" is a specific, documented complaint about at least one competitor.