If you want more sex, be nice!

Earlier this year, eminent marriage therapist John Gottman released a new book titled "The Science of Trust: Emotional Attunement for Couples." While you may not recognize Gottman by name, you may be aware of his work via Malcolm Gladwell’s book "Blink."

In that bestseller, readers were introduced to Gottman’s knack for “thin-slicing” a couple based upon a few minutes of observation, and determining, with incredible accuracy, whether they would succeed or fail in their marriage.

So what’s the secret of relationship success? Based upon his work with couples, as well as statistical analysis, Gottman has determined that, “It’s the balance between positive and negative emotional interactions in a marriage that determines its well-being - whether the good moments of mutual pleasure, passion, humor, support, kindness, and generosity outweigh the bad moments of complaining, criticism, anger, disgust, contempt, defensiveness, and coldness.”

Those couples that succeed in their marriages enjoy an overriding proportion of positive over negative sentiment.

But how do you ensure that? “All couples, happy and unhappy, have conflict,” writes Gottman, “but the ratio of positive to negative interactions during arguments is a critical factor.” He has proposed that this ratio should, ideally, be 5 to 1.

While it’s impossible to go through life tallying positive versus negative interactions, it is possible to determine intuitively whether your relationship is generally in the positive, or tending more toward the negative. And then you can change it.

I often advise couples to get in the “5 to 1 zone,” and it’s one of those pieces of simple advice that I often remind myself to practice in my own marriage. It isn’t easy to maintain a surplus of positivity, but it is possible.

In his latest book, Gottman encourages couples to cultivate emotional attunement through awareness, tolerance, understanding, non-defensive listening, and empathy.

“Boiling down the richly complex body of work described in the book to one sentence, Gottman’s point is that trust is made of people believing that their partners will be nice, that the partner will make an effort to make life better for you,” writes sex educator Emily Nagoski in her intellectually vivacious blog, Sex Nerd.

So there you have it - it all comes down to the “power of nice.” While many men like to complain that nice guys often finish last, it would seem that couples that are nice to each other tend to last the longest.

So why is it often so darn hard to be nice to our partners? Or why do we often end up being nice to everyone except the ones we hold closest? Why is nice so elusive?

“Maybe you plain old don’t know how to be nice. Maybe in your family of origin, people just weren’t nice to each other, so you never learned that skill. Or maybe you didn’t learn rules of Being Nice that are compatible with the rules your partner learned,” writes Nagoski.